CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-05-16 15:17:22 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 14 +1s)

Over a year ago, I posted the following. If you had a chance to listen to +Larry Page doing Q&A yesterday, you got a definite sense of what I was talking about. And he does this every week, when he takes Q&A at our companywide TGIF sessions.

--
Listening to +Larry Page right now in an internal meeting. I wish people outside Google could hear him as frequently and on as many different topics as Googlers do. He's technically brilliant—everybody knows that. But he's also incredibly thoughtful about non-technological implications (business, political, social, cultural). And "Google's just a bunch of geeks, they don't even think of that" comments aside, he does know when upcoming products/changes/policies will make some people unhappy. And he makes a call. Sure, sometimes you or I or even the market or general public may not agree with his calls. But the nextti... more »

2013-05-15 23:22:28 (14 comments, 3 reshares, 5 +1s)

Since several people have asked about this: If you want to see posts in a single column in the new Google+ UI, instead of in multiple columns, scroll to the top of your stream. To the right of your circles is a "More" menu. At the very bottom of that menu there's an option to switch between single- and multi-column mode.

#googleplustips

2013-05-15 17:49:24 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 8 +1s)

"I don't have time to organize my vacation photos because I'm not on vacation now."

So true... I only have fifteen days left before my Alaska photos will have been sitting, unshared, on disk waiting for a year for me to edit and organize them.

2013-05-15 17:13:08 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 2 +1s)

Now demoing: "A Journey Through Middle-earth", a Chrome Experiment inspired by the upcoming movie +The Hobbit.

The experiment uses WebGL & the Web Audio API on Chrome for +Android to bring Middle-earth to life in the browser with 3D Trolls, interactive musical experiences, and more. Keep an eye out for the entire experience coming later this year. Watch the video for a sneak peek and visit thehobbit.com/middle-earth.

#io13 #keynote

2013-05-15 17:10:47 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

I've done a "hello world" app with a prerelease of the new IntelliJ-based Android Studio anonunced today at #io13 , and it is really sweet.

UPDATE: Get the details, including availability of Android Studio to early adopters, at the session below, this afternoon.

2013-05-15 16:58:09 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

#io13  Announced a bootloader-unlocked, carrier-unlocked, pure Nexus experience Samsung Galaxy S4, $640 with availability next quarter.

2013-05-15 16:54:11 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

#io13  Google Play Music All Access—get access to millions of tracks, not just the ones you've uploaded or purchased from the Play Music Store. And "Radio" brings you a never-ending playlist of new tracks based on tracks you've chosen.

I have so many playlists queued up and ready to share with you as soon as this is available. :-)

Update: pricing was announced at $9.99/mo, with 30 days free. If you subscribe by June you'll get a discounted price of $7.99/mo. Available today in the U.S., more countries soon.

2013-05-15 16:46:42 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 13 +1s)

The new Google Music experience is now being announced at #io13 . This is gonna be huge and has been the hardest secret for me to keep by far.

2013-05-15 16:41:36 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Beta testing & staged rollouts of Android apps just announced for Google Play services at #io13  — very cool. In the past if you wanted to beta test, you had to enable sideloading, figure out how to download the APK, etc.

2013-05-14 15:26:49 (8 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Maybe a legal wonk friend can respond to the question that immediately came to me when I heard about this Kansas law (and also came to me and went unanswered when Montana passed its law some time ago):

In Wickard, the Court decided that Congress could regulate the activities of a farmer growing wheat for his own personal use under the Commerce Clause (which says that, for most laws to be constitutional, Congress must show that they come from Congress's authority to regulate "Commerce... among the several States"), even though that wheat was not being transported across state lines.

The Court came to this conclusion because the farmer's supposedly private, intrastate activity actually constituted interstate economic activity because if the farmer had not grown the wheat he would have had to buy it. Being a commodity with a national market, the farmer's wheat was... more »

2013-05-01 17:17:48 (2 comments, 4 reshares, 8 +1s)

If you're in the intersection of old-school geek and people who care about good formatting, like me, you'll love this.

Markdown Here is a fantastic Chrome extension by +Adam Pritchard (available from the Chrome Web Store link below or in open source on Github; there are also versions for Firefox and maybe other browsers too) that lets you type using the popular lightweight Markdown markup language in rich text editor boxes such as your Gmail compose box. Then press a hotkey, and the marked-down text gets converted to HTML before sending.

