- TED Blog: The greatest 16-minute speech ever: “I Have a Dream” — “Many of us know Martin Luther King Jr.‘s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech from snippets and news clips. If you have time for reflection today, watch it here, all the way through. It’s unmissable. In an era of open injustice and brutal hatred, King challenges his listeners to actively build a better world for themselves and their children. We know the highlights, but watching the whole 16-minute speech makes the context of ’63 shatteringly clear, and underscores the clarity and power of MLK’s vision.” Transcript also available.
- TED Blog: To watch today: The Anthem Project — “In these wonderful videos, choirs from one country sing the national anthem of another, with surprisingly powerful effects.”
- TED Blog: Ideas for changing the world: Jamais Cascio on TED.com — “We all want to make the world better — but how? Jamais Cascio looks at some specific tools and techniques that can make a difference. It’s a fascinating talk that might just inspire you to act.”
- TED Blog: A meditation on hope: Sherwin Nuland on TED.com — “Surgeon and writer Sherwin Nuland meditates on the idea of hope — the desire to become our better selves and make a better world. In a thoughtful 12 minutes, he explores the connection between “hope” and “change” — a fitting talk to end this week full of both.”
- TED Blog: Muhammad Yunus’ 3 ways to save the developing world — “Via the Daily Beast : An excerpt from “Creating a World Without Poverty,” by Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of Grameen Bank. In this essay, Yunus offers three thoughts about how luckier countries can help the developing world during this credit crisis, when gains of the past few years are being erased. The key: social business.” I KNEW IT.
- Marginal Revolution: The best argument I’ve read *for* the stimulus — “Economists like to talk about it, but in the end they’ve been very, very wrong and most of them in recent years on this. We don’t know the perfect answers on it.” But if I’ve been following the debate correctly (no guarantee), SOME economists have been right. Why aren’t we listening to them?
- Freakonomics: Hospitals as Hotels — “Hospitals may be more recession-proof than many other industries, but they are hardly immune. If you are running a hospital these days and want keep your beds full, what should you do: Try to raid your competitors for the best doctors available? Undertake an ad campaign that trumpets the excellence of your care? Or maybe just install wireless internet and spruce up the rooms?” Is it my imagination, or does the fact that one can write an article like this indicative of the madness of treating the medical industry like any other part of the consumer market?
- kottke.org: Old whitehouse.gov down the memory hole — “Greg Allen raises a good point regarding the new White House web site: why did the old site get completely erased?”
- kottke.org Lost in location awareness — This may well make you a little paranoid.
- kottke.org: Black triangles — “‘Afterwards, we came to refer to certain types of accomplishments as “black triangles.” These are important accomplishments that take a lot of effort to achieve, but upon completion you don’t have much to show for it — only that more work can now proceed. It takes someone who really knows the guts of what you are doing to appreciate a black triangle.’” This is my new favorite metaphor.
- kottke.org: Archimedes developed calculus? — “According to a Greek text that was overwritten with Christian prayers, Archimedes worked out some of the principles of calculus over 1900 years before Newton and Leibniz. He called it The Method. […] Much more is explained in the book The Archimedes Codex. The entire text is available for free on Google Books.”
- io: Watchmen’s Rape Scene Is Intact… And Violent [Watchmen] — This headline disturbs me more than the actual comic book does.
- io9: Science Fiction Stories That Make Gandhi Cry [Violence Rules] -
- Write to Done: How to Spread Your Ideas -
- Linux Journal: Fixed width vs. Flex width? -
- Linux Today: Liberation fonts for Linux -
- DesktopLinux.com: Googling up Ubuntu — “DesktopLinux founder Rick Lehrbaum has posted a fun how-to that shows how to lash a Ubuntu Linux desktop right up to Google’s cloud. Lehrbaum shares everything needed to make your Mac– and Vista-using friends feel like they’re living with last’s year’s model.”
- LinuxInsider: Browser Wars, the ‘Linux Killer’ and the Free Software Ditty — “…the Wisconsin college student who claimed that Ubuntu forced her to drop out of school.”
- Linux Today: Some useful commands in Linux administration when making a website — Ruby on Rails website building cheatsheet.
