Near the middle of this NY Times article describing one slice of the surrealistic state of affairs in Iraq, it goes over the top: “One patient in our hospital had been kidnapped by insurgents and then released […] Both of his hands and one of his ears had been amputated in a very precise and skilled way — with a skill that a newly trained doctor would not have had.”

A sympathetic portrayal of Hitchens’ life and recently published memoirs by a friend. Note that there is also a “mobile” version of the article that I was served when I went to read it on my phone. This version has been mangled to remove the typographic cues that let you know, for example, when you are reading a block quotation rather than the author’s own comments. It is hard to read, and the normal version works better on a phone anyway. Someone should tell the web wranglers at the New Criterion to learn about these techniques.

The author of Dilbert is amazed by post-1990’s operating systems.

The article in the New York Times begins with a promise of a new theory of gravity based on string theory and thermodynamics. By the time we get to the end, we’ve learned that the consensus among physicists concerning the paper in question (published not in a real journal but only in arxiv) is that it adds little to an earlier paper by someone else and that what might be new in it, nobody can understand.

Makes the eyes open wide. Offers a vista of new possibilities for web design responsive to the characteristics of the browser. Demonstrates, with lovely examples, how to use the media query, part of the CSS3 specification, to adjust your layout depending on the browser’s window size and resolution. A careful application of these techniques means that you need only design your pages once, and they will fit neatly and usefully onto both giant screens and phones. The only odd bit is that the author’s examples include a few too many significant digits in his dimension specifications; it is true that the pixel density of our screens is rising steadily, but I venture to speculate that we shall never need to lay out our web pages to a small fraction of a proton radius.

A demonstration of the W3C CSS Background and Borders Module Level 3 (a “working draft” that already works in fairly recent versions of modern browsers). Quite useful if you like illustrations covering the backgrounds of your web pages: they can scale intelligently in response to browser pixel dimensions, using techniques similar to those explained in this superb article.

Why those repetitive vendor prefixes in CSS (-webkit-border-top-left-radius, etc.) are actually a good thing. I feel better now for using a little bit of this.

Some handy tricks in this article about my favorite mail reader: how to deal with colors in different terminals, how to handle attachments, and how to read news feeds in mail.

Only in New York. This is well worth reading to the end.

From this well-written appraisal of Christopher Hitchens’ recently published memoir Hitch-22: “apart from his swift and spirited dispatches, he’s best known for his swift dispatch of spirits.”

Strong war reporting in the New York Times, describing the work of medics and the helicopter pilots who fly them into fire zones to rescue the wounded.

I upgraded mainly because I wanted to see if the new Safari handled SVG any better than Safari 4. It does!

“The NYPD has assigned more than 1,000 officers to counterterrorism duty, including a cadre of undercovers on assignments so secret that sometimes even loved ones don't know they're police officers.”

A rare, sensible article about the recent “flotilla” incident that puts things into the perspective of recent history and actual facts. Also, exceedingly well-written; every sentence here seems to have something interesting to say.

My favorite: How to test whether a point is inside a polygon — the function comes with the matplotlib installation. Who knew?

Devastating demolition of a book called “The Climate Imposture” by Claude Allègre. My favorite part:

[A]lmost every non-french scientist has their name spelled wrong [...] during the discussion of tropical cyclones with climate change, where he lists three names of people who have posited a connection: “Wester, Tech and Kerry Emmanuel”. Everyone of course recognizes Kerry Emanuel (despite the incorrect spelling), and “Wester” is (also misspelled) Peter Webster [...] But who was this eminent Hurricane expert Tech? I had no idea until Stephane Foucart lifted the veil. Peter Webster is from the Georgia Institute of Technology, frequently abbreviated to simply “Georgia Tech”. So in his “extensive literature studies” Allègre probably found a line like “Peter Webster, Georgia Tech, thinks that …” and voila! Professor Tech was born!

“[T]he pros and cons of using Google Wave to write a group paper in the academic setting.”

Two companies fold Wave into their processes. I’m not sure what they’re doing, but it’s an interesting development.