In addition to the expected emphasis, headers, numbered and bulleted lists, etc., it does syntax-aware formatting for programming code, so if you send emails about technical subjects, or just prefer typing markup rather than using your mouse or hotkeys, this is great. (And to my surprise, it works great in email replies, even if you... more »

2013-04-19 13:38:10 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Fascinating discussion on Boston's WBUR this morning I caught a bit of. If I got the gist right, one of the radio station's hosts was the mother of a friend of Dzokhar Tsarnaev's at Cambridge Rindge & Latin, and they had her son on talking about him at prom and Superbowl parties. Sounded like a completely normal kid. Makes you wonder what you don't know about people you think you know.

2013-04-18 16:04:26 (5 comments, 8 reshares, 9 +1s)

I have been disappointed often enough by software projects I cared about being cancelled, but I think my first experience with that feeling was Lotus Improv. Designed as the flagship project for Steve Jobs' NeXT, it aimed to totally reinvent the spreadsheet by doing away with cells (except as a way to store tabular data). Relationships and formulae were expressed using names, and the only way you could exclude part of a list was by explicitly filtering it-- it simply wasn't possible to put the wrong range into your formula.

If Improv had succeeded, and we weren't still chained to the thirty year old reference-by-cells tyranny of Visicalc, 1-2-3, Excel, Apple Numbers and, yes, Google Drive's spreadsheets, is it possible this literally world-changing disaster of miscalculation, one that guided so many central bank planners into austerity come hell or high water, would have never... more »

2013-04-18 15:20:47 (1 comments, 9 reshares, 15 +1s)

I know this has been making the rounds, but for those of you who haven't seen it, worth a watch for sure.

New Zealand cabinet member +Maurice Williamson¹ from Pakuranga, on the evils sure to befall Aotearoa now that same-sex marriage is legalized. High-larious.

Kia ora!

¹ I think that's his profile; it isn't verified.

2013-04-13 18:44:25 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 9 +1s)

An ad in The New York Times Magazine today... "Odds of becoming a top ranked NASCAR driver: 1 in 125 billion".

Hmm.... that means that, given the world population of about 7 billion, there's only a 6% chance that there are any top-ranked drivers?

(If it was a typo and they meant million, that that would be 56 people out of 7 billion, which seems somewhat more reasonable.)

2013-04-02 16:42:38 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Following up my recent post about Ennio Morricone's score for The Mission: I wonder what my friends who are classics buffs might say about the lyrics for "The River":

Vita, vita nostra, tellus nostra, vita nostra. Sic clamant!
Poena, poena nostra, vires nostrae, poena nostra. Sic clamant!
Ira, ira nostra, fides nostra, ira nostra. Sic clamant!

I was still studying Latin when I first heard the song and without thinking about it I translated it as ironic:
"Life, our life, our land, our life. So they say!"
"Punishment, our punishment, our violence, our punishment. So they say!"
"Anger, our anger, our faith, our anger. So they say!"

But then, looking for the lyrics of another song I happened upon two discussions about the lyrics. One was saying this is not ironic:
"Life, our life, our land, our life.... more »

2013-03-25 12:39:49 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

My podcast schedule revolves around my commutes (which are very short, just one subway ride), which means I listen to the Slate Political Gabfest partly on my way home Friday evenings and partly on my way to work Monday mornings.

Last week's was a live show from Brooklyn, so this morning I heard the end of the program, in which Stephen Colbert did a guest "cocktail chatter" (the segment at the end where the panelists present a short, interesting bit about the week's news). It was about the recently-released LBJ phone tapes showing that Nixon hijacked the Vietnam peace talks on the weekend before his election, thereby hampering Democrats from getting the end-the-war vote, but President Johnson couldn't blow the whistle on Nixon because it would have revealed their wire taps on Vietnamese officials.

But the really interesting thing to me about Colbert's chatter... more »

2013-03-24 19:16:59 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

The amazing MSNBC weekend show, +Up with Chris Hayes, that I've raved about here before had its last episode today; Chris Hayes is moving to the 8 p.m. weeknight spot on MSNBC recently vacated by Ed Schultz.

I'm pleased for Chris Hayes' success, but the change worries me a bit, because he was fantastic in the format he pioneered with Up, and I don't think it's a format he can carry with him into primetime. _Up_ was possibly the slowest show on TV this side of public access; individual panel-discussion segments were never less than 20 minutes, and frequently were over an hour of the two-hour show.

