A friend of mine wrote a long message on Facebook about how censoring the photo below was the exactly the wrong reaction. he expressed concern that his young daughter would grow up in a humorless, intolerant world.

The worst thing to happen anywhere ever

A friend of his wrote that they should “agree to disagree” on the impact that this picture has. I answered with the following comment (lightly edited to change tenses, pronouns and given names):

My first response

I understand that you’ve used a lot of words to say that you’re... [More]

Encodo has never been about maintaining or establishing a monoculture in either operating system, programming language or IDE. Pragmatism drives our technology and environment choices.[1]

Choosing technology

Each project we work on has different requirements and we choose the tools and technologies that fit best. A good fit involves considering:

• What exists in the project already?
• How much work needs to be done?
• What future directions could the project take?
• How maintainable is the... [More]

The title sounds like a self-post on Writing Prompts, but it describes quite accurately what I attempted to do when formulating a response to the essay Nobody. Understands. Punctuation. by Peter Welch (Still Drinking).

Below is the text of my mail to him.

I’ve read a few of your essays since you made such a splash with what you are probably aware is your making-it-to-the-big-time essay ”Programming Sucks” and I enjoyed the last one propounding descriptivism over prescriptivism.

A descriptivist is ordinarily... [More]

What is it worth to wade into a discussion where you are asked to choose a side based on no clear rules of evidence?

I mostly enjoy Woody Allen movies. That he has been with Soon Yi, the adopted daughter of his ex-wife for years doesn’t really weigh on my opinions of his films. I must admit that knowing that Polanski raped a teen-aged girl and fled the country enters into it very little when I’m considering whether to watch one of his movies. Polanski clearly got away with it and wasn’t... [More]

There are things that make us mad in this world. There are various release mechanisms for this. A common—and very effective—one is to curse.

But sometimes the thing about which we need to curse is so terrible, so skull-fuc&$kingly bad that you have to invent new curses for it. And sometimes, you have to invent entirely new technologies and possible futures in order to envision a situation bad enough to engender the creation of a language that would include language severe enough to... [More]

The article Netflix’s dumbed-down algorithms by Felix Salmon (Reuters) discusses a change in focus in recent years at Netflix—actually since they switched to emphasizing streaming content over DVD delivery.

Netflix has started to position itself more as a television company than a “great movies” company because of purely economic reasons. As Salmon puts it, “Netflix’s big problem, it seems to me, is that it can’t afford the content that its subscribers most want to watch.” The big blockbusters that people actual... [More]

A little while ago, I wrote about my experiences with the SBB automated ticket machines. The online experience is somewhat better but still has some mysterious bugs and omissions—it’s hard to believe that this software has been in use for years—and by millions of users.

Where’s the Zürich Hauptbahnhof?

One example comes from the list of suggestions returned when a user types in the “from” or “to” field in the route finder. One day, I entered what I thought was an easy match, one of the... [More]

The following story tells tale of a day spent with the ongoing user-experience (UX) catastrophe that is the interface of the SBB/ZVV automated ticket machines.

While it’s certainly possible that our experiences are unique and that others can easily purchase their perhaps simpler tickets, we have found that veering ever-so-slightly from the beaten path leads into some very deep and dark weeds.

Even were we to accept that the fault for the confusion engendered by the UI lay entirely with us,... [More]

It’s been raining a lot in Switzerland this year. The Tobelbach near Wetzikon was bound to be quite swollen with water after this Saturday so, despite the still-pounding rain, we took an evening walk to the Pfäffikersee to see just how drastic things had gotten.

A rainy day in Züri Oberland (YouTube)

It’s Euro-Vision Song Contest time again. Semifinals part II tonight. Don’t judge me. It’s like a traffic accident; you can’t look away. There were a lot of contestants, but here are the ones I found noteworthy.

