In LA » Politics

The official iPhone Twitter client’s “Nearby” feature is scary-neato

zach — Wed, 19 May 2010 18:57:50 +0000

Click this image to pop up a full-sized explanation of how to find the "Nearby" feature in the new iPhone Twitter app.

5/19/2010 4:43pm Edit: I’ve been told this feature was in the previous version of the app. I just never happened across it

The official iPhone Twitter client is finally up in the app store, today, now. The app,”Twitter”, is actually version 3 of what used to be called “Tweetie”. Twitter bought Tweetie, and what was previously an excellent commercial app is now free and improved.

The “Nearby” feature of Tweetie v2, which showed a list of nearby recent tweets, has been updated for v3. It’s more difficult to find this feature in the new version of the app, as it is accessed via an unlabeled button, but it’s there and has been significantly upgraded. Now one can see not just a list of nearby tweets, but tweets in any area, overlaid on a Google map.

On the one hand, I’m all about openness, and it seems pretty cool to be able to see what people in a given area are tweeting, overlaid on a map.

On the other hand, the ease with which any of us iPhone Twitter users¹ can now be tracked down by stalkers, paparazzi, their mothers, and other ne’er-do-wells is a little scary.

Change. Scary and neato, at the same time.

iPhone Twitter users who opt-in for the app’s location feature when asked, that is.

what is that health care bill (links to explanations)

zach — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:33:13 +0000

The house is set to vote on a big healthcare bill on Sunday, and I haven’t really been keeping up on the massive changes that the plan has gone through on its way to the vote, so I did some poking around on the net today. Maybe these links will be of use to others as well.

Here’s a quick summary of what the bill puts forth (from The New York Times):
The bills would expand coverage by making more lower-income people eligible for Medicaid, and by offering subsidies to help moderate-income people buy insurance. They would forbid insurance companies from denying coverage of pre-existing conditions, and would create insurance exchanges — new government-regulated marketplaces where individuals and small businesses could come together to buy coverage. The 160 million Americans who get their coverage through their employer would stay with that insurance. Nearly everyone would be required to get insurance or face a penalty, and businesses would be required to provide coverage or contribute to its cost.
It looks like there’s a decent breakdown of the healthcare bill on a CNN blog.
A slightly more detailed summary is here at CNN
The white house’s sales pitch for the plan

One of the more rational-sounding objections I often hear about the Obama administration’s focus on healthcare reform (which should be called “health insurance reform”) is that, with the economy in a sorry state, this is the wrong time to be focusing on health care costs. To my mind this argument is a non-starter and a false dichotomy. There’s no reason to believe that healthcare reform is unrelated to, and can’t be considered at the same time as pressing economic repairs. In a system in which most people have health insurance tied to employment; A rise in unemployment leads to a rise in under or uninsured people.

The question that matters to me is how this plan will affect the economic and social well-being of this country. Will it drive up the deficit? (the CBO says it’ll do the opposite, I’m sure I’ll find plenty of voices that disagree). Will it drive up insurance costs? (The proposed market for people and companies to shop for insurance sounds like an interesting way to lower costs using market forces). What is a “cadillac” insurance plan? I’ll be poking around those links and others to try and figure out what I can today to decide whether to call my representative to offer a word of encouragement.

My Tor Bridge link brings all Iranians to the yard ♫

zach — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:17:38 +0000

Folk in Iran and several other places happen to have governments who’ve decided that news and social networking sites on the internet should be blocked. Affected people can bypass such blocks by using a Tor bridge. Those of us who have high-speed connections and live in areas with little or no internet censorship can help by setting up Tor bridges on our personal computers and publishing our Tor bridge links to twitter, facebook, etc.

I spent a few minutes setting up a Tor bridge on my computer. Here’s the link to mine:

75.84.153.203:9001 8BA6A76D36F5A9830F25B5D8315906434AEE50FF

Simple instructions are available on the net for those of you who would also like to set up a Tor bridge on your computer (all OSes are welcome).