But Chris made it work, and turned the length into a great asset, by deep-diving into policy and keeping the discussion moving along. He consistently refused to let his guests devolve into talking-head conventions. Once he interrupted an advocate for the Keystone XLp... more »

2013-03-24 16:28:43 (9 comments, 3 reshares, 5 +1s)

I must not comment on Krugman's or Avent's or Fallow's conclusions. And I very much must not comment on whether my employer could be construed a monopolist. But the graph below is important and doesn't rely on monopoly, and I hope people consider it.

The economics here are important to a lot of things we produce in a "knowledge economy", and this sort of cost analysis applies to a greater or lesser extent to any non-commodity product, like a movie or piece of software, where substitutes from other producers are not valued identically by consumers. And when "willingness to pay" increases and/or average cost decreases, a service that used to be unprofitable at any price can become profitable.

Kozmo (the failed same-day convenience-store/movie delivery service from a decade ago) is a recent example where they clearly could not find any intersection of... more »

2013-03-24 16:07:39 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

As oral arguments for Hollingsworth v. Perry (the CA Prop. 8 case) are heard at the Supreme Court on Tuesday, I again wonder what, if any, effect there will be of the revelation—after the trial was underway—that trial judge Vaughn Walker is himself gay.

SCOTUS will be paying more attention to the Ninth Circuit opinion than to Walker's trial opinion, and even the conservative wing of justices probably aren't so petty as to fixate on the trial judge's sexual orientation. And the findings of fact in Perry are so damning that the conclusions of law are almost unnecessary to coming to the trial decision. Walker famously pleaded with the defendants to offer any rational basis whatsoever for the proposition. So the answer to the question of how much effect Walker's gayness will have on the outcome is probably "not much".

But as perhaps unnecessary as they are towha... more »

2013-03-24 03:04:45 (6 comments, 4 reshares, 18 +1s)

A feature I've wanted for quite awhile—without even knowing it—should be coming soon to Chrome; it's already in Chrome Canary¹ on some platforms.

Have you ever had that annoying experience when sound—usually an ad or some hokey music—starts playing out of nowhere, and you can't figure out where it's coming from, so you click tab after tab trying to find the culprit? The new feature adds a "throbber" animation—kind of like the one you see on Google Music next to the currently-playing song—to the icon of any tab making noise. So a glance at your tab bar will tell you where the audio's coming from.²

It's not perfect yet (which is why it's only in the canary channel)—the throbber's animation's not very pretty, and it sometimes shows up spuriously when anything is potentially playing audio, even if it isn't (like if you havea silent video p... more »

2013-03-23 20:56:47 (12 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Mrrrgl-brrgl. (That's pronounced /mɝrglʔbɝrgʌl/, btw.)

I stayed at work till midnight working on an interesting programming problem, and, as I have a wont to do, got home and couldn't go to sleep until I got back online and "took a quick look at" some things that had occurred to me about it on my way home. Only my bladder informed me that it was 5 a.m. and so I finally went to bed, canceling the alarm. But I awoke at 11, and have been in too zombie-ish a state to do much other than the usual weekend housework puttering.

The three-way tradeoff between getting enough sleep, getting into a weird circadian, and maximizing my use of unexpected mental energy when I have it has always bothered me. I could definitely go to bed right now (it's 4:30 p.m.) and sleep eight or nine hours, but being awake at 2 a.m. would wreck my wakefulness during normal hours in thecomin... more »

2013-03-21 14:33:02 (7 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Just in the past week, my nytimes.com account started logging me out constantly. Like, multiple times a day. I get the "you have used all your free articles this month" popup. Sometimes on the same page my login name appears at the top of!

Anyone else had this issue?

2013-03-20 13:36:24 (13 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Polls say the public wants deficit and debt reduction now and believe this is the path forward to prosperity.

Only thing is, that's a roundup of polls from 1936, just before FDR acquiesced to their demands... and the economy entered the second phase of the Great Depression.

What's that saying about history? Learn once from history, shame on you, learn twice from history, you can't be learned again? Something like that...

2013-03-19 16:19:05 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 9 +1s)

The Google NYC building spans an entire city block, so when I need to carry a cup of hot coffee the length of the building (700 feet or about 215m), the SpillNot is indispensable.

