No democracy can or should fight a war without the consent of its people, and that consent is only meaningful if it is predicated on real information.
Eloquently put in L.A. Times’ editorial on Wikileaks and the War Logs. (By the way, if you’re in Denmark, check out the news on TV2 at 7 o’clock tonight where I’ll be trying to say something intelligent about Wikileaks.)
Comic artist Darryl Cunningham is writing/drawing a book on science. He’s made early versions of three chapters available: The moon hoax, homeopathy and the MMR vaccination scare. It’s great stuff so far, can’t wait to get my hands on the completed book.
Yes! I want to quote this a million times over.
Revenue from Adsense and its ilk is a reward for writing content that made people want to visit your website and grant you a pageview. If you do it really well, you’ll get a bunch of pageviews, and a bunch of money. Employing tricks like needless pagination, auto-refreshing (see Salon.com), misleading headlines, and the like is cheating. You didn’t earn those pageviews, you tricked people into giving them to you. And then you look at shit like popups, popunders, double underlined links, Snap previews, Tynt scripts, and so on, and it’s pretty clear how hostile it all is. It’s nothing but money-grabbing. If you’ve got it set up so bad that your readers are employing things like ad blockers and Safari’s Reader, you fucked up. You did something wrong. You overestimated how much your readers are willing to tolerate. We all realise you rely on advertising revenue, but it’s not something you’re entitled to, it’s something you earn by cultivating a user base, and any revenue lost to ad blockers and Safari’s Reader is money you failed to earn this week, because you pissed off all your readers.
I’m never going to see Sex and the City 2. I didn’t see the first one and I didn’t watch the tv show. I’m glad the sequel exists, though, as the reviews have been much more fun to read than I’m guessing watching the movie will ever be. Observe:
When viewed as a rom-com, Sex and the City 2 is terrible and crappy and a horrific inversion of everything the show once was. But when viewed as a science fiction film, SATC2 is subversive, stylish and chilling. Like The Island from Lost, we may never know The City’s true identity — Is it a VR computer program? A malevolent interdimensional god? Satan? — but we do know the following:
1.) The City can control time.
2.) The City can control their personalities.
3.) Nothing exists outside of The City.
4.) The City keeps tabs on Carrie via shoes.
—Why Sex and the City 2 is a science fiction movie.
I’m not asking for much. I just don’t want to be sick in my mouth. I don’t want to leave the cinema feeling like I’ve paid £7.50 to be mocked, patronised and kicked in the face. I don’t want to be filled with despair at Hollywood’s increasing inability to conceive of women in comedic films as anything other than self-obsessed babies with breasts.
—The death of Sex and the City.
SATC2 takes everything that I hold dear as a woman and as a human—working hard, contributing to society, not being an entitled cunt like it’s my job—and rapes it to death with a stiletto that costs more than my car. It is 146 minutes long, which means that I entered the theater in the bloom of youth and emerged with a family of field mice living in my long, white mustache. This is an entirely inappropriate length for what is essentially a home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls.
Speaking of Ask MetaFilter, it really is on of my absolute favorite places on the internet. It’s full of amazing people with almost infinite knowledge and wisdom. Courtesy of mefi infodumpster, here are the five most favorited answers of all time.
First, be smart from the very beginning. Pulverize all teeth, burn off fingerprints, and disfigure the face. Forcing a DNA test to establish identity (if it ever comes to that) might introduce the legal/forensic hurdle that saves your ass down the line. An unidentifiable body can, in a pinch, be dressed in thrift store clothes and dropped in a bad part of town where the police are less likely to question it. I don’t reommend that disposal method, I’m just saying an easily identifiable body is an even bigger threat than the opposite.
Assuming you have it inside a house where you can work on it a bit, the first thing you want to do is drain it of fluids. This will make it easier to cut up, and slow decomposition a little bit. The best way to do this quick and dirty is to perforate the body with a pointed knife, and then perform CPR on it. Cut the fronts of the thighs deep, diagonally, to slit the femoral arteries. Then pump the chest. The valves in the heart will still work when dead, and the springback of the ribcage can put apply a fair amount of suction to the artria. Do this in a tub. Plug the drain, and mingle lots of bleach with the bodily fluids before unplugging the drain to empty the tub. This should help control the stench of death, which would otherwise reek from your gutter gratings. Do everything you can to control odors. Plug in an ionizer, burn candles, leave bowls of baking soda everywhere. Ventilate the room in the middle of the night, but otherwise keep it closed. Keep the body under a plastic sheet while it’s in the tub.
I actually got paid to do this.
For three years (from 1996 to 1999) I worked as a Public Information and Consultation Advisor for the Federal Treaty Negotiation Office in British Columbia. It was essentially my job to talk to angry and racist non-native people about the land claims settlements we, the federal government, were negotiating with First Nations.
