The DC government cares about you.

This thing is not a toy.

I thought they were already doing this.

An excellent gnuplot site demonstrating a handful of techniques and tricks for overcoming some of gnuplot’s quirks and producing truly appealing plots.

That’s the title of this website. If you are fascinated by innovative ways to visualize datasets, this provides a rewarding browsing opportunity. A little too much of the cute and pretty and not enough quantitative insight for my tastes, however.

Someone shot and killed a security guard at a Walgreens in Chicago today. Recently Walgreens fired an employee who had defended the people in the store against a gunman, because that kind of behavior is against their policies.

Why does a search for “Christopher Hitchens” return a sleazy “Yellow Pages” directory page in fifth place?

The family of an 88-year-old woman is suing Gary Null because, they claim, she died an excruciating death after consuming Null’s allegedly tainted “Ultimate Power Meal” over three months.

After the initial flurry of encomiums upon the untimely death of Christopher Hitchens, we now see something else.

A Canadian resident visiting Iran was arrested and will be killed for programming. He was tortured to make him confess to things that are physically impossible. The Iranian government’s excuse is that his open-source code happened to have been used by some porn site. The real reason seems to be that he’s an Iranian citizen and engineer who decided to live abroad. The Iranian government hates that. Via Hacker News.

Doctors who become experts at the ins and outs of PubMed searching will be in a better position to provide the best care for their patients.

Experts are concerned about India’s ability to safeguard its growing inventory of nuclear weapons material, largely because of the corruption that pervades that nation’s government.

I just installed this lovely plugin for vim that enhances its status line. Always see what git branch you're on, the filetype, whether the file is dirty, your mode, and more, in an attractive display. Tips: add these lines to your .vimrc file:
set nocompatible " Disable vi-compatibility
set laststatus=2 " Show the statusline even if there's only one buffer
let Powerline_symbols="unicode" " Get fancy symbols without using the patched fonts
You must say rm /tmp/Powerline.cache after every change in configuration to see the results.

Take a gander at the photographs of this beautiful snake, Atheris matildae, newly discovered in Tanzania.

Boing-boing links to what they mistakenly believe is the best NY Times correction ever. In fact, the best NY Times correction ever can be found here.

Laurence Tribe’s op-ed explains why the U.S. Senate should stop doing something I, and probably most Americans, had no idea they were up to: holding brief, “pro forma” sessions every three days in order to pretend that they are not in recess. The purpose is to prevent the President from making recess appointments.

The most interesting of the remembrances I’ve yet seen.

30 members of the U.S. House of Representatives think it’s wrong that the people hired to molest children at the airport are dressing up as cops and calling themselves “officers.” They’re trying to pass a law to get them to stop it. It’s about time. I’m proud of these congresspeople and hope that one day they find the courage to draft a bill that stops the TSA from molesting children, with or without the shiny badges.

I saw this article linked from Hacker News and I took a look, ready to bask in a rant against camera toters strobing obnoxiously at performances or trying to photograph fireworks with a flash. But it was advice against constructing your online portfolio using Adobe Flash. That’s almost as bad.

Must-read for worshippers at the altar of Levitt and Dubner.