It works great—I've never spilled a drop when the liquid was even a quarter inch (about half a centimeter) from the top.

Two tips for not spilling when the liquid's right up to the brim: one, don't swing your arms like you might when walking quickly, but don't try to hold the hand the SpillNot's hanging from still, either; a gentle sway is best. Two, be careful going around corners, because sudden movements are what will cause spillage. Let the SpillNot swing like it's going to while you ease around the corner. 

When people ask you about it (and they will), you can swing it in a total orbit with no spillage—with practice, try it outside first!

2013-03-17 20:57:08 (7 comments, 2 reshares, 16 +1s)

A discussion on the TV this morning about Pope Francis that mentioned the conquistador period led me to search my music library for Ennio Morricone's astounding soundtrack to the 1986 film The Mission. It wasn't there.

It's been years since I've listened to it, but I definitely remember having it on CD, because it was the first time I ever had an experience that will surely be quaint to anyone born even 10 years after me:

I heard some music with a haunting theme ("Gabriel's Oboe") played at a restaurant. I think this was 1993. I flagged down a waiter and asked what the music was. She apologetically explained that it was "piped in"—basically, a copper-wire cable service for music that public spaces like stores and restaurants could subscribe to. (One of the most common was called "Muzak" and was well-known for its channels of thee... more »

2013-03-14 12:48:27 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Okay, TiVo, it's been four years since you added custom RSS video podcasts, and you still can't add Season Passes for them; gotta navigate down four menus, find the feed, and see if there's something new. What is the deal already?

(I'm tired of watching +Jeff Jarvis , +Gina Trapani , +Leo Laporte and friends in standard definition on my big-screen, which is the only definition TiVo offers in the list you can Season Pad, but I'm too lazy to go find the menu option to download on demand.)

2013-03-13 14:13:22 (8 comments, 0 reshares, 13 +1s)

Three websites I attempted to create accounts on this morning, three websites gave me errors trying to create those account, three customer support teams couldn't help me except to agree that something was wrong and they'll look into it.

Maybe the problem is that I've been on the web too long and have now run out of accounts, a resource previously not known to be limited.

2013-03-12 14:35:49 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

I like this quote from Paul Krugman; it's true regardless of how you feel about Krugman's politics:

What all this means is that if you’re going to try to play a constructive role in public economic discourse, you have to be willing to say the same thing over and over again. Also, if you’re going to try to play a constructive role in public economic discourse, you have to be willing to say the same thing over and over again. And if you’re going to try …

2013-03-10 15:24:43 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Heard on +Up with Chris Hayes this morning, on why regulatory and legislative staff so frequently acquiesce to lobbyist demands, even when there's no obvious campaign-corruption sort of relationship:

+Alexis Goldstein, Occupy Wall Street: I think the staff themselves are also overwhelmed.... I feel like lobbying is a denial of service attack on the time of the [Capitol Hill] staffers—
Chris Hayes: —That is totally right.—
Goldstein: —and they don't have time to read up on the issues, they don't have time to make up their own informed opinions, so they just have to go on gut.

2013-03-09 18:19:58 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

#sitestobookmark  Want to have an IPA transcription spoken for you? Enter
something like:
<phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="ʧreɪ ˈiθən ˈhɛrɪs"> </phoneme>
into the box, replacing the ph="..." bit as desired. (The US English voices are the onely ones that work with this.)

2013-03-08 15:13:35 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 17 +1s)

Snow! Google NYC terrace, 09:50, 8 Mar 2013

2013-03-08 14:05:24 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

My Nexus 7's touchscreen behaves much more poorly than my Galaxy Nexus's or Nexus S's in snow. 

Maybe it's the larger glass (though I can't tell any difference between the GN and the somewhat smaller NS, they both seem to do fine unless I let them get wet), but when a bit of snow gets on the N7 glass, crazy stuff happens when I try to interact with the UI. Like just touching the back-arrow soft button is interpreted as a wild up-to-down swipe. I hardly notice it e-reading when I can configure the hard buttons to change pages, but when I use Readability, which only can be scrolled-by-swipe, it's pretty unusable if there are even a couple flakes on the screen.

