yes, Minecraft

**Edit: I've decided that if there's any chance I can create a Google search result for "crafting recipe Olivia Wilde," well then by God I need to take that chance:

"Ever since I saw Notch retweet someone saying that Tron Legacy is actually about a guy's Minecraft addiction gone out of control and the resulting intervention I've been trying to figure out what the crafting recipe is to make Olivia Wilde."
**/Edit

Chickens, internets, and biology

This should just be a funny piece of internets.

But unfortunately I'm a biologist and so after I got over how funny it is, I got fascinated. Its head is so incredibly motionless! How? Think about the motions it's performing with its neck and body. We can't imagine coming close to matching that. Why have they evolved this way?

I can only guess it's because birds have an incredibly developed inner ear in order to react very quickly and accurately during flight. I've previously been amazed at the balance of birds. Have you ever seen a seagull or duck with one foot that nevertheless stands effortlessly motionless? Or think whether you've ever seen a bird fail at balancing on a power line and fall off. This image demonstrates exactly how accurate their inertial sensor is and how instantly it provides feedback. I guess that's what's necessary to deal with the split-second world of flight.

TL;DR: Biology is awesome.

Less-controversially awesome things Wikileaks has done

(disclaimer: I really love this thing)

These days most people who recognize the name "Wikileaks" know it from recent hits like "Iraq War Diary" and "U.S. Diplomatic Cables." Unfortunately these well-known works don't suit everyone's tastes and critics are divided on Wikileaks. While I'm still making up my mind on their recent offerings, I thought I'd highlight some of their vintage efforts that might appeal to a wider range of tastes.

Translation: It's a big question whether the recent releases by Wikileaks are a good idea. Not sure what I think myself. But as a long-time fan of them it's troubling hearing so many assessments of Wikileaks and its merits from people (understandably) unaware of the sort of organization it's been up to this point. To help out, I compiled a list of previous releases of theirs that define my impression of them as an organization fiercely committed to free and open information. Then you can judge whether they still do more harm than good.

(credit to Wikipedia for the master list)


2007: Corruption of former Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi

Wasn't even aware of this, but apparently Wikileaks helped expose a web of corruption led by this Kenyan president who funneled millions of dollars out of the country.


2008: Scientology's secret documents

During Project Chanology, they published highly-secret documents about rituals and beliefs in the Church of Scientology. When the Church predictably reacted with all sorts of rabidly litigious threats (including demanding logs identifying the source), Wikileaks reacted with one of the most awesome statements in the history of free speech: "in response to the attempted suppression, WikiLeaks will release several thousand additional pages of Scientology material next week" (which they did).


2008: British National Party membership list

The BNP is a British political party. All you really need to know about it is that membership is restricted to white people and it's so bad it has to keep its membership list very secret. Wikileaks obtained and released it.


2009: ACMA blacklist (Australian internet censorship)

The Australian government has been considering censoring the internet, originally with the excuse of filtering only extreme and illegal pornography. Wikileaks released their developing blacklist, which shows how it has expanded to a much wider range of questionably "objectionable" material and completely unrelated sites like Youtube pages, Wikipedia articles, and the websites of religious organizations. In an interesting case of how quickly they're falling down the slippery slope of censorship, Wikileaks itself was on the list before the release, because they'd released a similar Danish blacklist.

2009: Congressional Research Service reports

The CRS is an organization under the Library of Congress that produces research to help with policymaking in Congress. Their reports aren't released to the general public unless the office of the congressmember that requested it allows it. These are nonpartisan researchers (an expert called them "even-handed to a fault") and their work is a great resource when trying to find information on national issues. Which is why I think most people could agree that it's a huge benefit that Wikileaks published thousands of CRS reports in 2009.
Read more at the Washington Post.


after the jump:
More-controversial things that may still be more palatable than the war logs and diplomatic cables

I knew this was coming

(kym)

Yo Dawg I heard you like blog posts

I really love the evolution of the Xzibit Yo Dawg meme.

It started with simple parodies of Pimp My Ride:

But it quickly became about putting things inside themselves:

Then people stopped even finishing the sentence:

And now it's to the point that you only need the slightest hint of Xzibit's presence to understand that the image is pointing out recursion:

He's become like a symbol in the sign language of the internets.

Or maybe I just like progressions like that. Like awesome nickname evolutions. For instance I know someone named Yotam. Soon after college started his friends started referring to him as "Yotizz." Then it progressed to just "'Tizz." And now his friends will casually refer to him as "'Tizzlet." From Yotam. Awesome.

I digress. Further Yo Dawg internets after the jump.

U.S. performs 1,200 traveler laptop searches per year

TrueCrypt: don't leave home without it.