One thing that helped me do this job was a story I heard Utah Phillips tell at the 1997 Vancouver Folk Music Festival. Seems one day he was told of an old cowboy in New Mexico who was dying. This old cowboy had ridden on some of the last cattle drives on the Great Plains in the 1800s and had scores of songs in his head about that time. Utah made an effort to go visit him on his death bed way out in the desert. When he got to the cowboy’s cabin, a nurse answered the door, said he was expected and asked him to wait in the sitting room while she got the cowboy ready for the visitor.
Queuing is definitely part of the national psyche here. People moan about kids not being brought up badly and not queuing properly but that’s just kids being kids and it’s always happened.
I can’t fucking stand queue jumpers though. In fact, the only time I can remember even coming close to being involved in physical violence in recent years was over some queue jumping.
The story is a bit long, but it probably helps build a picture of attitudes to queueing here in the UK:
If you ever want to see British queuing at its best, go to Victoria Station in London during the rush hour and watch the people filter out of the station and queue for the buses - long snaking queues stretching patiently across the concourse, some with gaps in to allow buses (and people) to go through.
Except, that is, when the Underground Train drivers are on strike. When that happens, every single Tube commuter tries to use the buses instead, and a significant portion seem to decide that the queues obviously don’t apply to them because their journey is far more important and must be completed RIGHT NOW!!!11ONEONE.
In other words, they become queue jumpers.
This is a classic case of Ask Culture meets Guess Culture.
In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it’s OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.
In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t even have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.
Here’s a spin on reverse-trick-or-treating that I got a kick out of. I grew up in a college town, and one Halloween our doorbell rang and we opened the door expecting to see trickortreaters— but what was in front of our open door—was another door! Like, a full-on wooden door, that had a sign that said “Please knock.” So we did, and the door swung open to reveal a bunch of college dudes dressed as really old grandmothers, curlers in their hair, etc, who proceeded to coo over our “costumes” and tell us we were “such cute trick or treaters!” One even pinched my cheek. Then THEY gave US candy, closed their door, picked it up and walked to the next house.
As an added bonus, the five most favorited questions on Ask MetaFilter:
D, please, stop calling somebody, please, don’t call to xxxx. All is ok.There is no problem!!!
11:25AM.OK
11:26AMD! Listen. I don’t know how thanks you. Lux lounge is a strip bar, if we will go there, i don’t know what would be… Thank you so much.! You saved our lifes.
3:33PMNo thanks necessary. It wasn’t only me.
3:35PMAlso, there may be people to escort you at the station. They are good people.
3:35PMYeh, i know. I’ve sms with (mefi member) i think she is cool) miss you. & see you soon.
3:35PM
MetaFilter users save a girl from human trafficking. Read the whole thing, it’s fucking amazing.
So Alex Payne is leaving Twitter to start a bank. That got me thinking about what it is I really want in a bank.
The way I see it, banking is a game. You get X amount of money in at the beginning of the month and when the month is through you have made a bunch of decisions leaving you with Y amount of money. Investing your money will give you a short-term disadvantage but might prove to be a good idea in the long run. If that isn’t the game dynamics of a strategy game I don’t know what is.
I want a bank that recognizes this dynamic and helps me exploit it to my gain. I want a bank that lets me level up if I meet my savings goals. I want a bank that gives me badges for not spending too much money on cab rides. I don’t want my online bank to be a long list of credit card charges. I want a heads up display that shows me how I’m doing in the game. Am I on my way to leveling up? Am I going to get the 2% bonus for having more money in my savings account than my current level requires?
If something like Chore Wars can get people to do chores why can’t we get something similar for spending and saving money?
lcd soundsystem does not guarantee that this record pack will make you look thinner, improve the market value of your home or make your hair nicer. lcd does however guarantee that this is the new lcd soundsystem record.
If you’re like me you like things nice and tidy but you don’t want to do all the hard work associated with keeping things that way. Here are two tricks for keeping the desktop on your Mac nice and tidy.
Via Andy Graulund, here is a trick for changing the default location of screenshots from the desktop to another folder:
Open a Terminal window and type this:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Full/Path/To/Folder
Log out and log back in, and the change will have taken effect.
Note: You have to put in the path properly. Using ~ to indicate your home folder will not work. The path must be entered starting from the root of the hard drive. For example, if you wanted to save them to a secondary partition, your path would start with /Volumes/SecondPartition/.
Mikkel Malmberg shares a tip for keeping the desktop completely clean. Use this one if you want to store files in ~/Desktop but don’t want to see them on your actual desktop.
Open the Terminal and type the following:
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool FALSE ; killall Finder
After that you won’t see any icons on your Desktop—no files, no folders, no disks; just the pretty picture.
Mikkel Marius Winther is interested in the way the Internet is changing the way we communicate and the consequences it has on society and everyday life. He loves Twitter, Red Bull and writing about himself in the third person.
