Well, hallelujah

Headline and lede from the Pew Research Center:

More See “Too Much” Religious Talk by Politicians

The public is uneasy about the mixing of religion and politics. The number of people who say there has been too much religious talk by political leaders stands at an all-time high since the Pew Research Center began asking the question more than a decade ago.

Emph. added.

And in what has to be a contender for All Time Least Surprising Subhead:

Santorum Voters Disagree

(h/t: Up with Chris Hayes, via Sarah Posner)

How to make me flee your website

I'm generally in favor of cheekiness, but that is just lame.

What is now lofty jargon was once schoolboy slang

I didn't know this:

Parsing is a venerable method for teaching inflected languages like Latin; the word itself is schoolboy slang derived from pars orationis, Latin for “a part of speech.”

From an interesting article (no, really) on the history of diagramming sentences.

"A Farewell to Newt"

It’s not easy letting him go. Not easy at all. Sort of like swearing off bedtime Ben & Jerry’s: there’s valor and the promise of self-improvement in the sacrifice, but also the sad awareness that the world just got a little less naughty. A little less fun.

No matter. It’s time to cut Newt out of our diets.

He has no nutritional value, certainly not at this point, as he peddles his ludicrous guarantee of $2.50-a-gallon gasoline, a promise that would be made only by someone with his own bottomless strategic reserve of crude.

!!!

I disagree with Frank Bruni's latest column slightly. Later in the piece, he recites the tired old saw beloved by self-flagellating journalists nationwide, that they somehow did wrong by covering the Republican primaries:

If he refuses to quit, we in the news media must quit him. Starve him of his very sustenance: attention. Exert a kind of willpower that we’ve lacked in this primary, which we turned into too much of a circus by encouraging too many clowns.

This is wrong in two ways. First, if only FoxNews and the Moonie Times were reporting on the early GOP campaigns and debates, there'd be no end of howling from the perpetually aggrieved that Teh Liebrul Media wasn't covering their people.

Second, and much more importantly, one of the ways we keep America safe from a President Bachmann, President Cain, President Perry, President Trump, or a President Gingrich is precisely by shining the spotlight on them.

Actually, it's wrong in a third way. The real problem with Teh Media covering the clown show is not that they gave exposure to clowns. It's that they spent months contorting themselves trying to present them as Serious Candidates, With Important Ideas.

But as to the rest, it's a funny column, worth reading.

A reply to Tom Henderson

The following is a response to a discussion started in a comment thread on On The Media's website, under a segment that aired this week called "Divorcing Google," featuring an interview by Bob Garfield of someone named Tom Henderson.

It probably won't make much sense without first listening to the segment and reading the earlier comments. I posted it here only because both its length and the number of links included would have run afoul of OTM's comment policy.

__________

MORE »

Meet the new Borg, same as the old Borg

Probably this has been going on for a while, but it's the first time I've seen it.

Haha, only serious

One of eight from Brian McFadden's Neighborhood Watch News and Notes:

Also good: fourth in the slideshow (the above is first): The Endangered Moderate Republican.

FW: Updated Terms of Service

Updated Pinterest Terms

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been working on an update to our Terms.

[...]

We updated our Acceptable Use Policy and we will not allow pins that explicitly encourage self-harm or self-abuse.

You hear that? So stop posting all those Vote Republican posters already.

Apple Annoyances

Not only does iTunes require a full download and reinstall for every minor patch, it can't even be arsed to remember that I clicked this checkbox every previous time I updated.

And how about this? Safari silently changes filetype associations, even after a mere patch update.

And apparently, quite deeply in the bowels of the system. Here's what it looks like after I change the filetype association back to the way I want it, on MY computer:

Are these things minor? Perhaps. But it does indicate a bad attitude, all part of the Steve Knows Best arrogance that insists that you don't know how you want to run your own computer.

Just so you know where your trillions have been going

Think U.S. military computer networks are secure? Think again. A panel of computer security experts from across the U.S. government told a U.S. Senate committee yesterday that computer networks operated by the U.S. Department of Defense are so thoroughly compromised by spies from other nations that there’s almost no point in trying to keep them out.

In fairness, the rest of the article from Ark Hesseldahl at AllThingsD makes it seem like the hysteria was driven in part by the desire to get the Senate to agree to give the military even more money.

Not sure if that's entirely comforting, but hey, it's what I got. Enjoy your weekend!

This won't go over well with the English Language Firsters

Just came across a British slang word: dekko. It means a glance or a look, as in, "Hey, I just found this smartphone. Let's have a dekko through the pictures."

I guessed it must be some sort of Cockney thing, but apparently not. According to Wiktionary, it is:

From Hindustani देखना / دیکھنا (dekhnā), to see, to look. Comes directly from the Hindi "Dekho" (see)

Various other sources confirm this.

My example sentence wasn't chosen at random, of course. It came from a post on CNET UK, about a study that Symantec just completed.

