Google is promising that its new location-reporting service Latitude, which lets you broadcast where you are to your friends, will have a memory leak and won’t remember anything.
That’s a feature, not a bug. The intention is to make sure Latitude doesn’t become an honeypot for cops wanting to be able to easily find out where you have been or even say the names of everyone who attended, or was near, a political protest.
The policy, created in consultation with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, puts Latitude on equal privacy footing with Loopt, a popular friend-finding service that predates Latitude. Both services now overwrite your previous location with your new location, and don’t keep logs.
MonthMarch 2009
Here’s another new project. The jist: like Personal MBA, but everything.
We’re in the first stages now, which is building the reading lists. Forums or discussion boards built around curricula will come later.
It’s running on wiki software, so feel free to join in and start building reading lists.
I’m specifically hoping for this economics curriculum to be one of the first ones done.
From his perch on a balcony high above the floor of a dimly-lit nightclub, Chris Hutchins looks out over a sea of long faces and grins.
He’s happy because he’s found his calling.
Hutchins isn’t surveying a crowd of boozing hipsters, but rather a mass of over 300 recently laid-off workers from the Bay Area’s technology industry. They assembled here Tuesday for LaidOffCamp, a free, day-long conference for the recent victims of the souring economy: the unemployed, the self-employed and the freelancers eager to fill their suddenly uncluttered schedules.
Long ago I heard a list of funny-sounding diseases. My spelling may be off, because I heard and did not read them. They were gastrocolitis, valbuminitus and lumpuckaroo. The first I’ve confirmed as real. The third I’ve confirmed as “the blahs.” The second I’ve not confirmed at all.
What’s more, it seems I was told of a disease in which a person grows black thorns from their skin which when cut off – vibrate.
Now I’ve been told a bunch of stuff in my life. I’ve also told plenty of fibs myself. I’m not saying the vibrating thorn disease is real, or that it is called valbuminitus. But I’d like to find the origin of this story if possible. Thanks for helping, metafilter.
The best guess so far is that this refers to cutaneous horns or the extreme form epidermodysplasia verruciformis. Anyone know anything else about this? Particularly the vibrating part?
Sky-watchers in Asia, Australia, and the Pacific islands welcomed a surprise guest Monday: an asteroid that passed just 41,010 miles (66,000 kilometers) above Earth.
Discovered only days ago, asteroid 2009 DD45 zipped between our planet and the moon at 13:44 universal time (8:44 a.m. ET). The asteroid was moving at about 12 miles (20 kilometers) a second when it was closest to Earth.
“We get objects passing fairly close, or closer than this, every few months,” Timothy Spahr, director of the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center in Massachusetts, said in an email.
“Also, though, note these are only the ones that are discovered. Many more pass this close undetected”—as asteroid 2009 DD45 nearly did.
Full Story: National Geographic
(via Xtal)
Most people have already seen the following images in the ‘WTF’ sections of social bookmarking sites, in threads dedicated to badass pictures or just circulated through their inboxes by the “funny” boss. There is never an explanation for these pictures, because they seem to intrinsically defy explanation; they are just still moments in time of unbelievable scope, and epic badassery. It seems hard to imagine what brought about the extraordinary circumstances these images depict, and that’s the magic, really – letting your imagination run with these ridiculous situations. Well, I decided to do some research on what the actual explanations were behind these famous pictures…because I hate magic, and I want to ruin it for you forever. I drown witches, bitches.
(via Robot Wisdom)
From a 1935 issue of Modern Machanix
Robot Messenger Displays Person-to-Person Notes In Public
TO AID persons who wish to make or cancel appointments or inform friends of their whereabouts, a robot message carrier has been introduced in London, England.
Known as the “notificator,” the new machine is installed in streets, stores, railroad stations or other public places where individuals may leave messages for friends.The user walks up on a small platform in front of the machine, writes a brief message on a continuous strip of paper and drops a coin in the slot. The inscription moves up behind a glass panel where it remains in public view for at least two hours so that the person for whom it is intended may have sufficient time to observe the note at the appointed place. The machine is similar in appearance to a candy-vending device.
(via Wadester23)
This is a very unscientific analysis of recent job listings on Portland Craig’s List based on 1) copying and pasting listings into Wordle and seeing what trended to the top and 2) some verification via searching for terms in Craig’s List.
