bjkeefe (via Mowser)

Friday, February 17, 2012

Wyatt Cenac investigates PETA

Good all the way through, but the last two minutes are truly FTW.

(alt. video link)

(h/t: Adam Rutherford)

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Another note on the vanishing free press

Looks like* Philadelphia's newspaper situation is about to get even worse.

Wonder what that'll mean for philly.com.

(previously)

* Hope the Blogger Ethics Panel doesn't come after me for linking to a piece by Buzz Bissinger.

I'd knock that shit off if I was you, Marvin

Just fired up Google Chrome. walked away from the machine, and when I came back, I saw a pop-up trying to get me to add McAfee secure search and browsing or some shit.

Can't be sure it was Google, but there's nothing else running that I'd suspect. Anyone else had this happen, and feel like it's because you just fired up Chrome?

I'm less inclined to make "Don't be evil" jokes than most people I know, but if they're starting to try to deliver shovelware just for using their browser, I'm going to become a Google-hater, too.

(title: cf.)

[Added] Probably not Chrome's fault. I had the McAfee SiteAdvisor add-on installed. WHICH I DON'T REMEMBER INSTALLING, but I'm willing to concede I might have, long ago. Threw that thing in the trash where it belongs, of course.

“Mathematicians are suddenly sexy.”

I take issue with the adverb, and my degree has NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.

That aside, the article where the assertion appears is quite interesting. You know how you're worried about being tracked online? It's not just online.

Yes, you knew that. But maybe you didn't know the extent of it. And anyway, it's a fascinating and creepy read: "How Companies Learn Your Secrets."

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Wingnut fight!

Probably you already heard about this, but just in case not:

The National Review Online called on Monday for Newt Gingrich to quit the Republican presidential contest and endorse Rick Santorum.

The editors of the conservative magazine said it would be a mistake for Republican voters to nominate someone with “such poor judgment and persistent unpopularity” to be the party’s standard bearer.

But wait. That's not the weird part. Here's the weird part:

“On his own arguments the proper course for him now is to endorse Santorum and exit,” the editors wrote.

Endorse Santorum? What about "poor judgment" and "persistent unpopularity?" On the NRO's editors' own arguments …

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Line of the Day: 2012-02-14

Snooki: Because it wouldn't be a worst-dressed list without her.
-- Christina Anderson

Thought Robyn's outfit (slide 13) was far worse, though. And those look disturbingly like grannie pannies there, Fergie.

Yeah, you busted me. I clicked a HuffPo "most popular" link. In my defense, at least it was a mean one.

Attn: Gail Collins (and all other Willard-watchers)

News item from Raw Story:

... a protester with the group “Dogs Against Romney” was recently pulled over by police in Littleton, Colorado for suspected animal abuse after officers spotted a dog kennel with what appeared to be an animal inside, strapped to the top of a vehicle.

It turned out the man just had a stuffed animal inside and he was not cited.

Man, that just made my day.

As did the reason I jumped over to that story in the first place. Apparently, Romney has taken on a whole new meaning. As of this moment, Mr. Number Two (iykwimaityd) is number three on Google!

(h/t: Daniel Clark and Hebrewzzi)

A couple of things to know about the US Postal Service

First, from Bob Lucore at the Americans for Democratic Action, "Don’t “Save” the Postal Service by Destroying It:"

This recent earnings release from the United States Postal Service (USPS) announced a large loss for the first quarter of its fiscal year. It could, just as accurately, have said that the Postal Service made a net operating profit of $200 million delivering the mail for this year’s first quarter.

The difference between the announced loss and the operating profit is almost entirely due to an external condition imposed by a severe congressional mandate, that requires that the post office pre-fund 75 years’ worth of future retiree health benefits within the next few years. This pre-funding requirement added $3.1 billion in red ink to the USPS’s first quarter not loss figure.

Pre-funding retiree health sounds like a very laudable goal. However, the amount that the Postal Service has been required to set aside for this purpose far exceeds that which is necessary, and is unmatched by any private corporation or agency of the federal government. It is being required to fund a 75-year liability within a ten-year framework.

[...]

