Something to think about the next time you indulge your appetite for celebrity gossip

Yeah, I have a taste, too. And yeah, they make the big money, and you can argue that this is part of what they get paid for. And then there's the freedom of the press argument.

Still, anyone who doesn't think there's something seriously wrong here is definitely part of the problem.

(alt. video link)

It's one thing to take some snapshots of, let's say, a celebrity acting like a celebretard at a nightclub. It's quite another to pull this level of harassment on a mother and her child just trying to collect their luggage and be on their way. And not to go all ZOMG TEH TERRISTS on you, but is that how we want a dozen airport security personnel spending their time?

Jezebel (via) says there's shortly going to be an anti-paparazzi law passed in California in response to episodes like this. I am dubious about any law restricting press access, but I have to say, there gets to be a point where abuse of rights and privileges causes the jackboot to come down, and while I don't like it -- people should just behave decently without threat of legal sanction -- the gossip rags, websites, and their audiences have no one to blame but themselves for this one.

If Sarah Palin doesn't write about this on her Facebook page, it didn't happen

Remember the last couple of weeks in August, when one Gallup poll showed a ten-point edge for generic Republicans over generic Democrats in the coming Congressional elections, and how much media attention that got? How even Nate "I don’t usually like to comment on individual polls" Silver was pleased to comment on this individual poll?

How much attention do you think the results of this week's Gallup poll will get?

(That's a 46-46 tie, for those of you blocking images
or not interested in donning your graph-reading nerd glasses)

Oh, wait. I forgot. Not only is it not news to the so-called liberal media unless it can be framed as Democrats In Disarray™, we also have some assclown minister from Florida who demands wall-to-wall coverage. And we must have equal parts fawning and chin-stroking over Beck and Palin doin' that 9/11 griftin', also, too.

Maybe the Balloon Juicers are on to something.

At least Jim Newell noticed.

An Illustration of the State of our Media

The Balloon Juicers have a tag called Our Failed Media Experiment, and they don't just mean FoxNews and hate radio.

Sometimes it seems a little hysterical. Other times …

A big part of why we're in the mess we're in is that the wingnut media makes ever more insane claims and the so-called liberal media responds by asking, "Is there anything to this? Maybe not, but to be safe, we should say the truth lies somewhere in the middle."

Pic swiped from Gin and Tacos, via Edroso's Tumblr.

[Added] On a related note (via), why is Rudy Giuliani of all people being asked to be on "Meet the Press?"

"The government doesn’t look good naked."

Very smart post from Gunnar Hellekson, pushing back against the shouty types who think transparency should equal instant reform of everything everywhere. It's not long, so you have no excuse not to read it.

(h/t: Weigel)

Dear Jonathan Chait

I am glad to see Ken Layne, and via him, Oliver Willis, Matt Yglesias, Jason Linkins, and Alex Pareene, calling attention to your boss's latest racist insanity, but I want to hear from you. It is long past time for you to speak out against Marty Peretz. Yeah, I know he signs your paychecks, but come on. Enough is enough. Same for your colleagues, but you're my favorite writer at TNR. So please, do the right thing.

We will be watching, in hope.

[Added] Follow-up: more voices.

Portrait of the Republican Party

Swiped from Sarah Palin Truth Squad, where you can also find a re-post of a fine Bob Cesca essay, originally published on HuffPo.

Cartoon by Stuart Carlson, whose work is definitely worth a longer look. Here's one on that clown minister from Florida. Here's another on the same theme as above. Here's one on the recent Lawn Chair Rally and Lardfest. Here's one on ZOMG TEH MOSK.

Follow-up on that Sarah Palin piece in Vanity Fair

New post up on VF's website: "Michael Joseph Gross Responds to Criticism of His Article on Sarah Palin."

Probably only of interest for obsessives, so, yes, naturally I read the whole thing. And so did your Ken Layne.

The funniest part concerns some PR person, also a Christian talk show host and (better sit down for this part) contributor to one of Breitbart's Big sites, "Gina Loudon, an acquaintance of Palin’s," about whom MJG says, "Let me state this as unequivocally as possible: Loudon’s accounts have no basis in reality."

There's also a little bit of a backhand delivered to the new Matthew Continetti, Ben Smith of the rePubOLITICO.

(previously)

(pic. source)

You're Still Using Internet Explorer ... Why?

This is far from the first time we've heard a story like this: "Microsoft investigates years-old IE bug."

