Day 10 of the 30 day flight garners a great story about the sound design of Disneyworld.
Day 10 of the 30 day flight garners a great story about the sound design of Disneyworld.
My favorite line from an interesting profile of Baidu’s Robin Li:
By year-end the company will move to a new headquarters designed to resemble an enormous, long rectangular search box.
An enormous long rectangular building that looks like an <input>? *That’s* how you spend FU money, folks.
Word of the day: apophenia, seeing patterns where none exist. That’s all.
From Bevan, who mails me tons of awesome links but for some reason never blogs anymore, a great short interview with Eliot Spitzer and Tyler Cowen by The Takeaway, which appears to be my new favorite thing ever.
Kottke links to the wtf that “Dolphin Safe” tuna is actually less safe for everything except dolphins. I’m completely unqualified to evaluate the truthfulness of this, so I’ll just nod and say “that sucks, we should figure out a way to get that to stop.”
Here’s the problem: the article blames environmental groups for the outcome from the more dangerous fishing method, and posits that Bush 43 was trying to be the good guy here but was stopped by those same groups.
First up: environmental groups are not to blame, tuna fishers (and consumers) are. If you oppose a person beating their spouse, then of course you’re to blame when they beat their children instead, right? The post itself links to one environmental group’s effort to make the term “Dolphin Safe” actually mean “No Dolphins Harmed”, and specifically mentions other preferred methods of harvesting tuna that would have less collateral damage. (An observation that these methods might be less efficient wouldn’t really matter – tuna is unsustainably overfished, anyways.)
Second: the Bush administration’s effort to change the definition of “Dolphin Safe” was not motivated by a deep and abiding concern for the environment or by any kind of science, it was driven by “foreign policy implications”, which was why it was rejected by the court. It should also be noted that Bush wasn’t the first to attempt to do this – the Clinton administration tried the same thing in 1999, after getting the law that would have allowed it to happen (had the government done the scientific legwork it mandated for, uh, itself) passed in 1997.
It’s always interesting to see unintended consequences, and I do applaud this post for bringing them to light here. It’s important, though, to not get swept up in the novelty (or politics) of those consequences and draw the conclusion that the initial effort was bad. For whatever reason, the blog author decided to place an arbitrary restriction that the conversation should focus only on choosing between the two flawed fishing methods, but the simple truth is that neither seems acceptable.
Another Sunlight Labs Apps for America honorable mention: Time Machine, a simple and effective visualization for annual government data. They include employment data, which is nice – you can really see the rollercoaster states with a manufacturing economy have been on over the years, and the recent surge in unemployment is disturbing in how quickly it changes the color of the map.
Everything you ever wanted to know… okay, way more than you ever wanted to know… about the Ad Council. I honestly always thought it was some kind of government propaganda program; as it turns out, it’s a private propaganda program that’s commonly sponsored by government agencies. My bad.
Following up, Gordon Brown is proud to apologize to Alan Turing. Good show.
The Book of Space. I love art that’s this intricate and detailed, and still manages to be beautiful.
Aww, Dolores Park, I miss you.
(via Laughing Squid)