- Linux Today: Obama vs. Microsoft -
- Linux Today: An odd choice to help government with open source strategy -
- Linux Today: Don’t Fear the Penguin: A Newbie’s Guide to Linux -
- Linux Today: Top 10 Applications to Install After Installing Ubuntu -
- Linux Today: Being Anti-Linux is bad for your business’ health -
- Linux Today: 5 Reasons Users Fail to Make the Linux Switch -
- Linux Today: Open source identity: Linux founder Linus Torvalds -
- Six Ways to Get People to Say “Yes” -
- Integrating Twitter into Your Blog — thorough overview
- Dinosaur Comics: astute readers will notice that t-rex has travelled through time on many occasions. just sayin’! -
- Samuel Delany Will Come Into Your House And Shred Your Notebooks [Book Review] — “Samuel Delany not only helped redefine science fiction, he’s one of a few SF writers who teach writing at the college level. So I was excited to see he’d written a book about writing. The book in question, About Writing, isn’t quite what I’d expected from someone who’s been teaching creative writing for the past thirty years. It’s definitely not a style guide or a tutorial on fiction writing. (The book’s subtitle, “7 essays, 4 letters & 5 interviews,” could be a bit of a clue.)” Even though I swore I was done buying books about writing, I kind of really want this.
- Feministe: Breaking: Obama Reverses the Global Gag Rule — “This is what change can mean. Thousands of women’s lives saved. And after the past 8 years of this deadly policy, it’s about time.“For an objective look at what the Global Gag Rule entailed, check out this fact sheet from Reuters. For the pro-choice version, see Planned Parenthood.”
- Pam’s House Blend: President Obama’s First 100 HOURS… — “Anyone else remember how Dubya took a good third of his presidency off as vacation time?”
- Pam’s House Blend: NY: Gillibrand comes out for marriage equality — Kirsten Gillibrand = Secretary of State Clinton’s replacement as Senator from NY.
- John DeVore Is Not the Best You Can Do — “And the Almighty Gods of Getting Laid Because You’re a Sensitive Cool Dude, Right, Ladies looked upon John DeVore of The Frisky, and they saw that he had written upon that blog an essay about gender relations in this modern day and age, and they read what he had presented unto them, and they pronounced upon him: FAAAAAAILLLLLLL.”
- Shakesville: The 25 Most Influential Liberals in the U.S. Media — “In which Forbes unintentionally writes the best Onion piece I’ve read in ages.”
- Survey: Few people believed campaign rumors about Obama, McCain — “About nine in 10 Americans heard the rumor that Barack Obama is a Muslim, making it possibly the most prevalent rumor of the 2008 presidential campaign, according to a nationwide survey. However, only 22 percent of those surveyed said they actually believed that Obama is a Muslim.” On the grimmer hand, nearly a quarter of Americans believed this easily-debunked lie.
- Digby: Spell It Out (Hullabaloo) — I think the administration needs to set the press straight on this if he means to have a successful foreign policy. Trying to split the baby on these issues is impossible and it will undermine his moral authority in the rest of the world if they think he’s being cute. (You can bet the intelligence community will leak any information that indicates he isn’t sincere.) If he means to make a clean break, he should make it clear to the media that it’s what he means. They aren’t seeing it that way.
- Shakesville: Obama to Lift Global Gag Rule — OMG indeed.“At the Obama rally I attended on the Friday night just before the election, Obama was more explicit in his support of women’s and LGBTQI equality than I had ever heard him. Part of me reacted to it by wishing he’d be so unapologetic even in areas he knew not to be so amenable to the message—and part of me reacted to it by suspecting it meant he would, if elected, go as far in the direction of real equality as the political culture will allow, that he would do whatever he can.”
- Shakesville: Senate Passes Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act — Oh, thank goodness. I can’t believe the Supreme Court even made this necessary.
- Shakesville: The Audacity of Trope — Anti-abortionists coöpt the struggle for emancipation.“Thing is, subjugating women to sustained psychological and emotional abuse, bodily risk, and physical labor on the basis of the intrinsic characteristic of their being women is pretty much a proximate fucking opposite, in concept if not in scope, of freeing people who had been enslaved on the basis of the intrinsic characteristic of their being black. […]
“There’s almost too much that’s crazy-makingly objectionable about this entire line of reasoning (the general stupidity, the breathtaking irony, the appropriation of the civil rights struggle) to pinpoint what’s most offensive, but the winning offense has got to be the wholesale and heartless refusal to acknowledge the vast role that unwanted pregnancies played in the perpetuation of American slavery.”
- Shakesville: Hey Your Racist — “I am going to admit that I really don’t understand Limbaugh’s point. Is he saying that is you’re a fan of President Obama you must hate white people? (And would the inverse there be that if you liked Bush you must therefore hate people of color?) I don’t know. Maybe he’s saying racism is no big deal. All except that directed at white people like Limbaugh or his cohort Hannity. Because airing inauguration coverage of America’s first African American president is racist against white people. Or something.” Rush doesn’t cast his net widely enough. I say you’re racist if a) you were born on planet Earth.
Your Revolution (The Blog!)
Why is it always in the last place you look?