An engaging and appreciative review of Ian McEwan’s new novel by a scientist who suggested to him a story about “humanity facing an existential threat that is well-understood by its scientists, but largely ignored by a population who prefers to delude itself in creative ways about the gradually unfolding disaster.”

This is the electronic version of the NIST Handbook of Mathematical Functions, an updated version of the 1964 classic (that is usually just called “Abramowitz & Stegun” after the editors). The electronic handbook is easy to consult and full of beautiful and useful graphs. Most people (who are not equipped with MathML) will encounter the equations as little pictures, however. This can be done in a way that is pleasant enough to read, but NIST’s pictorial mathematics is not optimal: the size of the symbols is not matched very well with the surrounding text and, because of extreme anti-aliasing, the contrast is very low.

It can be difficult to get Matplotlib to use the fonts you want in PDF exports.

Roger Ebert explains the problems with most 3D movies, and mentions some intriguing alternatives.

Sam Harris: “It is no exaggeration to say that for decades (if not centuries) the Vatican has met the formal definition of a criminal organization, devoted not to gambling, prostitution, drugs, or any other venial sin, but to the sexual enslavement of children.”

A generally favorable review of The Flight of the Intellectuals by Paul Berman.

Now it’s easier to embed waves on a website, and people without wave accounts can see them, but they still need an account to participate.

It’s strange to imagine a man behind a crime of such tragic import and consequence free, walking among us. It means we must imagine the natural consequences: see that shopper in the cereal aisle? He killed Malcolm X.

“At the Metropolitan Opera the general manager, Peter Gelb, cut his $1.5 million salary [...] in response to declining donations, ticket sales and endowment, and recognizing that the opera’s budget would have to shrink across the board. ‘An example had to be set,’ said Mr. Gelb, whose salary is now $1.3 million. ‘As the head of the institution, I felt it necessary that it begin with me.’”

This was going to bite me eventually: for once I found the solution before encountering the problem.

A nice set of slides about HTML5 in the form of an HTML5 website.

The Texas Attorney General is determined to help protect the traditional definition of divorce, which is the dissolution of the union between a man and a woman. Therefore any gay married couples who find their way into his state had better stay married. Comments on Slashdot.

The early diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease can slow down or even stop its progression, but established methods, such as brain imaging, are expensive, and inappropriate for screening large populations. Prof. Shimon Sapir at the University of Haifa has developed a new technique for early diagnosis that is reliable, non-invasive, simple, and inexpensive. The technique merely requires the patient to read out a few simple sentences, which are acoustically analyzed by a computer program. The analysis detects subtle abnormalities in speech that are present in the early stages of the disease but are not perceptible to listeners. This appears to be an application of the author’s technique for extracting vowel sounds from short phrases and analysing them to detect nervous system disorders.

It lets you use geometric objects as matplotlib paths and patches. Currently at v. 0.1.2.

“[W]e're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.[...]our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings[...]While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.” See slashdot for comments.

Their video of someone fiddling with iphone OS 4 provides a good idea of how multitasking works, including how to kill processes. They also demonstrate (digital) zoom in the camera, and mention that it works in video mode, too. The interface for putting apps into folders looks a bit clumsy, and they fumbled with that. They type using a bluetooth keyboard with no problems. One feature that might be the main reason I will install this is the promised threaded view in the primitive Mail application, but they couldn’t get that to work. This is a developer preview of the OS, however, and might not be in its final form.

From the webkit-dev mailing list: “[...] we will shortly start landing patches for a new WebKit framework that we at Apple have been working on for a while. We currently call this new framework "WebKit2". WebKit2 is designed from the ground up to support a split process model, where the web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process. This model is similar to what Google Chrome offers [...] Some high-level documentation is available at http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2”

Three excellent solutions are presented.

“A six-sided shape appears during a lab experiment to simulate Saturn’s north polar atmosphere. Scientists think the results can help explain the appearance of a gigantic hexagon on the planet.”

“There is no way of making PNG images that match CSS colors in all PNG-supporting browsers.[...]If the image colors and the colors defined in a style sheet need to match, it is safer to use GIF or JPEG.”

Dew bejeweled slumbering bugs at 3 am. I especially enjoy the magnified ocular hexagons.

