August 2009
87 posts
seven black groups you won't see in the media
abbyjean:
THE BLACK MIDDLE CLASS: Before anyone pipes up with a reference to The Cosby Show, try to remember that it ended more than 15 years ago. And the Obamas don’t count either—there’s nothing “middle class” about being the President of the United States. So what we’re ultimately left with is a case study in the coverage of extremes.
GAY BLACK PEOPLE: Unless they’re closeted gangsters on...
“When I am shooting on the street older women and larger size women often say...”
– The Sartorialist: So What Do We Think About This?
via langer
(via sexartandpolitics)
“The problem with calling pubic grooming and facials misogynistic acts in and of...”
– comment on I (Still) Blame Porn: A Response | Bitch Magazine (igather)
“Women want boyfriends to be like their girlfriends, fun to go to the pictures...”
– Fay Weldon
I guess I’m just surprised that this still counts as advice in 2009.
“Kathleen Vohs, a psychologist and associate professor at the University of...”
– Happiness: A buyer’s guide - The Boston Globe
“[… A] while back, I went to a writers’ conference. I was making chitchat...”
– N. Stephenson (via
jseliger)
TimeAPI →
TimeAPI is an API to get dates/times from natural language queries based on Chronic.
Examples:
/utc/now → Current UTC time
/pdt/in+two+hours → Time two hours from now in PDT
/pdt/next+monday → Datetime for next Monday in PDT
“Rousseau referred to human beings everywhere - but omitted Africans; spoke of...”
– S. Buck-Morss - Hegel and Haiti
It’s interesting to note that revolutionaries in the colonies were inspired by the Enlightenment.
“Locke’s outrage against the “Chains for all Mankind” was not a...”
– S. Buck-Morss - Hegel and Haiti
“A slave or negro, the moment he lands in England, falls under the protection of...”
– Davis - Problems of Slavery in the Age of Revolution
This did not apply to slaves in the colonies
“[…] Slaves were defined by law as property [but] property was supposedly...”
– Davis - Problems of Slavery in the Age of Revolution
““We read them, but really, they do not read us.”
Meaning, of...”
– Yes, in fact, I do blame (F)eminism | Rebecca Walker
On Katies Roiphe’s latest on feminism has let motherhood down.
why won't obama visit the gulf coast
abbyjean:
While campaigning in February, 2008, Obama said, “I will make it clear to members of my administration that their responsibilities don’t end in places like the 9th Ward; they begin in places like the 9th Ward.” Suffice it to say that the Gulf Coast is the Lower 9th Ward of the United States. And yet, for all of Obama’s posturing on 9th Ward primacy while running for office, he’s not...
“Les transferts financiers de la diaspora représentent 35% du Produit Intérieur...”
– [AlterPresse :: Haiti] Les transferts financiers de la diaspora et le financement du développement d’Haïti
Some good numbers on how much people sending money back to Haiti has become vital to its economic development: 35 % of our GDP come from transfers, 31% of families receive money from...
“women are involved in almost 91 percent of all contraceptive use. Men, in...”
– Autonomous Contraception
A short history of btrfs →
Great article on the origins of the BTRFS file system
“Laisse-moi devenir
L’ombre de ton ombre
L’ombre de ta main...”
– Jacques Brel - Ne Me Quitte Pas
There have been several reprises of this song, but Brel’s original is still the best in my mind. He combines a desperate intensity and a an irregular rhythm in his performance which no one has been able to match so far (Everybody else only manages to sound...
“ Astronomical data: 99 properties of 155,000 astronomical bodies
Chemical data:...”
– Wolfram Alpha to open data feeds | News | guardian.co.uk
“Things have changed and expectations need to be managed. In my opinion, few...”
– Aaron Cohen
“The only thing that matters in terms of your equity when you join a startup is...”
– cdixon.org / The one number you should know about your equity grant (via caterpillarcowboy)
So obvious it needs to be said. I think this is more of a human issue than a mathematical one.
“We are so caught up in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made...”
– Malcolm Gladwell (via azspot) (via noraleah)
“It wasn’t until the 1960s that [soul food] was given this term as a way that...”
– An Interview with Bryant Terry on Race, Class, Food, and Culture - Part 1
“The only things that you really need to watch out for are those annoying animal...”
– Dennis DiClaudio, The Deviant’s PocketGuide (via nightmarebrunette)
“Unless you know what you need to scale to, you can’t even begin to talk...”
– I’m Going To Scale My Foot Up Your Ass - Ted Dziuba
“Python threads are terrible for multi-CPU concurrency if you are CPU-bound on...”
– Dr. Dobb’s | Concurrency and Python | February 3, 2008
“don’t disagree that people can bracket off their sex life and otherwise be good...”
– pandagon.net
I don’t see how facials are like spitting in people’s faces, but I do agree with the general premise: not everything in sex is about intimacy and being nice. There are a lot of power dynamics in sex and facials are part of them. Doesn’t mean that they’re...
caterpillarcowboy:
“See, facials are like weddings. We all know that the institution of marriage is one of the patriarchy’s all-time greatest hits, in which women are sold into sexual slavery from father to husband in exchange for livestock. And yet, who derives the greatest joy from weddings? Women! It’s the craziest thing. But even though we all know that weddings were clearly institutionalized...