The Postal Service has been required by Congress to pay $5.5 billion annually, into what the IG calls a “war chest” that now holds over $326 billion. Even if no further funding was provided, and the fund simply collected a modest rate of interest, the account would be 100 percent funded in twenty-one years. In addition, the USPS has overpaid the federal retirement system by $13 billion.

[...]

The unprecedented pre-funding requirements are the work of Congressional Republicans. [...]

Shocking, I know. Worth reading the whole thing.

Second, an article from Reuters, "Special Report: Towns go dark with post office closings." Here's the nugget that made me start paying attention:

Nearly 80 percent of the 3,830 post offices under consideration are in sparsely populated rural areas where poverty rates are higher than the national average, demographic data analyzed by Reuters shows.

Moreover, about one-third of the offices slated for closure fall in areas with limited or no wired broadband Internet, Reuters found.

Time was when the USPS was lauded for providing a service to everyone in the US. Many a wild-eyed free marketer (well, at least one, anyway) who argued right after taking Econ 101 that the USPS should have to compete with private delivery services came to realize that it's a Good Thing that people off the beaten path don't have to pay ten or twenty bucks to send a letter, and that those sending to them don't have to, either. One might even say that this is what The Founding Fathers (PBUT) had in mind.

Long piece by Fallows on Obama

Stupid title, but a very good read. Nuanced and thoughtful, as you'd expect from James Fallows.

(h/t: TC, via email)

Monday, February 13, 2012

A new Pew report on online advertising and news sites

It's a monster, but I found it interesting enough to skim all the way through.

Here's how it starts:

Between 2011 and 2015, revenue from digital advertising in the United States is expected to grow by 40% and to overtake all other platforms by 2016.[1]

Yet how much of that growth will go to underwrite news remains in doubt and throws into question the financial future of journalism as audience continue to migrate online. What will happen pivots in part on whether the news industry can move into the more lucrative areas of digital advertising, particularly using consumer data to target ads, persuading major legacy advertisers to also advertise online and moving into new revenue areas.

A new study of advertising in news by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that, currently, even the top news websites in the country have had little success getting advertisers from traditional platforms to move online. The digital advertising they do get appears to be standard ads that are available across many websites. And with only a handful of exceptions, the ads on news sites tend not to be targeted based on the interests of users, the strategy that many experts consider key to the future of digital revenue.

Of the 22 news operations studied for this report, only three showed significant levels of targeting. A follow-up evaluation six months later found that two more sites had shown some movement in this direction, but only some, from virtually no targeting to a limited amount on inside pages. By contrast, highly targeted advertising is already a key component of the business model of operations such as Google and Facebook.

These are some of the findings of the study, which analyzed the advertising in 22 different news operations and 5,381 ads representing a cross section of media.

Most of us tend not to be thrilled about being tracked online, but what if your choice was be tracked and have access to lots of different news sites, or not be tracked and have access to fewer independent news sources?

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Let's get scared!

As I tweeted back to Brad DeLong, dog-lovers are going to be impossible to be around for the next few days:

How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy

Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia? A biologist’s science- fiction hunch is gaining credence and shaping the emerging science of mind- controlling parasites.

Click, if you dare.

And can't you just hear Carl Zimmer cackling?

(pic. source, pic. source)

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Niche of the Day. And oh, how I wish Julia Child were around to see this.

I bet she'd love it, actually.

Yes, it's Vegan Black Metal Chef. He's got a website! And a YouTube channel, with over 22,000 subscribers!

Episode 4 deserves its own special shoutout: "Hail Seitan."

But of course we want to watch them in order, amirite? So here is Episode 1: "Pad Thai."

[ http://www.youtube.com/embed/CeZlih4DDNg ]

(alt. video link)

See also the accompanying "Behind the video" post.

(h/t: John Seabrook)

Friday, February 10, 2012

There are some things that will never stop amazing me

And one of them, for sure, is the precision with which we can measure things, even remotely.

The tandem satellites, which are usually 137 miles apart, are sensitive to regional changes in the Earth’s mass and gravitational pull caused by the distribution of water and ice on the planet.

When the lead satellite flies over an area of increased mass, it will sense the increase in gravity and pull slightly away from the trailing satellite. Researchers can detect changes of just one micron between the two satellites …

How much is a micron? A millionth of a meter. Or put another way, the thickness of a human hair is about 100 microns.