The gist: Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera all had it, too. They have all patched it. Microsoft is "looking into it." And only after the security researcher who discovered the bug went public, after finding he was "unsuccessful in persuading the vendor to issue a fix."

Take Me Out to the Ballpark Cleaners

Good article by Ken Belson, Jo Craven McGinty, and Griff Palmer about the outstanding public debt still attached to pro sports arenas, many of which are … shall we say … erstwhile:

New Jerseyans are hardly alone in paying for stadiums that no longer exist. Residents of Seattle’s King County owe more than $80 million for the Kingdome, which was razed in 2000. The story has been similar in Indianapolis and Philadelphia. In Houston, Kansas City, Mo., Memphis and Pittsburgh, residents are paying for stadiums and arenas that were abandoned by the teams they were built for.

There's a very good sidebar, too.

__________

P.S. You'll be delighted, however, to note that teabagger darling Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey is showing the sort of take-charge, responsible, don't-blame-your-predecessors attitude that the Republican Party promises to deliver, come 2010:

“Believe me, I’m not unaware of the debt situation that was left here in my lap by decisions made by previous administrations,” Gov. Christie said, speaking from the 50-yard line at New Meadowlands Stadium.

Where he was no doubt shoving hotdogs into his face.

(pic. source)

Now would not be a good time to invite me to subscribe

I just happened upon the latest edition of your … my … hell, everybody's favorite feature of the New York Times: "The Conversation." As in, that recurrent (as in chronic) thing between Gail Collins and David Brooks about which Doghouse Riley once said:

Anyway, whenever I read one of these things I'm tempted to imagine the Slow News Monday last December some time when Brooks and Collins were spotted firing paperclips at a Dixie Cup, and a passing supervisor told them if they couldn't find anything to do he'd find something.

Nothing against Gail Collins, but I do not usually read those -- in fact, I usually run as fast as I can away from them -- but something (hathos, perhaps) made me start reading the latest. Oh, no, wait, I remember why I started -- the NYT tricked me by putting a link to it in a sidebar and only giving the headline: "What the Tea Party Really Wants." (I guess it was hathos that made me read the whole thing.) Here's how it starts.

Gail Collins: David, did you go to the Glenn Beck rally in Washington last weekend?

David Brooks: I did and I have to confess I really enjoyed it. I’m no Beck fan obviously, but the spirit was really warm, generous and uplifting. The only bit of unpleasantness I found emanated from some liberal gatecrashers behaving offensively, carrying anti-Beck banners and hoping to get in some televised fights.

If that doesn't fulfill every dark thought you had about David "Salad Bar at Applebee's" Brooks and his utter disengagement with reality and the hoi polloi, I don't know what will. I guess he never saw this video, for example.

Yes, that was shot at the same event Brooks ostensibly visited.

To her credit, Gail Collins does spend the entire conversation ridiculing him, at least as much as is possible in that context. The part about Sweden was pretty good.

(pic. of Brooks by Tom Tomorrow | hathos? | salad bar?)

Of course you want to read a fun baseball story!

Then:

Pretty good record, actually.

Now:

Bill Lee wins minor league game at age 63

(h/t: KK, via email)

Ask and ye shall receive

Yesterday, I noted some Flickr photographs of James Bridle's The Iraq War: A Historiography of Wikipedia Changelogs, which is a printed collection of every edit of the Wikipedia page for the Iraq War, a twelve volume set.

I mentioned in one of the afterthoughts to my post, about the creator of that work who had spoken at a recent conference:

Sounds like the rest of us really missed a good talk. Hope they taped it.

Today, I went over to booktwo.org, one of James Bridle's web sites, and what did I see but a fascinating post on the Historiography and his thinking on history as a process, and then this line at the very end:

UPDATE: You can listen to the whole talk, and me saying “um” a lot, over at Huffduffer.

You can stream or download the audio. Here is the blurb:

The Value Of Ruins

Huffduffed by dConstruct on September 6th, 2010

Between The Alexandrian War of 48 BCE and the Muslim conquest of 642 CE, the Library of Alexandria, containing a million scrolls and tens of thousands of individual works was completely destroyed, its contents scattered and lost. An appreciable percentage of all human knowledge to that point in history was erased. Yet in his novella “The Congress”, Jorge Luis Borges wrote that “every few centuries, it’s necessary to burn the Library of Alexandria”.