Here's how it begins:

Executive Summary

The Symantec Smartphone Honey Stick Project is an experiment involving 50 “lost” smartphones. Before the smartphones were intentionally lost, a collection of simulated corporate and personal data was placed on them, along with the capability to remotely monitor what happened to them once they were found.

Chief among the findings is that there is a very high likelihood attempts to access both sensitive personal- and business-related information will be made if a lost and unprotected smartphone is found by a stranger.

Chris Matyszczyk of CNET USA was nice enough to wade through the report and pick out the juicy numbers.

Sexters will be particularly disturbed that 72 percent of those who found the smartphones went through the pictures buried therein.

Please imagine your feelings, should some seedy New Yorker have gone through your holiday snaps and intimate self-portraits and, who knows, copied them to (and for) his own devices.

While your extremities shiver at that, please consider that 96 percent of finders tried to open at least one app or file. Some 43 percent of these finders opened all the banking and financial apps on the phones. A fulsome 57 per cent perused the saved logins and passwords. Oh, and a nosy 45 percent tried to access the corporate e-mail on the phones.

But at least you might imagine that, in the end, all these smartphones were returned to their rightful owners. You might imagine that quilts are made of popcorn. For a mere 50 percent of finders attempted to return the phones to their keepers.

(pic. source)

Dennis Perry: just another well-connected member of the American Taliban

BFF of Rick Santorum and Tony Perkins speaks to the sheeple:

(alt. video link)

(h/t: Sarah Posner)

Sneaked/snuck update

Reminded of a post from last year by this parenthetical remark:

The paper also tracked word usage through time (each year, for instance, 1% of the world's English-speaking population switches from "sneaked" to "snuck").

The above appears in a WSJ piece about a recently published journal article, "Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death." The paper's authors used the database created by Google's massive book-scanning effort and looked at the English, Spanish, and Hebrew languages.

A pre-print version of the paper is also available on arXiv, in case the first one above becomes inaccessible. As of this moment, you can read the whole thing online at the first link, and download a PDF from either.

(h/t: @GammaCounter, RT by @GreatDismal )

Your Patience Has Been Rewarded

(embiggen)

(source | via | via)

Noted global human rights expert goes undercover in America

If you buy a lot of stuff online, I would really like you to spend half an hour watching this.

(alt. video link)

Here's the article mentioned at the beginning of the diavlog: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave (Mar/Apr 2012 issue). Previous writing on that topic from Mac includes:

• Blog post: Pity the Elf Slaves of Online Shipping (Dec 2011)
• Blog post: A Visit to the Warehouse of Soul-Crushing Sadness (Jul 2011)
• Article: Ohio's War on the Middle Class (Nov/Dec 2011 issue)

Mac McClelland previously appeared on Bloggingheads to discuss what she learned in Burma and Haiti. She also wrote a book about her time in Burma. She has reported from numerous other countries and is currently the human rights reporter for Mother Jones.

If it's possible to have someone younger than oneself be a hero, then she's definitely one of mine.

Also, how many people can say they've been published in or on NPR, the BBC, the Onion, and Hustler?

Probably won't last very long, but ...

... it was fun to do, anyway. Even if they didn't show my last name.

(embiggen)

Here's the (probably inappropriately named) permalink.   [Update a few hours later] Yep. Gone. Shoutout to the #wingnuts for their love of free speech!]

Erin Go(ogle) Bragh

Interesting post on today's Google Doodle, by Michael Cavna at the WaPo, featuring discussion with the artist, Jennifer Hom, along with some of her working sketches.

At first glance, I thought it was kind of steampunky, which would be a good thing, but which also shows how much I have to learn about illuminated manuscripts.

Line of the Day (and not in a good way)

“My mistake, the mistake I truly regret, is that I had it on your show as journalism. And it’s not journalism. It’s theater.”

The above is from Mike Daisey, as quoted by Rob Schmitz of Marketplace. Apparently, Schmitz thought Daisey's report a while back on Apple's factory in China sounded sketchy, so he did some checking, and then, with Ira Glass in tow, confronted Daisey.

This American Life will be running an entire show "to detail the errors" in the original show. There's also a blog post from Ira Glass on this.

Sad day.

(h/t: Muck Rack)

Yeah, I'd say he's succeeding in drawing some attention

You're a good man, George Clooney.

I was headed here, if you haven't already heard.

Notorious on Listorious

Hmmm ... what is this Listorious thing Twitter thinks I should follow?

Hah! Just look at some of those lists and tags.

(embiggen)

Nice to know I'm having some effect, I guess.

Just wish they didn't misspell ingenious.

Exposed root

Gnarly old thing, about nine inches long, that's always caught my eye. (Except when it's catching my bare big toe.) For some reason, it really jumped out today, possibly because the greens all around it are popping, surprisingly so, considering how gray the light is right at the moment. Not sure the camera caught the vividness completely, but I liked the job it did.

Clickem2bigem.

