This taxi driver is playing the live action version of Grand Theft Auto.
Barack Obama Looking at Awesome Things #15: Proton Pack.
for kelsey
oh my god
That health care win does seem to make Obama feel like he can take on anything.
James Fallows' Interview with Google's Dan Drummond
Fallows’ raw transcript of his interview with Google’s chief council gives some insight in the timing and process of Google’s withdrawn from mainland China. What blows my mind is the Chinese stance that censorship is a reflexive responsibility, that such a practice is a law, and that all of these things can be discussed so rationaly. I know that this is one of the basic absurdities of a totalitarian state, but the Google episode is bringing it home for me.
On an different tack, one that’s maybe a little meta: Fallows is clearly going through his method as a journalist here, and the new media is acting as a very productive rider. He is covering this subject. He gathers annecdotes, performs interviews. This material will be condensed, synthesized, and edited to make an article. In the meantime, however, he is making use of the raw material on his blog at the Atlantic with what seems like very little extra effort expended in the way of reporter overhead. I read the full content on my RSS reader, and it both makes me feel like I am one of his readers (good for him) and much more interested in buying the end product (good for the Atlantic). It would seem that the only people who should be afraid of this business model are those who have no ability to go beyond the first-order of content. If all you are doing is republishing what is essentially a commodity (ahem, MacRumors and Apple Insider), then you can’t execute the change, use the lever of your mind to make something of the raw material, then you are in trouble in the media world. You are just an amature or a wire service.
A great little report by #TNR on the contrasting scene in DC: anti-healthcare Tea Partiers and pro-immigration families http://bit.ly/bpbY5L
Save funding for NY State Parks and Preservation, via #MAS http://bit.ly/boWGp4
During the president’s first year, as Obama’s and the Democrats’ poll numbers fell, and as the Democrats lost key elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, a kind of fatalism took hold in Washington. It was inevitable, the feeling went, that an administration facing an economic downturn would get drubbed in the next elections, and perhaps even lose the House and the Senate. But this argument assumed the kind of static insider model that the Obama administration followed during its first year. This model needs to be discarded, and replaced by the kind of political model that would be familiar to Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan: one where the politics of maneuver within Washington was supplemented—or better, transformed—by a politics of vigorous protest and advocacy. That’s the real lesson of the health care battle.
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John B. Judis, Democrats Discover Their Base | The New Republic
[A good “sideways glance,” as my thesis advisor always used to day.]
Via @Pogue, I tried #numberquotes.com. It’s weird. So many of their metrics are about how many iPhones, MacBooks or Escalades you could buy.
Lots of times the families will go down to Kinko’s,” the funeral director tells me. “They can do a memorial folder thing down there.” Do you help them get photos off Flickr, off Facebook? “We don’t really help with that.
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Raiding Eternity - Myspace - Gizmodo
Life in the Cloud.
(We’ve heard this story before, but this is a nice, albeit slightly mawkish, riff.)
Lastly, here’s Robin interacting with his fauxPad. I think he’s making color adjustments. On a fake, printed-out inspector that Bill made. To the document that is actually just a piece of paper. Man, software development is weird. (via Designing OmniGraphSketcher for the iPad - Blog - The Omni Group)
Sounds like a fun craft activity for the kids …
Dear USAir Shuttle business traveler: your shiny tassle loafers & roller-attaché do not make you a better human being. But my hair wax does.