I’m sure I drastically overrepresented something here and underrepresented something else. But this might give you a general idea:
The top ten most “in demand” jobs are, in no particular order:
Dental Assistant Medical Assistant Caregiver Registered Nurse Physical Therapist Office/Admin Assistant/Reception/Secretary Web developer Mechanic Call center worker/telemarketer Cook
Based on SimplyHired’s information, Tualatin has the most jobs in the area, followed by Lake Oswego, Tigard, Beaverton, Portland, Vancouver and Hillsboro (in that order), and the companies with the most jobs in the area are:
Home Depot Intel Kaiser Permanente Medical Connections Providence JP Morgan Wells Fargo Wal-Mart
Please keep in mind that these types of articles are not very useful. I put this together together out of curiosity.
Update: Added Lake Oswego to the list, with more jobs than Beaverton.
Update 2: Added Physical Therapist and dropped Nonprofit Director. See comments for details.
Update 3: Updated the city list again. Forgot Tigard and Vancouver. Going to leave it alone for now.
Q: What can we expect?
A: Pretty much what you read about in New Scientist every week. Climate change, dust bowls caused by over-cultivation necessitated by over-population, resource depletion in obscure and irritatingly mission-critical sectors (never mind oil; we’ve only got 60 years of easily exploitable phosphates left — if we run out of phosphates, our agricultural fertilizer base goes away), the great population overshoot (as developing countries transition to the low population growth model of developed countries) leading to happy fun economic side-effects (deflation, house prices crash, stagnation in cutting-edge research sectors due to not enough workers, aging populations), and general bad-tempered overcrowded primate bickering.
Oh, and the unknown unknowns.
Q: Unknown unknowns? Are you talking about Donald Rumsfeld?
A: No, but I’m stealing his term for unprecedented and unpredictable events (sometimes also known as black swans). From the point of view of an observer in 1909, the modern consumer electronics industry (not to mention computing and internetworking) is a black swan, a radical departure from the then-predictable revolutionary enabling technologies (automobiles and aeroplanes). Planes, trains and automobiles were already present, and progressed remarkably well — and a smart mind in 1909 would have predicted this. But antibiotics, communication satellites, and nuclear weapons were another matter. Some of these items were mentioned, in very approximate form, by 1909-era futurists, but for the most part they took the world by surprise.
We’re certainly going to see unknown unknowns in the 21st century. Possible sources of existential surprise include (but are not limited to) biotechnology, nanotechnology, AI, climate change, supply chain/logistics breakthroughs to rival the shipping container, fork lift pallet, bar code, and RFID chip — and politics. But there’ll be other stuff so weird and strange I can’t even guess at it.
Q: Eh? But what’s the big picture?
A: The big picture is that since around 2005, the human species has — for the first time ever — become a predominantly urban species. Prior to that time, the majority of humans lived in rural/agricultural lifestyles. Since then, just over 50% of us now live in cities; the move to urbanization is accelerating. If it continues at the current pace, then some time after 2100 the human population will tend towards the condition of the UK — in which roughly 99% of the population live in cities or suburbia.
This is going to affect everything.
It’s going to affect epidemiology. It’s going to affect wealth production. It’s going to affect agriculture (possibly for the better, if it means a global shift towards concentrated high-intensity food production, possibly in vertical farms, and a re-wilding/return to nature of depopulated and underutilized former rural areas). It’s going to affect the design and layout of our power, transport, and information grids. It’s going to affect our demographics (urban populations tend to grow by immigration, and tend to feature lower birth rates than agricultural communities).
There’s a gigantic difference between the sustainability of a year 2109 with 6.5 billion humans living a first world standard of living in creative cities, and a year 2109 with 3.3 billion humans living in cities and 3.2 billion humans still practicing slash’n’burn subsistence farming all over the map.
Q: Space colonization?
A: Forget it.
Full Story: Charlie Stross’s web page
(via Grinding)
The United States has the highest incarceration rate and the biggest prison population of any country in the world, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Most of those in the U.S. corrections system — one in 45 — are already on probation or parole, with one in 100 in prison or jail, the Pew study found.
Those numbers are higher in certain areas of the country, and Georgia tops all states with one in 13 adults in the justice system. The other leading states are Idaho, where one in 18 are in corrections and Texas, where the rate is one in 22. In the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., nearly 5 percent of adults are in the city’s penal system.
This was the first criminal justice study that took into account those on probation and parole as well as federal convicts, Pew said.
(via OVO)
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