Links for March 31st
Buzzfeed: 60 Completely Unusable Stock PhotosIt's difficult to know what these photographers were thinking. I can't envision a use for a photo of Hitler wearing a gingham dress, peeling potatoes. The Guardian: Doctor in court after father’s 27-year fight for justice for dead daughterAfter this Frenchman's daughter was raped and murdered, Germany wouldn't extradite the [...]
First thoughts on redistricting.
I’m getting home too late to provide much in the way of useful commentary, but I really want to point to the redistricting plans that became public this evening. Just one week before they’re due to be voted on, we’re all getting our first look at them. (To be fair, I thought odds were good [...]
Links for March 29th
BBC News: Jordan battles to regain ‘priceless’ Christian relicsSeventy ancient books, made out of lead, have been found in a Jordanian cave. The text is in encoded Hebrew, little of which has been translated. Scholars are debating whether they are of Jewish origin or—far more tantalizingly—very early Christian origin. Village Voice: Women’s Funding Network Sex [...]
Links for March 28th
Jim Loy: Converse, Inverse, ContrapositiveI never know when to use "converse" versus "interverse." (And I'm not smart enough—and possibly not pretentious enough—to ever use "contrapositive.") Turns out it's pretty straightforward. Philip Greenspun’s Weblog: How did the New York Times manage to spend $40 million on its pay wall?Forty million dollars? That's just stupid. I really [...]
Links for March 25th
The Washington Post: Shining some sunlight on $200 million in Virginia tax breaksDelegates David Toscano and Lee Ware propose some more stringent criteria for providing new tax credits. The annual tax credits that Virginia provides to the coal industry alone come to $100M/year, or $15/year/citizen. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: So, How Do We Put Elizabeth [...]
Tea Party disappointed by Hurt’s inaccessibility.
The Tea Party is upset with Rep. Robert Hurt: The group gathered in the parking lot outside Hurt’s Berkmar Circle office for about half an hour. After a few speeches, the crowd dispersed, with some attendees going to speak to office staff who were inside handling casework. Some were upset that no representative from Hurt’s [...]
Links for March 24th
Data Science ToolkitA self-contained virtual machine with a toolkit of brilliant data analysis utilities. Geolocation for IPs, street address to coordinates, coordinates to political divisions—that stuff you'd expect. But it can also pull country, city, and region names out of unstructured text. It can render HTML and return the text that would be displayed in [...]
Virginia Redistricting Competition winners announced.
Quentin Kidd (of CNU) and Michael McDonald (of GMU) held a competition for the best redistricting plans for Congress, the Senate, and the House. Fifteen teams from eleven universities participated. The winners, selected by folks from the the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, were announced today. Of all of the submissions, UVA won [...]
Links for March 21st
Stack Overflow: Regular expression to search for GadaffiHow do you identify "Gadaffi" (and its many, many variants) in an block of text? With this regular expression. \b(Kh?|Gh?|Qu?)[aeu](d['dt]?|t|zz|dhd)h?aff?[iy]\b looks like the winner. Bonus points go to the guy who figured out that it can be matched with Soundex, which is probably a better way to deal [...]
Links for March 19th
Wolfram MathWorld: Pi DigitsThe first thirty million digits of pi are almost uniformly distributed. That is, 1 occurs with the same frequency as 2, 3, 4, etc. That's consistent with randomness, but hardly evidence of it. Ludolph Van Ceulen’s HeadstoneThis Dutch mathematician devoted his life to calculating pi. By the time of his death, in [...]
McDonnell on open government.
Gov. McDonnell, on open government: “I’ve long been an advocate of putting our full budget, all our legislation, a number of things about state government online in an easy to download, easy to access fashion,” the governor said. Really? I mean, if that’s true, that’s great, but it’s news to me. If there has been [...]
Commenting bug fixed.
A few people have complained that they write a comment here, and it’s denied with a “comments are closed” message. Which must be infuriating, having invested time in writing something, and then having it be lost to the ether. I’ve eliminated the plugin that I was using to prevent spam, and now I’m fighting spam [...]
Everything that’s wrong with publishing.
In a talk at the Virginia Festival of the Book today, the director of UVA’s Rare Book School neatly summed up what’s wrong with the publishing industry today: “The physical part of the reading experience — the paper, the cover, the reviews, the suntan lotion that spills on the pages — are all part of [...]
Links for March 16th
Discover: Sex, Ys, and PlatypusesInstead of the XY/XX chromosomes that most mammals have, the platypus has a much more complicated sex chromosomes: five pairs instead of one. The male platypus is XYXYXYXYXY. That's the biggest number of sex chromosomes of any vertebrate. Man, platypus is weird. And so are the others. Christian Science Monitor: Pepsi [...]
Links for March 15th
FOIA.govWoot! It's not just open government—it's open government about open government. Virginia needs one of these. Virginian Pilot: Va. House members back redistricting planThe state's House of Representatives delegation have agreed on a redistricting plan that would protect all incumbents. Let's all pause and put on our best surprised faces. Griffith's district grows to take [...]
Links for March 14th
CBS News: Michigan bill would impose "financial martial law"Republican Gov. Rick Snyder hates big government…unless *he's* in charge of said big government. What card-carrying conservative would ever give a governor the unchecked power to wipe a city off the map? Katamari HackTurn any webpage into Katamari Damacy. Either you think this is brilliant or you [...]
Links for March 11th
The Blaze: Does Raw Video of NPR Expose Reveal Questionable Editing & Tactics?This undercover video of an NPR exec is such a hack job that even Glenn Beck is calling foul. Comparing the edited version to the raw video makes obvious that unrelated bits of audio were edited together to make it appear that the [...]
Links for March 9th
Richmond Times-Dispatch: 1,100 felons regain rights in McDonnell’s first yearColor me surprised. I would happily have put down $50 saying that McDonnell wouldn't restore the civil rights to but maybe 10% as many felons as Gov. Tim Kaine Kaine did. He's on pace to match Kaine. This is still a terrible system—we're one of just [...]
Links for March 8th
Wikipedia: Adjective OrderThe "red, big ball"? Of course not—it's "big, red ball." There's an adjective order in English: quantity, quality, size, age, shape, color, proper adjective, and purpose. One has a "nice, little, old, white, brick house," not a "brick, old, little, white, nice house." City Pages: Inside the multimillion-dollar essay-scoring businessThanks to NCLB and [...]
Links for March 7th
Washington Post: In states, parties clash over voting laws that call for IDs, limits on where college students can cast ballotsNew Hampshire Republicans are trying to prohibit college students from voting in their state because students are "foolish" and they tend to be "voting as a liberal." New York Times: Fox and Glenn Beck Stare [...]
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Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Charlottesville, VA, USA. more »
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