July 2010 Archives
Big map showing dialects of English in the US and Canada. Tulsa is on the border of the Inland South and West Midland. For cities marked in green there's a link to audio sample of a representative speaker. Chosen to represent Tulsa's accent is U. S. Rep. John Sullivan.
Route 66 nearly 60 years ago « Route 66 News
A home movie of the Chicago-to-LA trip in 1953, with scenes that include the Will Rogers Memorial in Claremore and the lights of downtown Las Vegas.
"Every year, the services spend millions of dollars teaching our people how to think. We invest in everything from war colleges to noncommissioned officer schools. Our senior schools in particular expose our leaders to broad issues and historical insights in an attempt to expose the complex and interactive nature of many of the decisions they will make.
"Unfortunately, as soon as they graduate, our people return to a world driven by a tool that is the antithesis of thinking: PowerPoint. Make no mistake, PowerPoint is not a neutral tool -- it is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making. It has fundamentally changed our culture by altering the expectations of who makes decisions, what decisions they make and how they make them....
"Rather than the intellectually demanding work of condensing a complex issue to two pages of clear text, the staff instead works to create 20 to 60 slides."
Grauniad: Cory Doctorow: Reports of blogging's death have been greatly exaggerated
"When blogging was the easiest, most prominent way to produce short, informal, thinking-aloud pieces for the net, we all blogged. Now that we have Twitter, social media platforms and all the other tools that continue to emerge, many of us are finding that the material we used to save for our blogs has a better home somewhere else. And some of us are discovering that we weren't bloggers after all - but blogging was good enough until something more suited to us came along.
"I still blog 10-15 items a day, just as I've done for 10 years now on Boing Boing. But I also tweet and retweet 30-50 times a day. Almost all of that material is stuff that wouldn't be a good fit for the blog - material I just wouldn't have published at all before Twitter came along. But a few of those tweets might have been stretched into a blogpost in years gone by, and now they can live as a short thought."
26 O.S. 4-120.2: Inactive Voters
The Oklahoma law governing the designation and purging from the voter rolls of inactive voters.
The Law of CONCENTRATED BENEFIT over DIFFUSE INJURY
Examples of this phenomenon in the realm of pollution, how to fight against the "iron law," and the connection to the Founders' insistence on limited government:
"A necessary requirement is that most people recognize the nature of the universal law which favors injustice over justice -- even in peaceful democracies. Since this type of education so rarely comes "from the top," either grassroots activists will do it, or it will not occur. The ground for inventing good and effective strategies will be much more fertile when everyone is so aware of the axiom that it enters the folklore ... when just the two words, 'Concentrated Benefit,' can communicate the ages-old dilemma and the dynamics of it.
"Successful solutions to the dilemma are far more likely to come from the grassroots than from prominent intellectuals who so often depend today, directly and indirectly, on approval from one special interest or another. We note that the 'founding fathers' of the United States were less beholden to special interests than today's professional intellectuals. The founding fathers actually addressed the law of Concentrated Benefit.... In the text of the Constitution, its authors tried to limit the areas of government activity -- limits which (if they had been honored) would have greatly reduced opportunities for narrow interests to 'persuade' elected officials to operate on behalf of the narrow interests."
27b/6: "yeah thats not what I was looking for at all."
This has gone viral; here's the original e-mail exchange between snarky designer David Thorne and the receptionist who wanted him to design a poster to help her find her lost cat. And here's another funny exchange (but with far ruder language) between Thorne and the "friend" who wanted him to design a logo and some pie charts for free for some pie-in-the-sky business concept that sounds suspiciously like an attempt to reinvent Twitter. (Warning: Vulgar language and hand gestures.)
snopes.com: Delayed Drowning Deaths
Sometimes erroneously called "dry drowning," these are cases where water in the lungs prevents oxygen intake, but the effects are delayed, sometimes as much as a day. Symptoms are extreme fatigue, changes in behavior, and difficulty breathing. Click the link to learn more. Anyone involved in a near-drowning incident should be closely monitored for at least 24 hours.