(Yes, I know, don't use expensive electronics in the snow. But when it's falling softly, I just wipe it frequently, and if a little moisture hurts it, well, that'll be my lesson, won't it?... more »

2013-03-07 14:11:50 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

This sign up page is fun. Try poking the I and O (or is it 1 and 0?) in interesting... shall we say, 8-bit ways? and see what happens.

2013-03-04 19:01:44 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

I am getting so tired of these pieces (The New York Times seems to be particularly fond of them, but it's by no means the only offender) indicting ADHD stimulants on the basis of people using them without proper medical supervision (either buying them illicitly, or getting a prescription on false premises, or as in this article, both).

These are serious drugs. There's a reason they aren't sold over the counter. And while there are very legitimate questions about over-diagnosis and over-prescription, especially for teenagers and college-age young adults, anecdotes about people having a bad time after using these drugs inappropriately muddy the waters of that debate. Any drug can be misused.

2013-03-04 17:50:12 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

#zshtips  I posted about this before, but I have a few new ones:

# Suffix aliases to pipe stderr+stdout, use like:
#   cmd arg arg2 argN ..g pat
alias -g ..l='|& less'
alias -g ..g='|& grep'
alias -g ..a='|& tee -a' # a for 'append to file'
alias -g ..c='|& wc -l' # c for 'count lines'
# To suppress commands like git from automatically using a pager
alias -g ..,='|& cat'  # comma: no reason, just it's nearby dot

2013-03-03 18:28:56 (12 comments, 1 reshares, 11 +1s)

...and for Android, my favorite RPN calculator is RealCalc Plus. (It also does algebraic notation if you don't like RPN.)

There's a free version with almost all the same features available at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.co.nickfines.RealCalc

2013-03-03 18:21:48 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

Being an RPN partisan, I value this Chrome extension that adds a simple but full-featured RPN calculator to your Chrome toolbar.

If you're also in the proud RPN minority, give it a try.

2013-03-03 17:48:32 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Grr. More fun with  #healthinsurancestupidity : 

Thursday evening my rheumatologist says my blood work is back and my uric acid (which causes gout) level is too high; he says I should double my dosage of the anti-gout drug allopurinol, and he'll call in a scrip. Friday when no medicine is awaiting me at the pharmacy, I call the doctor's office and they send the rx again.

But still no drug at the pharmacy; they say they haven't seen it. Another round of calls to the doctor, this time asking for the rx to be sent to the pharmacy near my apartment rather than near work, since it's already Friday afternoon.

Saturday morning, still no medicine, but grilling the pharmacist I find out it's been the insurance blocking it. (Apparently Duane Reade's system is now set up so that if our insurance plan doesn't cover it, the pharmacy staff don't even getn... more »

2013-03-03 17:20:09 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Stephanie Kelton, of UMKC and New Economics Perspectives, on +Up with Chris Hayes this morning, made a point I hadn't heard before: there is essentially no one, other than her and her small cohort of economists, arguing U.S. fiscal policy from an actual modern leftist viewpoint.

(By the way: "leftist" in economics today doesn't mean Marxist, folks. Basically it's coming up with real progressive answers to Keynes' observation: "The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again." Economists like Kelton are trying to find what economics can do now to help us reach a fairer society offering opportunities to the entrepreneur and harnessing the efficiency engine of the market... more »

2013-03-03 15:30:48 (17 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

I love this CJR piece from Prof. Nyhan; he nails it.

The "pox on both their houses" argument is just weak pseudo-centrist punditry. Especially when you consider stuff like Ezra Klein's reporting this past week, on a Republican's claim that a key barrier to compromise on sequestration was a point the administration had already offered in their own proposal.

I could write a program to spit out stern centrist budget punditry. Here's the algorithm: first say that Republicans are being obstinate and beholden to their right wing due to: insert the most recent outrageous statement that nobody's taking seriously. Then say what really needs to happen is: insert current Obama proposal here. Finally say that Obama's equally responsible for failure to compromise because: now randomize and pick from a list of meaningless cliches, like "lack of will" or&qu... more »

2013-02-28 23:58:11 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 27 +1s)

#lifeinNYC  If you've ever walked through Times Square, you're familiar with the many folks hawking tickets for comedy shows and how they try to engage you.

On my way home from the doctor's office this evening, I cut through Times Square and passed one of these guys. "Are you into comedy?" he called to me.

"No," I answered and kept walking.

He followed me. (They do that sometimes when business is slow.) "You're not into comedy? Then what are you into?"

