Thanks to this plugin, developers will now be able to give these users an option to at least switch to a faster rendering engine by just adding one single line of code to their sites.

If you don’t think this is awesome, or don’t realize how massively important this could be, you are pants-on-head retarded.

WebKit, inside Internet Explorer.

I’ll wait here while you dance around your office and sing.

As promised, I am now Google’s bestest-best friend.

Someone with less passion and talent and poorer content can totally beat you if they’re willing to work longer and harder than you are.

Things to do. Miles to go.

Thanks goes to Greg and Manton.

When JFK first raised the prospect of Medicare, Reagan warned that it had to be stopped or that generation would “spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” When FDR proposed Social Security, a Republican congressman said, “If this bill becomes law, the lash of the dictator will be felt.”

Well, at least they’re consistent.

The fair was an amazing show of both talent, and cliché. On one hand, I’ve never been to a street fair that had such a fantastic collection of print makers. I had to literally walk away from the fair and smoke just to stop myself from buying any more prints.

On the other, if I had to endure one more 10-speed silhouette printed on an American Apparel shirt, or a cute plush pseudo-monster, I was going to burn the damn thing down and demand half the fair go home and think about what they’d done.

I don’t know why it is that certain styles seem to just engulf entire communities. It’s interesting to see several plays off of a similar theme, if done in concert and reflection, artists riffing and goofing on one another. It’s another when you wonder whether every other booth is just a front for some generic wholesaler.

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.

I love new laws.

It won’t get you much … Not in the way of merchandise, anyway. No, you have to give the twenty. Pass it, release it. This is about as much Zen as I can muster: Stuff your pockets full of twenties and doors will open by themselves.

After hearing detractors say Manhattan was a special case, he decided to take his show on the road, traveling to Salt Lake City, Vegas and Los Angeles.

At the end of the second piece:

Our steaks came. A hostess stopped by. The sommelier joined her. My friend greeted them both by name. When we left, he said goodbye to everyone working in the restaurant by name, too.

“Man,” I said when we were on the terrace, “what’s with the names? Do you eat here every day?”

He smiled. A wind blew up a staircase. Men and women churned around us, moving from one important place to another. “People want to be remembered,” he said. “In my experience, names work way better than a twenty.”

Despite their simple premises, Chiarella manages to write each piece in a way that keeps you reading, even when the end result is something you may have guessed at long before you clicked my links.

Updated to reflect the article was from 2003, not this year. Thanks goes to Jason for catching it in his post.

America’s third (Nobel) peace-prize winner … has been the subject of little public notice, and has passed up every opportunity to parley his award into riches or personal distinction. And the third winner’s accomplishments, unlike Kissinger’s, are morally unambiguous.

One reason is that Borlaug’s deeds are done in nations remote from the media spotlight: the Western press covers tragedy and strife in poor countries, but has little to say about progress there. Another reason is that Borlaug’s mission — to cause the environment to produce significantly more food — has come to be seen, at least by some securely affluent commentators, as perhaps better left undone.

“Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”

Perhaps the issue is more complicated than that. Perhaps there are some valid concerns regarding genetically modified food. Perhaps we’ll find better ways to increase yields, without the application of chemicals. Perhaps.

But to quote Cynical-C:

If you die after selling between 250 million and 700 million records you’ll be on the front page of every newspaper while the entire world mourns.

If you die after saving between 250 million and 700 million people from starvation, your death notice will be somewhere near the classifieds section.

Sad, but true.

Zimbardo discusses the experiment, of course, but more interesting is his own post mortem on his personal reactions to the experiment. How he got just as sucked into it as anyone else.

But most interesting is his take on moral responsibility, and what his experiments mean to justice. Does his experiment show that situations alone can alter someone’s behavior in such a way that they can’t be held responsible for their actions?

It’s really a philosophical and legal issue. In the extreme case, it really is “The situation made me do it.” So are we going to put the situation on trial? Well, we don’t have a mechanism.

Tribunals say, “We have the power to put leaders on trial, even though they in fact—none of them actually killed anybody—it’s just they created a policy, they created a system.”

But once it’s created, once the Stanford Prison Experiment was created, I’m irrelevant. If I had died during the thing, it would have gone on. The guards would have been happier. If Hitler had been killed, the whole thing would have gone on only because it had already corrupted the legal system, the educational system, the business system. With all these mechanisms in place, he became irrelevant.

Perhaps most amazing to me is how he is able to recall with such detail the exact settings he used to capture the photo.

There’s another short clip of Ansel here, where he talks about his working methods. There’s a line he utters, that seems simple at first, but which caused me to pause.

The justification for technique is being able to do what you want to do when you want to do it.

In an age where so much technique is handled by software, or googled on demand, that line may ring quant. But it sticks, making me long for craftsmanship.

When Ansel discusses his photography in these clips, the art of it seems almost secondary to the technique of it to him. But the technique of it is the art, or at least, the art is dependent on it. As he says later in the same clip:

There is nothing mysterious about technique. It is merely a means to an end.

