Shared Items – January 3, 2010

• Daring Fireball: The Tablet

The way these meetings work, from what I’ve gathered, is as follows. Apple brings no hardware. They bring no software. They show no mockups. They do not even completely acknowledge that they’re making a new device. The people from Apple simply say something along the lines of, “If we were to create a new platform for book/magazine/newspaper content, would you be interested in offering your content for it?”

• January 2, 2010 – It must be nice to be in this position…
• Charges dismissed against Blackwater guards in Iraq deaths – washingtonpost.com
• January 1, 2010 – This seems like kind of a big deal. I’ve never bought into the conservative complaint that people “walk on technicalities” but I can’t say this feels like the right outcome. How does the sixth guy who pled guilty feel? Ouch.
• Gene Expression: Intercourse and Intelligence
• December 30, 2009 – Fascinating study on sex and intelligence. Among other fascinating results: Those with unusually low or high IQ are almost half as likely to have lost their virginity by 18 as their “normal” peers. Also sexual activity varies widely by chosen major with 85% of Math grad-students at MIT self-reporting as virgins. Wow! All the usual caveats about correlation and causation of course.
• << stephen j. dubner >>
• December 30, 2009 – Fascinating real-life story of a compulsive silver burglar.
• Security: Generic cross-browser cross-domain theft
• December 30, 2009 – Real and interesting security hack from CSS parsing. I can’t imagine we’ll ever run out of these things to fix…
• Groom Tweets, Changes Facebook Relationship Status from the Altar – overshares – Gawker
• December 2, 2009 – This is classic
• Google Chrome OS: 5 Ways It’s Completely Different
• November 19, 2009 – Well at least we’re past the part of the argument where we say that the web browser and the OS are two fundamentally different products.
• IEBlog : An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
• November 19, 2009 – The comments on this post are pretty classic. The gist, “Please just drop your renderer and use WebKit.” Harder and harder to justify why not right?
• Microsoft Excel : Sparklines in Excel
• November 19, 2009 – This is very cool. Despite Microsoft’s overall problems, the office team continues to do great stuff. I recently converted to a mac and generally I’m very happy but I do miss the PV version of Word and Excel. Running in vmware doesn’t work as well as it should and the Mac versions are just not as good.
• Women ‘should bare 40 per cent of their bodies to attract men’ – Telegraph
• November 18, 2009 – Glad we got that sorted out.
• Official Google Blog: New site hierarchies display in search results
• November 18, 2009 – This kind of thing is what makes Google so good. The visible part of this seems marginally useful – but it shows the classification work that Google must be doing underneath. No doubt they’ve built a classifier that can put many pages in their catalog in some kind of global topic hierarchy. That is impressively far-sighted and when combined with other similar low-level “not immediately valuable” work will pay huge dividends.
• Finding the laws that govern us
• November 17, 2009 – Wow wow wow. This is a huge deal. I bet Westlaw is quaking in their boots. And if they’re not, they should be.
• Paul Allen diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma
• November 17, 2009 – This is sad news.
• S&P 500 INDEX – Google Finance
• November 13, 2009 – The S&P 500 since the day I graduated from college more than 10 years ago. It’s flat; actually down slightly. Lost decade? I think we just had one.
• How to pick a co-founder
• November 12, 2009 – Awesome post by Naval Ravikant. He’s dead on.
• Barrick shuts hedge book as world gold supply runs out – Telegraph
• November 12, 2009 – This is interesting and an alternative explanation for the spiking price of gold.
• JSNES: A Javascript NES emulator
• November 9, 2009 – An NES coded in Javascript. Wow.
• Twitter Blog: Retweet Limited Rollout
• November 6, 2009 – Despite a rough start, the twitter guys have some pretty impressive engineering underneath. The fact that they can contemplate having a single message echo to effectively their whole network is hardcore. The scale implications of this are pretty substantial.
• DocVerse Turns Microsoft Office Into Google Docs With Collaboration Plug-In
• November 3, 2009 – Alex DeNeui in the news. Good stuff!
• First 5,000 Tags Released to the Linked Data Cloud – Open Blog – NYTimes.com
• October 30, 2009 – Wow