The battle never ends

Following up from the previous post, here's another interesting result. I Googled romney, to see how an old Google-bombing effort was holding up, and whoa:

(embiggen)

It appears that the site was hacked but is now fixed. From View Source of Google's cached version:

<meta name="description" content="Buy Cialis without a prescription from Certified Online Pharmacy. We guarantee hight quality and free worldwide shipping. Alsa we sell others ED meds for Cheap prices. " />
<meta name="keywords" content="pearson, pearsoned, pearson education, online resources, Romney" />

View Source of the actual page at this moment, though, shows it's been cleaned up:

<meta name="description" content="Pearson - Online resources for products by Romney" />
<meta name="keywords" content="pearson, pearsoned, pearson education, online resources, Romney" />

Never mind the site hack; this is amazing work on the Google-bombing. Gotta call that organized crime.

Still not determined: how many people Googling romney got the above results, and said, "Hmmm. Yes, perhaps now IS a good time to stock up on my boner pills."

So all that clever site-cracking and Google-bombing, and they probably made, what, six bucks? Which I'm sure is what Willard thinks all of his non-NASCAR-owner friends should be thankful to make, but that's another blog post.

P.S. Pearson does not appear to stock any books by everyone's least favorite Republican frontrunner. That page has links to two editions of a book by Marshall B. Romney. Who, it turns out, is related to Willard, so it should probably not be too surprising that his hot, hot textbook is titled Accounting Information Systems.

New (?) feature on Google ads deserves applause

New to me, at least. Apparently, if you click an ad in a Google search (at least, one of the ones that appear at the top of the listing) and then return to that page of search results, the page will show a new link, right under the link you just clicked, offering you the opportunity never to see ads from that company again. Here's a screenshot, which I took after I had clicked both of those links.

To repeat, the offer-to-block link doesn't appear until after you click the corresponding ad link. Also, I haven't yet played with it enough to know how it works, whether the offer to block persists, etc. But it does seem like a pretty nice feature at first glance.

By the way, there's nothing wrong with your my computer. I was searching on that term, to test, after having read Naked Security's post on Google's efforts to stamp out scam ads.

Round pegs need not apply

Just happened across this bit of coolness. (Don't crank your speakers or earbuds. There is no sound.)

(alt. video link)

Thanks for posting, jbmathfunnew.

Guess who just figured out she wasn't invited on the trip

(Swiped from Clare's FB album.)

(previously)

To: Libby Reinish, FreePress.net, Re: "You vs. Obama, Murdoch and Limbaugh"

Libby:

I might be inclined to support the idea of protesting further media consolidation, but sorry, I am not going to participate in any action which equates Barack Obama with Rupert Murdoch and Rush Limbaugh. We already have enough trouble in this country with mindless loudmouths yelling "they're all the same." (See also #firebaggers and #emoprogs.)

I believe this "all the same" attitude exacerbates the problem of the rightward drift of the Democratic Party, not to mention the undue clout given to the wingnuts, by aggravating the apathy among people who are more or less liberal. Especially young people.

I am well aware that it's believed necessary to scream in Subject lines to get attention in the Inboxes of this Internet, but this time, your approach has backfired.

Brendan Keefe

---

[Added] on a related note, see Zandar, via Frank Chow. I will treasure this phrase for days:

... despite being arrogant and subservient at the same time while remaining worse than Bush.

A look at today's GOP, by Tom Toles

I don't see a permalink for it (yet?) but at the moment, it's the first item shown on the Toles WaPo home page.

[Added] Outtake here.

James Whittaker: "Why I left Google"

You might have already seen this, given by the amount of buzz it appears to be generating, but in case not, it's worth reading. More importantly, let's hope that it becomes a big enough thing that Google notices, and helps spur Google toward getting its act back together.

It ties in well with Steve Yegge's "accidentally published" rant from a few months ago.

(h/t: Manish Vij, RT by Andrew Leonard)

Tour of Confusion (That's What The World Needs Today)

You'll understand the title when you get to the end of this minute-ish-long clip, but I thought I'd add the first part on for a little context, at least.

(alt. video link)

Sounds like a great idea, doesn't it? At least for the non-calcified. If I ever get to that part of the world, I'd love to go on a few of those.

That whole diavlog between Sarah and Sarah is worth listening to, as is their first one.

P.S. If the name that Sarah Wildman mentioned in the above clip rang a bell, but you're not quite sure … here's a reminder.

(title: cf.)

Noted for the record

"And on that basis of course you get rid of Obamacare, that's the easy one. Planned Parenthood, we're going to get rid of that. The subsidy for Amtrack, I'd eliminate that. The National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities," he said.

"He" being this guy, of course:

Were there any follow-up questions to these fairly radical eliminationist statements? Apparently not! But! Immediately following the above, there was this even more important stuff, to bring the important campaign coverage article home:

This was Romney's first public event in the Show Me state, so we wanted to know, does he say Missouri or Missourah?

"You know I've always said Missouri." He adds, "I know as I get to other parts of the state its Missourah. But I'll stick with Missouri 'cause that's what I know best," he said.

Romney also says he has yet to try toasted ravioli and gooey butter cake, but he'd like to.

DRINK.

(h/t: Liz Colville)