The first Carroll poem I ever heard was laced into a punk song. In the middle of Rancid’s Junkie Man, at the 1 minute and 54 second mark, Carroll’s voice squawked:

My hand went blind clairvoyant I make love to my trance sister My trance sister went on And my trance parents see from the balcony I looked out on the big field It opens like the cover of an old bible And out come the wolves Their paws trampling the snow The alphabet I stand on my head and watch it all go away

It was imaginative, dark, leering. It snuck into my head. I would hit reverse on the tape player, rewind to that moment, let it start up, and sing loudly trying to match Carroll’s staccato. Snarl and smile.

The only thing I’d add is a request that the architect find an inexpensive way to shorten the owner’s 1 hour commute from the suburbs to the city to less than 10 minutes.

(W)e grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs! So people pretend there is drama where there is none.

I will now queue up Cake’s Tougher Than It Is.

The study published in the journal Economics and Human Biology showed that tall people reported more enjoyment of life and less pain and sadness. Taller men also said they worry less though they are more likely to experience stress and anger than people of average height, said researchers led by Angus Deaton from Princeton University in New Jersey.

Each additional inch boosted happiness levels by the same amount as a 4.4 percent increase in family income for men and 3.8 percent pay raise for women.

At 6’8”, I’m a fucking ball of sunshine.

(S)everal times a day somewhere within earshot a teenager in full flow would utter the words, “I was like…,” followed by a little pause and then an accelerated torrent of more words oft accompanied by a cartoonish facial expression.

Why has an entire generation of kids caught this tick? What function does it serve and why them—that is, why this last decade or two of pre-teen to post-college age victims?

As an experiment back in my teenage days, I tried to eliminate all ums, ehs, likes and pauses in my speech. More than anything, I loathed the vagueness and repetition of “I/he/she was like…”, or even just “like”. Hated the way my peers stumbled around every sentence as though they were only partially convinced they should be speaking at all. How every story sounded like it was simile. So I sat down to correct it in my own speech first. Lead by example.

It was a grueling, completely self-inflicted process that did little more than make me sound overly formal for a kid with green hair.

I am not making this up:

A terrifying dream afflicting vegetarians in which the dreamer experiences extreme feelings of anxiety about meat. Nightmares might involve horrifying visions of meat or the (troubling) experience of eating meat.

By way of example:

“I was on like a hotel balcony just stuffing bacon in my mouth. I could hear my conscious mind telling me not to eat it, that it was bad for me. I also remember my brother in the dream yelling at me from below not to eat it. I made myself wake up and was so happy it was only a dream.”

To quote Bourdain:

Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It’s healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I’ve worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold.

Semantics are only important when they’re understood and used by specialized user agents or search tools. Do we imagine that calendar import of embedded time tags will suddenly become a killer feature of user agents, when microformats have been available for years? Will browsers resurrect the old and abandoned in-chrome site-tree features, and tie them only to nav tags, encouraging web developers to abandon their existing techniques en masse?

Allen’s article also points to this article from back in February by Joshua Allsopp:

By adding these elements, we are addressing the need for greater semantic capability in HTML, but only within a narrow scope. No matter how many elements we bolt on, we will always think of more semantic goodness to add to HTML. And so, having added as many new elements as we like, we still won’t have solved the problem. We don’t need to add specific terms to the vocabulary of HTML, we need to add a mechanism that allows semantic richness to be added to a document as required.

HTML 5, therefore, implements a feature that breaks a sizable percentage of current browsers, and doesn’t really allow us to add richer semantics to the language at all.

Both articles are a much better overview of the debate than what I scrawled out on Friday.

My grandfather was one of the many boys that landed on Normandy beach on June 6th, 1944. He never talked about the experience, at least not with me. Instead, he’d rattle on the beauty of France. On the tiny towns he made his way across. The food of the villages. The quaintness, laid thick in rubble, but still an essence he missed.

When he returned home, he named his new family after the towns he loved.

And so I spent a childhood explaining that “Norman D.” was my mother, a woman, and her name was actually just one word.

The bad boy of Ball State, Huck Finn grown and weathered, David Letterman has become the national Daddy. He is the ideal dad for the age—not a particularly pristine dad, or full of Cronkitean certitude, but confused and serious and full of conflict, anger, and ambiguity. Letterman is not a fuzzy person; working live he gives off the kind of dangerous electricity of stripped, dangling power lines. But he is a fundamentally serious comedian holding onto the gig of his life—Late Show With David Letterman—the hour in his day that seems to give him purpose.

I’ve never read a better account of just what it is that makes Letterman so great.

His show was a constant in my life growing up. Huddled in my room, head down in homework, up too late, I’d watch the flickering visual trick box as Letterman seemed at once to be in his own world and in mine. Laughing internally and externally. Amusing himself while trying to amuse me.

His recent growth as a national backbone, during last year’s presidential campaign and thereafter as he swatted down the Palin cult of outrage, has shown he’s on his way to being an icon in a way Jay Leno never will be:

“Cat jokes work,” The Wall Street Journal reported on him, as he tested new material in Boston this summer. “Edible underwear doesn’t.” His incessant shtick and weightless political attacks have made him a risk-free franchise. Of course President Obama visited his couch in Burbank. “I don’t like the edgy comics out there,” Deb Stoddard of Natick, Massachusetts, told the Journal. But she loves Jay Leno.

These are graphically interesting, but otherwise uncollectible, books that entered and exited bookstores quietly in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

A charming set of book covers, though some stand out more than others.