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Name Marco von Ballmoos
Member since
Email [hidden]
Home page https://earthli.com/users/marco
Description

The (only) developer at earthli.com.

Contents

3209 Articles
111 Comments

16 years Ago

Baseball in DC

Published on in Sports

Sportswriters Swoon Over DC Ballpark by Dave Zirin (Common Dreams) brings news of the opening of the new baseball park in Washington DC in a deal that moved the Montreal Expos south to the USA. Apparently, the mainstream media coverage was nothing short of effusive—gushing, even—about the new stadium, which was almost wholly financed by taxpayer money. From the article:

“$611 million of tax payer money in a city that has become a ground zero of economic segregation and gentrification. $611 million over majority... [More]”

The Olympics have always been Controversial

Published on in Sports

The next Olympics will be in China—everyone who’s anyone knows that by now. Some objected to the selection of China a long time ago, citing human rights violations; some objected to the selection of Russia for the next winter Olympics for similar reasons. None of the objecters seem to understand that the marketing—which emphasizes a wholesome gathering of nations striving for peace through competition—is wholly separate from the business of the Olympics, which emphasizes making money for... [More]

Fun Park Gitmo

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

The timing is poor for linking to this article, Club Gitmo: What it’s really like behind the wire. by Jacob Laksin (Weekly Standard) because it’s reads so much like an April Fool’s joke or an article from the Onion. The tour the writer claims to have received from the base staff sounds nothing like those given to members of the Red Cross or Amnesty International or the UN. He makes Gitmo sound like a pleasant place to spend some time to unwind. Consider this description of the chair on which detainees (read: prisoners) are... [More]

Exploitation

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

“Audacia Ray, former sex worker and editor of the sex worker magazine $pread, has pointed out that the public doesn’t even seem to understand what exploitation really means. The woman who did sex work for Spitzer has had her picture and personal history splattered all over the media in an incredibly insulting way. Nobody seems to realize she’s being degraded far more now than she ever was when Spitzer was her client. And she’s not getting any retirement savings out of it, either.”

Not Qualified

Published on in Quotes

“Bottom line, if you are so ignorant or confused that you think Shiite ayatollahs in Tehran are training and arming radical Salafi Sunnis to blow up Shiites in Iraq, you really should not be president.”

The First Rule of Obama Club is…

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

…you don’t talk about policy. Instead, you write long articles defending Obama against “absurd allegations that he has no specific policy initiatives” without mentioning a single one of them yourself. The article The Obama Generation − He’s No Pied Piper by Bethany Woolman (Common Dreams) is a typical, information-free example—packed with adulation, but containing no substance.

“Obama’s presidential campaign is inspiring a new generation of leaders. […] the true genius in the Obama campaign […] is [in] inspiring our... [More]”

Reading the Economist

Published on in Quotes

“The Economist flatters readers who aren’t quite intelligent enough to realize how shallow it is into thinking that they are more intelligent than they are because they read it.”

Nail. On. The. Head.

Financial Report Translated to English

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

The word “bailout” sounds so crass; it is to be avoided at all costs. Far better to dress up an announcement of corporate socialism in language the layman will interpret as sound financial planning, to make a statement to imbues on with a feeling that there is nothing to see here—just very knowledgeable people managing the very complex economy to the very best of their abilities to ensure as well as possible for you, the little guy. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like that, but, despite all... [More]

Learning about America in the 21st Century

Published on in Miscellaneous

Learning by example in Bush’s America leads to the list in Everything I Know I Learned Since Jan. 20, 2001 by Neal Starkman (Common Dreams). Some examples are cited below.

“Rich people hire everyone else to work for them, making our economy robust.

“Scientists’ opinions are neither better nor worse than anyone else’s.

“The fall of communism is the best evidence that providing everyone in this country with free health care is doomed.”

Dealing with Problems

Published on in Fun

There are a lot of versions of this, but this one is pretty neutral and to-the-point.

The English Language

Published on in Fun

Here’s a neat (rhyming) poem for those learning English (or think they already know everything they need to know), found on I thought I had it ruff, er rough! by David Bogner (Treppenwitz)[1]

“I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough
Others may stumble but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, laugh* and through.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?

“Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead: it’s said like bed, not bead -
For... [More]”

Hints on pronunciation for foreigners by T.S.W.

English Accents

Published on in Fun

This is a cool presentation of English accents. I can verify most of the American ones (I guessed the state before she said it), and the British/Irish/Oceanian ones sounded about right too. It’s about two and half minutes long.

21 Accents by Amy Walker (YouTube)

Kimmel’s Revenge

Published on in Fun

The Sarah Silverman & Matt Damon Sitting in a Tree… (earthli News) video soared to over 8 million views on YouTube. Kimmel, Silverman’s boyfriend has responded with a video of his own.

Jimmy Kimmel is F@cking Ben Affleck Response to Matt & Sarah (YouTube)

It features Ben Affleck, Brad Pitt, Macy Gray, Robin Williams, Josh Groban, Huey Lewis, Harrison Ford, Joan Jett, Perry Farrell and many other famous faces. Looking forward to Silverman’s response.

Office Formats

Published on in Programming

Microsoft recently released documentation for their binary office formats in both PDF and their own XPS format. The PDF for Word weighs in at 2.8MB and has 210 pages. Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? by Joel Spolsky, provides a lot of good reasons for why the formats are so complicated (most rooted in history), like speed, complexity of the task, purely internal formats (until now), etc.

Where Spolsky veers off the path (and he almost always does) is in reaching a bit too far with his... [More]

CSS Animations & Transforms in Safari 3.1

Published on in Technology

Webkit, the rendering engine on which the Safari browser is based has been quite aggresive in its support for advanced CSS3 features. Since the engine is used in many Apple applications and on all of their platforms (e.g. the iPhone and iTouch), the need for slickness there drives innovation everywhere.

