High-Tech Flirting Turns Explicit. Virtually all the damage resulting from “sexting” is done by the law, not the digital nudity. Eighth graders get naked. With each other. Theyve been doing this for a long time actually. And unlike getting pregnant at 14, having some nude pictures floating around is only serious if we choose to make it serious. It wasn’t so long ago that that was the age when people started getting married, after all. Instead of destroying their lives by registering them as sex offenders and trying to scare the other teens, why not accept it and change our norms surrounding nudity?
Category: linkstream
A running log of all the links/bookmarks I share.
Cornell refuses to sign journal pricing NDAs
Many academic journals require their library subscribers to sign non-disclosure agreements to keep their pricing structures secret. This is obviously anti-competitive, and precludes any kind of free market from forming. Cornell has decided it’s had enough of this, and will refuse to sign any such agreement in the future, while making the (often exorbitant) prices it pays for journal subscriptions public.
Big Brother Loves Your Phone
A great visualization of one person’s location, as tracked for 6 months by their cell phone carrier. The person is Malte Spitz, a Green Party politician in Germany. He fought a legal battle with Deutsche Telekom to obtain their records of his movements. This kind of data is collected on essentially everyone with a cell phone, and last year in the US carrier Sprint provided it more than 8,000,000 times to US law enforcement via a convenient online API. Many of them also sell the data in aggregate for marketing purposes.
Why I Won’t Be Turning Off Any Lights for Earth Hour
A GOOD (Magazine) summary of why Earth Hour is lame. First, it’s symbolic — turning lights off for an hour has a negligible effect on your (and the globe’s) energy consumption. Second, the symbolism (which is all it’s got) totally sucks! Want to be environmentally sound? Then sit shivering in the dark. Great. Widely publicizing an action which is both unnecessary and turns people off (ha!), isn’t gonna win any hearts or minds. It just reinforces the needlessly “hair shirt” vision of “green” that most people have.
Moms market
Further developments in India’s commercial surrogacy market. As the government mulls more detailed regulations, existing rules are already being neatly side-stepped. For instance, sex-selection is not permitted in India, but it is in Panama, so the embryo screening is done on the isthmus, with those selected forwarded to the subcontinent for implantation. Egg banks in India now stock a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds from international donors. It’s a baby smorgasbord. Gattaca, here we come!
All Transportation Infrastructure is Development
A good post from Fort Worthology on the perils of continuing to build late-20th century sprawling car-centric cities, and the fallacy that transit/bike/pedestrian infrastructure is a “handout for developers” while highways are not. All public infrastructure — especially transportation infrastructure — has consequences for developers, and economic development, and you get the development you build your transportation systems for. Who wants to be the next Detroit? Who wants to continue supporting the petro-dictators? Not me, thanks.
New York’s Bike Lane Battle is a Sham
New York’s streets are safer and more livable than ever. More than half the households in NYC do not own a car. Polls show conclusively that the public supports the bike lanes, traffic calming, and pedestrian plazas. They also make economic sense. Unfortunately, most decisionmakers in the city do own cars, drive regularly and get free parking everywhere, so they have a clear conflict of interest with the people they supposedly represent.
Is the Anthropocene here?
Anthropocene — the Age of Man. First coined in irony, the International Commission on Stratigraphy is now debating whether to officially end the Holocene geological epoch. We humans are leaving home, in time if not in space.
American Bucket Bikes: CETMA Cargo
Finally, somebody is making long-john style bucket bikes (bakfiets) in the US! That someone is CETMA. The frames come apart into two pieces so that they can be shipped at somewhat reasonable cost ($300) by ground carriers. Total cost for the frame, at your door: $2150. Eccentric bottom brackets for use with internally geared hubs. Disc brake tabs. Integrated platform allowing flat-bed or box-bike use. Looks pretty awesome.
Why don’t I dress up like a traffic cone?
Why not dress like a traffic cone when you ride your bike? Lots of great reasons, from the Lazy Randonneur. Including, importantly, the desire to move cycling in the US beyond being some kind of sporty geeked-out niche activity.