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In no particular order:
1. The Bureau Chiefs news briefs have some interesting links. (Actual news stories with amusing link text, brought to you by the people behind @fakeapstylebook.) Among them: Norway has a canine paratrooper.
2. Pop vs. Soda by US county. You can see the real effect of Coke's world HQ in Atlanta, GA. Kind of cool. (I wonder if there's a sprinkles vs jimmies map...)
3. There's a big thing on DW brought about by the latest LJ kerfuffle. (Sort of the straw that broke the camel's back. Except that it's a big straw.) I mentioned that before, but to recap: LJ secretly changed their code so that when you posted a link to Amazon, they got the commission instead of the original poster. It means they edited user's journals without their permission to steal income that some of them were counting on. It's really unscrupulous, and it's only the latest case.
Partly in response to that, partly because of the upcoming anniversary of DW's Open Beta launch, and partly just to promote the site and stir things up, two related movements have popped up:
There's "3 Weeks for Dreamwidth" (which has apparently since been retitled "Dreamwidth Anniversary Fest"). Participants will cease crossposting for three weeks to promote DW and pull in offsite friends.
Not sure how I feel about that. I'm a small-timer, really, and though I've encouraged my LJ friends to come to DW... they haven't. The few who did sign up don't really seem to be using their DW journals anymore. The contact I have with old friends through LJ (limited as it is these days) is crucial for me now. Though I don't like the direction LJ is taking and I would love it if all my LJ friends moved over... keeping in touch with LJ friends is more important for me now, and I don't think my leaving for three weeks is going to convince them to move.
The other thing is the Giant Non-Fandom Friending Meme. Which sounds great. Could always use more friends, right? Except that, emotionally speaking, I'm not in a good place to be promoting myself right now. More contact would probably be good for me, but I'm also not sure that I'm much of a friend right now. Or much of a blogger to follow, for that matter.
4. I'm approaching the 1k tweet mark. How the heck did that happen?
5. Partly, that happened because of The Coffee Party and The Stop Beck campaign.
I like the idea of the Coffee Party, though I haven't been hugely involved. It's non-partisan and the number one item on the agenda (about the only thing that actually is on the agenda, since the party doesn't have a coherent platform yet) is the re-establishment of civil debate across party lines. So, of course, the #coffeeparty Twitter stream is full of trolls screaming Tea Party rhetoric, calling Coffee Party members liberal shills, and throwing around wild accusations of astroturfing (fake grassroots). I tried stepping in a couple of times, telling people they were missing the point and misunderstanding. Most of their claims are provably false just by taking five minutes to look at the site and its discussion forums, but they don't care. It's ironic, of course. The entire point of the Coffee Party is to quell blind anger and promote reasoned discussion. But it's also sad that they can't help but feel the need to attack it and tear it down. It's also no surprise that Fox News had a slanted take on the matter.
As for Stop Beck - He goes further than just about any other major national figure does. We need accountability in our media. That has to start somewhere, and Beck, out on the fringes, seems a good first step. (Though I'd really like to see actual fact-checking of all pundits, with consequences for propaganda, misinformation, and other lies.) The campaign has already gotten 120 advertisers to stop sponsoring the show. In the UK, it's gone over a month without any sponsors. But the show continues to air. (Probably because he brings in huge numbers - which scares me. But many of those viewers stick around for other Fox broadcasts, and dropping the show would alienate a lot of them.) Still, it's a start. And it's garnered some attention from other major media outlets.
6. From the NSF: MIT researchers study spider silk. It's long been known that, pound for pound, spider silk has more tensile strength than steel. New research seems to indicate that it comes from hydrogen bonds. Individually, such bonds are among the weakest molecular connections (though their influence is responsible for, among other things, the fact that ice floats - one of many small factors which makes life on Earth possible). The trick with spider silk is that there is a lot of hydrogen bonding going on, packed tightly together. If bonds break, others will hold the net together... and the bonds will reform, "healing" the damage.
