How the government uses the state secrets privilege, a holdover from English common law, to derail civil lawsuits where they think national security might be threatened, is interesting and disturbing, especially because of how frequently the privilege is now being used and on what sort of cases.
I clicked on a link about Google buying a search algorithm and started reading it before the page even loaded, saying to myself, “Search engine giant Google…”. Sure enough, those were the opening words of the article.
Romantic ideas for up north. I’ll just file this one away until some point when it might actually be useful…
You know those stupid CAPTCHA tests that force you to type in the text from a horribly distorted image to prove you’re human? Now someone is proposing a far cuter solution, KittenAuth. Pretty much any Mechanical Turk-type tasks would do it, so why not kittens? 🙂 (via Waxy)
Glarkware continues to tempt me with awesome “now-or-never” t-shirt prints, but they’re just so freakishly expensive for a t-shirt that I can’t ever bring myself to buy them. Threadless, with their $10 sales, are a far better value.
Dreamlog: It must be Wednesday?
I don’t often have dreams that I can remember, and when I do remember them, they aren’t generably notable. Thus I awoke with some surprise this morning to realize that I had a dream that was out of the ordinary both because I remembered it and because of its marvelously odd dullness. Without getting into the twists and turns and quasi-indecipherable bits, the two notable aspects involved, first, me waiting at a bus stop for my bus to not come (a very good approximation of, oh, every other day or so in my life) and, second, me randomly meeting up with a couple of celebrities.
What was interesting about this meeting? Well, first off, I’m generally not one who spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about the lives of celebrities, so that they even made dream cameos, so to speak, was odd. More fun though was the context: one of the two asked me about blogging and how to blog anonymously, the second joined in the discussion and mentioned that she already had a blog. Heh. The discussion continued at some lenght about the relative merits of various kinds of blogging and anonymity, and then I awoke.
I won’t name celebrity names, but I will say that one of them recently had a brilliant guest performance on _Grey’s Anatomy_ and the second recently produced an _SNL_ rap video that confused me. None of this came up in the dream, though, it was just some discussion about blogging. So perhaps my job is slowly driving me crazy, I dunno. But it would be sorta neat if the dream recurred and we could talk LiveJournal vs. TypePad vs. WordPress.com tonight. 🙂
Each day as they go about their lives, most Britons likely make guest appearances on at least 300 different security camera screens. The UK now has more CCTV cameras than any other country, but their effect on crime seems to have been negligible, while people continue to live in more (media-fueled?) fear than they did before.
Harriet Jones, MP Flydale North (at least in _Doctor Who_-land)…has a website. Awesome. (via Jason)
Jack Shafer is cancelling his subscription to the _Times_, and I would too, if I had a subscription — which I don’t — for all the reasons he lists. (Hint: it’s not because they did anything *bad*, unless you consider “bad for their bottom line” as bad).
I’m on Wonkette’s side with regard to the latest piece of economic wanking from _Slate_.
_Doctor Who_ is back on the air on April 15th, and both David Tennant and Billie Piper have signed on for series 3!
Ever wonder what the studios of KCRW look like? No? Well, I have, and it turns out they look like this. Pretty sweet digs for a pretty sweet radio station. As a bonus, here’s a recent story on KCRW’s music director extrordinaire, Nic Harcourt.
We’re Soaring! We’re Flying! Slate says that for every generation, there is a musical. This one just happens to be Disney’s _High School Musical_. Also read my review.
Every year the Town of Brookline appoints two Measurers of Wood and Bark. Occasionally, these officials are even called on to measure wood — but never bark (why would you need to measure bark?).
On Thursday Jamaica swore in its first female PM. Come on America, we can do this!
The GV-affiliated site documenting the imprisonment of Chinese filmmaker and blogger Hao Wu is now posting translations of his sister’s blog posts as she works the Chinese legal system and tries to free her brother.
A new technique being dubbed “closed-heart surgery” looks very promising, and far less invasive.
DoJ steps in to stop EFF from filing evidence and arguments in its case against AT&T without letting them review and redact the documents first. Um, okay.