The del.icio.us redesign has been unleashed. The thing that makes me happiest is that the posting interface (a) shows you how many characters you have left to spend on the description and (b) the description size has grown from 255 characters to 1000. Win!
…not that I think anybody outside of my network actually uses descriptions for the things they bookmark.
Hot McDonald’s french fries and a call home encouraged Salim Hamdan to cooperate under interrogation but Osama bin Laden’s driver did not like cold fries and isolation upset him, witnesses said at his Guantanamo war crimes trial on Friday.
“Mr. Hamdan commented that he liked McDonald’s fries and we brought fries in,” FBI special agent George Crouch told Hamdan’s terrorism war crimes trial before a U.S. military commission. “Mr. Hamdan even appreciated that McDonald’s fries are not good cold.”
This is perhaps the most trivial headline and introduction to an article about the Guantanamo war crimes tribunals I could possibly imagine. The later pages have more information about Hamdan’s interrogation and the ongoing trial, but that’s basically filler borrowed from other articles. Why on earth would an article about the availability and temperature of french fries make it to the “top news” feed of a national wire service?
“Quite a few people in the world have seen my penis,” he says from his home in Los Angeles. “So that’s kinda cool.”
An interview with the kid who appeared on the cover of Nevermind as a baby. The interview is kind of lame (who really cares what this kid has to say about anything?), but it’s a good quote nonetheless.
A follow-up to the AOL electoral map post: the map above shows (to the best of my clumsy image manipulation ability) how the McCain and Obama maps differ. There is, indeed, a lot of overlap.
I still can’t really figure what this map is showing or how it’s generating its data.
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and some menace.
I’m curious as to how, precisely, “some menace” is defined.
This is overwhelmingly awesome. It’s from this collection of photos of Chinese anti-terrorism military exercises in preparation for the Olympics. The original caption says they’re “members of China’s armed police [demonstrating] a rapid deployment during an anti-terrorist drill.”
Ideas to ponder while contemplating this photo:
Stolen shamelessly from akamediasystem’s delicious feed.
We really like interesting ways of thinking about the electoral process. Sometimes, we’re also amused by disastrous failures in the same arena.
The above image comes from AOL’s Political Machine. To see the results, you need to vote by entering your state of residence and which of the two major candidates you’re voting for. Once you’ve voted, you’re presented with the results map.
The poll results, in effect since July 14, show McCain winning every single state and taking 67% of the popular vote. This strikes me as highly suspect, given that virtually every reputable poll conducted in the past several months has predicted a close race, and many put Obama in the lead. There’s lots to be said here about selection bias and sampling methods (and, probably, about ballot stuffing), but we’ll skip it for now.
What’s really mind-blowing is the pair of “view results by candidate” maps. All you’re ever asked for as a poll participant is your state of residence. How, then, do they have the data to create a finely gridded electoral map? If they’re doing IP lookups, why did they ask for a state of residence? If they’re not doing an IP lookup, are they just making the data up?
Also puzzling: the vast majority of “sectors” on the per-candidate map appear to be won by both candidates. Basically the entire north half of the country appears to have exactly the same dot patterns, but in different colors for the different candidates. Things are a little bit different in the Gulf area, but there’s still substantial overlap. Weird. (Update: this is shown in more detail in this follow-up post). Also, AOL seems to think that the only four important pieces of information about the candidates are their hometowns, number of years in office, marital status, and age.
As a side note, the tagline for the Political Machine is “cranking 24/7 to sort the spin.” There’s some serious irony there. They’re trying to cut through the “spin.” With a rotating motion. Oops.
(Thanks, Lee!)
Full disclosure: the above images were altered to remove the “you voted for…” tag that was in the upper left corner of all of the maps. Please fax pitchforks and torches to our complaints office.
Sun Microsystems, I generally have great respect for you. Don’t start pulling this crap. Also, “Install a free program with the Java” is a truly heinous sentence. You have also committed a crime of apostrophes in your third bullet point.
Come on, guys. Let’s get back to the reputable, dignified software thing.
A fortuitous pairing of headlines in my RSS feed. Bernanke says we have a long road ahead of us. Bush says everything’s great. My money’s on Bernanke.
Radiohead’s new video, shot entirely with LIDAR. Cute, but not really that groundbreaking. More info about the process here.
There is only one path and that is the path that you take, but you can take more than one path. Cross over the cell bars, find a new maze, make the maze from its path, find the cell bars, cross over the bars, find a maze, make the maze from its path, eat the food, eat the path.