Weekend sausage

More tabs from my browser:

• International Association of Time Travelers—
  11/15/2104
  
  At 14:52:28, FreedomFighter69 wrote:
  Reporting my first temporal excursion since joining IATT: have just returned from 1936 Berlin, having taken the place of one of Leni Riefenstahl’s cameramen and assassinated Adolf Hitler during the opening of the Olympic Games. Let a free world rejoice!

  At 14:57:44, SilverFox316 wrote:
  Back from 1936 Berlin; incapacitated FreedomFighter69 before he could pull his little stunt. Freedomfighter69, as you are a new member, please read IATT Bulletin 1147 regarding the killing of Hitler before your next excursion. Failure to do so may result in your expulsion per Bylaw 223.

• Five Reasons Obama Should Take Over BP–Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich writes, “If the government can take over giant global insurer AIG and the auto giant General Motors and replace their CEOs, in order to keep them financially solvent, it should be able to put BP’s north American operations into temporary receivership in order to stop one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.”
• Welcome to the Culture of News–I think Karoli buried the lede in her post titled “News, bloggers and oil spill coverage: You get what you pay for”. This is a story about the nuance and complexity of reporting a story like the slowly unfolding drama in the Gulf of Mexico, a meta-narrative. Hooking the “who” on sad-sack Mark Bernstein and his expressed desire for simplistic coverage takes the punch out of the central idea that Mr. Bernstein’s problem isn’t science bloggers; rather, it’s the Culture of News.
• Hamas
• FutureWeb—
  “Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project delivers a keynote on the Future of the Web and answers audience questions. Rainie’s initiative is a “fact tank” known around the world for its assessment of the influence of Internet evolution on every aspect of global life. He and his team release new reports nearly weekly, detailing our use of the Internet and the impact it has on our lives.”
• Using Social Media to Increase Civic Engagement in US Federal Agencies–Yasmin Fodil and Anna York share insights on public policy development at Yasmin’s blog about Government 2.0, “We the Goverati”.
• Wisconsin: Whistling Past the Graveyard, by George Lightbourn
• Burn Canvas–“A simple test of local pixel-based modifications of an HTML5 canvas drawing area,” from Chrome Experiments dot com.
• HTML5 and Web Standards–This is a demonstration that, according to Apple, shows “…how the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser, new Macs, and new Apple mobile devices all support the capabilities of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Not all browsers offer this support,” the Apple PR machine continues, “but soon other modern browsers will take advantage of these same web standards — and the amazing things they enable web designers to do.” The irony here, the giggle, is that this “web standards” showcase can only be accessed using Apple products. Other products such as the Google Chrome browser, a product already able to “take advantage of these same web standards,” are excluded. That Steve Jobs! What a kidder!
• America Speaks–National “town meeting” on the budget and the economy.
• arXiv vs. snarXiv–an addictive little game. Try to guess which title in the pair of titles offered is from a real paper published in a scientific journal.
• Visual Thesaurus
• “The Shallows”–NPR reporting on Nicholas Karr’s take on what the Internet is doing to our minds.
• Does the Internet Make You Smarter? by Clay Shirky–the opposing perspective to Nicholas Karr’s concern about the great dumbing down.
• Griper News, the bearer of bad tidings–blogging the way blogs should be blogged, by Terry Canaan.
• Slate–it ain’t Griper news, but it pays better.
• Aldiko–“…an ebook reading application that runs on any Android phone and which enables you to easily download and read thousands of books right on your smartphone.”
• arstechnica Week in Apple: pre-WWDC edition–the Apple World Wide developers Conference is just around the corner. The WWDC is a gathering of those who write code for the six percent of information appliance owners who have tied themselves to the closed Apple architecture. That’s six percent of a gazillion users though, no small number.
• Hulu: Life–a TV series about a cop who was framed and went to prison for a long time. When he is exonerated and released and given a $50 million settlement he returns to the LA police force, bringing a fresh if somewhat demented perspective to his police work.