links for 2009-10-12

The Many-Worlds FAQ.

"Starting Monday, issues dating back to 2000 will be available at Data.gov in a form known in the Web world as XML, which allows users to transport data from a Web site and store it, reorganize it or customize it elsewhere. Officials suggested that the move puts readers, rather than the government, in charge of deciding how to access the Register's reams of information. "

"Of course, that's not even close to true. Curley and Murdoch's macho outrage is calculated to be quotable, but it is fake. Here's why: go to Google News, or type a newsy topic like "Obama wins Nobel" into Google's search box. What do you get? Headlines and very brief teasers linking to news stories from news sites. If you click on them, you are taken to that news site, where you can read the story, which is surrounded by that site's ads. What, exactly, did Google steal in this scenario? If you don't click on the link, you don't see the story. If you do click on the link, you see the story on the originator's Web site. Instead of stealing, I would call this something else: a free service that drives lots of readers to news Web sites that wouldn't get nearly as much traffic, if any at all, if Google didn't link to their sites for free. That may not be as pithy as crying "thief!" But it has the advantage of being true."

"The purpose of this site is to capture the crazy but true comments said to birthing women by doctors, midwives, doulas, lactation consultants, and childbirth educators when they are having their babies!" Some pretty horrific stuff in here.

"To biologists and others, it is a source of amazement and embarrassment that many Americans repudiate Darwin’s theory and that some even espouse counter­theories like creationism or intelligent design. How can such willful ignorance thrive in today’s seas of knowledge? In the hope of diminishing such obscurantism, the prolific English biology writer Richard Dawkins has devoted his latest book to demonstrating the explanatory power of evolutionary ideas while hammering the creationists at every turn."

"Removable heads and underground exhibitions are just two of the guerrilla tactics the Gao brothers have employed, often with the help of Melanie Ouyang, their broker, to enable fans and friends to view their work. The Gaos are part of a generation of avant-garde Chinese artists who are pushing the boundaries of artistic expression. In the increasingly open Chinese art world, nudity is commonplace where it used to be forbidden, and art parodying the Cultural Revolution has become so ubiquitous that it is passé. Still, the Gaos are a reminder that, especially as China celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Communist revolution, limits to expression remain: although artists are increasingly free to deal with social and political topics, works that explicitly criticize Chinese leaders or symbols of China are still out of bounds."

"The nearly 600km-wide rock is an example of an object that started out on the process of becoming a planet but never grew up into the real thing."

"At their August 2009 meeting, the National Council for Examiners of Engineering and Surveying (NCEES) Board of Directors approved moving forward with the development of a Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE) exam for the discipline of SOFTWARE ENGINEERING. As part of the Board action, it was agreed that IEEE-USA will serve as the lead technical society sponsoring the examination with cooperative agreements from other organizations, including the IEEE-Computer Society, the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE), and the Texas Board of Professional Engineers (TBPE)." Weirdly they don't list ACM as one of the participating organizations.

"In this tutorial we are going to create a pure jQuery & CSS twitter ticker which utilizes Twitter’s Search API. It will show your or your friends’ latest tweets, and will not require any server side code or databases. As a result, the ticker will be easily included into any web page and easily modified to your likings."

"Logical fallacies when trying to teach logical fallacies. Thank you, book." Fun stuff.

"CouchDB joins other offline application technologies such as Google Gears and Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). The main difference between CouchDB and a technology such as Gears is CouchDB offers the same application code running on the server and locally, Anderson said. Normally, developers have a lot of work to do to make an application run offline, he said."

"Good luck trying to find an Internet user who admits to responding to spam. Still, they're out there, and in pretty good numbers. According to a new report, a full 12 percent of Internet users have actually wanted to pay for some product or service being advertised by e-mail."

"Opponents of same-sex marriage reject it on religious and moral grounds but also on practical ones. If we let homosexuals marry, they believe, a parade of horribles will follow—the weakening of marriage as an institution, children at increased risk of broken homes, the eventual legalization of polygamy, and who knows what all. But with the experiment looming, some opponents seem to be doubting their own convictions. But I have a strong suspicion that both sides of the debate are right. The supporters of same-sex marriage are right in predicting that it will have no bad side effects. And the opponents are right not to make predictions."

"The 802.11n technology, as it is known, was ratified by the IEEE, a body that oversees all wi-fi standards. All existing draft 802.11n wi-fi products will work with the final standard, according to the Wi-Fi Alliance, a group that tests wireless products to ensure compliance."

"Doctors, by a large majority, support adding a government run health insurance program that would compete with private insurance. That's according to a new survey. What's been called the public option continues to be one of the most contentious issues in the health care debate, but the survey shows that doctors are already used to dealing with government run insurance."

If it doesn't get posted on the blog does it get seen?

"The Supreme Court refused on Monday to block the release of documents generated by lawsuits against priests in Connecticut for alleged sexual abuse. Several newspapers are seeking the release of more than 12,000 pages from 23 lawsuits against six priests."

"Thousands of gay and lesbian activists are marching through Washington to demand greater civil rights. The protest is taking place a day after President Barack Obama said he would repeal a ban on gay people serving openly in the military. The marchers in Washington are also calling for the speedy removal of legal restrictions on same-sex partnerships. Mr Obama has been accused by some in the gay community of being slow to act on gay rights."

"LibraryThing's systems administrator, John Dalton, came up with this—using LibraryThing's tagmash feature to demonstrate the difference between geeks and nerds:"