In his session James will ask if, as we build ourselves new structures of knowledge and certainty, as we design our future, should we be concerned with the value of our ruins?

http://2010.dconstruct.org/speakers/james-bridle

With a background in both computing and traditional publishing James Bridle attempts to bridge the gaps between technology and literature. He runs Bookkake, a small independent publisher and writes about books and the publishing industry at booktwo.org. In 2009 he helped launch Enhanced Editions, the first e-reading application with integrated audiobooks.

So there's that. Downloading now.

[Added] Note that clicking the dConstruct link in the above blockquote (or that one, obvs.) will show you some of the other talks from the same conference.

Wingnuts Are Furious About Labor Day and Everything It Stands For

Roy Edroso's latest round-up is now available. Intro here, full column here. Every time I think they can't possibly get any more willfully stupid, they eat another handful of paint chips. [Added: and a pre-Labor Day post here.]

And from the comments under the column, also see commie atheist's Labor Day remembrances.

Why is The Obama deleting Sher Zieve from Google?

Alerted by @edroso, we are led to a report by Tintin of Sadly, No! on a column by Sher Zieve of RenewAmerica.

Apparently, this woman believes that because she is one of "the voices of those who oppose the tyrant," her voice is being "eliminated."

And such strongly seems to be the case of the techniques now utilized by the two major Internet search engines — Google and Yahoo. It appears that when they are told by The Obama to delete an opposer's name from their files, like Pharaoh Seti I is said to have deleted Moses' name from everything in the Egyptian New Kingdom, my name has now almost been completely deleted from Google and Yahoo is following close behind the leftist leader. Are plans to eradicate other truth-tellers on the way?

Note: For regular readers, this additional sabotage will come as no surprise. This has been occurring steadily over the past 2-3 years. I have gone from over 1.5Million entries on each search site to — now — under 8,000 entries on Google and about 22K on Yahoo.

We do not, of course, have any way to verify that she used to get "1.5Million" hits in her previous moments of ego-surfing, although we can confirm Googling Sher Zieve at this moment does indeed return "about 7870" hits. We will also note that Googling Sher returns 35 million hits, Googling Zieve returns 473,000, and one of the top hits for the latter is Zieve's Syndrome, which "is an acute metabolic condition that can occur during withdrawal from prolonged alcohol abuse."

You will want to read Tintin's take, for sure, but true connoisseurs might want to start at the source. Here are some of my favorite passages.

For my Uber-leftist critics, no I am not equating myself to the Deliverer Moses. First, I simply wouldn't do so. Second I'm a woman and third I doubt even The Obama would yet have the audacity to take on a known messenger from God; although I have no doubt he might actually consider it.

The reason I'm writing this has nothing to do with either self-pity or self-aggrandizement. […] Instead, I am writing it to let you know the depths to which this administration — and all Marxists — will stoop to silence their critics. Historically, when these totalitarian governments remain unchallenged by any effective means — and are allowed to remain in power — will, in time, begin to use more brutal and perverse tactics; from placing their opposition into prisons and eventual outright mass "exterminations." […] After Obama & Co has completed its experiment on me, which of you will be next for speaking up against the planned demise of We-the-People?

And then there are her … references, I guess she'd call them, at the bottom of the page: links to "Moses, Ramses and Seti," "Worst Genocides of 20th Century," and "Stalin Atrocities (pictorial)."

For a little perspective, let's note the headline of a few of her previous columns: "Obama's August surprise: turning AZ and 22 other states over to the UN." "Obama vacations: destroying a country is hard work." "ObamaGov establishing Islam as official USA state religion?" "Midterm elections 2010: Marxists vs. Americans." "Will Obama 'persuade' Americans their slavery is inevitable?" "Obama doesn't want America's recovery." "AZ ceded to Mexico and the rise of the Obama police state?" "Obama's 'fundamental transformation' means total annihilation." "Dictator Obama reaches day 70 of his Gulf destruction."

Which only gets us back the end of June. There are gobs more. Hard to believe we haven't run out of purple crayons yet.

Oh, and what's this, back in April? "Obama's Google deleting me?" Good lord. And it's actually a different column. Well, different word arrangements, same great paranoid flavor; e.g.:

And although my column output continues to be even greater than in has been in the past, within about a year and a half I have gone from between 1-2 millions of Google entries to a few thousand after last week. Note: Google knocked off 60,000 entries after I wrote and had published my article "Barack Hussein Obama: Marxist Ideologue or Evolving Madman?" Guess it struck a rather large nerve. Retribution and retaliation against my continuing to tell the truth? You betcha'!