• Finland: What the hell Finland? A few years ago you win with Death/Gore-Metal band Lordi and now you descend into the depths of bubble-gum pop with Krista (who was literally wearing bubble-gum–colored boots)? How did that number even get off the ground? It was, however, one of the... [More]

Penn and Teller have had a TV show on ShowTime for a while now, but I’ve never seen any. Most of them are available on YouTube (see links below) but I have no idea how long those will last there due to copyright issues. As I watched, it was easy to sympathize with the new-agey folks—Penn is ruthless and relentless. Though he’s too self-satisfied at times, he tempers it with explanations for his anger—that he hates to see people preyed upon. Still, you think to yourself, these people seem to... [More]

Olivia Wilde was on the Daily Show recently (full episode) to promote a film. Jon Stewart was not only bedazzled by her, but also by her having had Christopher Hitchens as a babysitter when she was much younger. They lauded good ol’ Hitch for a while ‘cause he was such a stand-up guy, especially for someone who was a raging alcoholic (their words). When Jon asked her how her family had gotten Hitch as a babysitter, she responded that her family was part of a wonderful group of journalists that... [More]

So it’s another dreary Saturday (weather-wise) and I’m trying to make my way through this article, List of Pardons Included Many Tied to Power by Campbell Robertson (NY Times).

It tells of a traffic accident:

“Scotty Plunk, the driver of the truck, was killed. The driver of the Toyota, 19-year-old Joel Vann, had been drinking so much that he did not remember the accident.”

Plunk killed by teenage drunk driver, Vann. The story is about why Haley Barbour—notoriously corrupt governor of Mississippi—pardoned him.

“It is... [More]”

The photo below is from the first week of the revolution in Tunisia by Fred Dufour/AFP/Getty Images (Big Picture Blog) and shows a protester taking aim at the police with a baguette[1].

I just couldn’t help thinking that the cops were surprisingly nonchalant considering the guy pretending his bread is a gun is part of a revolution. Would anyone like to hazard a guess as to what would have happened to this guy had he tried something like this in a real hot zone, like New York City? Amadou Diallo’s family, perhaps?

The video below[1] explains the difference between the various political and geographical entities that are still or have historically been associated with England. Below the video is a summary with links and a screenshot of the final graphic, which is a nice Venn diagram of all of the various entities.

The Difference between the United Kingdom, Great Britain and England Explained by CGPGrey (YouTube)

• The United Kingdom is a political entity that comprises England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.
• Great Britain is a geographical entity and is the largest of the British Isles and is a... [More]

Imagine, if you will, that you would like to take a trip from Zürich (to pick an arbitrary starting point) to Copenhagen (to pick an equally random destination).

Imagine further, if you will further indulge, that you would like to take the train in order to see Germany along the way instead of flying over everything. Imagine that you have a vague notion of nobility in doing so because of the ghastly wastefulness of flying, as far as carbon footprint goes.

You will be surprised—and not just... [More]

The venerable Plastic.com is closing its doors for good this weekend. I’ve been a member for about a decade and contributed sporadically throughout. I saved my comments from the site before it goes dark and included them below. The context is often not there, but it’s an interesting compendium of issues from the last decade.

My stats were as follows:

• name: dur
• member since: Tue 23 Oct 2001
• karma: 8 (astute scholarly underrated succinct)
• favorite words: countries(16), already(10),... [More]

From the article This column will change your life by Oliver Burkeman (The Guardian):

“[…] when an Asker meets a Guesser, unpleasantness results. An Asker won’t think it’s rude to request two weeks in your spare room, but a Guess culture person will hear it as presumptuous and resent the agony involved in saying no. Your boss, asking for a project to be finished early, may be an overdemanding boor – or just an Asker, who’s assuming you might decline. If you’re a Guesser, you’ll hear it as an expectation. This is a spectrum,... [More]”

Season 14, episodes 5 (#200 overall) and 6 (#201 overall) have been pulled by Comedy Central because of vieled death threats made by proprietors of a purportedly Islamic web site. The site—called RevolutionMuslim.com[1]—supposedly peddles Osama bin Laden support and celebrates 9–11. It’s hard to tell because they’re down right now and showing no signs of coming back up anytime soon. The proprietors of the site live in New York City and claim to be devout Muslims, though they are more likely... [More]

Alternate title: Why Reddit is so awesome.

