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April 29, 2005
At Global Voices, Ethan blogs about children’s drawings of the horrors of Darfur.
[Technorati tags: darfur sudan]“The Janjaweed came on camels and horses, very fast. Sometimes two on one camel, with guns. Many soldiers, with guns. This one is a machine gun. They were shooting us.”
“These here, at the bottom of the page, these are dead people.”
“Now my nights are hard because I feel frightened”
“We needed help. There was no one to protect us.”
April 28, 2005
April 27, 2005
Jobs doesn’t like what a biographer says about him so he stops Apple stores from selling all books by that publisher? Note that he’s not just keeping the book he doesn’t like out of the store. No, he’s de-shelving any book from that publisher in retaliation.
You can pre-order the book here. Let’s drive it up the charts. (Hey, Amazon, how about pairing this book with a Dixie Chicks album?) [Technorati tags: apple SteveJobs DixieChicks]
TotheSource calls for a reform of how the US spends our money on malaria prevention and treatment. It argues that small amount of DDT could save many lives without causing environmental damage.
I’m not an expert in, well, anything, so I don’t know how much DDT it takes to start screwing up the ecosystem, nor do I know how effective it is at preventing malaria when used in small amounts on house walls, as ToTheSource suggests. But wel over a million deaths a year — most of them children? And apparently the US aid agency, USAID, has not been forthright about how it spends our money.
(The article is not yet up on the ToTheSource site. Check the archive eventually, for “Silent Tsunami.”) [Technorati tag: malaria]
Chris Locke has a disturbing bit of history on display at ChiefBloggingOfficer, discussing research into America’s history of support of eugenics, including Margaret Sanger‘s belief in the “mass sterilization of so-called defectives.”
April 26, 2005
Satellite Fun finds some amusing photos in Google’s collection of satellite images (similar to here and here, previously blogged). It also has a link to City-Data that displays long lists of data about various cities. For example, did you know that between 7:30 and 8:00AM, 201 people over 16 leave for work in Great Barrington, MA, making that the peak leaving-for-work time in this city of 7,527? [Technorati tags: maps google]
April 25, 2005
RAW files contain the raw, low-level info about the state of the camera when you took a digital photo. It’s important to the pros but it remains undocumented. Now Stanley Krute writes, in an email:
..we’re launching a website today that’ll spearhead our campaign to get the camera manufacturers to document their RAW formats. The website is here: http://OpenRAW.org There’s a press release here: http://OpenRAW.org/press/
Sounds like just the sort of thing wikis were built for. Anyway, good luck to the RAW folks. [Technorati tags: raw photography]
April 23, 2005
Merry Willis, my sister-in-law the writer, has had a bunch of writing published recently.
You can read “The Story of Scheherezade and Dunzyad” in The Pedestal Magazine here. How can you go wrong with a story that begins “Except for the eunuchs…”? It’s a terrific read…sort of Scheherezade fan-fiction.
And the American Book Review gives Merry’s Dwight’s House and Other Stories a very positive review. That book and her new sf novel, The City Built of Starships, are both finalists for Foreward Magazine’s Book-of-the-Year award. Go Meredith Sue! [Technorati tags: MeredithSueWillis fiction]
I’m trying to whip my collection of MP3s into basic shape so that I can find them via the rather limited UI of my Creative Nomad Not-an-iPod Zen player. (Oy, so now I’m taxonomizing on the weekends!) And The Godfather has turned out to be really helpful. It’s overly-featured from my point of view, but I have minimal needs. And it sure seems to do the job. Want to tag all the tracks in your Bach directory as artist=”Bach, JS” and rename them using a “Composer – Album – Track” format? This is the tool for you. (Well, I actually haven’t figured out how to do the renaming, but it’s definitely a key feature.) It’s free, it’s got a scripting capability, and it’s well-supported by a forum. Thank you, JTClipper!
April 22, 2005
Steve is going to give a free talk about his new book, Everything Bad Is Good For You — How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, this Thursday, at 7pm, in the Langdell North Classroom in the Langdell Law Library at Harvard.
The book is going to be a big bestseller, and Steve is a wonderful, funny presenter. (You can see a preview of the book in this Sunday’s NY Times Magazine.)
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