Interesting Links for 21-9-2011

[andrewducker]

• Where do I get Sonic Screwdriver replacement ink?
  (tags: funny drwho)
• Turkey finds a radical solution to football hooliganism - banning men from the stadiums
  (tags: football gender violence turkey)
• Mexico president hints legalizing drugs may be needed
  (tags: drugs Mexico usa)
• People think that a silent majority agrees with them
  (tags: voting society psychology belief)
• Hackers break SSL encryption used by millions of sites
  (tags: encryption security web)
• Some insight into why children get shiny new cells, not their parents' worn out ones.
  (tags: genes children)
• Autonomous Car Navigates the Streets of Berlin
  (tags: technology driving cars)
• Google+ opens service to everyone. Anyone still care?
  (tags: google googleplus)
• Some of the bad choices made in Game of Thrones
  (tags: funny gameofthrones)
• FAQ: The “Snake Fight” Portion Of Your Thesis Defense. I think most PhD students would prefer this...
  (tags: academia phd funny satire)

Comments

[miss_s_b]

Yet another thing where Lib Dems are weird. We tend to assume (and bemoan) that most people disagree with us.

[pseudomonas]

And blame it on the Daily Mail.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

Well, for 'anyone still care?', here's a data point - ten people added me today...

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

How many of them where provably actually people?

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

Eight were people I know. The other two I didn't add back, but seemed to have a few people in common with me.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

"people in common" could mean that your friends have added them, or that they have added your friends. It's deceptively ambiguous.

[ckd]

Spot-checking indicates that it's people who your circle members have added to their circles.

(In particular, the "glamour photo 'university student'" profiles that have added ~1000 people but aren't in any circles show up with no "people in common".)

[pigwotflies.livejournal.com]

Before clicking the cells link, I thought it referred to cell phones, not body cells. Why? I'm not an American? Maybe I'm used to the internets being in American. Weird. And clearly I didn't read the tags either.

[usmu.livejournal.com]

It's good to know I'm not the only one. :)

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Me too, and I'm not even American. I can assure you that *my* children get their parents' worn out mobiles.

[skington.livejournal.com]

Moxie Marlinspike is a fantastic name.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

People think that a silent majority agrees with them

That's incomprehensible to me - I've always known that I'm a freak and that my politics are very far to the left of most of the US. I'd expect that "silent majority" in Denmark or Sweden to agree with most of my political beliefs, but definitely not here.

Autonomous Car Navigates the Streets of Berlin

I didn't know automatic cars could effectively drive in traffic. At this point, I'm betting on commercial release within 3-4 years (with legal requirements for a licensed driver to be behind the wheel for far longer).

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Why Denmark? Denmark has had a coalition government of right-wing parties for years (although confusingly, the biggest of the right wing parties is actually called 'Left'.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I assume because Danish right-wing parties are not so in US terms. On the spectrum of the US mainstream, Venstre are left-wing, though in Scandinavia they are not. I don't know heron61's politics, but she could be far to the US left and still a Danish right-winger (or, of course, a Danish left-winger, who I see have just won the elections).

(I vividly remember the seminar in Denmark when the political system was explained to we overseas exchange students and one of the US students asked, not unreasonably from her POV, who on earth was on the left if the lecturer had just put the liberals on the right. And come to that, where were the Republicans?)

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

That makes sense*. I think you're right in saying that it's American politics that doesn't fit into the conventional views of left and right. I'd characterise the U.S. Democratic Party as basically a centre-right party, but one that for the last twenty or so years has been hung up on political correctness (possibly out of guilt for previously (in the South) being the party of racial segregation).

I've given up trying to work out what the Republicans stand for. They seem to have a small libertarian faction that's being bullied out of existence by a larger christian faction that doesn't seem to have much idea of what to stand for politically or economically past "What Would Jesus Do?".



Q: How many sensible Republican presidential candidates does it take to change a light bulb?
A: It's going to be a long four years isn't it...?


Q: How many Democrats does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Just bring Obama into the room and ask him to remove his pants. We all know the sun shines out of his arse.


Oh, and the American use of the word 'liberal' to denote people who believe in a bigger role for the federal government is just as confusing as Denmark having a right-wing party called 'Left'.



* Although the Danish People's Party (the third party of the current coalition) is in some ways more right-wing than anything in the U.S.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I have spent many fruitless internet hours trying to explain to a member of the tea party that when a certain group of people on that forum talked about Liberalism we were actually talking about the 19th Century political philosophy centred around personal liberty and not a form of fig leave socialism.

This hurt my head.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I think if I were Mexican I would be very, very cross with the US Federal government's intransigence on the subject of decriminalisation. 42,000 deaths and your northern border is essentially a free fire zone. Not pretty.