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol spokeswoman Kelly Ivahnenko:

"Between October 1, 2008 and August 11, 2009 CBP encountered more than 221 million travelers and of these, fewer than 1,050 searches were performed on laptops."
- Wired.com

For those unfamiliar with the border search exception to the fourth amendment, when you are flying internationally, security agents can take you aside and search your belongings without any warrant or reasonable suspicion. Ok, big deal, so I'm going to have to open my bag again, right?

Thing is, this policy has been interpreted to include searching all files on your laptop, phone, USB drive, etc. They'll even confiscate your computer for months, copy the entire hard drive, and mail it back to you.

Now is the first time I've seen numbers on this. That's a rate of about 1,200 searches per year as of last year. And I was already upset about this policy when I thought it was a really rare occurrence.

I remember hearing an explanation for this policy is that they've determined that searching the files on an electronic device is equivalent to searching your current personal effects. This is what gets me upset. I assume that the people who decided on this interpretation of the law imagine the contents of a phone or laptop to be just about the same as the contents of, say, a notepad you bring on a plane.

But many people, especially of my generation, have a good proportion of their lives on their computers. Personally I can't deal with physical things and lose them all the time, so my most personal possessions are files on my hard drive. Search my apartment all you want; there's not much I'd be upset over losing. But on my computer I have personal documents I wrote in 1998 in middle school. I have IM conversations from high school. I have all the texts I've sent since 2006. All emails since 2004. Calendar events since 2008. And 10,000 personal photos.

I know, no one cares about my middle school secrets or the texts I sent to my ex-girlfriend (though I could see them having a good old time back at the office with some of my photos). The point is, it feels as violating as a warrantless search of my home would've felt 20 years ago. Preventing such a violation is the whole point of the fourth amendment.

And it's coming to a laptop near you. So remember kids, if you want to spit in the face of a violation of your rights, TrueCrypt up!

DC crime map - by block!

Ok this should be great, but on closer inspection it actually sucks.

My thoughts on first look: "Wow! I've still been going off this old homicides map because I haven't yet seen anything more precise. But block-by-block is amazing!"

But then I realized it's just a simple count of crimes for each block, not at all taking into account the size or population of the block. Hence universities, whose entire campuses count as one block, seem like the most dangerous places in the city. And then there's more obvious (and just dumb) examples like this pinwheel centered on Thomas Circle.

I don't think I'll be much safer on the small-slice blocks. In fact I think there's a good chance all eight blocks have statistically the same crime rate. If you measure it in a more meaningful way, that is.

So yes, in reality it's not useless. I've seen some interesting things when comparing blocks of similar size. But it's pretty frustrating. Because the DC Crime Policy Institute it comes from gives no info that would help better interpret the data. And because the information they give us is already divided into bins (5-9 crimes/year, 10-25 crimes/year, etc) you can't manually correct for block size with any accuracy.

There's several easy steps they could've taken to produce a better (not perfect) representation of crime in The District. The easiest thing to do would be to simply divide the number of crimes by the area of the block. Then at least they wouldn't have made a map that was near-meaningless.

I guess since that would be so easy, the only conclusion I can come to is that the map was mostly decoration and what they were most interested in was the data in their table showing trends over time. But honestly I found that less interesting than the prospect of seeing the spatial distribution of crime in DC.

Rally to Restore Sanity

"It was very good humored, and one sensed that the entire crowd loathed Fox, felt queasy about MSNBC, couldn't bring themselves to watch CNN and caught NPR in the commute."

-Andrew Sullivan pegs the mood of the rally


Good photo galleries of the signs (best part of the day) here and here.

Died in a skydiving blog accident

Just re-read a nearly 3-year-old xkcd:

And discovered that now the top Google result for "Died in a skydiving accident" is "Died in a blogging accident."

Wait what?

U.S. Government Seeks Backdoor into All Encrypted Services

U.S. Tries to Make It Easier to Wiretap the Internet

I really want to see the consensus on this story become, as loud as possible,

WTF is this, India?

Back in August we all* scoffed at this up-and-coming country reverting to its plebeian roots by demanding such a ghastly thing (if the image I'm painting isn't clear enough, let me add a swirling brandy snifter). But now we see our own government thinking India had a good idea with this. But if that brandy snifter-scoffing has any use, please let us use it to recognize how lowly we view this idea at least when put forward by someone else's government.

That's all for now. For further analysis, I'll defer to the EFF (usually a good idea):
Government Seeks Back Door Into All Our Communications


*Yes, be "we all" I mean only the perpetually-drunk-on-tech-news demographic. I'm sorry! It's hard to quit! It's a disease, you know.