rants.org

Go see Jessica Ferris’s “Missing” in San Francisco on July 10th. Stop thinking — there is no decision to make. Just do it. Buy tickets. Tell your friends. Then show up. It’s that easy. I saw Jessica perform in San Francisco a few years ago and it was mesmerizing. And that was for a show that she [...]

These two quotes from the June 10th New York Times beg for juxtaposition: The first is from the article about the oldest leather shoe ever discovered: …an Armenian doctoral student, Diana Zardaryan, noticed a small pit of weeds. Reaching down, she touched two sheep horns, then an upside-down broken bowl. Under that was what felt [...]

Saw another legitimate email bounced as spam today: This message was created automatically by mail delivery software. A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed: myfriend@myfriendsdomain.com (generated from myfriend@domain-on-shared-server.org) SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:<myfriend@myfriendsdomain.com>: [...]

[Reblogged from my post at Talking Points Memo.] Bob Ostertag has a short but lancing piece in the Huff Post today about how the New York Times got astroturfed by an organization calling itself the “Gulf of Mexico Foundation”. The NYT describes them as a “conservation group” when the evidence is that they are, essentially, [...]

For folks in the SF Bay Area: I’m at speaking at WordCamp San Francisco this Saturday at 10:30am: Bodysurfing the Blogosphere: How an Audience-Distributed Film Won Big. It’s an in-depth look at how audience distribution worked for Nina Paley’s freely-licensed film Sita Sings the Blues. The rest of the WordCamp speaker schedule looks great too: [...]

This is going to be a short one, but I can’t go to bed without sharing the news: PUBPAT (the Public Patent Foundation) and the ACLU have just won a major victory for scientific freedom: the US District Court for the Southern District of New York has ruled in favor of their argument that patents [...]

I meant to post this sooner — my birthday was a month ago — but I just got busy. Anyway, these two wonderful objects came in the mail right on my birthday… The first was a gift from Jim Blandy: It’s a Lichtenberg Figure, that is to say, lightning captured in a solid medium. Whoa. They use a linear [...]

I meant to post this sooner, but the time when I took the photo was really busy because Winnie was moving in (!). While we were moving stuff from her apartment, we encountered a Snow Citizen: Ah, Williamsburg. Whatever else you can say about it, it definitely has production values! (Well, except when it comes [...]

Breaking news: Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) will champion a new bill to provide more and better sex education to high-schoolers and even young adults, in a tactic designed to lower the number of abortions in America through improved access to information and counseling. Rep. Stupak became famous during the debates leading up to the health [...]

Breaking news from James Vasile: Scientists going back to Galileo have secretly abused corpses in the pursuit of knowledge. Researchers studying the Atlantic Ocean garbage patch have been throwing dead pigs into the sea just to see what happens next. Yes, that’s shocking and gross, but just like in the Whitewater scandal, it’s the coverup [...]