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Shared Google Reader Items, 2/26/2009

It's been almost a week since I last did this! Doh! Here they finally are, my shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

Art:

• I love Photoshop, but I'm not as good at it as I should be after using it for... holy jeebus, about 15 years now! I want to get better, so I need to start using VunkySearch's tutorial finder thingy.

Technology:

• Researchers found a way to make solar power cheaper. Any time now solar should make sense (sadly, it usually doesn't right now; it hurts the environment enough to make solar cells that their benefit probably doesn't offset it). How long after that do you think it'll take for it to actually be used?
• I'm so in love with this key finder idea that I want to elope with it and bear its children.

Psychology:

• A couple weeks ago, I mentioned an interesting-sounding survey over at Cognitive Daily. Soon after that (but not soon enough to make it into my last update), they posted results. Turns out we're more random than at least one of their readers thought.

The Internets:

• The stimulus bill requires that each government agency report money it gives out via RSS. Neat.
• I'm using Gmail's new multiple inboxes feature, and I think I like it.
• Speaking of Gmail, attaching multiple files in Gmail is now easier. Can gDrive be far away?
• This xkcd comic notes something I noticed with my Kindle the first time I laid eyes on it; that's why I re-read the Hitchhiker's series on it, and set up this store. Took him long enough!
  

Politics:

• Legalization of marijuana is more popular than key conservative leaders.
• 538.com examines the same question I had: Was volcano monitoring really the worst thing Kenneth Jindal could find in the stimulus bill? Really? The Governor of Louisiana can't see the economic benefit in paying people to make sure people aren't killed by volcanos? Really??
• News organizations can now show photos of returning war dead, after an 18-year ban. The reason reversing this was important was so Americans could get a clear picture of what these wars are costing. I think we're already starting to get that, but better late than never on the reversal.
• The economy tanking may have a good result: states are scrapping barbarism because it's too expense. Woot.
• Obama has picked former Washington Governor Gary Locke for Commerce. Let's hope third time's a charm...
• Because I like to be fair, here's FactCheck.org's run-down on Obama's speech. I think most of those "exaggerations and factual misstatements" are what I'd call "rhetorically true," meaning that the truth fits at least one interpretation of what he said, whether that's the interpretation most people would jump to first or not... but anyway, it's good to check this sorta thing.
• The Senate has passed the DC Voting Rights Bill 61-37. The idea sounds great, but, dammit, it's illegal. You can't just change the Constitution because it sounds like a good idea. You need to ammend it. It's not that complicated: "Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed." That's quoted from the 14th Amendment, because we already realized once that the original was broken. Fixing it again wouldn't be a big thing, but you can't change the Constitution through a bill, no matter how good of an idea you think the bill is.

Science:

• Researchers are getting close to a universal flu vaccine. Neat. Someone was talking about something similar at a party recently (because that's the sort of party I attend), but they had the process all wrong.
• Learn all about nanotechnology and why it's cool through the Nano Song. Strong work.

Entertainment:

• The Oscars didn't show Don LaFontaine in their dead people montage. That's terribly lame.
• Jim Kakalios, author of the awesome The Physics of Superheroes (great read, I highly recommend it), was a consultant on The Watchmen movie, and made a video about it. Neat.
• U2's Bono and the Edge are writing music and lyrics for a Spider-Man musical, set to premier in 2010. Awesome.

Atheism:

• Teehee. (BTW, for those who think I filed the comic under the wrong heading, "atheist" and "agnostic" pretty much mean the same thing, I just prefer the taken-as-more-shocking term. If you aren't sure that you believe in something, particularly something that damns you to eternal torment for not swearing fealty to it, you don't believe in it.)
• The UN has passed a resolution trying to ban making fun of religion. The response to that is obvious: Fuck you, religion! In case that's not specific enough, I'm talking about you, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism. Are you such a bunch of pussies that you need special protection? Aw, what's wrong, religion? Is free speech telling you you're unnecessary? Suck it up and take it like a man.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

The Curious Case of Jon the Stamper

It began innocently enough. I was, as is often the case, chatting with my older sister. "Any idea what this film is?" she asked, sending me to a stamping blog she frequents called Cinema Saturday. I was intrigued. I'd tried to play along before, but this time they claimed to be doing something special. I got sucked in.

