CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-06-19 18:41:13 (2 comments, 3 reshares, 5 +1s)

Here's something interesting: some people are making maps of the world, with the place names replaced by the best possible rendering into English of what the names actually mean. (I'm writing this from just north of St. Addgod, in the Land of the Successor, which is actually one of the less poetic names you end up with)

The translations aren't perfectly even; I don't know why their world map leaves the capital of Cuba as "Havana," rather than "Haven," for example. But I have to say that this is pretty awesome, and would love to see it in the form of a printed atlas, not just a map...

2013-06-19 17:58:25 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

The nightmare that is drug-resistant TB.

TB is invisible because the people who suffer it are already on the margins, says Hewison. “They are the poor, the prisoners, alcoholics, refugees, Aboriginals, drug users, old people. And the drug companies forgot it because there is no money to be made there,” she observes. “I think we should blame it on a lack of interest.”

2013-06-19 17:46:52 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name, Of A Beetle For A Beer Bottle http://n.pr/14iOC2Q

2013-06-19 17:31:22 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

Math. It's what's for dinner.

2013-06-19 14:14:11 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

My mother started this as a bracelet, but it was too delicate, so it's become a vase decoration.

2013-06-19 14:01:26 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

2013-06-19 13:33:00 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

2013-06-19 13:24:47 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

When You Don't Exist - Race effects judgement!

2013-06-19 13:22:10 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

A NSFW video tutorial takes you through the uninstall process for McAfee antivirus software from the founder himself

2013-06-19 11:53:23 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

If you're wondering why your iPhone got a "carrier settings updated" message out of the blue…

2013-06-19 00:52:47 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

This is so cute. Kind of puts a lot of fairy tales out to pasture.

2013-06-19 00:17:27 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

A porcupine gallops to the safety of a tree.

I wish I'd gotten a bit more of the galloping part; it's quite a sight.

2013-06-18 21:27:46 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

No, it's not wrong to be angry. Or Jealous. Or even to hate. It's actually pretty normal.

(Not my usual subject matter)

A friend of mine recently talked to me about feeling bad about feeling jealous. I've felt bad about feeling angry. In fact, I've seen people spend a lot of time feeling like they're terrible people for having negative emotions of any sort. You know what? They're not. It's perfectly OK to be pissed off.

I think there's something very dangerous about describing your emotional states as bad. I've seen this done with any number of states -- anger, jealousy, depression -- and in all of these cases, it just seems to be a way to make the person try to shut down their feeling, or feel ashamed for it, without asking themselves why they're feeling it and if the feeling is reasonable. 

Take anger, for example,... more »

2013-06-18 19:55:41 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Family has to keep doors locked because giant pet snake knows how to open them

Julius is a 16-foot albino burmese python:  http://on.mash.to/100OpBR

(P.S. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel so I can get Live Streaming :-)  http://bit.ly/10PN6qU 

2013-06-18 19:48:07 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet. The constant metamorphosis of junk electronic messages mirrors the evolution of the online world itself. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=spam-shadow-history-of-internet-excerpt-part-one

2013-06-18 19:39:29 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

Nigerian cook is trapped for three days in an air bubble on the ocean floor, survives because physics: http://slate.me/1apvfK4 

2013-06-18 18:48:40 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

❝ I do not want to live in a world where the government and a select few conservative feminists get to decide what we may and may not masturbate to, and use the bodies of murdered women or children as emotional pawns in that debate. ❞

2013-06-18 18:16:42 (11 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Is "petting a phoenix" a euphemism I’m unaware of? It sounds intriguing.

#ns  

2013-06-18 18:05:41 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

This incarceration graph is mindblowingly disturbing.

+Yonatan Zunger comments here https://plus.google.com/u/0/+YonatanZunger/posts/9Lmp2MNitPz on what it means that the Sesame Street has felt it's necessary to have a character whose father is in prison, and this graph pretty much nails it.

Furthermore, consider the Catch-22 we've got ourselves in. If we release those people from prison, will they find jobs? A criminal record is a death blow on most resumes, never mind that being out of work for more than six months dramatically reduces your chance of being hired. Many of them won't even be allowed to vote to change the system (something I'm sure many politicians are quite happy about, as are the corporations employing prisoners at below minimum wage.). We're creating an unsustainable system. Morally, financially, ethically... this can't go on indefinitely,a... more »

2013-06-18 17:38:36 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

Most of the section titles in The Ugly-Girl Papers, an 1874 treatise on women's beauty secrets, double as serviceable Lovecraft stories. For instance:

Regimen for Purity of the Blood
Doom of the Complexion Artist
To Remove Mask
Shining Pallor
Sulphurous Acid
A Dark Potion
Olive-Tar For Inhalation
Bohemian Arsenic Waters
The Fearful Malady Of Which No One Dies
The Trials of Corupulence
Accepting the Situation

Perversely, the Ugly-Girl Papers also contains a section titled How to Be Pleased With Oneself. After inhaling olive-tar, treating your smallpox scars with sulphurous acid, and touching up your skin with Bohemian arsenic waters (to get that shining pallor, of course), I imagine that might be difficult.