And then there are her fellow inmates site colleagues. Let's have a quick look at the ledes from the latest from some of them, shall we? Start right off with their rock star, Bryan Fischer, whose fear of Muslins (NO MORE MOSQUES, PERIOD) is matched only by his homophobia. What's the latest from ol' BF?

Here's something you wouldn't expect unless you were an Islamorealist (as opposed to an Islamophobe):

President Obama's surrender in Iraq is more popular in America than in Iraq.

Wow. Pushing that "surrender" line already, huh? Oooo-kay. Who's next? Oh, hello, Wes Vernon!

Before Communist Howard Zinn died in January, he was actively spearheading an effort to inject his lying version of American history into the innocent heads of little tots almost as soon as they are able to talk.

Meh. Rewarmed Birch. What about … A.J. DiCintio?

Red hot liberal arrogance

Ever since Karl Marx lied that he based his ideas upon science — for example, his "scientific socialism" — a defining characteristic of leftists has been an insufferably arrogant bragging about their exquisite rationality.

Now, if it were true that leftist ideology is based upon reason, it would qualify for inclusion in science textbooks. However, as every honest person knows, it can't be because it isn't.

RenewAmerica, ladies and gentlemen.

You're registered to vote, right?

Let's start Monday morning off right, for a change

Congressional tweet of the week:

(embiggen)

Can I get a few more Democrats with this spirit, please?

(h/t: RT by steveking_)

Happy Labor Day. Guess what your Koch brothers were up to this holiday weekend.

If you guessed giving $1 million to back Prop. 23, "an effort to suspend California's global warming law," you're right!

But really. Only a million dollars? Pikers. I mean, compared to …

Valero Energy Corporation and Tesoro Petroleum Corporation, two Texas refining companies, [who] have together donated more than $4.5 million to the campaign to repeal AB 32, the state’s clean air and energy law.

But! Good news! The AP also reports:

According to the Los Angeles Times, a spokeswoman for Flint Hills Resources said the company "may consider additional support."

And why are the Koch brothers and these other Good Corporate Citizens™ giving so much money to this proposition? Because they care about the little guy! Not about whether he and his kids can breathe or stay out of floods, but his "jobs!"

This proposition to overturn California's Global Warming Act of 2006 is called the "California Jobs Initiative." You know, kind of like the tobacco lobby-backed proposition from 1994, which was spun as an "anti-smoking" proposition that would Protect the Children™. And more recently, like George W. Bush, who gave his environment-killing agenda items names like "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests."

Hurrah for not being bullshitted by billionaires, who only care about Your Best Interests™!

Oh, one other thing: you'll also be delighted to know that despite a concerted effort to avoid getting pinned down about where she stands on this, Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina finally announced -- on the Friday before Labor Day Weekend, but that's probably a coincidence, amirite? -- that she stands with Big Pollution and supports Prop. 23. And we know Carly Cares™ about jobs. After all, when she was running Hewlett-Packard, she added, what, negative ten thousand of them?

If you want to learn more about where the money is coming from and going to, here are some starting points:

• Ballotpedia Prop. 23 page: a good executive summary of the issues and the players, with lots of solid reference links.
  
  
• The Sacramento Bee's CapitolAlert blog, posts tagged "2010 ballot initiatives."
  
  
• Cal-Access: the California Secretary of State's official database of campaign contributions. Layout is a bit clunky, but if you're willing to dig, the information is there. Start here or here, perhaps.
  
  
• OpenSecrets.org's page on the oil and gas industry. This is a national effort, so you'll also be able to find out where, and who, else the likes of Valero, Tesoro, and the Koch brothers are seeking to buy.
  
  
• Sen. Barbara Boxer's campaign website, featuring a section called "Get the Facts on Fiorina."
  
  
• LA Times: article on the Koch brothers' donation and a good opinion piece by Steve Lopez.
  
  

One final note: Louise Bedsworth, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, said in back in spring it's likely campaign spending on this ballot measure will set a new record. That means well more than $150 million burned up on buying ads and politicians. I wonder how many jobs we could create for that. With bonus cleaner air thrown in.