The post “Eyjafjallajökull” isn’t as foreign to English as it sounds (Reddit) is in the linquistics Reddit (to which I am subscribed, natch) and is treasure-trove of crowdsourcing goodness vis-à-vis the etymology, pronunciation (OGG file[1]) and unique linquistic characteristics of spoken Icelandic. There is no way I would have guessed the pronunciation from the spelling; the native Icelander seems to elide quite a bit, but what do I know about Icelandic... [More]

At the end of last year, a bit of very good news emerged from the otherwise increasingly draconian U.S. As detailed in the article Did a Court Just Deal a Fatal Blow to Tasers for Police? by Raj Jayadev (AlterNet), the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals made what appeared to be a landmark decision that, in cases where officers used tasers, “[t]he objective facts must indicate that the suspect poses an immediate threat to the officer or a member of the public.”

Unfortunately, this sounds much better than it is, because of the... [More]

The article, «Westerwave» ist talentiert im Vergleich (Tages Anzeiger) (“Westerwave” is talented compared to this), is about the EU commissar Günther Oettinger, who has deemed English to be the language of the future. He has often said in interviews that everyone will have to know English, from newscasters to construction workers. His own spoken English is abysmal, which earns him ridicule. Why is it, though, that he must himself be a master of English in order to promote it as the language of the future?... [More]

The fifth Nicolas Felton Annual Report (2009) is now available for purchase. Each year, Mr. Felton, a graphic designer in New York City collects a ludicrous amount of information about himself and publishes it in an attractive, elegant and eminently readable format on some yuppie paper with yuppie fonts. This year, he enlisted the help of all of the people he encountered:

“Each day in 2009, I asked every person with whom I had a meaningful encounter to submit a record of this meeting through an... [More]”

There are many admitted fans of The Big Lebowski and many of them are dedicated to the point of obsession. Into that category squarely falls Two Gentlemen of Lebowski by Adam Bertocci, which is the entire script of the film rewritten in the style of William Shakespeare.

This first sample is the first scene in the bowling alley where Smokey steps over the foul line and Walter takes offense.

The first terrorist attempt in eight years means that everyone at the Department of Homeland Security has gotten their knickers in a twist…again. However, they should instead be delighted with the extraordinarily good numbers favoring the good guys. The good guys being those people who don’t want to blow up metal canisters full of innocent people just to prove a point.

The post, The Odds of Airborne Terror by Nate Silver (538.com), crunches the flight statistics for the last decade and comes up with “one terrorist... [More]”

We all do it. We all commit certain behaviors to habit so that we don’t have to think about them anymore. We don’t think about how we get to work in the morning or home again in the evening. We just take the right exit, the right stairway or get on the right train without a second thought, our bodies taking us where we need to go without any intervention from the brain.

So we all have these well-worn grooves along which we coast, using the energy we spare for other things—perhaps thinking... [More]

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace came out years ago and stunk up the place big time. Most of us just agreed that it sucked and that it spent way too much time on the stupid little kid and the even stupider Jar Jar Binks. The movie below builds a 70-minute thesis on the suckiness of SW:TPM with copious examples of how the older movies did everything better and a startlingly insightful analysis of plot devices and movie-making, in general.[1] You almost have to feel sorry for the older Lucas, because... [More]

The New York Times thinks we’re mentally challenged; from today’s NY Times Front Page podcast:

“The MTA will be eliminating the W and Z lines.”

So far, so good. That’s the informative bit. They followed up with:

“As a result, some commuters will have to wait longer for trains.”

With a bit of editing, they could chop the podcast in half without losing any information at all.
 

The post Grammar Challenge! by Amy McDaniel includes a quiz written by David Foster Wallace that she obtained during a writing course many years ago. Each of the sentences has one major fault—not necessarily a grammatical one—though there may be other, smaller ones as well.

The full text of the quiz is included below; the footnote for each line links to its answer.

The following picture is from a photo essay, Ian Fisher : American Soldier (Denver Post) following a young American from his initial recruiting to deployment in Iraq and return to America.

Child Soldiers

The picture of the four recruits during basic training makes them look remarkably young, far less than the 18 years each of them must be. The two to the right—with Ian, the star of the essay, on the far right—really look like they dressed up in Daddy’s war togs.

To be honest, Ian’s story is neither particularly... [More]