Bonus hilarity: while not a H.P. Lovecraft title, The Ugly-Girl Papers also has a chapter entitled Artistic... more »

2013-06-18 16:54:25 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

2013-06-18 14:07:07 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 7 +1s)

It's critical that we have more women designing the systems that define how we interact with the modern world.

2013-06-18 13:40:20 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

2013-06-18 13:22:49 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

A Supercell Thunderstorm Over Texas
Video Credit & Copyright: Mike Oblinski; Music: Impact Lento (Kevin MacLeod, Incompetech)

Is that a cloud or an alien spaceship? It's an unusual and sometimes dangerous type of thunderstorm cloud called a supercell. Supercells may spawn damaging tornados, hail, downbursts of air, or drenching rain. Or they may just look impressive. A supercell harbors a mesocylone -- a rising column of air surrounded by drafts of falling air. Supercells could occur over many places on Earth but are particularly common in Tornado Alley of the USA. Pictured above are four time lapse sequences of a supercell rotating above and moving across Booker, Texas. Captured in the video are new clouds forming near the storm center, dust swirling on the ground, lightning flashing in the upper clouds, all while the impressively sculptured complex rotates ominously.... more »

2013-06-18 12:25:45 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

2013-06-18 00:28:13 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

The Oocyte Cartel: Price fixing on human eggs is being challenged in court for violating anti-trust laws.

Yet another organization making decisions for women about what they can and can't do with their bodies.

2013-06-18 00:22:03 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

This is going to take more than petitions. :(

"Malala Yousafzai -- the 15-year-old Pakistani girl militants tried to assassinate -- is the first signatory of a new worldwide petition launched today after terrorists, hell-bent on preventing girls being educated, murdered 14 students at an all girls' college in Pakistan."

#f

2013-06-17 23:48:14 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 14 +1s)

Someone's tuckered out after a day in the woods.

2013-06-17 23:45:30 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Pintergoogle, my sweet home,
cards and cards, wherever I roam
faddish business, interface style
cuts back info by a mile,
but pretty matters more these days
until the next new designer craze.....

2013-06-17 23:43:09 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

Evening falls on the hillside.

2013-06-17 23:09:03 (4 comments, 3 reshares, 6 +1s)

This Japanese man creates magnificent art with...Microsoft Excel?

http://w.readwrite.com/13VKk0N 

2013-06-17 23:07:31 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Today is my 30th birthday, so I'm writing this letter to Google

I'm going to put all the jokes about my youth coming to a close aside and talk about something that I usually don't ever speak of. The wave of technology in the past couple decades has been amazing. I used a lite brite as a kid. Now 3 year olds are using iPads. We've reached whole new levels but have somehow managed to ignore people with disabilities who could really benefit from these advancements. I know we all want to create things for recreation, but how about helping some people out along the way.

Hearing disabilities are rarely ever talked about and if you watched that deaf girl hear for the first time on youtube about a year ago, you'd think that deafness had been cured once and for all. Less than 1% of hearing impaired people in the U .S. could even benefit from the type of surgery she... more »

2013-06-17 22:03:11 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

Scientology lands on the EFF hall of shame for false take downs, but GoDaddy deserves blame too.

2013-06-17 21:59:02 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Fracking is straining water supplies. Like ethanol, it pits energy demand against food demand.

And energy buyers outpay food buyers.

2013-06-17 21:36:09 (9 comments, 0 reshares, 21 +1s)

When my parents built this cabin, they'd never built anything larger than a bench before. My mother (an artist) designed it, and we built it. Later they took a class on house building. As part of that, they did lift calculations on the roof; turns out it would take off at about 90mph. :)

It's a cute little cabin. The inside feels large, with the high ceiling, tall windows (bought second hand, and the cabin designed around them) and a half loft, but it's only 12x12. We spent a summer in it when I was a kid.

2013-06-17 21:30:23 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

2013-06-17 17:59:25 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Florida bans local governments from requiring paid sick leave for companies.

The headline is misleading; a company can do what it wants. Paid sick leave isn't banned. The bill simply prevents municipalities from setting standards. Doesn't make the bill any better, but it doesn't help the cause when you exaggerate.