Thanks to the “Ian’s Brain” post Tor and the Iranian Election for the great idea.

A few relevant links:

Hopefully this sort of information is already out there in the native languages of the folk who need it most.

Saddam Hussein has seen the South Park movie

zach — Wed, 06 May 2009 01:07:28 +0000

No word on whether Saddam saw the film during its theatrical run, but apparently he watched the film in captivity, involuntarily, multiple times. As much as I enjoy that film, and as bad a guy as Saddam Hussein was, I can’t help but feel there’s an uncomfortable bit of the schoolyard bully at play in the action of forcing the man to repeatedly watch a film in which he’s depicted as Satan’s gay lover.

In any case, if you were curious whether Saddam ever saw his star turn in “South Park; Bigger, Longer, and Uncut”, you now have your answer.

Ms. Universe, Ms. USA tour Guantanamo, call it a “relaxing, calm, beautiful place”?!

zach — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 17:19:09 +0000

“It was a loooot of fun!,”
“We visited the Detainees camps and we saw the jails, where they shower, how the(y) recreate themselves with movies, classes of art, books. It was very interesting,”
“I didn’t want to leave, it was such a relaxing place, so calm and beautiful,”
–Miss Universe, Dayana Mendoza

Words fail me.¹

Here’s the article.

Actually they don’t, I could say “Reality is determined to make all media become The Onion.” But isn’t my original statement more dramatic?

Seen in LA: a prescription pot brownie?

zach — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:38:07 +0000

I ran across this baked good yesterday and was floored. I had to take a photo for posterity. Apparently brownies¹ are now an official delivery method for a prescription medication, at least in California, where it’s not exactly as illegal as it is elsewhere in the U.S. to inhale, or apparently, ingest –as long as you’re a 25-year-old who can convince a doctor to give you a prescription to help with your “glaucoma”.

I hope they start selling weed kügel over in the Fairfax district if California legalizes the chronic.

Technorati Tags: brownie, California, chocolate, clear plastic container, demon weed, Garbanzo Beans, marijuana, pot, pot brownie, prescription pot, prohibition, forward thinking, so cute, the sky is falling

cupcakes too?

Get a closer look at Minnesota’s senatorial recount

zach — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 02:13:53 +0000

The recount continues in the Minnesota senatorial race, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune has put up scans of every contested ballot. Site visitors who login are able to peruse these ballots, attempt to determine voter intent, and tell the site whether they think the voter meant to vote for Al Franken or Norm Coleman. At the moment, they have 6700 contested ballots available for perusal.

Want to know why vote totals change during a recount? Go to the site and see for yourself. The fourth estate is alive and well in Minneapolis, bringing needed transparency to a mystifying political process. This is just too cool.

Why I will need no car in a few years

zach — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 03:55:32 +0000

I ran my third half-marathon a week ago, the Las Vegas Half-Marathon, and bested my previous finishing by nearly six minutes. In order to better visualize my progress over the past 3 such runs, I tortured Excel into producing a graph of my finishing times. It looks like a nice and linear progression. If my finishing times continue to drop at the same rate I’ll be setting world records within two years, and a year or two after that I’ll be running faster than traffic and will be able to ditch my car and commute around LA on foot. Extrapolating the trend any further starts to get more complicated, I don’t understand the theory of general relativity well enough to detail the implications of negative finishing times .

But in any case, I’m happy to be improving at this whole long-distance running thing. Next up: my first full marathon, at Disney World in January.

