Posts from — October 2009

My Mom sent me this NYT article a little while ago… I highly recommend it:
Life at the Top in America Isn’t Just Better, It’s Longer
The article describes three people having a heart attack and how their socioeconomic position affected their treatment and recover. Definitely worth reading.

You may not recall, but a while ago, I wrote a post about the life of Fritz Joubert Duquesne (Boer War fighter, German spy, etc). Since posting that, several South Africans (both Afrikaans and British) have written comments about the effects of the Boer War, how it’s remembered in South Africa, and recommending books on the subject.

Awesome.

I recently saw the film Examined Life, a movie in which philosophers discuss things while walking around (it’s hard to explain better than that). In the movie, Peter Singer posed a question I hadn’t heard before. The premise, paraphrased:

You’re walking in a park one day, and suddenly see a small child drowning in a shallow pond. It’s clear that the child will die if you do nothing. If you attempt to save them, you will not risk drowning at all, but the $200 shoes you are wearing will be completely ruined. (Pretend you can’t take them off for some reason)

Now, most likely, you’d be willing to jump in and save the child in this instance. But what if you consider the moment when you bought the $200 shoes. You could have donated that $200 to an organization like Oxfam and almost certainly save a child’s life (or the lives of several children). If you’re willing to give up the shoes to save a life at the pond, why not save a life at the cash register?

I don’t know. Certainly this framework could be followed ad absurdum to the point where you can barely buy anything, but I still think there’s a meaningful point here.

This clip is amazing:

You’ll know what’s going to happen right away, but it’s still weirdly thrilling to watch.

Stephen really figured it out:

A masterful segment from The Daily Show about the state of discourse in cable news (CNN specifically):

I don’t really have much to add, though I think the point about “balance” is especially important: instead of checking the facts of guests, many cable news shows often just have someone from “the other side”, that way journalists just become weak moderators, not arbiters of truth. One of the problems with this is that this leads to just listening to two sides of the same political consensus, and makes no attempt at representative intellectual diversity.

Steve Sounders documents a trick used by the Gmail Mobile web interface to reduce latency. In order to make things load quickly, complex web apps try to defer loading of some features and load them in the background. The problem with this is that it causes the javascript to be parsed in the background as it is loaded, which can make the UI seem lurchy to the user. In order to get around this, the gmail interface downloads the non-critical code in the background as a big HTML comment, so no javascript parsing is involved, then when it actually needs the feature, it strips off the comment boundaries and parses the now-local javascript.

His writeup is better than mine, just thought I’d pass along a clever trick.

Google Translate has been on a roll this year, integrating with a ton of different properties. I’m not sure why this recent one struck me the most, but I think it’s awesome:
Now on Picasa photos, like this one, it translates comments in other languages into your native language. There’s something about people all over the world looking at the same picture, reacting to it, and talking about it in their native languages that amazes me.

I meant to pass this along a while ago…

Food animal production accounts for 70 percent — 70 percent! — of the antibiotics used in the United States. That doesn’t even include the antibiotics used for animals that actually get sick.

source