Link Banana

An intelligent-sounding explanation of Lia Holleran’s Dark Skate photographs:

The works blur the boundaries of photography and become self-portraits and drawings as well as records of performances. Light is used to form the drawing line while HALLORAN skateboards at night through different venues. The resulting images are each a trajectory of the artist’s movements over time. The photographs pair urban environments with lines of light which behave as physical objects or break apart into flurries of abstraction.

A less intelligent-sounding explanation: awesome.

(via The Daily Dish)

A new paper (PDF) argues that though immigration has a small depressive effects on the wages of low-education Americans in the short run, it helps even them in the long run.

Using our estimates and Census data we find that immigration (1990-2006) had small negative effects in the short run on native workers with no high school degree (-0.7%) and on average wages (-0.4%) while it had small positive effects on native workers with no high school degree (+0.3%) and on average native wages (+0.6%) in the long run. These results are perfectly in line with the estimated aggregate elasticities in the labor literature since Katz and Murphy (1992). We also find a wage effect of new immigrants on previous immigrants in the order of negative 6%.

William Saletan sees the impersonality of killing with aerial drones — now made more videogame-like by Raytheon — as a bad thing:

Is the “synthetic environment” real? That depends on which end of the missile you’re looking at. In the targeted car, it’s as real as death. But from the console, it looks more like virtual reality. If the drone goes down, you’re not in it. The environment you actually inhabit is pretty nice. To enhance “operator comfort,” Raytheon offers “ergonomic, memory seating,” “ergonomically-correct displays,” and “adjustable hand and foot positions.” According to the Associated Press, “The leather chair is adaptable to individual users, who can also control a heating and cooling duct above their head at the touch of a switch.”

If you’ve seen combat in the flesh, you know what the fireball on the screen means to the people in the car. But to a teenager raised on Doom and Halo, it looks like just another score. He can’t feel or smell the explosion. He isn’t even there. The eeriest thing in the demo video is the total silence that accompanies the car’s destruction. The only sound that follows is the pilot’s triumphant verdict: “Excellent job.” It’s like something you’d read on the screen after getting a high score at an arcade.

Scientists figured out why the Northern Lights flitter around:

The satellites confirmed that the storm was caused by a phenomenon called magnetic reconnection in which solar energy stretches the Earth’s magnetic field lines until they reach their limits and snap back into equilibrium. Like an earthquake in the sky, this releases enormous amounts of energy, and charged particles go flying into the atmosphere.

Though I don’t know how much I’ll use it, I think it’s cool that Google Maps now offers walking (and public transportation — when did that happen?) directions.

(via Gizmodo)

Being a native (and, to my chagrin, monolingual) English speaker I’ve never much considered Wikipedia in other languages. The Arabic version is prehaps the most conspicuously small:

It has fewer than 65,000 articles, and ranks 29th among the various Wikipedias, just behind Slovenian, and well behind the artificial tongue, Esperanto.

Some possible reasons:

…young people find it easier to communicate in English online — whether chatting, sending instant messages or contributing to Wikipedia — both because not all keyboards are compatible with the Arabic alphabet and because they want their words to be more accessible to the wider world. (Some write in Arabic using the Roman alphabet.)

…by barring them from popular culture(?!). Maybe it’s just me, but this thesis seems a little absurd:

And many of those who imagined chimpanzees to be safe reported that they based their thinking on the prevalence of chimps in advertisements, on television and in the movies.

Having said that, I also didn’t know that chimpanzees are endangered. But I attribute it to insuffient publicity for that fact, not their presence popular culture.

Jasmina Tešanović was neighbors with the recently apprehended (accused) genocider. Its interesting, but not terribly surprising:

To judge by the chatter on my B92 blog and the phone messages I get from my friends: as I long suspected, “Europe’s Osama bin Laden” and I have been neighbors. We shared the same food, saw the same beggars in downtown Belgrade where he had been hiding all these years, a genocidal butcher disguised as a New Age quack.

A journalist who lives close to me sent me an sms: Karadzic must have been drinking beer with our gypsy neighbor in the street. As we all suspected, or as some of us surely knew: Karadzic was hiding from justice behind our names and our daily lives, using the Serbian population as his living shields.

For a broader perspective on the Karadzic arrest, try this Economist story.

I’m a little disappointed by how obvious all the character choices in this sketch were, but I did laugh a few times anyway.