(h/t: TC and PF, via email, for the heads-up about the Koch AP story | pic. sources: Wonk Room and Open Salon)

ZOMG Terrorist Fist Jab Jumps Species Boundary

(Swiped from Matt's Tumblr)

(previously)

Guess what I saw in the sky yesterday

Two of them, actually. During a delightful sun shower.

I've been thinking since then that never mind the colors, the shape had to be really startling to early humans -- so simple a curve, so unlike the cragginess of rocks and trees and clouds. That, perhaps, even looks like it's holding up the sky. So it just occurred to me: I wonder if the original impetus for the arch as a structural element came from marveling at rainbows?

(embiggen)

---

"double rainbow over bike arch - burning man festival 2007"
"Bike Rack (aka Bike Arch), by Mark Grieve and Ilana Spector"
Photo © Tristan Savatier
Found on loupiote.com | for hi-res, see here

Fuck yeah, Hitch

While my so far uncancerous throat, let me rush to assure my Christian correspondent above, is not at all the only organ with which I have blasphemed.

Christopher Hitchens has a new piece up on Vanity Fair: "Unanswerable Prayers." In which he answers those who claim to be Christians, among other things.

And don't miss this sidebar thing, "Dear Hitchens." Way cool.

(h/t: @steveking_)

Looks more like Rocky Raccoon to me ...

... but this red panda is pretty darned cute by any name.

This picture is one of a series called "15 animals that are living fossils," featuring sixteen slides but who's counting, and it's well worth a look. Here's what they have to say about the little one above:

Hailing from the temperate forests of the Himalayas, these adorable creatures are the only surviving members of the family Ailuridae.

Despite the name, red pandas are barely related to the giant panda. They represent a lineage that more closely marks a cross section of bears and skunks, weasels and raccoons. They are truly in a world all their own.

Their association with the giant panda may have to do with the animals' similar diets, which includes a lot of bamboo, than it does any sort of evolutionary relationship.

Not all of the "living fossils" will give you a warm fuzzy. The purple frog? The mantis shrimp? The hagfish ("the only living animals that have a skull but not a vertebral column")? The goblin shark? Whoa. Way cool, even if not unanimously cuddly. But there are koalas. And no end of interesting-looking related links. So click on over.

(previously)

(h/t: KK, via email)

Calvin and ... some other philosopher

The rest.

(h/t: KK, via email)

__________

(Reminder: The First Real Competition to Google.)

"Mr. W"

No, no, come back. This is not about the ex-Preznit. This is considerably more likeable, although it may take you two minutes to see why, if you haven't seen it already.

(alt. video link)

Great ad, huh?

(h/t: KK, via email)

All right, just one more swipe from David McCandless. For now.

Remember the Icelandic volcano from a few months back?

(embiggen)

From here.

As you can tell, it's possible to spend hours on Information is Beautiful.

"Libertarians Are Wrong About Infrastructure, News at 11"

Here. See also: 'The Reason Foundation’s Unreasonable Highway Report."

Both on The Infrastructurist.

(via)

(previously, sorta)

But can I get it on the Kindle?

(embiggen)

Srsly.

(via)

You already knew glibertarians were ludicrous. Now it has been proven, by Science.

(Updated below)

Okay, not quite. But the notion that we should just do away with all regulation, let the individual thrive, trust in the magic of the free market, and oppose SOCIALISM!!!1!, when carried just a little too far, has to be seen as an idea not to be taken seriously. We've gotten ourselves to where we are by creating an enormously complex interdependent society.

I just came across a good article by Matt Ridley, "Humans: Why They Triumphed," [1] that elaborates upon this. Here's a section that really rang the cherries:

The more scientists discover, the bigger the evolution puzzle has become. Tool-making itself has now been pushed back at least two million years, and modern tool kits emerged very gradually over 300,000 years in Africa. Meanwhile, Neanderthals are now known to have had brains that were bigger than ours and to have inherited the same genetic mutations that facilitate speech as us. Yet, despite surviving until 30,000 years ago, they hardly invented any new tools, let alone farms, cities and toothpaste. The Neanderthals prove that it is quite possible to be intelligent and imaginative human beings (they buried their dead) yet not experience cultural and economic progress.

Scientists have so far been looking for the answer to this riddle in the wrong place: inside human heads. Most have been expecting to find a sort of neural or genetic breakthrough that sparked a "big bang of human consciousness," an auspicious mutation so that people could speak, think or plan better, setting the human race on the path to continuous and exponential innovation.