So, we're detecting a difference of one one-hundredth the width of a human hair, on a scale of 137 miles, between two things whizzing 500 km overhead at 27,000 km/hr. (300 miles overhead at 17,000 mph, in American.)

Whoof.

You know what Randall would say.

In conclusion, this proves that global warming is a hoax.

(pic. source: NASA/the GRACE mission)

Looks like one of the Five Brothers after this past Tuesday, doesn't it?

(Actually, their eyes always look like that.)

Santorum did WHAT???

But seriously, a pretty cool little article, with bonus sound clip.

(title: cf.)

Wednesday, February 08, 2012

From the annals of online tracking

Here's an ad that was just presented to me, on YouTube (a Google property), where, as you can see, I was logged in.

Knowing what you do about me, can you think of anything less likely to appeal to me?

(previously)

Tuesday, February 07, 2012

Google+ bug report: links that get disabled

Starting yesterday, I noticed that links to my blog posts on my Google+ posts page, that I have put there through Blogger's share function, stop being links a second or two after my G+ posts page loads. Even weirder, it only happens when I'm logged into Google. Anybody else have this problem?

Following is the most exciting video evar a screencast that I made, using Screenr, to show the problem. You'll probably want to go full screen. The text that's displayed at the start of the video is reproduced below.

(alt. video links: YouTube | Screenr)

If you really want to scrutinize this video, click the Screenr alt. video link, and click the HD button when you get over there.

Google+ Weirdness

You may want to PAUSE THE VIDEO so you can read this whole page.

I use Blogger's Share function to cause my blog posts to appear on my Google+ posts page. Beginning yesterday, I noticed that the post titles, which are supposed to be permalinks back to blog posts, are no longer links.

More precisely, the titles are links for a moment, as the page is loading, and then they fade to gray and stop being hyperlinks.

This happens with Chrome and Firefox on a machine running WinXP, and with Firefox on WinVista.

But that's not the weird part. The weird part is that it only happens when I'm logged in to my Google account.

First, I'll visit my Google+ posts page while logged in and show that the titles are momentarily links. (I'll middle-click one of them, which will cause it to open in a new tab.)

Second, I'll log out of Google and then revisit my Google+ page, and show how the titles remain links.

My Google+ posts page is at http://gplus.to/bjkeefe.

The full URL: https://plus.google.com/u/0/102552943911220179348/posts.

[Added] A version of the above is also posted on Google Groups, in the Google+ Pages Discussion Forum.

[Update 2012-02-08 14:16] As of this moment, the problem seems to have gone away. Now, I'm not going to take all the credit, but that was some seriously good videography, wasn't it?

It was the best of Google doodles, it was the wor-- ...

I'm probably only about the millionth person to make that joke today, on the Internet.

Monday, February 06, 2012

Thought this was a fake ...

... when I saw it over at TBogg's place, but apparently, it's not.

(pic. source: The Frisky)

"... the malignant narcissim of malicious politicians ..."

Why, yes. That does pretty well sum up Newt Gingrich, doesn't it?

Here is a nice old southern gentleman taking Newt to school, courtesy of a nice young western gentleman.

[ http://player.vimeo.com/video/36128486?title=0

(alt. video link)

(previously)

P.S. Far be it from me to tell you I told you so, but told ya.

Subvertising

Here's a five-minute talk (because that's all Ignite allows!) by Tae Phoenix, aka Teresa Valdez Klein. It's about spending surprisingly tiny amounts of money to get your message out there, for example, on Facebook.

(alt. video link)

(h/t: Baratunde Thurston on TWiT #339, via Don McArthur in G+ comments)

Wingnut Watch: Shadrack McGill

Above: Mr. Soon To Be Posterized
on Tea Party Jesus. One hopes.It's a great thing about the Internet that assclowns like Shadrack McGill can be named and shamed.

Start with kez's tweet.

And then see Cal Alabaster, Jr., for stops two and three.

(smug mug swiped from Out of Steppers)

Sunday, February 05, 2012

Line of the Day: 2012-02-05

So now the Hairpiece has endorsed the Haircut, and not the Harebrained. Sweetheart, get me rewrite!
-- Charles P. Pierce

Bonus at the link: outstanding caricatures by Donkey Hotey. Lots more on Flickr.

