From www.theatlantic.com:
Nazis Everywhere
As a way of giving back to the community, Goldblog is going to start compiling lists of people who are not Nazis but who have nevertheless been called Nazis in public, as a way of proving the obvious point, which is that people reaching for insults should find something better than Nazi.
After reading “Nazis Everywhere,” a blog post by Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic Monthly (excerpt below), I did a few Google searches to see how many results the names in his article would have when paired with a Nazi-related term. I got a bit carried away and ended up putting the results in a Google spreadsheet (suitably enough). I thought I’d throw together a quick spreadsheet showing the search result count for each name he included when a Nazi-related term is part of the search. It is somehow reassuring that a search for “hitler nazi” still comes out on top of all the others by a wide margin. I used what I deemed to be the most relevant Nazi-related term, and in several uncertain cases, the term that provided the highest number of results. People, groups, and subjects that have a party affiliation are colored accordingly. There are a few charts in separate sheets (see tabs at the bottom) that help compare the results. Far from complete and yes, unscientific!
By the President of the United States of America.
A Proclamation.
The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consiousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.
In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the United States the Eighty-eighth.
By the President: Abraham Lincoln
William H. Seward,
Secretary of State
Thanks to Dan Foster at NRO, from whom I ripped off this idea (original source). Hey, Lincoln belongs to all of us, right? Happy Thanksgiving.
I highly recommend reading this whole post (originally linked by @daringfireball on Twitter). Enough with these thugs. Let’s disband the #TSA and outsource airport security to Israel already.
Today, I was detained by the TSA for about 30 minutes for taking pictures while going through security. Taking pictures is perfectly legal.
TSA: You can’t take pictures in this area.
Me: Well, I read the TSA guidelines on the web a few months ago, and they clearly state that people can take pictures in this area.
TSA: You can’t take pictures in this area.
Me: Can you show me the rules that say that I cannot?TSA: (Nodding over to the main desk) They are checking on that now.
TSA: You have to show us your pictures and delete them.Me: I’m not going to delete my pictures.
TSA: Show us the pictures you took.
Me: If I unlock my phone, I want assurances that you will give me the chance to relock it before you take it from my control.
TSA: We can’t give you any promises.Me: So I’m not going to unlock my phone.
Q: When is your flight?
A: 4:30 (in roughly two hours)The implied issue was that if I didn’t comply with their demands, they could detain me long enough to miss my flight.
I know some people prefer single-line CSS formatting. It’s horribly unreadable in my opinion, but okay, to each their own. Throwing tabs into the mix, and a varying number of tabs at that, makes it pretty clear there’s a masochist at the keyboard. As if single-line wasn’t bad enough, look at the wrapping nightmare this creates. How much time is wasted trying (and failing, here) to line up the declaration blocks?
And I do know who formats their CSS this way, but it wouldn’t be nice to say, now, would it?
Originally posted on skitch.com.
My fascination with the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald goes back as far as I can remember. It sank just a month after I was born. Like most people who know about the disaster, it was Gordon Lightfoot’s song that first made me aware of it, probably playing on a bad AM radio in my parents’ car in the early ’80s. Trips to Duluth — still one of my favorite cities after traveling far from Minnesota — always had to include a visit to the maritime museum there, and I could have looked at the Fitzgerald exhibits all day. But as nostalgic as it is to think back on this childhood fascination, I was reminded by one of the pages linked below that this wasn’t just a mysterious calamity that became a romantic ballad. It was a tragic loss for 29 families who have been without one of their members for 35 years now.
Photo source: www.mhsd.org
From cimss.ssec.wisc.edu:
On November 10, 1975 the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior. All 29 crew members died. At the time, it was the worst shipping disaster on the Great Lakes in 11 years.
Gordon Lightfoot’s song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” (1976, Moose Music, Ltd.) is a tribute to this ship wreck and the men who lost their lives. Some of the lyrics of the song are given below along with descriptions of related events.
From ssefo.com
Why has the sinking become such a fascination of so many people? Surely the mystery has contributed to this, but for me, the stories of the twenty-nine men lost on the Edmund Fitzgerald tell an even greater story: the value of family. A ship was not the only loss in 1975. Twenty-nine families mourned the loss of a loved one, and the memories of their loved ones will never be forgotten.
From www.thestar.com:
Gordon Lightfoot has changed the lyric of his 1976 hit, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, to remove the implication that human error played a part.