The next morning, when the movie was revealed, one of the women who runs the site posted, "Jon and Libby - i love that you have made this a family affair - now Jon, we are expecting you to play along - can't wait to see your card!!!" I have no desire to work with scissors and ink, but, after some consideration, I got an idea. I could use the challenge to play with some CSS and Javascript tricks.

The result is here, with a small version to the right. Over at the site, you can click to hide/reveal each individual element of the card, to see how it's put together.

The pieces are:

• A gear cut out from this clock at The Clockworks Unlimited. Cutting out the gear was more tedious than I hoped, so I just cut out the top-left corner of the gear and the center, then duplicated the spokes to build a gear (you can tell if you note the repeating white spots). All three gears are the same image file, resized on the fly as necessary.
• Brown paper from an Australian stamping store.
• A vintage calendar that was way too hard to find, and then I closed the tab that had it, and now I can't find it again!
• A clock from the awesome Clipart, Etc project at the University of South Florida. If you are or know a student working on a school project, that site is great. I wish that had existed when I was in school.
• A plain HTML/CSS block for the text, using the Papyrus font if you have it, but defaulting to other fonts if you don't.

Please click through to see how it's all put together. I'm really happy with how it all came out.

Name This Food

Updated with info from Cindy + pointing out something I missed in the instructions.

Today my coworker Cindy and I made something delicious. The idea was all hers; all I added was the banana peppers to mine. Are these a thing? If so, what are they? If not, how did nobody think of this before?

Ingredients:

• Buttery croissant dough stuff (I'm trying to find out exactly what it was from Cindy, will update when I hear) Update: Pillsbury crescent rolls, extra large style. Update 2: Pillsbury Crescent Rolls, Big and Buttery 50% Bigger style, to be more specific. And the butteriness is vital.
• Maple-honey-baked ham
• Provolone cheese
• Horseradish mustard
• Banana peppers (optional)

Stretch out 2 of the croissant dough pieces. Pierce each with fork. Lay one down on a sheet, and layer on ham, cheese, and peppers. Update: Spread mustard on the other piece. Place that piece over the top, and seal the edges (and crimp with a fork). Bake at 350 F for 15 minutes. Eat, and be contented.

They weren't quite pierogis. Were they a thing? Note: If you make this a thing, you can use virtually any sandwich ingredients. For that reason, I am temporarily calling them "dumpling sandwiches," although I guess "Cindy's Dumpling Sandwiches" (or whatever else she might decide to call them) would be more fitting.

Shared Google Reader Items, 2/20/2009

It's time again to discuss some shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

Astronomy:

• This is at least the second article I've seen about liquid water at or near the site of one of our landers on Mars. Given the helpful diagram at the right (edited from a NASA image), can anyone tell me what I'm missing?
• It looks like part of the fireball seen over Austin last weekend has been found. Neat! Bad joke/question: It's a meteor in the sky, and a meteorite on the ground. If you throw it or take it on a plane, is it a meteor again?
• The good news: Europa was selected as the target for a big NASA mission. The bad news: we won't get there until 2025 or 2026. The worse news: ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.
• Given that the Hubble repair mission was one of the first things I blogged about on here, news that Hubble might not get repaired due to the debris from the colliding satellites has made me sad.
• Luckily, I have this Flickr tagger thingy to make me happy again. You post an image of the sky to Flickr, a server analyzes it and tells you what's in it, and the people running the server get another shot to analyze to see if it has any info they missed. Awesome.

Technology:

• I was in love with this G1 Android-controlled robotic blimp the first time I saw it, but I think I've accepted that it isn't worth the $600 or so it'd take to put it together.
• I. Want. So. Bad.
• A new company is working on commercial, space-based solar power within a decade. Sweet. There's a cool Asimov story about that in I think it was I, Robot (the collection of short stories that has zero relation to the movie, if for no other reason than that the short stories are entertaining).
• Ok, bear with me. DARPA's remote-controlled insects are absolutely awesome, and not at all creepy. But I understand that it probably sounds like they're creepy. Here's the thing: Imagine a spy camera, tiny speaker, microphone, and transmitter on these things. Now imagine a rescue crew at the other end of the remote control, searching through rubble for earthquaker survivors or whatnot. Now imagine a cockroach crawling up to someone's ear and whispering, "Stay calm, we're coming for you." Ok, you're right. That's creepy. But it's still freaking awesome.