But the sophistication of the modern world lies not in individual intelligence or imagination. It is a collective enterprise. Nobody—literally nobody—knows how to make the pencil on my desk (as the economist Leonard Read once pointed out), let alone the computer on which I am writing. The knowledge of how to design, mine, fell, extract, synthesize, combine, manufacture and market these things is fragmented among thousands, sometimes millions of heads. Once human progress started, it was no longer limited by the size of human brains. Intelligence became collective and cumulative.

In the modern world, innovation is a collective enterprise that relies on exchange.

And later on:

Self-sufficiency—subsistence—is poverty.

Read the whole thing to see how he supports this conclusion. See also my source for this, Jeremy Keith's post, "Listening," for audio of a lecture by Ridley on this topic, as well as other fascinating-looking talks.

[Added] And this bit ...

Where population falls or is fragmented, cultural evolution may actually regress. A telling example comes from Tasmania, where people who had been making bone tools, clothing and fishing equipment for 25,000 years gradually gave these up after being isolated by rising sea levels 10,000 years ago. Joe Henrich of the University of British Columbia argues that the population of 4,000 Tasmanians on the island constituted too small a collective brain to sustain, let alone improve, the existing technology.

... reminded me of an earlier post.

---

[1] Not sure why it's not "We" instead of "They," but maybe the WSJ has robots writing their headlines.

---

Update

2010-09-05 18:00

In Comments, claymisher offers a couple of useful links. Ridley has some serious warts, especially as pertains to the way I began this post.

An Illustration of Scale

Here is something you might already know about, but if not, can you guess what these two blue squares represent?

Answer here.

And really, when you consider the fourth addition to the previous post …

"The Iraq War: A Wikipedia Historiography"

"The Iraq War: A Historiography of Wikipedia Changelogs" is a twelve-volume set of all changes to the Wikipedia article on the Iraq War.

The twelve volumes cover a five year period from December 2004 to November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.

Quite possibly the last item on the giant list of all books I'd someday like to own, but I find the idea of it oddly compelling.

You can go look at digital photos posted online, of books containing nicely-formatted renderings of various versions on a particular page on the Web, here.

__________

Via Matthew Culnane's post "Visiting Deconstruct 2010," which sounds like something I bet I'd have enjoyed, via a hint from @adactio. (Yeah, it's all connected.)

[Added] Another rave review for James Bridle, creator of the above. And here's a link to his page in the brochure for the conference, as it were. Damn. Sounds like the rest of us really missed a good talk. Hope they taped it.

[Added2] See also James Bridle's blog booktwo.org.

[Added3] Matthew also mentioned the Billion-Dollar-O-Gram, due to David McCandless of Information is Beautiful. See here and here.

[Added4] And from IiB, do not miss "Wikipedia’s Lamest Edit Wars" (and here). Yep. That's an actual thing.

"How to catch a mouse without a mousetrap"

Chris Glass says it's the most popular link on his website. I can see why.

(via)

[Added] I just tried the related fly-killing idea. OMG. It really, really worked, first shot!

Line of the Day: 2010-09-05

I’ve found the wwilfing motherlode for markup nerds like me: The Early History of HTML. It’s a short document, but each link will send you down a rabbit hole of geek history.

Thrill to the original code by Tim Berners-Lee for parsing hypertext! Gasp at the first document ever published on the web!

Interestingly, that first ever web page almost validates as HTML5. It’s just missing a doctype, which—as the spec makes clear—is only required "for legacy reasons." Oh, the irony!

The above is an excerpt from "Hypertext History" by Jeremy Keith/Adactio. The original is full of links, but I wanted this bit of text to stand on its own.

__________

Another short post over there that caught my eye: social media reconsidered in "Slight Return." [I started to say more about this, but it got long, so I'll be putting it into another post.]

---

Notes mostly to self: came across Adactio (and @adactio) after having been referred here (by whom, I forget, but likely, from the personal blog of Jason Morrison). Following up on the post excerpted above, see also Jeremy Keith's article "A Brief History of Markup" on A List Apart -- it's Chapter One of his new book on HTML5.

[Added] Bonus LOTD from that article:

After HTML 4.01, the next revision to the language was called XHTML 1.0. The X stood for “eXtreme” and web developers were required to cross their arms in an X shape when speaking the letter.

[Added2] By the same author, elsewhere:

This is how technology evolves. Common patterns that require a programming solution eventually get a declarative implementation.