The Economics of Being Born

"Another Google I/O, and another raft of awesome products. One announced API that I’m..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 04:44:30 -0400

“Another Google I/O, and another raft of awesome products. One announced API that I’m particularly excited about is requestAutocomplete(), a feature which is landing in Chrome Canary for Windows and Mobile (with OSX support coming shortly). What this API does, in a nutshell, is give you programatic access to autocomplete (or autofill) data.”

- Chrome’s requestAutocomplete() | Mostly harmless by Alex MacCaw

cujoJS: Javascript architectural toolkit

Tue, 14 May 2013 09:32:01 -0400

cujoJS: Javascript architectural toolkit:

cujoJS is an architectural toolkit for building highly modular, maintainable web applications that are easy to test and refactor, with zero framework lock-in.

"Five silent philosophers sit at a table around a bowl of spaghetti. A fork is placed between each..."

Tue, 14 May 2013 04:21:21 -0400

“Five silent philosophers sit at a table around a bowl of spaghetti. A fork is placed between each pair of adjacent philosophers.”

- Dining philosophers problem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"This is a write-up of how the Syrian Electronic Army hacked The Onion. In summary, they phished..."

Thu, 09 May 2013 09:18:54 -0400

“This is a write-up of how the Syrian Electronic Army hacked The Onion. In summary, they phished Onion employees’ Google Apps accounts via 3 seperate methods.”

- The Onion Tech Blog

Mobile emulation - Chrome DevTools — Google Developers

Thu, 09 May 2013 05:10:56 -0400

Mobile emulation - Chrome DevTools — Google Developers:

The mobile web has evolved to enable increasingly sophisticated applications, which we often wish to debug during development on the desktop. The DevTools include support for a number of features that can help with this which we will walk through in this section.

Remote-Tilt - emulate motion events

Thu, 09 May 2013 04:55:00 -0400

Remote-Tilt - emulate motion events:

That’s where Remote-Tilt comes in. By including a single line of JavaScript you can emulate device motion events in your test page which can either be a regular browser or even a mobile emulator.

Transit - CSS transitions and transformations for jQuery

Thu, 09 May 2013 04:46:39 -0400

Transit - CSS transitions and transformations for jQuery:

Super-smooth CSS transitions & transformations for jQuery

jQuery Animations with automatic CSS3 transitions when possible

Thu, 09 May 2013 04:46:11 -0400

jQuery Animations with automatic CSS3 transitions when possible:

Extend $.animate() to detect CSS transitions for Webkit, Mozilla and Opera and convert animations automatically. Compatible with IE6

Tue, 07 May 2013 07:50:42 -0400

"Which is something that Morozov doesn’t touch on in his review: that TED-think isn’t merely vapid,..."

Tue, 07 May 2013 06:25:36 -0400

“Which is something that Morozov doesn’t touch on in his review: that TED-think isn’t merely vapid, it’s downright dangerous in the way that it devalues intellectual rigor at the expense of tricksy emotional and narrative devices. TED is a hugely successful franchise; its stars, like Jonah Lehrer, are going to continue to percolate into the world of journalism. And when they get there, they’ll be deeply versed in the dark arts of manipulating facts in order to create something perfectly self-contained and compelling. Does any editor out there want to take it upon herself to try to unteach such arts, when bringing on a hot new star? I didn’t think so.”

- Jonah Lehrer, TED, and the narrative dark arts | Felix Salmon

"The law makes a simple but powerful point: Why would you go to the trouble of obtaining genuine..."

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 07:27:25 -0400

“The law makes a simple but powerful point: Why would you go to the trouble of obtaining genuine legal tender when, at a lower cost, you can get something that works just as well? Joseph Schumpeter may have explained the law best in his History of Economic Analysis, pointing out that “if coins containing metal of different value enjoy equal legal-tender power, then the ‘cheapest’ ones will be used for payment, the better ones will tend to disappear from circulation.””

- The Wealthy Elizabethan Merchant Who Explains CNN’s Bad Boston Coverage - By Daniel Altman | Foreign Policy

"The triad of “Good, Fast, Cheap” is missing a fourth element: “Done”. Good,..."

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 12:15:53 -0400

“The triad of “Good, Fast, Cheap” is missing a fourth element: “Done”. Good, Fast, Cheap, Done: Pick any three. A lean prototype is a version of a product that is good, fast, and cheap; it’s just not done.”

- Speed vs Quality vs Feedback

iosscripts.com – iosSlider – Touch Enabled jQuery Horizontal Slider/Carousel/Image Gallery Plugin

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 06:26:42 -0400

iosscripts.com – iosSlider – Touch Enabled jQuery Horizontal Slider/Carousel/Image Gallery Plugin:

iosSlider is a jQuery plugin which allows you to integrate a customizable, cross-browser content slider into your web presence. Designed for use as a content slider, carousel, scrolling website banner, or image gallery.

"The hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the supposed tendency of humans to..."

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 06:40:21 -0400

“The hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the supposed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.”

- Hedonic treadmill - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"To Foucault, this is real power: the plague moment is one in which the political apparatus achieves..."

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 05:59:11 -0400

“To Foucault, this is real power: the plague moment is one in which the political apparatus achieves its fullest expression. It does so through ever-expanding knowledge, and the purpose of that knowledge – which is itself not held in secret, since plague deaths are announced on a daily basis – is the further elaboration of the means of control. There is no orgy of violence or social breakdown: the plague town model also introduces the essential concept that this is all performed on the populace for its own good. All of Foucault’s subsequent models of power rely on this kind of efficiency. As technologies of surveillance and discipline become more pervasive and efficient – as norms of behavior become more established – the population does most of the work itself. Power finds itself ever more easily creating the conditions of its own further reinvestment. Hence these technologies become ever more subtle.”

- 3quarksdaily: Foucault’s Plague

"In anthropology, liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”[1]) is the..."

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 11:33:24 -0400

“In anthropology, liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”[1]) is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete. During a ritual’s liminal stage, participants “stand at the threshold” between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which the ritual establishes.”

- Liminality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"We’ve been working on code that takes many years of images at once, looks at individual pixels..."

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 11:14:09 -0400

“We’ve been working on code that takes many years of images at once, looks at individual pixels instead of large regions, and outputs the average of all their clearest days. I could talk your ear off about the technical details, but the upshot is simple – we get cloudless images without seams!”

- Making Clouds Go Away on MapBox Satellite | MapBox

ftlabs/fastclick · GitHub

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 04:24:10 -0400

ftlabs/fastclick · GitHub:

FastClick is a simple, easy-to-use library for eliminating the 300ms delay between a physical tap and the firing of a click event on mobile browsers.

"When I started work, I realized that the job of the practical economist was not so much about..."

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:11:20 -0400

“When I started work, I realized that the job of the practical economist was not so much about theorizing but more concerned with gathering and understanding data - something which academe had wholly unprepared me for. For me, the difference between the professional economist and the amateur is that the former knows the numbers not in the sense of understanding high econometric theory, but in the sense of knowing where they are, what they mean and what they don’t. This is no small skill. An ability to navigate the ONS website without recourse to language you wouldn’t use in front of your mother requires a mastery of the arcane which is not given to many mortals.”

- Stumbling and Mumbling: Reinhart & Rogoff: true Keynesians

"When Lua was in High School, SCUMM beat it up for lunch money."

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 09:14:17 -0400

“When Lua was in High School, SCUMM beat it up for lunch money.”

- Grumpy Gamer If I Made Another Monkey Island…