Politics:

• Governor Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas is likely to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services. I had heard her name when I wrote my picks, but I thought Daschle was a lock. Oops.
• This comparison of diagramming an Obama sentence to diagramming a Palin sentence is high geekery, and thus awesome.
• Teehee. The Obama Administration is setting the right-wing loonies up as foils. I love this strategy. "Look how crazy our opponents are." Giggle. Getting the right wing to either say, "These people don't speak for us!" or "Yes, we're crazy!" (leaving pretty much no other choice) is just beautiful.

Entertainment:

• Nate Silver has figured out who's going to win Oscars this weekend. Why bother having the ceremony? Ah, I see; we need to find out who wins Best Supporting Actress (apparently Kate Winslet won it in all the other awards, but she got nominated for Best Actress for the same role at the Oscars, and that threw his model off).

Atheism:

• Something is rotten in the state of Washington.

Art:

• Layer Tennis sounds absolutely awesome. I may have to try something similar (but on a non-competitive level) with McCarron.
• Every frame in this movie is a painting. Over 6000 paintings for a five-minute film. Beautiful, but I really wish the artist had chosen different music to set it to.

Science:

• Very briefly: One of Einstein's problems with quantum mechanics was that it allowed for entanglement of particles, leading to "spooky action at a distance," where things done to one particle happen to the other one, too. It turns out the human eye may be sensitive enough to detect it. If so, the people detecting it would briefly become entangled with one another. This is leading me to visions of the precogs in Minority Report or perhaps the pilots in Dune. Very strange, very potentially cool.
• Damn you, YouTube! How can you not have a clip of "Your Komodo Dragon" from The Freshman? Is it because only about six of us actually saw that movie, and nobody bought the DVD to rip it? My comments about this story of a thought-to-be-extinct bird being photographed and then promptly sold as food would now only make sense to the six of us. But seriously, isn't that tragically hilarious, fellow Freshman-viewers?
• I am absolutely going to have to buy one of these posters to frame and hang.

The Internets:

• Shaquille O'Neal Tweets, and is a bit of a tech junky. Neat.

Jeebus, this post has 26 links in it. As always, leave your comments on these or anything else (but seriously, you could probably keep it to these this time) below.

Blogless

No blog tonight. I was thinking about knocking out a quick share recap, but then I shared something for which I want to draw a diagram (and, no, it wasn't the sentence diagramming thing). 'Cuz that's how I roll.

Shared Google Reader Items, 2/18/2009

It's time again to discuss some shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

The Internets:

• This is the best place I could think to put this interactive map of front pages across the US. Neat!
• Facebook gave up, the TOS change is no more.
• This finance tracking thingy Lifehacker told us about today looks useful. I'm gonna give it a try.
• A free application called Queued promises to make Netflix queue management better.
• In that I now use two different applications to keep track of all my tweets, this comic tickled me.

Science:

• Geographers at UCLA think they've narrowed the search for Bin Laden to one of three houses in a certain city in Pakistan. Very cool, especially if accurate.

Politics:

• 538.com has a good explanation of what's going on with the banking crisis.

That's it today. As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Shared Google Reader Items, 2/17/2009

It's time again to discuss some shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

Digital Rights:

• Facebook swears we own our stuff we put on Facebook. I agree, but it's nice for them to say so before the lawsuits.
• Inspired by all this Facebook insanity, Lifehacker points us to privacy settings every Facebook user should know.

The Internets:

• NBC now has HD episodes available for download. Neat.

Technology:

• Universal chargers are (slowly) coming to cell phones. When I mentioned this plan a week and a half ago, the article I referenced said cell phone companies were against the idea. So I'm going to assume me blogging about it made it happen.

Science:

• It turns out men really do objectify women when the women are dressed subjectively. We knew that, but we were trying to keep that information to ourselves.