I was feeling cheeky; I looked at him, and called over my shoulder, "Me? I'm into hardcore man-on-man action," and kept walking.

S'welp me, he hurried ahead of me, stopped right in front of me, locked eyes with me, and gave me a smoldering porn-actor look. Then he leaned in towards me, and right before I would have flinched, he broke upla... more »

2013-02-28 17:16:44 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

Posturing by ranchers about the USDA's plans to cut inspector hours and by the airlines about the FAA's plans to cut air traffic controllers as attempts by the Obama administration to get the public on his side of the sequester debate is just that-- posturing, by Republican-leaning groups, to deceive the public.

"Across-the-board spending cuts" means exactly that, across-the-board spending cuts. The USDA is not permitted, by law, to move around money so they can cut some other programs more and preserve inspection. The FAA isn't allowed to keep up ATC staffing. Every department must cut every line item in their budgets equally.

So the industry interest groups are calling this nuts. Yes, it's totally nuts. But nuts is what Congress passed. Blaming the administration for responding in nutso fashion is like blaming someone being forced at gunpoint to do the... more »

2013-02-28 00:53:30 (8 comments, 1 reshares, 8 +1s)

Please... don't notify individual Googlers in your circles when you post an "if I had Glass" message. All the posts will get handled the same by the Glass team, whether or not you send notifications. The enthusiasm is great, but some of us are getting swamped here!

2013-02-26 15:51:41 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

This is cute. Working out a proof for how it works is even more interesting. (Hint: "calculus" originally meant "a small pebble", and arithmetic is basically just different ways to manipulate piles of pebbles.)

(I make no comment on the trolling description below.)

2013-02-26 15:34:34 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

#badforarthritis  This morning I needed to fix a slow drain, and for that I needed a large Phillips bit on this screwdriver. But I could not get this little flat bit out with my fingers.

Did you know that OXO Good Grips kitchen tools were first developed for people with arthritis? It's needed for household tools as well¹.

¹ FWIW, OXO did release a Good Grips screwdriver. But bizarrely, it had the same problem as this one: standard interchangeable bits that are difficult to change. The only change from any other screwdriver was a cushier handle with a large diameter. I think OXO has stopped seeing Good Grips as a product line designed with arthritics in mind that other people like as well and are now just using the brand for general-purpose marketing. :-(

2013-02-26 14:48:57 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

By weird coincidence, I was heading to my dentist's office half a block down 58th when this happened. I was about three blocks away when it happened and I remember thinking how much backfire can sound like a gunshot.

My dental hygienist, on the other hand, was just steps away, heading back to the office from the drugstore, and saw the shooting—or rather, saw Woodard fall, she thought it was a suicide because she didn't see the shooter.

This is just crazy. Murders like this in Midtown, in broad daylight, are just unheard of since gangland days. And that they still don't have a suspect just boggles the mind.

2013-02-25 15:10:03 (6 comments, 2 reshares, 6 +1s)

Linguistically, I don't think these are invalid explanations, but they aren't well suppoooooorted....

2013-02-21 18:46:40 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

This paragraph from Ezra Klein echoes my own bewilderment about the reporting on Simpson-Bowles and deficit reduction in general:

For reasons I’ve never quite understood, the rules of reportorial neutrality don’t apply when it comes to the deficit. On this one issue, reporters are permitted to openly cheer a particular set of highly controversial policy solutions. At Tuesday’s Playbook breakfast, for instance, Mike Allen, as a straightforward and fair a reporter as you’ll find, asked Simpson and Bowles whether they believed Obama would do “the right thing” on entitlements — with “the right thing” clearly meaning “cut entitlements.”

2013-02-19 14:35:26 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

+Sam Whited In re your complaint about CNN referring to the "F-bomb" and "N-word", the Times is certainly the most fusty major American news outlet out there on this score, to the point of refusing to even tell you which word was used ("F---", "F-word", "rhymes with" and the like are specifically disallowed by its style guide), and even disallowing naughty words when they appear in the names of companies like Get Your Shit Together or the titles of artistic works (hilariously rebranding the off-Broadway show "Cock" as "The Cockfight Play").

And unlike CNN, it doesn't have regulators or cable companies to fight with. (Even Comedy Central bleeps words until after the nightly "watershed"—watch a daytime rebroadcast of "The Daily Show" or "The Colbert Report" sometime and see.)