“Those who are saying the game is changing for the worse, well, they don’t have a father who can’t remember his name because of the game. I’m pretty sure if everybody had to wake with their dad not knowing his name, not knowing his kids’ name, not being able to function at a normal rate after football, they would understand that the game needs to change. If it doesn’t there are going to be more players, more great players, being affected by the things that we know of and aren’t changing. That’s not right.” — Junior Seau on whether football is becoming too soft.
You’ll go far with leaders like this, North Carolina:
Tami Fitzgerald, who heads the pro-amendment group Vote FOR Marriage NC, said she believes the initiative awoke a silent majority of more active voters in the future.
“I think it sends a message to the rest of the country that marriage is between one man and one woman,” Fitzgerald said at a celebration Tuesday night. “The whole point is simply that you don’t rewrite the nature of God’s design based on the demands of a group of adults.”
Just so we’re clear: the head of a group called “Vote for Marriage” is against making decisions based on “the demands of a group of adults”.
Sina Weibo updates its "Community Conventions" -
Of special note is article 13:
Article 13: Users have the right to publish information, but may not publish any information that:
Opposes the basic principles established by the constitution
Harms the unity, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of the nation
Reveals national secrets, endangers national security, or threatens the the honor or interests of the nation
Incites ethnic hatred or ethnic discrimination, undermines ethnic unity, or harms ethnic traditions and customs
Promotes evil teachings and superstitions
Spreads rumors, disrupts social order, and destroys societal stability
Promotes illicit activity, gambling, violence, or calls for the committing of crimes
Calls for disruption of social order through illegal gatherings, formation of organizations, protests, demonstrations, mass gatherings and assemblies
Has other content which is forbidden by laws, administrative regulations and national regulations.
(Via Caijing English, via China Digital Times)
Shell Apps and Silver Bullets -
Web technology is great for many things. Replicating a native app experience is not one of them.
If you’re thinking of going with HTML5 for your company’s app, read this and think again. Great arguments from someone who seems to know their ass from a hole in the ground.
AKA: don’t judge a framework/language/technique by its demo app.
This not only applies to HTML5, but also to bridge efforts like Ruby Motion. Sure, it’s crazy simple to write an example app, but once your app grows to a practical size, and you start spelunking in the API, the benefits of the bridge becomes moot.
However: the writer’s Facebook example is poorly chosen. FB’s app is largely HTML5, and for their specific situation this makes a lot of sense.
Update: Pete Warden (who is much better qualified to address this than I) responds much more vigorously (and convincingly) against this article’s claims, especially with regard to HTML5 performance claims.
“Born in Los Angeles, he was raised in the Mojave Desert, and was inspired at an early age by the humming tone caused by wind blown across telephone wires.” — Ambient composer Harold Budd has a fantastic Wikipedia lede.
The Sun, as shot by Alan Friedman
Abraham Lincoln Filed a Patent for Facebook in 1845 -
Nate St. Pierre writes:
Lincoln was requesting a patent for “The Gazette,” a system to “keep People aware of Others in the Town.” He laid out a plan where every town would have its own Gazette, named after the town itself. He listed the Springfield Gazette as his Visual Appendix, an example of the system he was talking about. Lincoln was proposing that each town build a centrally located collection of documents where “every Man may have his own page, where he might discuss his Family, his Work, and his Various Endeavors.”
He went on to propose that “each Man may decide if he shall make his page Available to the entire Town, or only to those with whom he has established Family or Friendship.” Evidently there was to be someone overseeing this collection of documents, and he would somehow know which pages anyone could look at, and which ones only certain people could see (it wasn’t quite clear in the application). Lincoln stated that these documents could be updated “at any time deemed Fit or Necessary,” so that anyone in town could know what was going on in their friends’ lives “without being Present in Body.”
A patent request for Facebook, filed by Abraham Lincoln in 1845.
I’ve long argued Facebook is working towards natural or timeless (for lack of better words) human interaction. That their central idea is relevant in any age should not be surprising.
(Though it is astounding Lincoln was imagining a nearly identical privacy system.)
(Via The Next Web)
Update: And it looks like a hoax! And we all fell for it… Patents, Facebook, and the Lincoln-twist. Gets ‘em every time.
Update, Part 2: The Atlantic explains it all.
New York Magazine reports on an interesting development in computer/human relations:
The Southern District of New York recently became the nation’s first federal court to explicitly approve the use of predictive coding, a computer-assisted document review that turns much of the legal grunt work currently done by underemployed attorneys over to the machines.
Last month, U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Peck endorsed a plan by the parties in Da Silva Moore v. Publicis Groupe — a sex discrimination case filed against the global communications agency by five former employees — to use predictive coding to review more than 3 million electronic documents in order to determine whether they should be produced in discovery, the process through which parties exchange relevant information before trial.
Analysts expect decisions like this to open the door for an eruption of computer analyzed legal work.
A few questions:
“How do you write for children? I really have never figured that out. So I decided to just ignore it.” — Maurice Sendak, who died today at 83, discusses creativity and his latest work, ‘Bumble-Ardy,’ in an interview with The Atlantic. Read more.
(Source: theatlantic)
“In something called the Orion Molecular Cloud, truly vast amounts of water are being produced. How much? Incredibly, Fishman explains, “the cloud is making sixty Earth waters every twenty-four hours”—or, in simpler terms, “there is enough water being formed sufficient to fill all of Earth’s oceans every twenty-four minutes.” This is occurring, however, in an area “420 times the size of our solar system.” — BLDGBLOG