Politics:

• Burris didn't talk to any of Blago's people only talked to his brother, but not about money when they talked about money Burris wasn't able to raise any. Jeez, isn't that close enough to what he originally said? Why's everyone down on Burris?

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Shared Google Reader Items, 2/16/2009

It's time again to discuss some shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

Art:

• Lifehacker has a write-up of a tool to create a color palette from any image. Useful.

Science:

• A sea sponge extract is showing promise for killing drug-resistant bacteria (or, technically, for making drug-resistant bacteria no longer drug-resistant). Good stuff.
• A large fireball appeared in the sky over Austin Sunday morning, and I missed it. Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy is keeping us posted on what's known about it. He doesn't think it has anything to do with the satellites that collided.
• I had a lot of trouble deciding which category to put this one in. For the first time, as part of the $787 billion stimulus bill, the US is going to fund a comparison of the effectiveness of different treatments for the same medical conditions. Holy crap, we're going to use science to figure out where to put future money!
• Australia has virtually eliminated measles, save for some cases brought in by foreign visitors. Awesome.
• If you know anyone who's trying to learn general chemistry, some coworkers and I are trying to make that easier. If you have any chemistry questions you'd like answered, post them in the comments over there, and we'll try to get an answer.
• Again, is this politics, or is it science? I'm happy that it's hard to decide where to put it.

Politics:

• FiveThirtyEight has an informative write-up on the "Two Progressivisms." Can you guess which camp I'd put myself in?
• Global-warming denial has nothing to do with science, so it was easier to categorize FiveThirtyEight's slamdown of the myth that scientists thought the world was cooling in the 70s. I'd seen the myth a billion times in various fora, but I didn't realize the amount of BS involved in it.

Digital Rights:

• Facebook has troubling new terms of service. I hope this was unintentional, and they come up with a cleaner version.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Shared Google Reader Items, 2/15/2009

Here are today's shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

The Internets:

• With a simple edit to a text file, you can make Firefox ignore security settings and remember passwords. Be careful using this one. The bookmarklet version is also neato.
• We can now edit Google Spreadsheets on our phones. I can barely imagine all of the possibilities! (Note: Like many geeks, I have an unnatural love for spreadsheets.)
• "Web 2.0" has passed from a buzzword into being an actual thing. It's becoming uncool to invest in Web 2.0, and I'm hoping investors will realize the reason the hype has gone down is that now it's the right way to make a website.

Technology:

• IBM has patented a bullet-dodging bionic suit. Seriously. We definitely have the technology now.
• Samsung has released a solar-powered mobile phone. This means we can edit our spreadsheets all day without fear of power loss!
• Abraham Lincoln was a technology nut, and even had a patent. Cool.
• Liquid wood is coming back as a possible plastic replacement. It's good to see there's something in the works as a plastic replacement. If we switched to 100% alternative energy today, we'd still need a crapton of oil to make plastic. We need to find a plastic replacement, or our reliance on fossil fuels can't go away.

Politics:

• Andrew Sullivan is still not happy with the party to which he supposedly belongs. I think he hoped they'd become his ideal of the party after Bush left office, and is now even angrier.
• Roland Burris now says Blago's brother asked him to donate to buy the Senate seat, but Burris also claims he didn't do so. BTW, NYTimes.com seems to be requiring a login more often than it used to. Sorry about that. I'll probably switch to a different general news feed.

Psychology:

• I don't know what Cognitive Daily is planning with this survey, but it looks interesting.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Today's Shared Google Reader Items, 2/12/2009

Here are today's shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

Science:

• Woot, anti-vax lost in court today. This ruling makes no difference on reality (science figures that out, not lawyers), but it's nice to see the law (and, judging from the stories I've been seeing in the last few days, public opinion) matching reality.
• Speaking of anti-vax, the jackass who started it all may have done so to try to sell his own vaccine. This is a very special kind of evil.
• Um. Stem cells may have cured AIDS. Holy shit.
• A biologist has conducted another study of the "25 Random Things" meme on Facebook. I love memetics, it's awesome to see it becoming a thing.

Atheism:

• The LA Times has a pretty good editorial about atheism today by Sam Harris. It's worth a read.

