Gladwell finds the Duke rape case interesting because it gives us a chance to look at how the legal system will deal with the problems of eyewitness testimony across races when its a minority person picking out *white* defendants. There is a pretty good scientific understanding that our ability to identify other people is far reduced when they are people of a race different than our own. In most high profile cases in the past, though, it has been a white victim picking out blacks. Gladwell asserts that there could be thousands of black men in prison on the basis of flawed eyewitness testimony. He is probably right.
Category Archives: Aside
At a yearly talent show held at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, students “re-enact a complete level of Super Mario Brothers”:http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2139555376132383479 — live. (via Waxy)
UNO 1.3 is out! Hooray! Finally we users of Intel Macs can escape the awful ugliness of “brushed metal”.
UC Berkeley has made their iTunes webcasts publically available, and the selection of free audio lectures is awesome. Check it out! Stanford is also offering similar amounts of content. Harvard? Not so much.
Time for some wanderings in Londn’s sewer system, where the creepiest thing to be found is blocks of congealed fat dumped by fast food restaurants. Huh. I find this sort of infrastructure fascinating, and London so much more so as the bulk of its sewers were built 150 years ago. This story seems to be the first in a series. Awesome.
Dahlia Lithwick writes about how we fool ourselves into believing we are dispassionate about the Duke case. Which is all well and good, but I *am* dispassionate about the Duke case. Probably because I don’t watch TV news.
jwz points to pictures of the spacejunk-littered countryside of Russia and Kazakhstan.
Which era would you nominate as New York’s Golden Age? Bill T. Jones says right after 9/11.
I now discover that a good cross-section of the Mac-using “elite” have the same setup that I (now) have. Namely, they’ve standardized on one super-powered laptop, a nice stand, and a 23″ Cinema Display for heavy lifting in the office. Not to mention a very similar set of software and utilities. Now if only I’d read a few of these entries first, instead of having to figure everything out for myself and reach the same conclusions!
Berkmanite Rebecca Mackinnon, writing in the _Washington Post_: “As an American who lived and worked in China for more than a decade, I continue to believe that peaceful engagement between the United States and China is in the best interest of both nations’ people. But we have a serious problem that won’t go away: How can Americans respect or trust a regime that kidnaps our friends?“
Fluxiom, an awesome-looking new digital asset management tool, has been released, which is great. It is a hosted app, and they charge based on strorage space, and it maxes out at 8GB, which is nowhere near great. So much for storing 100GB or more of digital content in a highly useful system. Who the hell sells a *hosted app* for asset management?
“Beyond embiggens and cromulent,” a listing of tons of Simpsons-related lingustic goodness, has managed to keep me awake and laughing for a full hour. Splendiforous!
Greg Knauss, who sat in for Jason Kottke for two weeks, analyzes his (perceived) failure. He postulates that there are two kinds of bloggers, referential and experiental, editors and writers. I’ve always considered myself a far better editor than writer, which perhaps explains why I have so many link posts and so few long-form posts, which always end up being so much longer than intended.
Five suggested Flickr tags: 3. “My Defenseless Child In A Funny Shirt I Made Him Wear�
How Mike Davidson created the great live-updated Puget Sound picture in his blog header. About what you’d expect, except with Flash.
With some blood, some sweat, and a good dose of tears, it is possible to make a MySpace profile page that does not suck. Incredible. I didn’t believe it could be done.
Wow, someday I’d love to live in a place like where Ethan & Rachel live.
Daily Kos points out that Patrick Moore, who bills himself as a Greenpeace cofounder and wrote the op-ed in the _Washington Post_ about the need for nuclear energy that I linked to a couple days ago, has for years been a highly paid lobbyist for various industries and companies that have questionable environmental records. The sentiment still feels sound to me, but be wary of paid influence peddlers shilling their wares.