Pears is an open source WordPress theme, enabling people like you to get your own pattern library up and running quickly.
At first glance, it appears to be more general than for just WordPress. Looks like a good starting point for a generically good looking UI.
China fact of the day — Marginal Revolution
Simply astounding. I hold my opinion that continued growth in China can not continue unless there’s some significant social upheaval.
Possibly my favorite Radiolab episode. Scientists have used Henrietta Lack’s cells in all sorts of medical experiments that led to vaccines and advances in our understanding of cancer, and they’ve even shot them out into space — all without her consent.
This is a really fascinating and heart wrenching mini-adaptation of the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which is being turned into an HBO movie penned by Alan Ball.
Very nice! In college I wrote (computer) scripts to do a similar thing, though not as elegantly. They compiled to Latex, and from there into PDF. That was 1999… my how technology moves fast.
(via John Gruber)
How sharing disrupts media | Felix Salmon
From the always insightful Felix Salmon. This is what we’re trying to capitalize on with Remixtus, however our unit of “re” is not the image, but the collection of images.
The Two Things that you need to know for a variety of subjects. (via Swissmiss)
My favorite for software engineering:
Pick two, and only two: stable, feature-complete, on-time.
The Path kerfuffle has been going around for a bit. In case you haven’t heard, their iOS app used to upload the contents of your address book to their servers and they’d store it for future use. iOS doesn’t require the user’s permission for an app to access your address book, so it’s possible (some claim *common*) for any app to get that data.
Dare I say, that seems a shockingly Facebook-esque thing for Apple to do.
Facebook considers what schools you attended and what pages you like data an app must get permission to access. Facebook does not consider who your friends are sensitive data. Your friends are public data that can be access without your knowledge by anybody at anytime.
Facebook’s values are the exact opposite of mine — I care less that a stranger knows what school I went to than who my friends are.
Groupon lost $42.7 million last quarter. But during the same period last year, they lost $378.6 million. That’s an 89% “improvement”.
Nice to see they haven’t axed their sales staff in order to become profitable yet.
10 Tips on Writing Well from David Ogilvy | Brain Pickings
Note that people who think poorly may still write well.
File this under things to keep in mind when designing my operating system that will mount the world. (Been reading Game of Thrones lately…)
Showcase of some of the nicer Google Web Fonts. My eyes glaze over whenever I have to search for a font, so this is a welcome starting point.
Jimmy Williams, a repentant former lobbyist, explains to Planet Money the basics of lobbying and his doe-eyed vision of getting money out of politics. The really insightful point he makes about it all is that the perception that money chases politicians is flipped. In reality, it’s the politicians who chase the money (he regularly dodged calls from politicians he didn’t need), because of the frequency of the election cycle and the sheer cost of getting elected. His solution: remove the dollars.
I’m pessimistic this can be done. Politicians are rich, not just in salary, but also in lifestyle. We’d be asking them to pass laws that would restrict their wealth. Only an enormous amount of public pressure would have any sort of hope.
But I think there might be another strategy: remove the need to spend money. I’m taking a guess that much of the money is spent on ads and publicity. What if, instead, politicians who voluntarily adhere to a set of campaign austerity rules get free access to a PR network with an expansive reach?
Bloggers and content aggregators: I’m looking at you. Set aside space the size of, say, a Google ad, and subscribe to a political ad network which screens for candidates who are abiding by the stripped down finance rules. Maybe this network could even allow you to weight ads by political affiliation or views (it would certainly have to take into account the reader’s location). I haven’t done the math, but I imagine the reach of this network could be enormous with just the top 0.5% or 1% of sites on board. The technology to do this might be similar enough to existing ad delivery networks that perhaps a network would be willing to license or run the infrastructure. What’s left then is creating the organization that coordinates all this and vets the politicians, which is admittedly no small feat.