Politics:

• Obama has dumped Republican Senator Judd Gregg as potential Secretary of Commerce. The statement about it is beautiful.
• Iowa is considering a bill to send all of its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, with the bill only going into effect if 270 electoral votes worth of states enact similar measures. It's a neat way to get rid of the electoral college without a Constitutional amendment, but it's weird to be coming out of Iowa. If all you needed was the majority of votes, would you bother visiting the state ranked 30th in population? Weird.

Random:

• Lifehacker has a tip on reducing rent. Interesting.

Technology:

• An MIT team has developed shocks that recharge car batteries, thus saving fuel for hybrids. Neat.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Today's Shared Google Reader Items, 2/11/2009

It's technically 2/12 now, but close enough. Here are today's shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

Politics:

• Americans might get reminders about the fact that people actually die in Iraq. It's nice that it's finally happening, but I think people are already starting to understand that.
• Twitter is great for political organization. The tweets calling for volunteers as needed during this election cycle were great. It turns out Twitter is even more useful when Republicans learn how to use it.

Technology:

• This story about a wearable tech demo at TED makes me happy. It's almost the future!
• A pair of satellites collided today in orbit. This could be a big problem. We don't know yet. I'll be watching this story closely.

Random:

• Get your forever stamps now. The price of stamps is going to go up again soon.

Digital Rights:

• Dammit, Authors' Guild. Stop being stupid. Text-to-speech is not a "performance" of your work.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Firefox Keywords and Chrome Search Engines

In my last blog, I mentioned Chrome search engines, and how you can use them to make your address bar smarter. I had never noticed these in Firefox, but they're also there. Chrome makes them a bit more obvious (with the "Press TAB to search..." thingies), and adds them automatically for pages that you search on that are formatted in a way that Chrome can recognize, but they're there for all of us (well, except weirdos using IE or Safari; they might be there, too, but who would know?). These things are very useful if you have to poke around within a site a lot with just slightly changed URLs (I need to do this several times a day, loading different itemIDs in an author view or student preview), but they're also useful if all you want to do is search. Here's how they work.

Firefox:

1. Create a new bookmark. It can be any page; we're going to edit it to make it what we want. Starting from Google for a Google-based keyword wouldn't be a bad idea, though, to get the favicon right.
2. Click Bookmarks, then right click the new bookmark and choose Properties (or whatever the equivalent is on Mac).
3. Change the Name to something to remember it by in case you need to edit it in the future, such as "Google Map Search" (or whichever one you might be setting up).
4. Change the Location to the url you're going to search, with %s for the word or phrase you want to search on. To put that in concrete language and hopefully make it more comprehensible, let's do one of my favorites, "map" (for looking something up in Google Maps). We'll do a cooler version of this in a sec, but this is an easier place to start. For this one, your Location is http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=%s
5. Most importantly, change the Keyword to something short to type, "map" in this case.
6. Save changes.

Chrome:

1. Right click the address bar, and choose "Edit search engines."
2. Click "Add"
3. The name, keyword, and url are the same as Firefox. The only difference is that Chrome will give you the "Press TAB" clue to let you know that you have a keyword setup with that name.

To use these things, type your keyword in the address bar, followed by your search (for example, "map 123 Fake Street, 78754". The page will load, with your search.

Note that these don't have to use search engines; any time you can fill in a phrase in a url to go to a page you're looking for, it works. It's hard to give you examples of that, since I can't show you the ones I use at work... but, well, for example, this one will load an xkcd comic by ID number:

• keyword: xkcd
• location: http://xkcd.com/%s

Typing "xkcd 526" in your address bar would then load one of my favorite xkcds, which you should keep around for reference.

Here are some others (note: in Chrome, I highly recommend just going to most of these pages and searching to get them into your list, and then editing the keywords; the url they grab has some extra trickiness that's neat, but I'm not going to sort out all of how those extra bits work):

• YouTube: you, http://youtube.com/results?search_type=search_videos&search_query=%s&search_sort=relevance
  
• Amazon: am, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/external-search/?field-keywords=%s&mode=blended
• IMDB: imdb, http://www.imdb.com/find?q=%s
• Merriam-Webster: mw, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/%s
• Allrecipes.com: cook, http://allrecipes.com/search/recipes.aspx?withterm=%s
• Images.google.com: i, http://images.google.com/images?gbv=2&hl=en&q=%s&btnG=Search+Images
• Maps.google.com: map, http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=%s

And this brings me to my favorite: mapto. This one is slightly trickier. The easiest thing to do is probably to search for your starting address (I have this set as my work address for my work lappy, and my home address for my home desktop) using "map YourAddress," and then copy that string into this.

