Quick Sunday link

• AtlHistory.com
• Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are
• BailOutSleuth.com
• The new demographics of the two parties
• A very good post from McArdle on the Detroit bailout
• The biggest internet takedown in history - for a good cause no less
  

Monday links

• Fertility rate in US on upswing
• This post on Ron Paul from Col. Lang, featuring the lovely line "citadels of exalted brooding". I saw the interview he mentions as well and got the same impression; namely that Russert was trying to rapid fire the questions enough to get him to trip up and say something that could be easily misinterpreted. It's not like Paul is hiding what he believes, or that it's not controversial in his version. Lame. A bit reminiscent of Ace in the Hole.
  
• This Matt Yglesias post on the same interview
• This is a nice web app
  

X-Sql, welcome to the Blogroll

I have recently discovered that my friend Naim has recently started blogging about software matters and such at http://xsqlsoftware.blogspot.com/

Welcome to the blogsphere!

Ron Paul Spam

Check out this article from Ars Technica on the source of all the Ron Paul spam you've probably been getting.

Amazing Time Savers!

I've been looking for this clip online for years now, and it finally made it's appearance. Check out Amazing Time Savers. You do have to watch it till the end.

Amazing Time Savers

An advancement in gender equality

While perusing my spam folder to make sure there were no false positives, I came across this little gem amongst the enlargement and Viagra ads

LADIES, bigger your asset now, give your mate a big surprise

SizeUpBreast is a safe all herbal formula that helps woman to increase theirBreast Size

- help with sagging problems
- has a powerful phyto-hormonal action that leads to the growth and
development of the areoli and consequently TheBreast size.

* if your are her BF/HUBBY, buy your girl this 100% safe BreastEnhancement Pill
* you will feel proud of having LargerBoobie mate

About time women got their share of annoying email.

An original Flash interface

Check out Schematic.

I never thought I'd say this but...

This is a Flash intro worth seeing.

A cool ASP.net feature

If you're getting strange ASP.net errors like "Padding is invalid and cannot be removed", check out this entry on CodingHorror.com.

An awesome use of web video

Check out dylanmessaging.com

Shock Doctrine

A well done piece of propaganda is Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, available on MySpace TV. It's another attempt to get everyone riled up about income disparity, which no one seems to mind. Unmentioned is the fact that it is an indie film, being released on a social networking site, and being given away. Hardly something that would happen in a poor society.

A minor internet miracle

Yesterday I was searching for a domain name for a friend of mine, and found exactly what we wanted, in the .com! That hasn't happened in years, it's a name you think would be taken as too.

An odd correlation

For whatever reason, the hits to this site, and my other major public site, JargonDatabase.com move in inverse correlation to each other. Odd.

A cool flash embedder

The best Flash embedder I've seen actually. It's called SWFObject.

Everyone watching everything

Bruce Schneier has a very interesting post about the current state of internet monitoring, which would seem to be pretty total. He links to a Daily Kos piece, which states

Specifically, this equipment was the Narus ST-6400, a machine that was capable of monitoring over 622 Mbits/second in real time in May, 2000, and capturing anything that hits its' semantic (i.e. the meaning of the content) triggers. The latest generation is called NarusInsight, capable of monitoring 10 billion bits of data per second.

I recommend reading the whole thing. It seems to have no direct purpose, it doesn't break a single code, and it does absolutely nothing to discover anything about the use of steganography (messages in plain site). However it does seem like it would be useful to discover the terrorist (or whatever) networks (probably with a lot of false positives).

In any case, I think it's safe to say we have no digital privacy anymore.

Referrals

Oddly enough, this InstaChuckNorris from Parrotline is the largest referrer to Jargondatabase.com this month but a wide margin.

A good design

Once you get past the Flash, is Gorilla Nation Media.

It's as if the internet is all about Nick

I cruise on over to Marginal Revolution, and I see Why people don't like Wikipedia (and blogs) which references The Probabalistic Age over on The Long Tail

When professionals--editors, academics, journalists--are running the show, we at least know that it's someone's job to look out for such things as accuracy. But now we're depending more and more on systems where nobody's in charge; the intelligence is simply emergent. These probabilistic systems aren't perfect, but they are statistically optimized to excel over time and large numbers. They're designed to scale, and to improve with size. And a little slop at the microscale is the price of such efficiency at the macroscale.

But how can that be right when it feels so wrong?

There's the rub. This tradeoff is just hard for people to wrap their heads around. There's a reason why we're still debating Darwin. And why Jim Suroweicki's book on Adam Smith's invisible hand is still surprising (and still needed to be written) more than 200 years after the great Scotsman's death. Both market economics and evolution are probabilistic systems, which are simply counterintuitive to our mammalian brains. The fact that a few smart humans figured this out and used that insight to build the foundations of our modern economy, from the stock market to Google, is just evidence that our mental software has evolved faster than our hardware.

RTWT

Becoming unburied

After my longest work week ever.

Link of Journal: Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica.

Looks interesting

Another good tech podcast. It's with Leo Laporte and someone I've never heard of. It's called "Inside the Net" and it's about the so-called Web 2.0 thing happening right now. Quite a lot of potential.

Amazing

I go to check on some domains today and what do I see "directNIC Versus Hurricane Katrina"

Apparently they're in New Orleans and they're toughing it out on the 26th floor of a non-flooded area. It would seem to be just a few people doing it. They are currently running a blog, a photo gallery, and a video feed (!!!) is here.

Best selling artists

I recently stumbled upon this list of top selling artists of all time. While it was pretty much what I expected there were some notable surprises, most notably, Leonard Cohen is in the top 20! He's ahead of Mettalica, AC/DC, Bon Jovi, Barbra Streisand and Bruce Springsteen.

I then go to the Leonard Cohen page on Wikipedia, and see this quote:

"I feel that, you know, the enormous luck I've had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didn't want to write, to be able to have satisfied that dictum I set for myself, which was not to work for pay, but to be paid for my work. Just to be able to satisfy those standards that I set for myself has been an enormous privilege."

which is as good a theory of working I've seen in quite some time.

Now readers, whose presence surprised you the most on the list of best selling artists? Comments are open.

Wow

Due to he technological miracle of DNS pointing and server to server FTP, this site will now be available at www.moodyloner.net

This is really quite a robust and mighty tool.

AJAX

Asynchonous Javascript and XML - which allows the browser to communicate with the server without refreshing the page (a la GMail) is going to be revolutionary. An over view and a specific. Wow.

And the cool thing is that it's a synthesis of technologies, nothing really new. Wow.

Addendum - From Mike, another very cool article on it here