In the meanwhile, ponder this bit of news.
(06-12) 17:33 PDT Zephyr Cove, Nev. (AP) --I had no idea...
A 53-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of being naked near a high school on Lake Tahoe's east shore.
A collection of daily thoughts and comments
by sascha benjamin cohen
"reading the news, so you don't have to!"
(06-12) 17:33 PDT Zephyr Cove, Nev. (AP) --I had no idea...
A 53-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of being naked near a high school on Lake Tahoe's east shore.
The study from Alexandra Horowitz, assistant professor at Barnard College in New York, showed that owners were projecting human values onto their pets.Ummm....for a six-pack of beer, I could've told them that. Note to indulgent pet owners: you only think you know what your pet is feeling. And what you think comes from you, not from your pet.
It concluded that many relationships on Twitter were "meaningless from an interaction point of view."No surprise there. Nor that HP is using this information to develop and market their own social networking tool. But it does drive the question even harder: how soon will the general public realize that twitter is not a social network, but something far more subversive and (from a marketing and profitability standpoint) interesting?
"A link between any two people does not necessarily imply an interaction between them," the team wrote.
Instead, most people using the service tend to interact with very few people, even though they may follow many.
Studies of Facebook and YouTube show a similar pattern, he said.
"Social networks that truly matter - those ones where you are actually communicated in a human sense - happen to be much smaller than the circle of followers," said Professor Huberman.
Twitter let’s [sic] you speak all you want without pissing off anyone who doesn’t want to listen, which makes it a marketing and sales tool that might have the nirvana potential to actually innocuously zero in a prime demographic. Even better: your biggest fans viral market for you, by re-tweeting to their followers.This may be the vector where the web, advertising, and revenue all finally intersect in a meaningful way.....
S.F. supervisors likened to NazisThen there's this:
Lawyers for a Catholic advocacy group that sued San Francisco for condemning the Vatican's policy on same-sex adoptions are comparing the city's supervisors to Nazis laying the groundwork for the slaughter of Jews.
Aged gunman kills Holocaust Museum guardSomehow, I hope that the Vatican lawyers are finding some room in the humility-lobes of their brains to be a bit embarrassed at the moment. (Links to the articles is question here and here).
An elderly gunman opened fire with a rifle inside the crowded U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Wednesday, killing a security guard before being shot. Authorities said they were investigating a white supremacist as the suspect.
The gunman was identified by law enforcement officials as James W. von Brunn, who embraces various conspiracy theories involving Jews, blacks and other minority groups and has at times waged a personal war with the federal government.As is usually the case, Josh Marshall has a lead on further information. For instance, here's the gunman's profile. A real mensch, this one. WaPo is blogging updates.
The legislation calls for every residence and business in the city to have three separate color-coded bins for waste: blue for recycling, green for compost and black for trash.I'm all for composting. And recycling. But in a city where bin scavenging is a serious and increasing problem, where the city is perpetually seeking new means of revenue generation via punitive fines, and where most people are not homeowners, but renters, living in small spaces and often shared spaces, the idea that this sort of draconian measure will do anything constructive is absurd. And sadly, only one supervisor had the nerve to say so.
Failing to properly sort your refuse could result in a fine.
Supervisors Carmen Chu and Sean Elsbernd, were the only opponents. "This is a little too much big brother, even for me," Elsbernd said. "We've got a huge problem in my district and a lot of other parts of the city with people who go in and out of garbage cans at night scavenging. Who's going to be responsible for that? Are we creating a whole brand-new problem?"As I said, a catastrophe in the making in terms of quality-of-life --- ironically, the very thing this measure is looking to improve. I deeply appreciate the public contra comments from supervisor Elsbernd; I only wish they carried more weight.
Elsbernd also questioned assurances that fines would not be aggressively pursued against residents, saying similar promises were broken on legislation against leaving trash cans visible.
"The Harvard data says very, very few people tweet and the Nielsen data says very, very few people listen consistently," Mr Heil told BBC News...the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one.I wonder when folks will realize that the great potential for Twitter is not in the social aspect of its use, but in the natural bed it gives for micro-marketing. This is the perfect fertile bed for niche advertisement: not only can a potential customer find what they are looking for, but they can interact with the marketing material if, and how, they want. This is the transformation of individuals into an endless highway of billboards constructed of 140 characters.
"Twitter is a broadcast medium rather than an intimate conversation with friends," he said.
Design college located near ________ has current full time opening in library for a customer service directed person who is willing to work at least one evening per week ( until 9 PM) and one Saturday per week ( 9-3) as needs of students require.My emphasis. Clearly, they don't teach reading the calendar at this college....
Italy is not a meritocracy. It is a highly evolved feudal society in which everyone is seen as — and inevitably is — the product of a system, or a patron.Apparently right now in Italy, there is in the end only one patron, and one system. What happens when Silvio is gone?
We Lean To The Right.The swing from left of center to solid right of center is a disappointing but not totally unsurprising outcome of the elections; a reaction to sitting powers during an economic collapse, and a rush toward the apparent safety of conservative thought, and reactionary nationalism, and authoritarian tendencies...it's to be expected. We even see it here. But some of the less than delightful highlights:
"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."As long as the political frameworks that existed 60 years ago continue to frame our world, there will be pertinence to this story.
"the only winner is democracy and Lebanon."Official results should start coming out in a few hours. But for now, I toast the people of Lebanon, and wish them well.