I first met Julie on February 28, 1993. Julie, 18, stood in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel, barefoot, pants unzipped, and an 8 day-old infant in her arms. She lived in San Francisco’s SRO district, a neighborhood of soup kitchens and cheap rooms. Her room was piled with clothes, overfull ashtrays and trash. She lived with Jack, father of her first baby Rachael, and who had given her AIDS. She left him months later to stop using drugs.
“People often assume that I must be some extremely moral person because I didn’t take advantage of the lottery,” he says. “I can assure you that that’s not the case. I’d simply done the math and concluded that beating the game wasn’t worth my time.”
via Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code | Magazine.
A really interesting story about the mathematical weaknesses of common scratch lottery tickets.
New York City investigators found it easy to replicate the arsenal of Jared Loughner at a gun show in Arizona. It’s not really a surprise to me that they were able to, but it’s interesting that New York City is examining other jurisdictions’ gun policies and enforcement as part of their domestic crime prevention policy.
So I guess the modern equivalent of the vanity email address is the vanity URL shortener. I registered ian.lc because it was available and cheapish and because bit.ly’s links keep getting longer and longer.
I tried both Google’s and Bit.ly’s BYO domain shorteners and didn’t like them at all. Google forces you to use a subdomain and Bit.ly uses the same namespace for all shortening domains, so all it really offered was vanity, not improved shortness.
After a couple of wisely aborted efforts to write my own I just installed YOURLS, a simple, straight-forward, extensible URL shortener. Like all useful internet software it’s all PHP and MySQL so it took virtually no time to deploy – unzip, create database, edit config file, reload.
There’s a pretty good WordPress plugin that shortens a link and then posts to twitter that I’m experimenting with as a way to encourage myself to make longer than 140 character posts. Let’s see how that goes.
One year ago, an elite Mossad hit squad traveled to Dubai to kill a high-ranking member of Hamas. They completed the mission, but their covers were blown, and Israel was humiliated by the twenty-seven-minute video of their movements that was posted online for all the world to see.
via The Dubai Job: Big Issues: GQ.
It’s a long article but worth the time. A really in depth analysis of the evidence around the Mossad assassination of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh by an Israeli journalist. It’s fascinating to see how the assassins were able to be so competent and so incompetent at the same time.
The world has witnessed an unprecedented popular action in the streets of Egypt. Led by Egypt’s youth, with their justified demands for more freedom, more democracy, lower prices for necessities and more employment opportunities.
via To our friends around the world: The Events in Egypt – News – Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
PhantomJS is a commodity version of what I built at Danger and others have built for specific use cases again and again – a headless, scriptable web browser. Pretty cool.
The recent leak or crack of the HDCP key has mostly been discussed in terms media piracy. There is already plenty of Blu-Ray piracy – nobody’s going to bother capturing raw HDMI traffic and re-encode it when they can easily buy a ripper. What this will do is make it possible for more small chinese manufacturers to get in on the HD television manufacturing game. HDCP provided a high barrier to entry for manufacturers so we haven’t seen the proliferation of TV manufacturers that we’ve seen in virtually every other kind of electronics. I expect that to change. I’m looking forward to buying sketchy HDTVs in chinatown super cheap.
Sharon sent me Jill Filipovic’s blog post about Stephanie Grace’s “racist email” that seems to be doing the rounds of the angry internet. First of all Stephanie Grace’s email was kind of racist. Not Arizona racist, but it definitely had a racist subtext. She doesn’t state that she believes that African Americans are genetically predisposed to be less intelligent than the rest of the US population, but by raising the suggestion she… raises the suggestion. It’s kind of like me pointing out that Glenn Beck has never provided evidence that he didn’t rape and murder a young girl in 1990.
Personally I think that it’s an entirely reasonable belief that more closely related groups (for example Americans whose ancestors largely originated in the Twi-speaking tribes of West Africa, or Americans whose ancestors originated from small towns in Scandinavia) will share physical traits. We’ve spent the past year travelling the world and people in different places look different. They have significantly different features, often adapted to their environment. If we connect the fact that genes can determine traits and closely related groups of people tend to share genes it’s obvious that closely related people tend to share some traits. I really don’t think that’s a racist concept.
What is racist is attaching moral value to traits associated with groups of people.
I don’t have any reason to believe African Americans are less intelligent than the rest of the population. Any difference in performance at school or income levels or incarceration rates are easily attributable to the class issues that Americans are so afraid of talking about. I think Stephanie Grace’s suggestion that their might be a genetic predisposition to lower than average intelligence among African Americans isn’t a particularly sound or even interesting suggestion, but she didn’t directly suggest that lower intelligence lowers the worth of individuals or groups. That all came from Jill Filipovic. It was Filipovic who used took a discussion of different traits and applied language like “genetically inferior”.
To equate intelligence with value (which is what Jill Filipovic does in her post) is where I have the problem. I’m happy to assume (as Filipovic does) that Stephanie Grace also equates intelligence with value or “superiority” but that’s not what the blog post was about. It was about arguing that intelligence is the key factor in determining the value of a person in society, and in the legal system in particular.