I take voting very seriously. It’s the sacred right of every citizen living in a democratic society. As an American living abroad, I made sure to request a ballot well in advance of the election and sent it in with plenty of time before the deadline. So imagine my surprise when I found out I could have voted in more races if I had put it off until the last minute. Since moving to Latvia 2.5 years ago I have only been able to vote in federal races — president and U.S. House & Senate. Twelve days ago I got an email from a “@state.gov” email address saying I could use electronic voting to vote a full ballot including federal, state, and local races. This was not an option when I visited http://www.fvap.gov/ weeks before. The last line of the email: “If you have already received, voted, and returned your state ballot, you should not participate in this project.” How is this fair? I was penalized, and you could even say disenfranchised, for getting my ballot in early. I’m not too worried about who becomes the next Soil and Water Supervisor in my county, but there are a number of very close races on the state level and I would have liked very much to vote in them. As it is, I got to vote in one race — for a U.S. House seat. And it wasn’t even close.
This is one of the best articles on procrastination I’ve ever read. Read the whole thing… unless you’re one of those mutants who doesn’t procrastinate.
You keep promising yourself this will be the year you do all these things. You know your life would improve if you would just buckle down and put forth the effort.
You can try to fight it back. You can buy a daily planner and a to-do list application for your phone. You can write yourself notes and fill out schedules. You can become a productivity junkie surrounded by instruments to make life more efficient, but these tools alone will not help, because the problem isn’t you are a bad manager of your time – you are a bad tactician in the war inside your brain.
The fact that this exists made my bearded (but not goateed) jaw drop. Then I read the copy and watched the video. And that mouthpiece… Wow.
From www.goateesaver.com:
It reflects your personality. It declares your individuality. Your goatee is much more than just facial hair, your goatee style helps fashion your identity. We understand its importance to you. That’s why we created the GoateeSaver shaving template, the innovative grooming tool designed to give you the perfect goatee every time you shave.
After reading yet another article about privacy issues with Facebook apps, I was planning to eliminate unused apps from my account and check the privacy settings and policies of others. After 5 minutes of searching for my applications, I checked the Facebook help pages — which weren’t much help, as you can see here. Would Facebook intentionally make apps more difficult to remove or did someone screw up here? I’m not one to assume the worst, but as this page seems increasingly difficult to find with every update to their user interface, I’m starting to wonder. Or am I just missing the not-so-obvious new location of the application settings link?
If you use Facebook but don’t want your personal information leaked all over the Web, you had better make sure you don’t use any of Facebook’s most popular apps. According to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, “tens of millions” of apps on Facebook transmit varying amounts of identifying information to their own personal ad servers, even in cases when users’ profiles were set to completely private.
Every once in a while, interesting subjects coincide in such a way that brings me back to the early days of the Web as we know it. BoingBoing’s post today about the male Bower bird got me started. The order of the images at BoingBoing emphasized the optical illusion, and at first I followed the Ames Room link to read more about that at Wikipedia. Fascinating stuff. When I went back to finish reading the BoingBoing post, I found the footnote link to the original Creature Cast article (a better read, in my opinion; see excerpt below). The emphasis there was on the bird first, then the optical illusion. A subtle distinction, but this difference got me interested in the bird itself, whose peculiarities extend beyond the already amazing ability to construct optical illusions to fool “the ladies.” Again at BoingBoing, a National Geographic article and photo gallery linked in the comments tell more of this color-crazy architect of a bird.
Clicking through page after page and site after site is such an everyday experience that it has become mundane. A decade or more of high school graduates don’t remember the days before little bits of underlined text took us from one page, document, server, or continent to another. But somehow tonight, as each link led to something more fascinating, I was reminded of those early days of surfing with Mosaic, when the act of serendipitous discovery was just beginning to come to the computer. Ah, geek memories.
Male bower birds boast an architectural prowess, it is true. They also have a discerning eye when it comes to the color palette for their homes. It turns out that, if that weren’t enough, these birds also use forced perspective, arranging stones in their court in size order to create an optical illusion for the female who is shopping around for a mate.
The males are creating variation of an Ames room, sort of like this one:
The trick in this picture is that the room is actually much deeper and taller on the left side, and so the leftmost suited guy looks really tiny, whereas the suit on the right is standing closer downstage, on the smaller side of the irregularly shaped room, which makes him look huge.
