Current_Events: December 2007 Archive Page

Philip Kennicott (Washington Post) reflects on what we might learn about ourselves when we notice that the photographer who snapped the iconic image of a young girl crying in terror after a napalm attack in Viet Nam 35 years ago also snapped the iconic image of Paris HIlton weeping in the back seat of a police car.

They are both photographs. They were both taken by Nick Ut. They are both images of someone in pain. There, with the word "pain," you feel the powerful forces of repulsion. The pain of a little girl burned by napalm (dropped by our South Vietnamese allies) can't be equated with the pain of a silly goose who doesn't have the basic maturity to face a well-merited and laughably mild punishment with any dignity. The photograph of Kim Phuc is about a pain that is real and compelling to the conscience, not just because it was physical but because it was inflicted on an innocent child. The tears of Hilton were due to a court order that returned her to jail to complete a 23-day prison term after repeated probation violations (stemming from a drunk-driving arrest). The vision of her weeping just doesn't feel real. Hilton's pain was fodder for the national pastime of schadenfreude -- an ugly use for celebrity that often borders on sadism -- but at the same time, her pain could have disappeared in an instant, if she were capable of a single philosophical thought.

The new clip improves on last night's version, I've added blinking eyes, improved the nose glowing effect, and moved one of the legs a bit.

AP:

A baby Jesus statue here is getting a Global Positioning System for Christmas. The statue, part of a nativity scene, will be equipped with the device after the previous statue went missing, even though it had been bolted down. "I don't anticipate this will ever happen again," said Dina Cellini, who oversees the display, "but we may need to rely on technology to save our savior."

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

In 2002, David Winer bet Martin Nisenholtz that

In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site.

According to Workbench:

So Winer wins the bet 3-2, but his premise of blog triumphalism is challenged by the fact that on all five stories, a major U.S. media outlet ranks above the leading weblog in Google search. Also, the results for the top story of the year reflect poorly on both sides.

In the five years since the bet was made, a clear winner did emerge, but it was neither blogs nor the Times.

Wikipedia, which was only one year old in 2002, ranks higher today on four of the five news stories: 12th for Chinese exports, fifth for oil prices, first for the Iraq war, fourth for the mortgage crisis and first for the Virginia Tech killings.

NY Times

Elizabeth has nearly eight years to go yet before she would overtake Victoria's other noteworthy place in the monarchical record books, the length of her reign -- 64 hugely eventful years, from the abolition of slavery to the Boer War. But the chances look pretty good: Elizabeth is thought to be fairly healthy, as octogenerians go, and her mother lived to be 101.

News I saw on theonering.net (via Slashdot) has LOTR fans unclenching their hairy, unshod toes and reaching for the tobacco jar:

The two "Hobbit" films - "The Hobbit" and its sequel - are scheduled to be shot simultaneously, with pre-production beginning as soon as possible. Principal photography is tentatively set for a 2009 start, with the intention of "The Hobbit" release slated for 2010 and its sequel the following year, in 2011.

movabletype.org

As of today, and forever forward, Movable Type is open source. This means you can freely modify, redistribute, and use Movable Type for any purpose you choose.

This is a good thing. MT had previously had a policy that you could make changes to the code but you couldn't redistribute those changes. MT has an architecture that supports plugins (optional add-ons that change the way MT works, but without messing under the hood).  Several times MT tech support people have recommended particular plugins to me, and several times free third-party plugins that were very popular were integrated into subsequent versions of MT.

I paid a reasonable fee (a couple hundred bucks) to license MT3 for blogs.setonhill.edu, and the past few years I've paid another reasonable fee for technical support that has saved me hours and hours of frustration.

News.com.au

Det-Sgt Jeff Maher of the homicide squad confirmed that a Google Earth satellite mapping van had been filming the area for up to a week.

He said the images captured by satellite could hold some clues to the gruesome murder.

"They (Google Earth) have had a van in the area for the last week," Det-Sgt Maher said. "We don't know what they've got yet. It's an avenue of inquiry at the moment." Police learnt of the Google Earth link during a door-knock of the area.

But wait a minute... the Google van takes pictures at street level. If it's the street-level pictures they're interested in, then what do "the images captured by satellite " have to do with the case? The quote from the police officer refers specifically to the van, so I'm guessing the reporter made a hasty assumption here.

I remember reading an interview with some who said he never bothers to read a news article that has "may" in the headline. Move along, folks, nothing to see here.

Yahoo | Reuters

"w00t," an expression of joy coined by online gamers, was crowned word of the year on Tuesday by the publisher of a leading U.S. dictionary.

Footage from a NASA camera, via CBS:

Heh. Lightweight. That's funny. Via Information Week.

Zuckerberg said that when Facebook considered Beacon it hoped to let people share information across sites with their friends. He said it had to be clear and easy to control, while also being "lightweight so it wouldn't get in people's way as they browsed the Web."

Macworld has new info on the scope of the information Beacon gathers on Facebook users:

While users' activities on the Web are tracked in various ways for different purposes, most commonly with tracking cookies in banner ads, the Beacon implementation is one Berteau has never come across before in terms of the details of users' actions that it's able to capture and send back.

These latest findings build on Berteau's report on Friday that Beacon stealthily tracked the activities of users on affiliate Beacon sites even if they were logged off from Facebook and had previously declined having their activities reported back to their Facebook friends.

Over the weekend, Facebook confirmed that Berteau's report on Friday was accurate, but said that it deletes the data it gets under these circumstances.

Still, Friday's findings deepened the privacy concerns surrounding Beacon since its introduction several weeks ago. And the admission Monday added to the concerns, since it contradicted what had, until then, been the official company line about this issue.

Thanks for the link, Karissa.

Via CNN. Here's a heartbreaking detail I hadn't noticed in previous coverage.

When Megan's mother returned home, she found her daughter crying at the computer. After reading the messages, she criticized her daughter for using inappropriate language, Banas said.

Telling her mom that "I can't believe you're not on my side," Megan ran upstairs and hanged herself, Banas said.

The NY Times reports that Six Apart is selling LiveJournal.

The owner of LiveJournal, a blogging and social-networking site, agreed yesterday to sell the company to SUP, a Russian online media company, in the latest example of deal-making in the social-networking sector.

Inside Higher Ed offers short stories on two student papers that are struggling to keep their administrations at bay:

At Oklahoma State University, the editors of the Daily O'Collegian, the more than 80-year-old campus newspaper, have for several weeks refused to let the articles they write for the print publication appear on ocolly.com, the newspaper's online portal, because the student journalists are at odds with the university administration's publications board over who should have the power to hire and fire staff for the online operation.

And the editor of the student newspaper at Connecticut's Quinnipiac University has been threatened with the loss of his job in the wake of his public criticism of a university policy that bars the weekly Quinnipiac Chronicle from posting articles on its Web site until after they have already appeared in print. The editor, Jason Braff, argued that the policy impaired the newspaper's ability to keep the campus informed, but Quinnipiac officials said it was designed to improve the accuracy of the Chronicle's reporting, "in light of a student's enthusiasm to release 'breaking news.'"