Here's an example, with 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, District of Columbia 20006 (the White House) as our starting address:

• Keyword: mapto
• Location: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&saddr=1600+Pennsylvania+Ave+NW,+Washington,+District+of+Columbia+20006&daddr=%s&hl=en

Notice the +'s; if you're careful, you could just change that to your address. You can actually shorten that a bit; for example, this would also work:

• Location: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&saddr=1600+Pennsylvania+Ave,+20006&daddr=%s&hl=en

Once you have that set up, you can type "mapto DestinationAddress" (for example, "mapto 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, 20006"), and a map from your starting address to that destination address will load.

Let me know in the comments if you have any other creative uses of keywords.

ETA: Be sure to check out the follow-up to this post, where I discover way cooler tricks.

Today's Shared Google Reader Items, 2/10/2009

Here are today's shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

Science:

• Trees are marching north at a rate of about 1 km/year. Kudos to NatGeo for the Ents reference, but boo on the sig fig error (100 km/century = 60 miles/century, not 62, no matter what Google might tell you). Bad NatGeo!
• Oh great. We were told the other day that many renewable energy technologies rely on non-renewable materials. Now Scientific American points out that biofuels are bad for feeding people and combating climate change. Dammit.
• Carl Safina informs us in the NYTimes that "Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live," calling on biologists to stop worshipping Darwin. He refrains from asking biologists whether they've stopped beating their wives. Pharyngula points out some of the many things wrong with Safina's diatribe.

The Internets:

• Firefox 3.2 (or possibly 4.0) will have natural language abilities. Natural language (and the semantic web, its close cousin) is the next big thing that'll happen to the web. It's cool to see it's coming. I mean, I already have a lot of that through fancy Chrome search engines (I should probably blog about how to do that one of these days...), but it's cool that it'll be built in.
• Chris Wilson at Slate is performing memetic research. If you took part in the "25 random things" meme, get thee over there to help them out!
• Microsoft is offering domaing name registration and hosting free for a year, $15/year after that. That's an incredibly good deal, so good that I really don't trust it. If you've thought about setting up a website, check it out and let us know if it feels legit.
• Google plans to offer real-time power-consumption monitoring. I love this idea, particularly the services to warn you of spikes and auto-map those to causes that will grow out of it. Neat.
• Um, Lifehacker? It's built into Reader, we just need to drag that "Note in Reader" link up from "Your Stuff" to our bookmark bar. Why would we download something? Well, ok, I really wanted to find something to make a hotkey out of it, but I'm not sure it's worth the script (especially since I've gotten in the habit of using bookmarklets).

Technology:

• A new artificial arm listens to brain signals. Neat! We have the technology!

Politics:

• Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley want to give us our money back. Before you fall down in shock, don't worry, it isn't altruistic; it's because they're afraid they'll get more regulation.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Today's Shared Google Reader Items, 2/9/2009

Here are today's shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy.

The Internets:

• I love the idea of WikiDashboard, a tool to track the contentious parts of an article in Wikipedia... but I think they failed at visualization. Good idea, just make the actual parts that are contentious more obvious, please.
• CBS now has tons of old shows available online for free. Neat.
• Randall at xkcd addresses a conundrum I often fight with myself about. I've settled on option 2, mostly due to auto-conversion.
• Gmail has made it easier to switch from other email, such as Yahoo. Yes, this one's for you, Mc.
• Holy crap, Gmail also finally added a clean contact merge! Woohoo!

Art:

• I hate to share this idea about using board games as picture frames, because I think I'm going to do it, and if everyone's seen it already it won't be as cool. Oh well.
• I think the first photo of bushfires in Australia is absolutely gorgeous. I realize that might reveal something wrong with me.
• Shepard Fairey is pre-emptively suing AP to force them to lay off about their ridiculous copyright claims. This is fair use, morons. Absolutely clearly. Stop it.

