Interesting Links for 11-02-2012

• A Strange Form of Social Collapse (i.e. one where life is getting steadily better)
  (tags: society usa crime pregnancy )
• About my 'spilled semen' amendment to Oklahoma's Personhood bill
  (tags: politics women usa viaZornhau )
• What does new glacier data mean for the climate debate?
  (tags: globalwarming glaciers )
• IT guy answers daughter's Facebook rant by shooting her laptop
  (tags: facebook parenting funny )
• Economics explained: Plan A vs Plan B
  (tags: economics uk )
• Scotland may have answers to English maths problem
  (tags: scotland england education mathematics )
• Iran Shut Down Gmail , Google , Yahoo and sites using “Https” Protocol
  (tags: iran internet censorship )
• The Swedish model is the opposite of the big society
  (tags: sweden society politics )
• There is no single root cause of your problems (or successes)
  (tags: complexity problems systems troubleshooting )
• The internet is drowning in inaccurate anti-ACTA arguments
  (tags: copyright law )
• British children are culture starved
  (tags: uk culture art )
• Controlling parents more likely to have delinquent children
  (tags: development behaviour children parenting )

Kitten!

I'm over at my brother's to make use of his washing machine.

On the plus side, they've gone out swimming leaving me alone with a playful kitten.

On the down side, my hand is mysteriously in pain, after many small holes appeared in it.

I saw the sun shine through the sea, poured its light down over me

Time lapse video of fog over San Francisco during day and night. Utterly gorgeous.

The Unseen Sea from Simon Christen on Vimeo.

via sbisson

I read comics so you don't have to

From OurValuedCustomers, which I read mostly so I can despair.


From PhD Comics, which is so realistic that Julie can't read it at the moment.

What we do

I bumped into this randomly:


and then bart_calendar posted this one his girlfriend made:


I assume it's now a meme, and there are thousands of them out there.

I bought a book today. It was a little more faff than I'd like.

nancylebov linked me to an essay about the importance of myths that reminded me that I'd been meaning to read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms after seeing some good reviews of it a while back.

So I popped over to the Google ebooks store, tracked it down for £4.99, checked that it was in epub format (because frankly PDFs do not resize well) and downloaded it. I then had to install Adobe Digital Editions, because that manages the DRM. And I then googled for this guide to stripping the DRM straight off of it.

It took me about five minutes to download the latest version of Calibre (which is the best app for transferring books to readers, in my experience) and the tools for removing the DRM, and everything just worked first time. I now have a file in an industry standard format, that's not locked in any way, that I don't have to worry about people removing my right to use, or locking to any number of devices.

I refuse, if you didn't know, to have anything to do with locked file formats if I can possibly avoid it. There have been enough examples already of people buying music or video from a vendor who then shuts down their authentication server, leaving them with a bunch of files that can't be played. And once I've bought a book/song/video I want to be able to read/watch/listen to it wherever I fancy, without a third party telling me what I can do with it.

And so I'll happily buy MP3s from Amazon (or whoever), because everything plays MP3s. And now I know I can pick the locks on Google books I'll happily buy them and instantly do so. I just wish that (a) they wouldn't feel the need to put the locks on in the first place, and (b) more people would do similarly with video.