Interesting Links for 6-11-2011

[andrewducker]

• Drew Barrymore, Eddie Murphy named Hollywood’s most overpaid actors.
  (tags: acting pay investment movies )
• The World's Ugliest Music (a TED Talk)
  (tags: music maths science )
• Uber-Time: A Theory of Time Travel In Doctor Who
  (tags: drwho timetravel )
• How A Sheriff Uses His 10,000 Facebook Fans To Solve Crimes
  (tags: facebook police crime )
• 10 Stubborn Food Myths That Just Won’t Die
  (tags: nutrition food myths health )
• 3D moving CAPTCHAs. Just what the world needs.
  And there aren't even any clues as to where it starts!
  (tags: captcha EpicFail )
• Anti-vaccination parents now posting live viruses to each other.
  (tags: virus vaccination EpicFail mail )
• Tableless forms using CSS (after hours of faffing, the simplest approach I've seen)
  (tags: forms html css tables layout )

Comments

I have to disagree with a part of that list

[thejeopardymaze]

Protein is protein, regardless of its source, and there's nothing to the myth that animal protein is somehow better than plant protein.

That is incorrect, we're talking about separate biological kingdoms here. I recognize this as the same animal rights nonsense I used to buy in to back in to my vegetarian days.

What is 'better' in regards to protein depends on what species you are a member of, and humans did evolve to depend on animals for protein resources. http://www.beyondveg.com/ is a great resource for debunking vegetarian myths.

What I hate the most about this kind of 'debunking' is the complete inability of so many to understand even the smallest chemical differences have a huge impact on systems, and ultimately biology, like climate and ocean studies, deals with the study of complex systems. One of my favorite examples of this is the differences between the Omega 3 and 6 fatty acids, pretty small, but you really want more 3's than 6's, and preferably-and this is my opinion, mind you-from natural resources.

[skington.livejournal.com]

CSS still doesn't have the ability to say "make all of these elements the same width, and the widest they need to be" that tables have, though. Which is not a problem for canned examples, but does become a problem when you start getting into i18n territory - translate that form into French and suddenly you need (probably) 30% more room, so if you don't have access to the CSS you're screwed.

I believe there's stuff in CSS that says "display this element as if it were a table cell", but frankly, if you're going to do that, why not just use an actual table? Not to mention that forms like this actually are inherently pretty tabular.

[andrewducker]

I agree. I've got it all looking good, but there's still a manual "Labels are x wide" in the CSS.

Tables wouldn't do it for me here either, I think, because I'm using fieldsets with rows inside them.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Anti-vaccination parents now posting live viruses to each other.

I was goingto link to this one but didn't get around to it. My headline was something like "Anti-vaccination parents take it one step further and start deliberately infecting their children with deadly diseases. I am not making this up, this is from an actual newspaper, not the Onion[1]."

[1] Except I hadn't actually checked the story myself, hence not getting round to posting it.

[andrewducker]

It's not a new thing. It was extremely common before there was a decent vaccine. Chicken Pox (and measles) are both a lot more dangerous to adults than they are to children. Catching them while they just produce a lot of spots is definitely worthwhile.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it makes sense for chicken pox (at least for a long time). I mean, that's basically where vaccines first came from, deliberately infecting with cowpox (?). But I had the impression they were actually using diseases which were too dangerous too -- although as I say, that was the impression I got from the article, and what I based my response on, but I didn't verify that it was accurate (or new).

[luckylove.livejournal.com]

Unless you're me. I spent a week in hospital at the age of six thanks to chicken pox.

[pete stevens (from livejournal.com)]

My elder brother had a week in hospital due to a reaction to the measles vaccine. Consequently I had measles, mumps, german measles and chicken pox.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

3D moving CAPTCHAs. Just what the world needs

As we head further in the direction of creating human-detection tests that even most humans can't pass. I'm also starting to think that Charles Stross' Rule 34 was correct and that spam and anti-spam efforts will eventually produce AIs.

Anti-vaccination parents now posting live viruses to each other.

When some of these idiots are (quite justly) arrested, I'm certain they'll whine at length about government oppression and the evils of "Big-Pharma", and am equally certain that (at least in the US) a bunch of wing-nuts will flock to their defense.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

CSS is inexcusable.
It's significant that it's difficult to find out who was responsible. Obviously someone who didn't know shit about programming.

In the entire histories of writing (it's been invented about half a dozen times), the commonest way to arrange glyphs has been in columns. CSS is such a botch that the nickname for a system for three robust columns is “the Holy Grail”.
And CSS3 is worse. Everybody got one free kitchen sink of their own choosing.

[andrewducker]

So early versions are bad for not supporting things you want, and CSS3 is bad for supporting things other people want as well as the thing you wanted?

That doesn't really make any sense to me.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

No. CSS began wildly inconsistent and with no thought to language design whatsoever. Let's say you want to center an element both horizontally and vertically. How would you do it? Who the hell invented the "box model" and what is its rationale?
CSS3 adds more random crap, still with no thought to consistency or organization. It that sense, it does directly extend CSS in its original direction.
I have never wasted enough time to find out who invented CSS*, but I bet they know nothing about the design of computer languages.

* I have actually Googled a little, but never successfully. One of the painful professional lessons I've learned is that when you find an important strategic decision which is so fubar that no one admits even to knowing who made the original decision, run, don't walk, to the nearest exit.