Steel, on the other hand, relies on a fine balance between being simultaneously strengthened and weakened by fragmentation. Steel is made up of tiny crystals, composed of iron, carbon, and sometimes other trace elements. The crystals are hard, jagged things that interlock, pushing against each other. Kind of like a wall made up of stones that fit together. Those hard boundaries give it strength in that they keep neighboring crystals from being pushed around too much. At the same time, though, that same fragmentation makes the metal more brittle. Push hard enough, and those boundaries can become cracks... which quickly spread into large-scale breaks.
It's kind of like the old oak vs willow debate. The oak stands firm, but the willow can bend. Which means that the oak is both stronger and more liable to break. The dense collection of weak bonds makes the spider silk flexible and adaptable - qualities the steel lacks.
7. Saw an ad on TV a week or two back for new One Touch test strips. They're talking about new "Double Sure technology." The thing about home glucose testing is that the FDA only requires that meters be accurate within +/- 20%. Over the years, sample sizes have gone down, reading times have become faster, and bells and whistles have been added... but most companies haven't bothered to make their meters any more accurate. And yet, the number on the screen is what you use to adjust the amount of insulin you take (and perhaps the amount of food you eat). It's absolutely central to the treatment regimen of a potentially life-threatening disease. How well you keep that number in balance will, in the long term, make a big difference in how and when you develop long-term complications like blindness, kidney failure, joint disease, and more.
I've used meters made by Lifescan (which includes the One Touch line) since I first became diabetic. This is the first step towards greater accuracy that I've seen from them or any other meter brand, and I'm looking forward to getting the new strips next time I refill.
They haven't changed the meter. They haven't changed its software or the way it does the reading. The change is in the test strip. But what they're saying is that it reads it twice. I don't work for Lifescan and I can't be sure, but I can only see one logical way for it to work:
The strip takes two readings, averages them, and gives that data to the meter to process as if it were a single test. It's a relatively simple trick that can be done entirely through hard-wiring.
In the end, you're not guaranteed better than the original 20% error factor on any single test, but it does mean a step forward in overall accuracy. Why has no one done this before? And why isn't One Touch doing a better job advertising it?
1. The Bureau Chiefs news briefs have some interesting links. (Actual news stories with amusing link text, brought to you by the people behind @fakeapstylebook.) Among them: Norway has a canine paratrooper.
2. Pop vs. Soda by US county. You can see the real effect of Coke's world HQ in Atlanta, GA. Kind of cool. (I wonder if there's a sprinkles vs jimmies map...)
3. There's a big thing on DW brought about by the latest LJ kerfuffle. (Sort of the straw that broke the camel's back. Except that it's a big straw.) I mentioned that before, but to recap: LJ secretly changed their code so that when you posted a link to Amazon, they got the commission instead of the original poster. It means they edited user's journals without their permission to steal income that some of them were counting on. It's really unscrupulous, and it's only the latest case.
Partly in response to that, partly because of the upcoming anniversary of DW's Open Beta launch, and partly just to promote the site and stir things up, two related movements have popped up:
There's "3 Weeks for Dreamwidth" (which has apparently since been retitled "Dreamwidth Anniversary Fest"). Participants will cease crossposting for three weeks to promote DW and pull in offsite friends.
Not sure how I feel about that. I'm a small-timer, really, and though I've encouraged my LJ friends to come to DW... they haven't. The few who did sign up don't really seem to be using their DW journals anymore. The contact I have with old friends through LJ (limited as it is these days) is crucial for me now. Though I don't like the direction LJ is taking and I would love it if all my LJ friends moved over... keeping in touch with LJ friends is more important for me now, and I don't think my leaving for three weeks is going to convince them to move.
The other thing is the Giant Non-Fandom Friending Meme. Which sounds great. Could always use more friends, right? Except that, emotionally speaking, I'm not in a good place to be promoting myself right now. More contact would probably be good for me, but I'm also not sure that I'm much of a friend right now. Or much of a blogger to follow, for that matter.