Crowdsourced news of Mumbai attacks

zach — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 23:12:50 +0000

I just overheard a colleague saying that British and American citizens have been targeted in a number of simultaneous attacks in Mumbai, India, and that there have been at least 80 people killed. I’m not going to rehash the actual news item here, because it’s already awful now and will probably be worse by the time anyone reads this post. But I do want to point out how well the web as a community is working to collect, analyze, and aggregate all the news. Much information on the attacks can be gleaned from a scan of a few websites:

news.google.com has automatically collected a set of 458 articles at the time of this writing.
The Wikipedia article on the 26 November 2008 Mumbai attacks includes photos and a rundown of all currently known information as well as links and references to articles on the attacks and on the locations and groups involved.
Vinukumar Ranganathan is a photographer in Mumbai, shooting photos in the danger zone. He has been uploading a series of up-to-the-minute photos that can be viewed in his flickr stream. The shots of bystanders, police with automatic weapons, and the aftermath of explosions are maybe more atmospheric than informative, but it’s interesting to me to see a semi-unedited series of news photos and attempt to piece together an interpretation.

bulletin: iPhone USB adapter recalled. How Palin’s email was cracked.

zach — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 02:00:52 +0000

If ye power supply be featurin a dot most viridescent, drink up me hearty. That be the safe, new replacement adapterr. If ye adapter be flying a blood red jolly roger, beware. Ye be in great peril. Arr. 儿.

Two notes of note:

Apple has recalled the Ultracompact (sic) USB Power Adapter that they provided with the iPhone 3G. It is not that the device will burst into flame or do anything so catastrophic; The problem is simply that the metal prongs aren’t perfectly anchored in that delicious little white plastic cube, and “under certain conditions” the prongs break off and remain in the electrical outlet when the adapter is unplugged. As anyone who has ever before seen two shiny and arcing bits of metal sticking out of an electrical socket can tell you, it is humanly impossible to resist immediately grabbing barehandedly at such conductors. Y’all iPhone cult members can get your USB Power Adapters exchanged for free from Apple.
Some (insult deleted as I don’t want to be hacked) college student cracked open Alaska Governor, Republican Vice Presidential candidate, and former Miss Wasilla Sarah Palin’s yahoo email account¹ and posted its contents online.

3/o2d399Jp says "arrf"
According to the cracker’s 1st person account, he simply reset her yahoo email password by guessing his way through the security questions that are part of the “I forgot my password” process on Yahoo and on many other sites. I long ago realized the vulnerability of such identity verification processes which use simplistic questions like “What is your pet’s name?”. This is why for years I’ve been using a “strong password generator” application to make sure my pets’ names all are of sufficient length and contain enough symbols and numbers to be difficult to guess. You should do the same.

That is all .

Yes, I think there ought to be a law restricting public servants from using private email servers for government business simply to evade scrutiny, and yes I think it sounds like possible evidence tampering that her emails have conveniently been deleted given that there are ongoing investigations that have subpoenaed Gov. Palin’s email messages, but I still think it is sick and wrong that someone has cracked her account and posted the information online.

Onion Fun: Obama Deletes Another Unread MoveOn.org E-Mail

zach — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 18:09:39 +0000

Article that made me laugh this morning:

Obama Deletes Another Unread MoveOn.org E-Mail

“They already know I’m going to vote for Obama,” Obama added. “The only people who sign up for this thing are Democrats anyway. They’re just preaching to the choir.”

…

“I know this election is important and everything,” Obama added. “But these people seriously need to relax.”

Love the Onion.

Fox News headline says Palin “Misleads”, then doesn’t.

zach — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 03:03:34 +0000

A remarkable headline?

I took a look at Google News this afternoon and noticed the following remarkable headline, “Palin Misleads: Accuses Obama of Supporting Tax Hikes”. That headline is not remarkable on its face, but what took me by surprise was that it was apparently the headline of an article on FOXNews.com (slogan “We Report. You Decide.”). I decided long ago that Fox News is partisan in the general direction of the current Republican party, so I did a double-take when noting that they’d published an article with a headline so sharply critical of the GOP Vice Presidential candidate.

Click image to see screenshot at full size.