(via Daring Fireball)

Farhed Manjoo gives some (metaphorical) ink to a fact that’s been bothering me lately:

Ha, ha, ha. These days the Web brims with opportunities for such chuckles. “Stealth viral” video ads—i.e., clips that betray few obvious signs that they’re part of a campaign—have invaded the Internet. You may think you’ve just seen a ball girl at a minor-league baseball game scale a wall to catch a foul. Wrong: She’s a stunt woman, and that’s a Gatorade ad. Did you recently send your friends that kick-ass security-cam clip of an office worker going berserk? If so, you took part in director Timur Bekmambetov’s bizarre stealth advertisement for his film Wanted. Ray-Ban, Levi’s, Nike, and other brands have also recently launched similar campaigns.

I’m not sure why, but this bit of idle technological speculation caught my eye. Jonathan Hedley wants to know why all modern mice seem to use a clearly inferior design.

Matrix found that the best place for the ball was up front as far as possible between the users thumb and forefinger. The forefinger can be controlled very precisely — much more so than the wrist and forearm. Matrix found that users would move their wrist and arm to move the cursor are large distance, but for fine control relied on the thumb and forefinger.

.. It simply seems that designers and manufacturers have, over the years, forgotten about the benefit of putting the sensor up front, or have placed precision and control further down their list of priorities. I hope that this isn’t the case: that newer research has shown that the current placement is the correct placement, or that something else has changed over time. But if that’s not the case, then I hope that some design team will rediscover either the principle, or the findings — so that we can continue to strengthen the connection between the user and the computer.

(via Big Contrarian)

It’s a pretty well-understood truth that public perception of the economy’s welfare is disproportionately focused on the price we pay to fuel our cars. Dan Ariely’s recent op-ed explores why:

For the several minutes that I stand at the pump, all I do is stare at the growing total on the meter — there is nothing else to do. And I have time to remember how much it cost a year ago, two years ago and even six years ago.

Yet I have no such memory about the prices of items in any other category. I have no idea how much milk was six years ago, how much bread was three years ago or how much yogurt was a week ago. But I suspect that if I stood next to the yogurt case in the supermarket for five minutes every week with nothing to do but stare at the price, I would also know how much it has gone up — and I might become outraged when yogurt passed the $2 mark.

Another odd thing about the way we buy gasoline is that we usually buy multiple units. I just bought 13 gallons for a little more than $55. The sticker shock isn’t as intense when I see the price per gallon as it is when I’m faced with the total cost. Fifty-five dollars! I remember when I filled my tank for $20 and $25 and $30! Maybe if we bought 13 loaves of bread at a time or 15 gallons of milk we might become just as sensitive to how much we spend on those items.

If only to demonstrate how much a fan I am of The Big Picture, another link to another stunning series.

Two interesting data points, both pointed out by Kevin Drum, should cheer gay activists and allies:

• Support for Proposition 8, California’s ballot initiative to define marriage as “between a man and a woman,” is only at 42%. With 51% opposed, most think it’s unlikely to pass, leaving the recent court decision in favor of gay marriage as state law.
• American public opinion now favors gays serving openly in the military by a wide margin. Where in 1993, only 44% of people supported it, a recent poll puts the number as high as 75%.

I thought this little collection of lists from yesterday’s New York Times was enjoyable enough to share. It, as Matt observed about “Fourteen Passive Aggressive Appetizers,” straddles the line between clever banter and the tired redeployment of a tired idea to reach your word count. A sample:

STUFF GRANDPARENTS LIKE

Anything cinnamon
Any Brach’s candy
Craftmatic adjustable beds
Quilted toaster covers
Water aerobics
Buicks

Via the Big Contrarian, some excellent and arty photos. (Which seem to me out of place on Flickr.)

Of all the provocative possibilities raised by Ben Fry’s playing with intelligence (Wonderlic) scores and (American) football positions, the most obvious and interesting may be that offensive players — and especially linemen — are usually smarter than defensive players.

Though I’m not quite sure what makes these satellite images “abstract,” I do think they’re pretty neat. (Seperately, some of these pictures were linked to in this post.)

(via Andrew Sullivan)

I’m not sure what to think about this article. A part of me is made a little queasy by the idea, while another part agrees with the woman that no relationship should be forbidden so long as it is free of coercion:

There’s no comparison between siblings close in age having sexual feelings and contact and an adult forcing a younger member of the family to do something they neither understand nor want to be involved in.

(via Ross Douthat)

@#$%^&*!, there’s a word for that?

The term is grawlix, and it looks to have been coined by Beetle Bailey cartoonist Mort Walker around 1964. Though it’s yet to gain admission to the Oxford English Dictionary, OED Editor-at-Large Jesse Sheidlower describes it as “undeniably useful, certainly a word, and one that I’d love to see used more.”

… Until its OED entry is solemnized, we’ll have to settle for this definition on Wiktionary: “grawlix, n. A string of typographical symbols used (especially in comic strips) to represent an obscenity or swear word.” I don’t think I’ll ever look at a character set quite the same way again.

(via kottke)