• via http://delicious.com/url/248ad3827d03107181bfd0b380dbe945 The Question of Global Warming - The New York Review of Books
• Why "Jump" by Van Halen is the greatest record ever made
• http://twitter.com/charlesfrith/

JSON ... it's the intersection of all modern programming languages. All languages have some sense of data, and structures of data. They all have simple values like number strings, and booleans. They all have some sense of a sequence of values. ... Every language has some sense of a collection of named values; it might be an object, or a record, or a struct, or a hash, or a property list, or something. All languages have these, these are universal ideas.

... But they all have the same idea about what the data looks like, and JSON has the thing that's common to everything. By being at the intersection, it turns out to be the thing that everybody can agree on, so it's really easy to pass data back and forth.

Prior data interchange formats tended to try to be the union of all the languages, and that turns out to be horrendously complex, and very difficult to deal with. JSON, by being so simple, actually became really easy to use.

she collected a bunch of Flickr photos of people spinning on the bull’s balls in Milan. Notice how that fulltext query effectively retrieves a pile of images, taken by different people, of the same curious custom:

If you are passing through the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, you should spin around on the testicles of the bull mosaic found in the centre. Legend has it that this will bring you good luck!

Now try this query, which uses the same terms but looks at tags instead of the free text (title, description) associated with the photos. It finds nothing.

...Amazon’s “See a Kindle in Your City” promotion. Her Kindle was in her purse; she’d crocheted a cover for it out of green yarn. In the past, she said, she’d taken books out of the library, but some of them smelled of smoke—a Kindle book is a smoke-free environment. I thanked her and bought some digestive biscuits and a teapot, and then I went next door to Sherman’s Books and Stationery. I asked Josh Christie, who worked there, to recommend a truly gut-churningly suspenseful novel. I was going to do a comparison between the paperback and the Kindle 2 version. Christie suggested “The Bourne Identity” and a book by Michael Connelly, “The Lincoln Lawyer”—one of his colleagues at the shop swore by it. I bought them both.

Outside, I sat on a bench near L. L. Bean, eating an ice cream, and tried to order “The Bourne Identity” wirelessly from the Kindle Store. But no—there is no Kindle version of “The Bourne Identity.” What?

Daniel Everett "A recursive sentence like “The boy who was fishing owned the dog” does not occur in the Pirahã language. They would say, “The boy was fishing” and “The boy owned the dog.” The eminent linguist Noam Chomsky has declared that recursion is an essential part of human language and is innate. Chomsky’s former student Everett says that the Pirahã language proves otherwise. The resultant controversy is profound. The Pirahã language is the simplest in the world. Speaking it and singing it are the same, and it can be hummed or even whistled, yet it can convey enormous richness. Among other things, the wide variety of verb forms are used to account for the directness of evidence for a statement. Everett originally went to the Pirahã in 1977 as a Christian missionary. They challenged him to provide evidence for the existence of Jesus, and lost interest when he couldn’t. Eventually so did he. The Pirahã made him an atheist."

"The Russert Test was a disaster because it rewarded people willing to lie unabashedly on TV. They lied because they could not truthfully defend their positions. But Russert's famed "gotcha" research couldn't catch them. Much has been said this eulogizing week about Russert's hard-working ways assembling the material in advance of the show. Old metal. When someone told a new lie on Meet the Press, such as when Dick Cheney flat-out denied he had ever said that intelligence confirmed the Al Qaeda/Iraq link, Meet the Press had no procedure for producing the contrary evidence. This would hardly have been difficult, given Google, an earpiece and a producer to do instant research. As it happened, NBC had the rebuttal to Cheney's lies in its own archives, but it remained for The Daily Show to do the research."

"In his view, the HPC industry has focused on achieving bigger and faster computation at the expense of human productivity, verifiable correctness, and reproducibility. I claim no expertise in that field, but Greg is an expert, so I wondered what he’d think about the approach discussed in one of my recent Perspectives shows, Cluster computing for the classroom. On that show, Kryil Faenov — Microsoft’s general manager for Windows HPC — describes a system that enables professors to define computational models that students can check out, tweak, and then run against large data on a compute cluster. From a human productivity standpoint Greg likes that approach. But he’d prefer to see more attention paid to verifying the correctness of the models, and to ensuring that code and the data are managed in ways that make experiments reliably reproducible. "

"Greg Wilson recently gave a talk entitled High-Performance Computing Considered Harmful. On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, Wilson explains why HPC can't be all about speed and power. Instead, we must also care, more than we have in the past, about human productivity, correctness, and reproducibility."

" * Afghanistan–Statistics * Afghanistan–Strategic aspects * Afghanistan–Study and teaching * Afghanistan–Yearbooks Most of these headings are themselves further subdivided. All of these aspects of the topic might well be of interest to an historian; but such a taxonomy of options for pursuing the inquiry cannot be revealed by a simple combination of the keywords "Afghanistan" and "history" in a blank Google search box. There is a categorical distinction between "prior specification" and "recognition" subject searching techniques. Keywords inquiries–no matter how the words are weighted, ranked, massaged, or manipulated–essentially give you only those results having the terms you’ ve been able to specify in advance. They do not bring to you attention, except by chance, conceptual options that are slightly different in their focus. They do not allow you to recognize related sources whose terms you cannot think of beforehand. Traditional librarian-created "