- An unvaccinated child has died from a preventable disease | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine – “Out of three unvaccinated children, one died. The historical rate of death from Hib, once infected, is about 1 in 20, so this is something of a fluke. But 1 in 20 is still way, way too high… and of the ones who do survive the infection, 1 in 5 will suffer deafness, blindness, or severe, permanent brain damage.”
- Wordpress Plugins DB: PopuList 1.0 – “PopuList allows you to track the popularity of your posts on social bookmarking sites reddit, stumbleupon, <a href=”http://del.icio.us”>del.icio.us</a> and digg. When PopuList is activated, a page is added to your dashboard giving the number of times a page has been saved or upvoted.”
- Write to Done: How to Make Your Writing Matter to Your Readers -
- Slashdot: Jumping To Ubuntu At Work For Non-Linux Geeks – “I’m a network engineer, meaning I spend my days dealing with things like selective route advertisements, peering, and traffic engineering; I’m not a Linux admin or developer. About 6 months ago I finally got fed up enough with my experience on Windows XP to jump ship to Ubuntu 8.04, despite not having much Linux experience, particularly on the desktop. Read my ramblings for an engineer’s take on taking what can be a pretty intimidating plunge for us Linux noobcakes.”
- Slashdot: Linus Switches From KDE To Gnome – “In a recent Computerworld interview, Linus revealed that he’s switched to Gnome — this despite launching a heavily critical broadside against Gnome just a few years ago. His reason? He thinks KDE 4 is a ‘disaster.’”
- DesktopLinux.com: Beginner Linux articles posted – “A relatively new website devoted to laptops has posted several articles that may interest beginning Linux desktop users. One offers advice on identifying malicious script commands, while another offers advice on installing software packaged in various different formats (deb, rpm, tar.gz, etc).”
- The Bellows » Stimulus on the Cheap – “But there is another reason to want to accelerate needed infrastructure investment as much as possible. Mainly, everything is cheap right now.”
- ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES: Repeat After Me: Correlation Does Not Necessarily Mean Causation – Breastfeeding does not prevent child abuse.
- Barack Obama vs. Genetic Determinism | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine – “My theory is that Barack Obama, among his various superpowers, has the ability to reach out to groups of people across the world and subtly re-arrange their DNA. How else are we to explain this? [...]“One is almost tempted to conclude that scores on standardized tests might be influenced by factors other than one’s genetic background. Who could have guessed?”
- Did Darwin Have a Different Motivation For Creating the Theory of Evolution? at Racialicious – the intersection of race and pop culture – “‘A big theory of mine is that the whole “intelligent design”/natural selection debate is deeply rooted in the struggle between those who would seek to extend the white Christian hegemony and those who would seek to dismantle it through science. Unfortunately, the media always portrays it as some dense philosophical debate, without any implications for social power structures.’”
- Is The Idea of Fairness Universal?: The Balance Sheet: Online Only: The New Yorker – “The economist Bart Wilson has an interesting post on one of the more important experiments that behavioral economists have run, the ultimatum game. The core insight that economists have gleaned from ultimatum-game experiments is that people care quite a bit about fairness, and are actually willing to turn down free money if they feel that the amount of money they’re being offered is unfair.”
- What’s in a name? – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com – “Now, if you prefer a different definition of a liquidity trap, OK; call our current situation a banana, instead. But changing the name does not change the essential fact — namely, conventional monetary policy has lost effectiveness.”Yes, there are other things the Fed could do — and it’s doing them, on an awesome scale. But they’re controversial, precisely because, unlike conventional monetary policy, they involve picking and choosing among potentially risky investments. And there’s a much stronger case for fiscal policy than in normal times, because we don’t know how well these unconventional measures will work.”
- To Save The Banks We Must Stand Up To The Bankers « The Baseline Scenario -
- Financial regulation reform: The Goodhart Report | vox – Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists – The ICMB-CEPR Geneva Report: “The Future of Financial Regulation”
- Robert Reich’s Blog: How You and I Are Paying Wall Street to Lobby Congress to Go Easy on Wall Street -
- Econbrowser: Five Reasons Why Fiscal Policy Might Be Completely Ineffective: A Textbook Exposition – via Brad DeLong
- ALP Statement: A Different Kind of Morning in America | Audre Lorde Project – “…we write this statement as a commitment to not be paralyzed by disappointment and disillusionment, but to organize more strongly, deeply, and strategically from this day on. “Audre Lorde Project.
- AP: Officials: Family planning money may be dropped – Yahoo! News – “House Democrats are likely to jettison family planning funds for the low-income from an $825 billion economic stimulus bill, officials said late Monday, following a personal appeal from President Barack Obama at a time the administration is courting Republican critics of the legislation.”
- Marcus Chown: Our world may be a giant hologram – space – 15 January 2009 – New Scientist – “GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century. [...]“According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into ‘grains’, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. ‘It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,’ says Hogan.
“If this doesn’t blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: ‘If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.’”
Long but interesting. Sounds to me like the universe is digital, not analog? Also: Plato’s cave analogy FTW.
- Charlie Jane Anders: A First Stab At A Science Fiction Canon [Books] – io9 – “Easily as interesting as the main list are some of the side articles, like Michael Moorcock’s list of the best dystopias (which contains few surprises but is still an interesting bit of analysis.) And Roz Kaveny’s list of radical novels. Susanna Clarke names her favorite world-building series. And there’s [etc]“
- Kitten Fail – Video.
- Annalee Newitz: Meet the Ancestor of All Animals on Earth [Evolution] – io9 – “The research also makes it sound as if most animal life on Earth tends to evolve towards creatures with brains.”
- Amanda Marcotte: Republicans exploit economic stimulus bill to increase the abortion rate (Pandagon) – “And while I’m weary of pointing this out, I feel compelled to do it until people really, truly get it—the takeaway from this (besides “anti-choicers are misogynists”) is that anti-choice fanatics aren’t, despite their claims, just really avid fetus protectors. Over and over and over and over again, given the chance to deprive women of contraception access, they’ll take it. Now they’re exploiting this economic stimulus to deprive women of birth control pills, because this was never about fetuses, but always and forever about promoting misogyny and punishing sex. There is absolutely no reason to think that depriving women on Medicaid access to contraception won’t raise the abortion rate.”
- Feminism 101: Girl Math -
- Bush’s Final Mesage -
- Samhita: Some reflections in the moment that Obama won and Prop 8 passed. (Feministing) – “I completely forgot that back in November on election night, someone was taking video of our reactions to Obama winning and to Prop 8 failing. I was in CA for the historic election this year and I felt this video captured the moment so well and the tension in all our hearts that this moment was so great and so tragic at once.”
- Steven Johnson: The case against Candy Land – Boing Boing – “[As a parent] I get to revisit the games that I played as a child. Just last week it was Battleship. Before that it was Sorry, Bingo, Go Fish, Candy Land, and so on.”There’s a consistent theme to all these old-school game introductions: almost without exception, I have been mortified by the pathetic game that I’ve excitedly brought to the kids. [...] What’s irritating about the games is that they are exercises in sheer randomness. It’s not that they fail to sharpen any useful skills; it’s that they make it literally impossible for a player to acquire any skills at all.”
- Melissa McEwan: Have I Mentioned Lately That I Love Russ Feingold? (Shakesville) – “”As this plan [to amend the Constitution to require the filling of vacant Senate seats by special election instead of by gubernatorial appointment] involves more democracy, I fully expect Republicans to oppose it.”And possibly the DNC.”
The Links for January 27th from 13:38 to 17:54 by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.