Animation

The trend lately has been to move to flashy effects done with JavaScript libraries that can manipulate the DOM and address elements using CSS selectors. There are many top... [More]

On Multiculturalism

Published on in Quotes

“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”
General Sir Charles Napier


[1] On the practice of “suttee”—the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands.

Good Luck Wishes for McCain

Published on in Fun

About a week ago, the Obamians released a black and white video (YouTube) supporting their candidate. It features an acoustic guitar as accompaniment to snippets of Obama’s most inspiring words[1] as spoken by him and sung or intoned by various other famous persons. It was pretty schmaltzy, but not horrible. Since McCain didn’t come up with a video response of his own, the crew of Election08 threw one together for him, using a very similar style. This one’s a lot shorter and a lot funnier; it starts going... [More]

Excellent 2008 Candidate Poll

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

There are a lot of online surveys to help voting Americans figure on which of the candidates in the quickly dwindling field they should pin their hopes. Though USA Today has taken it on the chin over the years for their vastly over-simplified graphics—usually prominently featured on their front page—their Candidate Match Game (USA Today) is tour-de-force of design. It compresses a huge amount of information into a very understandable form. It also has only 11 questions, which vastly increases the... [More]

History History

Published on in Quotes

“History doesn’t repeat itself—at best, it sometimes rhymes.”
Mark Twain

Using Miro

Published on in Technology

So you’d like to watch TV shows whenever you like, but you’re too lazy to Tivo them yourself? Or maybe you live in a foreign country and would like to stay up-to-date on American culture? Let the magic of newsfeeds maintained by Tivo-using obsessives and the Miro Player do your work for you. It works like this:

Get Miro
Download and install the Miro Player. This player can check video newsfeeds, showing what’s available and letting you download a show from one or more sources. Once you’ve... [More]

Improving Online Chatting

Published on in Programming

The article Two-Party Threaded Chat by Peter Arrenbrecht addresses the problem of multiple threads of discussion within a single conversation. Without face-to-face contact, the threshold for interruption is much lower and answers will not always neatly line up under their questions. A conversation may have many of these “threads”, though individual ones are usually quite short-lived. Chat clients are currently limited by their purely serial approach to inserting text into a conversation.

The solution proposed in... [More]

The Cult of Obama

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

First the Tom Cruise video and now this one: Yes We Can − Barack Obama Music Video (YouTube). OMFG! Famous people *heart* Obama! Game, set and match to you sir. There is also a Letter from an Obama supporter by Jesse Last (3QuarksDaily) making the rounds and people who should know better are guzzling the kool-aid at a majestic pace and are completely gaga about this gentleman, philosopher, poet and bridger of cultures.

Here are some excerpts with snide commentary.

“I cheered with hundreds of people from all backgrounds and thought... [More]”

The Right to Use Force

Published on in Quotes

“A distinguishing feature of the modern state is that it claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory … the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence.”
Max Weber


Citation found in the article Weber and Legitimate Violence (Crooked Timber).

Protect Our Corporations

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

The State of the Union 2008 wasn’t all boring. In addition to essentially declaring war on Iran, Bush demanded that Congress pass the new FISA legislation tout d’suite[1]. He naturally couched the demand in a way that failure on Congress’s part to do so would play directly into the hands of the terrorists and make America unsafe. Congress, for their part, has agreed to the legislation, but dared to take exception to the provision for retroactive immunity for telecoms companies that aided in... [More]

Sarah Silverman & Matt Damon Sitting in a Tree…

Published on in Fun

 So this weekend, one mildly out-of-touch ex-pat discovered that:

  1. Jimmy Kimmel, who used to host The Man Show with Adam Carolla, now has his own late-night TV show.
  2. That Jimmy Kimmel has been dating Sarah Silverman for over five years.
  3. That Matt Damon totally doesn’t take himself too seriously.

To celebrate their anniversary (and his show’s), Silverman showed Kimmel a video she made for him, called Sarah Silverman “I’m F*cking Matt Damon” on Jimmy Kimmel (YouTube). It’s hilarious. Silverman is fully... [More]

No Shelter for Goldberg

Published on in Public Policy & Politics

Jonah Goldberg has been doing the “book circuit”, attempting to pump up interest for his latest and greatest “Liberal Fascism”. His interview on (a) Daily Show with Jon Stewart didn’t go well for him at all—well, because Jon Stewart is not stupid enough to believe his premise and is both well-read and quick-witted enough to refute him in real-time. Goldberg was intellectually defrocked within minutes (but at least managed to chuckle good-naturedly—albeit nervously—instead of getting... [More]

Undersea Cables

Published on in Technology

 Here’s a great diagram of the Fibre-optic Submarine Cable Systems (The Guardian) encircling the globe. In addition to an map of the cable systems throughout the world, it provides some statistics about the recent shipping accident that severed four of those cable lines, killing the internet and business traffic for almost 80 million users. The government of Egypt was exhorting its citizens to lay off downloading movies and songs for a day or two so that “more important” business could use the bandwidth. If... [More]

Free Rice

Published on in Fun

 Free Rice ScoreInstead of chasing down video references in YouTube, you can expand your vocabulary for a good cause using FreeRice, all while remaining glued to the internet. The initial levels aren’t bad, but the game nicely adjusts to your level of vocabulary and, after a while, you’ll find yourself using educated guesses almost exclusively as they shovel words at you that you’ve never, ever seen before. The word list is maintained and expanded by a “team of professional lexicographers from the firm of Lexiteria... [More]”

Spot the Difference

Published on in Quotes

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?”
Mahatma Ghandi

Choose

Published on in Quotes

“Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday... [More]”