Another look at the cocoon

Remember that part I highlighted from the recent "New Rules" bit I posted last week?

Say it again:

But people in the mainstream don’t know a lot about that world. The worst thing that most people hear is a few seconds of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh when they’re in a taxicab. But if you spend time at Media Matters or the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Hate Watch” blog, and so on, or, if, God help you, you go to a white nationalist conference as I did in Washington in September, you know that these ideas have real currency.

My worry isn’t that Newsweek would approach some right-wing guy and get a quote from him, but that they would do it without knowing just how right-wing he is.

[Links added].

The above is from Katie Ryder's interview of Arthur Goldwag, on the question of the New Hate and whether it's different from or worse than what wingnuts of old wallowed in.

Another statement from Goldwag that's well worth repeating:

... Ryan Lizza, the other week in the New Yorker, wrote about a study showing that in recent years the mainstream right has moved much farther to the right than the left has moved to the left.

And from that article:

Polarization also has affected the two parties differently. The Republican Party has drifted much farther to the right than the Democratic Party has drifted to the left. Jacob Hacker, a professor at Yale, whose 2006 book, “Off Center,” documented this trend, told me, citing Poole and Rosenthal’s data on congressional voting records, that, since 1975, “Senate Republicans moved roughly twice as far to the right as Senate Democrats moved to the left” and “House Republicans moved roughly six times as far to the right as House Democrats moved to the left.” In other words, the story of the past few decades is asymmetric polarization.

(h/t: KK, via email)

The One True

From Brian McFadden's "How to Have a Highbrow Halftime:"

And don't fail to click on the arrow at the side of the page when you've finished reading that one. Five more pages of goodness, featuring Newt, SOPA, and other reprehensibilities.

Saturday, February 04, 2012

I would like to file a report: Truth in Advertising violation

Oh, wait. My bad. It doesn't actually say "Rational," does it?

Line of the Day: 2012-02-04

Fond memories:

I discovered the pleasures of YouTube around this time. Someone sent me a link to a music video, and I followed it to the site. The whimsical D.I.Y.-ness of the home page, with its clutter of clickable offerings, many sophomoric in nature, made the place feel like a college dorm. Adorable babies, angry cats, embarrassing falls, and child prodigies mingled with the music videos and great concert footage of bands I loved performing at their peak. I e-mailed links to my friends. One of them wrote back, “This is like public television was supposed to be!”

That's from Ryan John Seabrook's New Yorker piece in the Annals of Technology, "Streaming Dreams: YouTube turns pro." Haven't finished it yet (511: I'm reading the print edition in chunks, when nature calls, the way Harold Ross would have wanted it), but so far, so very good.

Seabrook also has a related blog post featuring videos from the dawn of (YouTube) time.

[Added] In Comments, nice guy Steve M. points to another article about YouTube for your reading pleasure.

Hey, Republicans. This is just like creeping Sharia, isn't it?

Church lawyer tells judge: 'Only Scientology law applies'

Actually, my biggest fear is running out of coffee

But this thing that I swiped from Rexi44's sidebar is still appealing.

Don't they already have about 365 of those every year?

Arizona GOP Lawmaker Wants A State Holiday To Celebrate White People

(Think Progress, via Rexi44)

Not sure how I feel about this, but ...

... it certainly bears further contemplation, and I definitely sympathize with the underlying motivations.

Ban The Box

Our “Ban the Box” campaign calls for the elimination of the questions about past convictions on initialpublic employment applications. Our aim is to win policy change through grassroots mobilizations, and to build a political movement of formerly-incarcerated activists. This campaign will allow us to target and challenge the many “boxes” on a variety of applications (i.e. employment, housing, social services, etc.) we are required to check that supports structural discrimination against formerly-incarcerated people.

Banning the box on public employment applications will contribute to public safety because it will promote stable employment in our communities. Communities of color and poor communities already are targeted by mass imprisonment, racial profiling, school closures, and low employment rates. People coming out of prison or county jails need to be able to feed their families, pay rent, and reunite with their families, and return their lives as productive members of the community. People with jobs and stable community lives are much less likely to return committing crimes in order to survive.

Ban The Box is a campaign being conducted by All Of Us Or None.

(h/t: Rexi44)