[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. --L.]
- Karl Rove Walks Back His Diss And Gives In To O’Donnell Fever (VIDEO) | TPMDC
- After being pounded for a full day by some of the conservative movement’s biggest names, a bruised and battered Karl Rove took to the Fox News airwaves this morning to get on board the Christine O’Donnell train.
Rove, you’ll recall, refused to buy the tea party hype about Delaware’s new Republican Senate nominee, telling Sean Hannity on the night O’Donnell won that the “nutty” things O’Donnell says meant that the GOP had no shot at winning a Senate majority with her representing the party in Delaware (a race the GOP was expected to win with establishment choice Mike Castle as the nominee.)
Since he made that comment, commentators from Michelle Malkin to Sarah Palin to Rush Limbaugh have called Rove everything from incompetent to traitorous.
- Baby Lion Cubs Get First Vet Exam
- [Wired: Science - Jess McNally]
The four baby lion cubs that we have been following on the lion cub webcam since they were born at the Smithsonian National Zoo August 31 got their first physical exam today, and their first mug shots.
- The shape of things
- [PLoS Blogs - mangrist]
Foldit, the downloadable protein-folding game, has gotten a boatload of coverage [images]
And rightly so. I am hard-pressed to describe why without falling back on cliches like “paradigm shift” or “game changer.” But as far as I can tell, it potentially is those things. Here is a video game that has as its ambition the solution to one of the most abiding problems in biochemistry and perhaps all of science…
As a pedagogical tool, that would be extraordinary enough. But Foldit goes further: it says, “Here, inmates–the asylum is yours! …”
And they have [found new solutions], says co-creator Zoran Popovic…
[This is pretty exciting, although I notice there is still going to be the very hard work of building an *accurate* model of a problem for human players to manipulate/solve. It would be very sad if we spent a hundred thousand hours on a game whose results were entirely bogus. -L]
- Minimolecule May Explain How Antidepressants Work – Science News
- Scientists knew that Prozac and other drugs like it, called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs, somehow blocked the action of the serotonin transporter and left more serotonin in the brain. But exactly how the drugs worked, and why they took so long to have an effect, was a mystery.
…Prozac worked through miR-16 to cause a set of brain cells that don’t normally produce serotonin to produce [it]…
…the researchers found that mice could be treated with miR-16 instead of Prozac and still experience antidepressant benefits.
…“Only a proportion of the patients that are receiving these drugs are responding, and there is a very high rate of relapse,” says Berton. “By looking at this new mechanism in screening, that could be a way to predict which patients are going to respond or not to the treatment.”
- Help fund free culture
- Musopen is a group that’s been trying to release classical music that’s long been out of copyright back into the public domain. How did it leave the public domain? Each recording is considered a new work… They’re using Kickstarter to get money to hire professional orchestras to record classical music for the public domain.
- The in-jokes from way out
- [Futurismic - Paul Raven]
…that’s a pretty ubiquitous aspect of popular culture he’s on about, but I think we can suggest that sf will suffer more strongly than regular mimetic novels from this problem when appraised by the readers of the future. [discusses example] To fully grok the story and its commentary, the reader would need to understand not just the historical situation of the Noughties, but also the way the Noughties looked at the future, and (to a perhaps lesser extent) the way in which a work of sf tends to engage in a dialogue with its antecedents and contemporaries.
[Oh, trying to understand old fanfiction is harder. -L]
…Even so, I quite fancy the job of knocking up hypertext Cliff’s Study Notes-style annotated versions of modern sf novels for the benefit of the cultural anthropologists of the near future… would anyone like to pay me to do that, please?
- Diaspora vs. BuddyPress: Open Source Social Networking Matchup
- [Pressography - Sarah Gooding]
[My conclusion: if the Diaspora devs succeed at what they plan and the BuddyPress devs don't incorporate some of Diaspora's features, Diaspora should win. But the best thing of all would be for the BP devs to concentrate on cross-site interoperability. -L]
- The Look That Says Book
- [A List Apart]
Hyphenation and justification: It’s not just for print any more. Armed with good taste, a special unicode font character called the soft hyphen, and a bit o’ JavaScript jiggery, you can justify and hyphenate web pages with the best of them. Master the zero width space. Use the Hyphenator.js library to bottle fame, brew glory, and put a stopper in death. Create web pages that hyphenate and justify on the fly, even when the layout reflows in response to changes in viewport size.
- Design With Intent: Free eBook
- [Daily Blog Tips - Daniel Scocco]
This is probably the best free eBook I have downloaded in a while. It doesn’t require email subscribption or anything either, you just need to go there and download it… 101 Patterns for Influencing Behaviour Through Design.
- It’s [All Right] – Google Knows You’re Frustrated
- [ReadWriteWeb - Mike Melanson]
Already, Google catches simple misspellings as you type… If that isn’t enough, the search engine may soon be able to sense your frustration when you’re unable to find what you’re looking for and change [its] behavior accordingly.
…doesn’t have a webcam pointed in your face. It does, however, have all it needs in five other user behaviors that appear to indicate user frustration…
…the findings might help them to build “a model that will one day make it possible for computers to detect frustration in real time”….
- “Working as a phone-sex dominatrix is a lot simpler than being on a college faculty”
- [PLoS Blogs - David Kroll]
- Catholics demand that atheists apologize for Hitler
- [Why Evolution Is True]
- Dueling Rallies: Stewart, Colbert Sponsor Competing Marches In D.C., Oct. 30th – ‘A Date Of No Particular Significance’
- [Crooks and Liars - Susie Madrak]
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are sponsoring competing marches on Washington this Oct. 30th – Stewart’s “Rally To Restore Sanity” vs. Colbert’s “Rally To Keep Fear Alive.”
…Um, Jon? Starting a war of aggression under false pretenses is not only a war crime, it’s a moral crime.
The Of interest (Fri, Sep 17th, 10am) 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.