“See, facials are like weddings. We all know that the institution of marriage is...”
– Semen Facials Are Like Weddings - The Sexist - Washington City Paper
Straw Feminist Weekly: The baby-hater « Kate... →
Straw Feminist Weekly: We define feminism so you don’t have to!
I can’t wait for more of this
“Parse.ly is incredibly simple to use, and what I like best about it is the lack...”
– Tech Review: Enough with all these alerts | Richmond BizSense
Nothing relevant to add really, just to say that these reviews are (obviously) really nice.
“I am eager to see Parse.ly open up and let people get into the product, for...”
– louisgray.com: Parse.ly Spices Up the News Based On Your Interest Filters
“Parse.ly also allows easy sharing of links through email, Facebook, Twitter,...”
– Parse.ly | Thrillist
Another good review of parsely.
“When you were against the wall,” I said, meaning the moment when we agreed...”
– Nightmare Brunette: Best Unbeaten
“The result? Every word in a document is automatically given a “label” (think of...”
– Raft of papers #2: Declarative Info Extraction From Text « Data Beta
“You can use Unicode to display the characters in different languages or...”
– Mozilla Unicode support
“Before you call for “an XML format for X”, let me tell you a story about LaTeX...”
– How XML Threatens Big Data : Dataspora Blog
In MathML’s defense, it tries to convey both semantic and visual meanings. So a+b can be rendered both visually, which LateX does well, and semanticaly (ie, + is an operator that has a specific meaning for the operands a and b).
...
“ Encoding
JSON text SHALL be encoded in Unicode. The default encoding is...”
– http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4627.txt?number=4627
We have definitely hit bugs where JS was not rendering characters because it didn’t like the charset we were serving. So now we just serve old ascii
“We have just released flightcaster.com which uses statistical inference...”
– clojure success story …
From the guys at flightcaster.com . I’m always excited by data-intensive apps
“Both of Django authentication’s key extensibility points are flawed. These...”
– You work for me, Computer: Dropping Django
We ran into this problem the first few days we were building our app. The username fields has 30-character limit, which makes it not practical for storing usernames as that are email addresses.
Couldery Shouldery
rafer:
Coulda-Shoulda #1. We exposed ourselves to a huge single point of failure called Facebook.
Coulda-Shoulda #2. Predictably and reasonably, Facebook acted in their own interest rather than ours. Their Summer 2008 redesign supported Facebook’s goals elegantly but hurt our publishers and us in ways that became clear just weeks after we’d raised another ~$2M. At this point, we made a mistake...
“In order to justify crossing boundaries and writing part of implementation in...”
– Simple JNI on Ubuntu 9.04
I wrote this with the official sun-java-1.6 virtual in mind.
Someone actually mention GMPJava as a good example of using JNI. I appreciate the mention, but most of the credit should go the the GNU Classpath guys.
I ran some benchmarks to compare it against gmpy and...
“Computer science was born knowing its own limitations. For the strength of the...”
– Computability and Complexity - Jon Kleinberg and Chrstos Papadimitriou (via llimllib)
2 tags
There is only one reason that I cannot wait to upgrade our source code at work to python 3: unicode. I never realized how badly I wanted all my strings to be unicode (with UTF-8 encoding as the default) until I started working on a web app.
Random tidbits:
If you’re crawling web pages and not using chardet , you should know better . It statistically determines which encoding a web page...
1 tag
Date-handling in Python
Date-handling is so bad in python that you need 2 libraries to get it right.
You need Pytz for the timezone-handling, especially when you’re getting errors like this from SQLAlchemy: can't compare offset-naive and offset-aware datetimes (the Django ORM doesn’t seem to mind at all about this, but somehow SQLA picks up when you’re being vague about your dates).
You also need...
Kind of Bloop: An 8-Bit Tribute to Miles Davis'... →
Kinda sad
“1. pre money valuation should value the company as it exists today. if investors...”
– a comment from my friend Mark Pincus on doing business with VCs. there is some really good advice in here.
The Ideal First Round Term Sheet
(via fred-wilson)
(via giantrobotlasers)
(via joeconyers)
(via caterpillarcowboy)
Nice and clear(er) bullets for people like me who don’t...
“So it’s not only that it’s complete bullshit that vegetarianism = thinness, as...”
– Whom we talk to when we talk about fat « Kate Harding’s Shapely Prose
On PETA’s latest billboard
Get Rid Of Tumblarity - Petition Spot - Sign it. →
caterpillarcowboy:
suitep:
ianlee:
bigfun:
bebelestrange:culturedscene:(via cwphoto)
I think I’ve learned to ignore dumblarity. I can’t tell. But i think that is just the point… Get rid of something that is just fuckin there for WHO KNOWS? what reason. It just seems so un-tumblr to have this sort of “monkey on my back” feature that you have no control over. From what I can tell it has...
One more in the women as property series. Not... →
(via dixiecupua)
“It is ridiculous for them to try to make that a law, because I don’t think a man can rape his own wife. After two people get married, the Bible says that they become one – one flesh. How is it possible to rape what is yours?” asked Mr. Sutherland.