The “FAQ” usually stikes me as a lazy substitute for organized documentation. This guy sort of agrees.

The phonecall-over-wifi cellphone application species just experienced a big adaptive mutation. Update: David Pogue explains why Line2 has disappeared and reappeared several times from the App Store.

Several stunning photographs and OK time-lapse movies. The design is notable: an elegant scrolling display without flash (but with javascript). Also has a portfolio of interface design work, which explains why the page design is so sweet: the catalog includes several of the excellent interfaces used in the iphone.

“Here’s an example of how it works. Let’s say you’re a basketball team with tickets that you want to sell. You can put a piece of code on the tickets page of your website, which will let you later show relevant ticket ads (such as last minute discounts) to everyone who has visited that page, as they subsequently browse sites in the Google Content Network.” So you are being tracked and served advertising based on your browsing history. It’s a perfect age in which to be paranoid.

Google enrages users of its Calendar web service by exposing private

A weird bug has plagued users of Google Calendar since at least 18 March, and is still not fixed. If you create an event in a calendar other than your default calendar, that calendar itself will be listed as a guest that has been invited to the event. Google has admitted that this is a bug and not some weird new attempt at deciding who our friends are, or something. Complainers to the official forum are pretty hysterical, although all you have to do is uninvite the phantom guest and all is good. I'm surprised that they didn't roll back their code to the state before the bug crept in: a lot of people use this product, and this does not look good. But maybe that created other problems.

If this interview is any indication, this book is bound to be fascinating. See also the Amazon interview with the author. Update: another interview, with a very nice picture.

Yet another amazing bit of mimicry by another species of my favorite animal. With video.

According to this research, if you are female and not yet fat, then moderate drinking will keep you from gaining weight. At least, that is suggested by correlations after the fact; the mechanism, if it is real, is not yet understood.

An excellent roundup of the sad situation.

You could, if you wanted an iphone and had little money, buy a horribly scratched unit with a broken screen on ebay and, with a bit of manual labor and an additional investment of less than $50, transform it into a device pristine in looks and fully functional, burnished of even the blemish of the Apple logo. This detailed guide shows you how.

I have pubsubhubbub working now, so new items added to my feed show up instantly (two seconds in my last test) in readers that exploit the technology, such as Google Reader.

Some fuel cell experts see nothing new there.

Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security outfit, is believed to benefit from a network of Palestinian informants. It has now been revealed that one of these informants, Mosab Hassan Yousef, is the son of one of the founders of Hamas. There is not a single sentence in the article describing Yousef’s work for the Israelis that is less than fascinating. In this man’s opinion, “the Israelis care about the Palestinians far more than the Hamas or Fatah leadership does.” His reasons for this pronouncement make the article required reading for those who make a facile equivalence between the Israelis and the terrorists. Naturally, the story is being denounced as false “Zionist propoganda” by Hamas and its friends.

One of my favorite nanogenres is the correction issued by a fastidious publication, such as the New Yorker or the New York Times. Follow the link for a correction so excellent that it should be inscribed over the door to the correction hall of fame. It’s funny because it’s the Times. (Discovered by TPM and in turn by John Gruber)

I found this when looking for a free iphone calculator that could do some plotting. The full version does a wide array of symbolic mathematics as well as numerical calculation. Even the free version is impressive: it’s the only one I found that lets me change the x and y scales of a plot independently (using a pinch gesture).

Firefox may crash, but it’s better at displaying type.

“Sometimes a difference between the sexes is not based on sex at all. Women have a finer sense of touch than men do, but a new study shows that this is simply because their fingertips tend to be smaller.”

This article praising the “Brooklyn-based alt-Sephardi indie band DeLeon” embeds an entertaining YouTube video of their song “La Serena” from a live concert. Their album is available from Amazon.

I’ve long been convinced of the truth of the article’s conclusion: probability theory, in some form, should be taught to the young.

The insight of the article “Unwebbable” by an expert in web accessibility, Joe Clark, is that certain standard document forms convey their structure and semantics through visual layout and formatting, and that they can not be satisfactorily translated to HTML. The assumption implicit in the article is that there exist some documents that can be satisfactorily translated to HTML.