I clicked through and read the article. Though it wasn’t the attack-dog piece on Palin that the headline had led me to expect, it did include some salient criticisms of her recent statements –and was more balanced than I’ve come to expect from Fox. Then I noticed that the article’s headline had been defanged from the original, and now reads,”Palin Accuses Obama of Supporting Tax Hikes”. My guess is that when the article was first posted, the headline included the word “Misleads”, and this is the headline that was present when the Google News bot crawled the Fox News site, indexed the article, and built the database that is used to auto-generate Google News pages. Sometime in the 10 minutes that elapsed from the moment I loaded the Google News front page and clicked the Fox News article, the editors at Fox News changed the article’s headline to change the focus from the fact that Palin made misleading statements to the simple fact that she made accusations. I wonder if the contents of the article were similarly adjusted.

Click image to see screenshot at full size.

As an aside, I’d encourage anyone who is curious about the respective Obama and McCain tax plans to take a look at the infographic and discussion on this page. That infographic is an attempt by some statistically-minded bloggers to bring some clarity to the table and correct the distortions and mistakes made by many such graphics recently published in print media. Rathergate proved that blogs and internet forums can make up a powerful “5th estate” to keep tabs on and correct the media’s failings. I think it’s interesting to see that this netizen watchdog role encompasses even infographics.

Technorati Tags: Fifth Estate, Fourth Estate, Fox News, McCain, Media, Obama, Palin, Politics

White people won’t be the majority in 2042? Which white people?

zach — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 06:11:21 +0000

The US Census bureau¹ has come out with a report which states that ethnic and racial minorities will outnumber the majority by the year 2042². I don’t know if the Census bureau uses the word “whites” because I can’t find their report online, but the Associated Press promptly wrote a headline declaring,”White Americans no longer a majority by 2042“, and the Detroit Free Press declared,”Whites will be US minority group by 2042, Census predicts“.

But “White” and “minority” are surprisingly mutable social constructs in the USA. History tells me that in the U.S., whoever is considered to be on top of the socioeconomic ladder at a given period of time automatically becomes part of the “White” blob. At one point, all those Italian immigrants to the US were not considered to be White, and the Whiteness of Irish and European Jewish immigrants was also in doubt.

I bet there were similar if more clearly alarmist headlines back in the early 1900s, shouting to anyone who would listen that in a few decades Whites would be outnumbered by these non-Anglo immigrant masses. In 2042, when the ethnic and racial groups included under the White banner include Latinos, Hispanics, and East Asians³ , I fully expect to see identical headlines to those of today about how “Whites will lose their majority status by 2076″.

America has always bubbled with immigration, cultural exchange and conflict, opportunity and oppression, and demographic shifts. My rational mind suspects there’s little new about this latest batch of news, though I am planning to hurry up and learn some Español, Italian, and Yiddish just in case.

Technorati Tags: race, whitey

Motto: “Page Last Modified: May 20, 2004″
Perhaps not coincidentally, 2042 is also the year in which a computer-generated Charles Grodin will replace Chris Tucker as Jackie Chan’s co-star in the ever-popular Rush Hour franchise.
If that assumption sounds improbable to your 2008 racial spidey-sense, please reevaluate my argument in 2038.

Save Our Taco Trucks!

zach — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:33:12 +0000

From saveourtacotrucks.org:

Led by District 1 County Supervisor Gloria Molina, the L.A. Board of Supervisors has passed new restrictions that will effectively eliminate taco trucks from our streets. Under Supervisor Molina’s new rules, taco trucks will have to change location every hour, or face a misdemeanor charge carrying a $1000 fine and/or jail. Yes, jail.
Taco Trucks are a special facet of Los Angeles, and something we don’t want to lose. Though this ordinance currently affects just unincorporated parts of L.A., that’s 65% of the County. And of course it opens up the doors for legislation closer to home too.

I happen to think taco trucks are cuter than the average brick and mortar restaurant, and always like seeing them parked around the city, serving their wares. If you also think taco trucks are charming or useful, and don’t want to see them disappear from Los Angeles, you could do worse than spend a few minutes visiting the saveourtacotrucks.org website. There you can download printable posters, sign petitions, that sort of thing. If you’re wondering what a taco truck is, there are plenty of photos of taco trucks on flickr for you to peruse.

Technorati Tags: food, hollywood, los angeles, mexican food, politics, taco, taco truck