4. I'm approaching the 1k tweet mark. How the heck did that happen?
5. Partly, that happened because of The Coffee Party and The Stop Beck campaign.
I like the idea of the Coffee Party, though I haven't been hugely involved. It's non-partisan and the number one item on the agenda (about the only thing that actually is on the agenda, since the party doesn't have a coherent platform yet) is the re-establishment of civil debate across party lines. So, of course, the #coffeeparty Twitter stream is full of trolls screaming Tea Party rhetoric, calling Coffee Party members liberal shills, and throwing around wild accusations of astroturfing (fake grassroots). I tried stepping in a couple of times, telling people they were missing the point and misunderstanding. Most of their claims are provably false just by taking five minutes to look at the site and its discussion forums, but they don't care. It's ironic, of course. The entire point of the Coffee Party is to quell blind anger and promote reasoned discussion. But it's also sad that they can't help but feel the need to attack it and tear it down. It's also no surprise that Fox News had a slanted take on the matter.
As for Stop Beck - He goes further than just about any other major national figure does. We need accountability in our media. That has to start somewhere, and Beck, out on the fringes, seems a good first step. (Though I'd really like to see actual fact-checking of all pundits, with consequences for propaganda, misinformation, and other lies.) The campaign has already gotten 120 advertisers to stop sponsoring the show. In the UK, it's gone over a month without any sponsors. But the show continues to air. (Probably because he brings in huge numbers - which scares me. But many of those viewers stick around for other Fox broadcasts, and dropping the show would alienate a lot of them.) Still, it's a start. And it's garnered some attention from other major media outlets.
6. From the NSF: MIT researchers study spider silk. It's long been known that, pound for pound, spider silk has more tensile strength than steel. New research seems to indicate that it comes from hydrogen bonds. Individually, such bonds are among the weakest molecular connections (though their influence is responsible for, among other things, the fact that ice floats - one of many small factors which makes life on Earth possible). The trick with spider silk is that there is a lot of hydrogen bonding going on, packed tightly together. If bonds break, others will hold the net together... and the bonds will reform, "healing" the damage.
Steel, on the other hand, relies on a fine balance between being simultaneously strengthened and weakened by fragmentation. Steel is made up of tiny crystals, composed of iron, carbon, and sometimes other trace elements. The crystals are hard, jagged things that interlock, pushing against each other. Kind of like a wall made up of stones that fit together. Those hard boundaries give it strength in that they keep neighboring crystals from being pushed around too much. At the same time, though, that same fragmentation makes the metal more brittle. Push hard enough, and those boundaries can become cracks... which quickly spread into large-scale breaks.
It's kind of like the old oak vs willow debate. The oak stands firm, but the willow can bend. Which means that the oak is both stronger and more liable to break. The dense collection of weak bonds makes the spider silk flexible and adaptable - qualities the steel lacks.
7. Saw an ad on TV a week or two back for new One Touch test strips. They're talking about new "Double Sure technology." The thing about home glucose testing is that the FDA only requires that meters be accurate within +/- 20%. Over the years, sample sizes have gone down, reading times have become faster, and bells and whistles have been added... but most companies haven't bothered to make their meters any more accurate. And yet, the number on the screen is what you use to adjust the amount of insulin you take (and perhaps the amount of food you eat). It's absolutely central to the treatment regimen of a potentially life-threatening disease. How well you keep that number in balance will, in the long term, make a big difference in how and when you develop long-term complications like blindness, kidney failure, joint disease, and more.
I've used meters made by Lifescan (which includes the One Touch line) since I first became diabetic. This is the first step towards greater accuracy that I've seen from them or any other meter brand, and I'm looking forward to getting the new strips next time I refill.
They haven't changed the meter. They haven't changed its software or the way it does the reading. The change is in the test strip. But what they're saying is that it reads it twice. I don't work for Lifescan and I can't be sure, but I can only see one logical way for it to work:
The strip takes two readings, averages them, and gives that data to the meter to process as if it were a single test. It's a relatively simple trick that can be done entirely through hard-wiring.
In the end, you're not guaranteed better than the original 20% error factor on any single test, but it does mean a step forward in overall accuracy. Why has no one done this before? And why isn't One Touch doing a better job advertising it?
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