Why the Eagles, Rihanna and the Jonas Brothers Have Canceled Concert Dates This Summer - WSJ.com
The younger generation just doesn't connect deeply with their favorite bands in the same way as the Boomers did. "Beyond the vagaries of ticket pricing and the economy, a generational shift in how music is perceived may be at work, say some in the industry. 'The love that baby boomers had for music in their lives is a historical anomaly. It was their theme song,' says Jim McCarthy, chief executive of discount service Goldstar, which offers its members deals on everything from regional theater to rap concerts.... [18-year-old Gordy Murphy] intimately knows the 5,000 songs on his computer, but he rarely visits the sites of current artists in his collection, and thus rarely knows when they're releasing new music or embarking on a tour. 'There's no way to keep on top of all that,' he says." Be sure to read through the comments on the story -- good insights there.
Down With Big Business - WSJ.com
Robert L. Bartley in a 1979 Wall Street Journal op-ed (via @TPCarney on Twitter): "These insights are gradually helping us to understand why the very biggest businesses are such unreliable allies in the fight to preserve a free enterprise economy."
Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning
Parents, especially, you need to click that link and read the article.
"The Instinctive Drowning Response - so named by Francesco A. Pia, Ph.D., is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water. And it does not look like most people expect. There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind. To get an idea of just how quiet and undramatic from the surface drowning can be, consider this: It is the number two cause of accidental death in children, age 15 and under (just behind vehicle accidents) - of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult. In ten percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch them do it, having no idea it is happening (source: CDC)."
For the GOP, Insiders Finish Last | Wilson Research Strategies Political Insider Journal
Revolt against corporate welfare? "Many, like Sen. Graham, chalk up the strength of the Tea Party to the anger-fueled 'throw the bums out' mentality that is gripping the GOP electorate in the wake of the Obama administration's liberal policy initiatives. While that dynamic certainly plays a major role, it does not account for the fact that insiders aren't the only candidates being defeated en masse by Tea Partiers. Businessmen candidates, whom many analysts predicted would be strong in 2010 due to the troubled economy, are also falling short when faced with conservative activist opponents."
PDFUnlock! - Unlock PDF files online for free.
I used this handy tool to unlock a City of Tulsa document (a Tulsa Public Facilities Authority annual report) so I could OCR it. (By the way, there's no excuse for posting scanned, un-OCRed PDFs of Word or Excel documents when the original document is in the city's possession. Convert the file directly to PDF so it's easily searchable, and post the document in its original format, too.)
Dread tackling your pile of unsorted photos? Sally Jacobs, the Practical Archivist, has a plan to help you find photos, make them last, get your memories in writing, and digitize your collection (while avoiding common mistakes). Four hours of instruction by phone/web, half price to the first 100 to register.
When You Can't Quite Figure Out How to Live Your Best Life... ~ Holy Experience
"Do we give up what makes us really happy --- farming, restoring tractors, writing, study, whatever we are good at it--- a lifetime of happiness--for a few days of happiness at the end? Do we sacrifice what makes us really happy day in and day out, for a few days of happiness with the people at the end? And there's no guarantees with the people." (Via Shannon Lowe on Facebook.)
Jacob Sullum is pleased that five Supreme Court justices upheld the individual right to keep and bear arms but worries that four justices believe that democracy should be able to override individual rights:
"In their dissenting opinions, Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer (joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor) worry that overturning gun control laws undermines democracy. If 'the people' want to ban handguns, they say, 'the people' should be allowed to implement that desire through their elected representatives.
"What if the people want to ban books that offend them, establish an official church, or authorize police to conduct warrantless searches at will? Those options are also foreclosed by constitutional provisions that apply to the states by way of the 14th Amendment. The crucial difference between a pure democracy and a constitutional democracy like ours is that sometimes the majority does not decide."
Ace of Spades HQ: Chasing Degrees As An Alternative to Chasing a Job
"I think that we as a country have to re-think this whole 'chase your dreams!' idea that we've been feeding kids, because let's face it, their 'dreams' are often unrealistic and unlikely to lead to a decent career. The notion that 'every child must go to college' is slowly being recognized as a complete fallacy."
Appealing Industries: Animated History Of NYC Subway
"An animated GIF starts with a blank subway map and draws each line in the sequence in which it was built." (Via Incoming Signals.)
Mapping Mannahatta : The New Yorker
Simulated aerial photos of Manhattan Island before the arrival of Europeans, based on the topography and hydrology shown in early maps. (Via Incoming Signals.)