Science:

• I love you, Conan O'Brien. I'm sorry I've been neglecting you. After this, I may have to add you to my DVR (which, now that I think about it, would be a much better way to watch Conan anyway).
• Yay! The Bad Astronomer had some pro-vaccination news! Go Canada! BTW, it's only may-be-embarrassing-for-people-to-overhear-at-work, not so much NSFW (depending where you work).

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Today's Shared Google Reader Items, 2/7/2009

Here are today's shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy.

Politics:

• Ezra Klein shows just how ridiculous the "this isn't a stimulus bill, it's a spending bill" argument is.
• Holy crap. Just, wow.

The Internets:

• There have been a lot of articles slamming the "25 Random Things" meme on Facebook. I like this article's take on it better.

Science

• Oh, look. The anti-vax thing is even worse. It turns out the paper that started it all, in 1998, was not only bad research, but possibly also fraud. Perfect.
• Many renewable energy technologies rely on non-renewable materials, like indium and platinum, that could be dry in 10-15 years. Lovely.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

g1 blog test

I'm writing this on my newish G1, aka the "google phone" or "gphone." I'll be back later to talk about my shared items, but I wanted to try this out. Typing isn't too bad, but I'm really missing copy and paste (coming in a week or two), and the width of the entry window doesn't fix itself to fit my screen. Fix it, google! You have to expect that people who would buy your phone would also use your blog software...

Today's Shared Google Reader Items, 2/6/2009

Hey, I think I'll give you a thread to comment on my shared Google Reader items again. What a novel idea!

The Internets:

• Gmail now has a nifty multiple inbox feature. Lifehacker has a run-down of 9 other useful gmail extensions, too. Good stuff.

Technology:

• A company has an idea for universal power cords, so we can use the same cord(s) for all of our various devices (which would also, now that I think about it, make things like portable solar chargers more likely to come along). I love the idea. Makers of electronics... less so. We need an outcry to make this happen.

Science:

• Goddammit, people. Vaccines save lives. Vaccines have drastically improved our quality of life. If I had to pick one medical discovery to keep out of all of them (other than, perhaps, doctors washing their hands), it'd be vaccines. So STOP IT, MORONS. You're killing people, not just your own kids. Less people being vaccinated means the viruses have more places to hide, and it makes it more likely for even vaccinated people to get exposed to levels their particular immune system can't handle. This is something that already drove me crazy, and then I found out this week that I work with one of these loonies. You people have no scientific leg to stand on. STOP IT.

That's it for today. Hopefully I'll be back with more on Monday, if not before!

Welcome Pickles

When I moved into my current rental house back in July, the previous occupants had left many things: spices, cleaning chemicals, even a vase in the bathroom full of some sort of scented oil. The thing that weirded me out, though, was a large, unopened jar of pickles in the fridge. Why would you buy a large jar of pickles just before you moved out? And pickle juice isn't exactly a color that instills trust. I threw out the pickles.

A few months later, I was watching a repeat of the sitcom How I Met Your Mother. In this episode, two of the characters moved into a new apartment, and were starving after the move. One of the characters complained that there was nothing in the fridge, not even pickles.

Wait, what? Are the pickles a thing?

I decided that, regardless of whether they were a thing, they're a thing now.

The next time you move, leave a jar of unopened pickles in the fridge. I recommend labeling them "Welcome Pickles," and possibly even attaching a note to the new occupants of your former home. Let them know the tricks and quirks that it took you a while to figure out when you moved in, such as tips on how to get the thermostats to play nice with the changing weather, or a warning that the guest toilet doesn't flush properly unless you hold down the lever for a couple seconds.

We can make this a thing.

Doggies (without pics)

This post should have pics, but I'm trying to knock out a post to appease the masses, while still not taking any sizable time-wasting from work... so there's no time!

I just wanted to share that we got those cord keeper thingies in the office recently. We didn't do this to make things look nicer. We did so to make sure none of the various dogs that have been known to hang out at the office pulled any monitors off of desks, as one almost did last week.

Today we have an Irish wolfhound mutt (the boss's sweet but timid dog) and a chihuahua. It's funny when the chihuahua chases the Irish wolfhound into an office.