The claimed rationale behind the bill is that it hurts productivity to pay sick leave. Unfortunately the fact is that at worst it has no impact on productivity, and in some cases it improves it. (My company, for instance, goes out of it's way to encourage employees not to show up if they are sick—otherwise more people get sick.) I'd say that the actual rationale has nothing to do with productivity, and everything to do with an ideology that claims that government should have no role in corporate decision making; even though corporations area... more »

2013-06-17 17:21:02 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Continuation of the recent posts, and relevancy. This is Universal Soldier by Buffy Sainte-Marie. And it's still just as relevant, and I wish it wasn't. If you've never heard this song, you need to listen to it. If you have, well, you know what I'm talking about.

2013-06-17 16:39:09 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Rain coming in, but the sun is still shining through the trees.

2013-06-17 13:20:01 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

Buffy Sainte-Marie has been protesting the corruption of politicians by the 1% since before you were born.

I saw her in concert last night, and listening to her songs, old and new, made me realize that the politically sanctioned corporate abuses of Native American and First Nations people, which she was protesting in the 60's—energy mining that poisoned the water, lands taken by the government and sold at a pittance to corporate donors, militarized police and FBI working for corporate interests, law enforcement lying under oath and sending innocent protesters to prison—are now happening to all Americans. What Native Americans suffered then, was the bellwether of what we all live under now.

Buffy isn't your a average singer/song-writer, though few Americans know her except from Sesame Street. She has a PhD and five honorary Doctorates, and she's created a numberof ... more »

2013-06-17 13:18:13 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Paul Krugman comments on the conservative reaction to bike shares (socialism!) in NYC. Nazi Islamic Bikes From Hell.

Actually, he doesn't so much comment, as quote. Not much more is necessary. And this quote is by no means the only reaction. Some people really seem to feel that bike shares are a threat to society (and traffic).

❝ Bicycles are one of the obsessions of Mayor Bloomberg and his transportation secretary Janette Sadik-Khan. Khan is the granddaughter of Imam Alimjan Idris, a Nazi collaborator and principle teacher at an SS school for Imams under Hitler’s Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini. The bio of his son, Wall Street executive Orhan Sadik-Khan, frequently mentions the bombing of the family home in Dresden and surviving trying times after World War II. It neglects to mention that the times were only trying because their side was losing.

…

Inparti... more »

2013-06-17 12:45:37 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

First Nation's people arrested protesting shale mining in Kent County, New Brunswick, CA. Nothing changes.

2013-06-17 11:17:01 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Apple issues commitment to privacy. Says iMessage/FaceTime encrypted end to end. Are iCloud backups secure too?

2013-06-17 11:12:59 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Resumes for ppl out of work for less than six months get 4x more interest, even w less experience.

How can we change this?

❝ Recent research by Rand Ghayad, a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, has shown that employers frequently screen out job candidates who have been unemployed for more than six months. Ghayad mailed 4,800 fictitious résumés, differing only in work experience and length of unemployment, to employers across the United States. He found that employers showed about four times more interest in applicants out of work for six months or less, even if they had less experience and fewer qualifications than candidates unemployed for longer periods. ❞

2013-06-17 00:21:21 (5 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

I like that this man is changing the narrative. It is about poverty. Nearly every scholarly commentary on drugs, just like nearly every commentary on poverty, is written by people in a position of privilege telling poor people what their problem is.

I can respect Carl Hart's point of view because he's been there and actually knows what he's talking about from experience. It makes it a little easier to take him seriously.

2013-06-16 23:26:02 (2 comments, 4 reshares, 9 +1s)

Differentiating "geek" and "nerd" via words that appear with them in tweets.

I still go for the definition from one of Stephenson's books; neither a geek or need have social skills, but a geek knows it. (Talk about mixed blessings.)

2013-06-16 23:09:25 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

"Anti-social: 'Hell is Other People' keeps you as far away from your 'friends' as possible" http://feedly.com/k/11F6NfL

2013-06-16 23:01:58 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 7 +1s)

Happy Father's Day to Edward C. Hinckley, 1934-2012. Always missed.

http://bangordailynews.com/2012/11/18/news/mid-maine/titan-in-maine-tribal-state-relations-dies-at-age-77/

2013-06-16 01:46:17 (1 comments, 3 reshares, 7 +1s)

"That sounds like a bunch of baloney," he said. "Give me something real to do."

2013-06-16 01:28:32 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

Well, how disappointing. The Google Play books and magazines apps now have a horrible, gender-skewed "Recommended for you" section that seems to have nothing to do with one's previous selections or purchases.

Play Magazines: Apparently, based on one home improvement magazine and Popular Mechanics, I ought to subscribe to Woman's Day, Soap Opera Digest, House Beautiful and Harper's Bazaar.

Play Books: Further, based on a library full of architecture, arts and folklore books (incidentally including old archives of ... Popular Mechanics), I am being advised to buy and read: romance novels!

Clearly the only significant metric being used is whether or not I'm female. Does anyone think this will actually sell books or magazines? Because, currently, I'm less inclined to buy either via Google Play.

#fail #googleplay #sexism