This is only the second time in its nearly ten-year history that the Dish has gone silent. The reason now is the same as the reason then. When dealing with a delusional fantasist like Sarah Palin, it takes time to absorb and make sense of the various competing narratives that she tells about her life. There are so many fabrications and delusions in the book, mixed in with facts, that just making sense of it - and comparing it with objective reality as we know it, and the subjective reality she has previously provided - is a bewildering task. She is a deeply disturbed person which makes this work of fiction and fact all the more challenging to read. And the fact that she is now the leader of the Republican party and a potential presidential candidate, makes this process of deconstruction an important civil responsibility. We take this seriously as we always have. We want to be fair to her, and to her family, and to the innocent people she has brought into the spotlight. And we are not reporters. We are merely analysts trying to make sense of evidence already in the public domain, evidence that points in all sorts of directions, only one of which can be true.

Since the Dish has tried to be rigorous and careful in analyzing Palin's unhinged grip on reality from the very beginning - specifically her fantastic story of her fifth pregnancy -  we feel it's vital that we grapple with this new data as fairly and as rigorously as possible. That takes time to get right. And it is so complicated we simply cannot focus on anything else.

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via The Notion:

In an unusually aggressive move, Organizing for America announced Wednesday that it is mobilizing its volunteer army to confront the 32 Republican legislators who voted against health care reform -- despite representing districts that voted for Obama.

The pressure campaign is designed "to remind these members that voters in their districts voted for change last year," explain OFA officials, "and urge them to reconsider their position when the House votes again on a final bill later this year."

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"The inconvenient truth is that although the country's best-loved "French chef" produced an unparalleled recipe collection in Mastering the Art, it has always been daunting. It was never meant for the frivolous or trendy. And it now seems even more overwhelming in a Rachael Ray world: Those thousands and thousands of cookbooks sold are very likely going to wind up where so many of the previous printings have—in pristine condition decorating a kitchen bookshelf or on a nightstand, handy for vicarious cooking and eating."

The two biggest deceptions of all are that life has "meaning" and that each of us is unique.

Techcrunch on the Sidekick data disaster:

The solution may be to do nothing, certainly not to panic. The biggest problem is that we hoard data. We produce more data and information than we ever have, and we are all vain enough to believe that the data we create is so fantastic that it should live on for eternity. Losing the contact list on your phone shouldn’t be a problem – you should know who your friends are anyway. If you are losing sleep because you can’t find an old email you wrote, you likely have deeper issues to address.

Technology has spoiled us to the point where we feel nostalgic when we lose data that didn’t really matter in the first place. If it did matter, a primal instinct would have driven us to do more to preserve, rather than rely on a sleep deprived sysadmin on the other side of the country. If you didn’t care enough to take care of it yourself, then you didn’t really need it. It is our misguided expectation of technology that causes us to panic when we lose data. The only people who have a larger incentive to preserve your data are those who are using it to target an advertisement at you, or sell you something.

From the Hammer Museum:

In his 2002 video Dwelling, Hiraki Sawa creates a dreamlike universe inside a nondescript apartment. Dwelling follows the dramatic slow and solemn flight patterns of roaring miniaturized Boeings, Airbuses, Concordes, jet planes, and commuter aircrafts as if documenting chaotic airport traffic. Using grainy black and white footage, Sawa’s video is as mysterious and evocative as it is comical. Set entirely in Sawa’s apartment, the work addresses notions of displacement and melancholy, and was completed while he was a graduate student at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.

Wired quote on the Soviet Doomsday Machine, with is apparently still functional:

By guaranteeing that Moscow could hit back, Perimeter was actually designed to keep an overeager Soviet military or civilian leader from launching prematurely during a crisis. The point, says [former Soviet space official Alexander]  Zhelenyakov says, was “to cool down all these hotheads and extremists. No matter what was going to happen, there still would be revenge. Those who attack us will be punished.”

Google Tournament function
The GoogleTournament() function allows users to query NCAA data (including team names, records, scores, seedings, game times, etc) in a Google spreadsheet (ideal for creating automatic brackets)

via Wil Wheaton

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To wrestle with a blancmange is, in my experience, a mistake. Pink, sickly and smug, the sugary pudding happily takes any number of blows, absorbs the attack, quivers a bit and comes back – unperturbed – as a blancmange.

Creationists have the same talent. For them, evidence is of no interest. I once told someone who used the enormous gap in the fossil record between the chimp-human ancestor and modern chimpanzees as evidence against evolution that it had been partly filled: an ancestral chimp half a million years old had just been found. His face lit up: “See,” he said. “Now there are two gaps!”

It's the Kindle that needs to read standard PDF's, not content creators who need to make special files for the kindle.