infundibulum

Jesus H Christ.

1.33% of American males are incarcerated. The rates can be much higher within certain demographics - one set of estimates finds that 12.9% of black men between 25-29 were in jail or prison in the US in 2002.

kids are dying out in the snow, look at em go, look at em go

allAfrica.com is one of the better resources on the web for news from Africa. But sometimes…

East Africa [analysis]: Horn of Africa’s Thorny Dispute

Africa is arguably more peaceful now than ever - with war and conflict fast disappearing on the political map as well as wide-ranging political reforms arising from a constellation of factors. Clearly, conflict resolution in Africa has been a resounding success, but the Eritrea-Ethiopia case remains a serious dent.

Huh?

This is absurd:

USATODAY.com - Burger King to offer whopper of a breakfast sandwich

Here’s an idea for a startup.

A restaurant that’s not utterly insane. Serve food in portions that are, you know, rational. Be hip — free wifi. Inform customers on nutrition, not just in a pamphlet you have ask for, but as part of marketing. Offer vegetarian and vegan options that without granola veneer. The complicated menu options would require some technology for ordering — kiosks, maybe, or even web-enabled accounts where you can order things ahead of time, and track calories, etc. Have a website, hire nutritionists to hang out on message boards. Build community.

A restaurant with an API.

I’d certainly frequent such a place.

Here’s a lovely post on how people in exile (or just expatriates) must deal with separation from their language community: Paul Frank’s Language Jottings: Exile and language.

I sometimes feel frustrated that I’m not in Brazil, and that I can’t really live in a Portuguese-speaking environment. I love a lot of languages (too many, probably), but for whatever reason Brazilian Portuguese is the language I love most. The post refers to the fact that one can still be a part of a language community since we now have the internet, and I think it’s true that without the net I would have lost all my Portuguese long ago (I haven’t been there in ten years), but even so, I think I understand what he’s talking about to some extent, even though English is my only native language.

I hang out on some chat boards where people sometimes will photoshop stuff, just as a joke. As a result, I’ve been doing a fair amount of image editing myself (although I use The Gimp, not Photoshop).

I’ve found that this habit has a weird side effect: I have gotten used to thinking of images on the web as malleable things. When I came across this pic on Boingboing:

My immediate reaction was to fix it:

And that’s just tweaking the brightness. I guess I’m easily amused, but to me there’s something vaguely astonishing about how scrolling the little brightness bar reveals things in the shadows. How long will it be before every image on the web will be futzable in this way, straight from the browser?

People would stop ranting about XML. It is useful, after all.

As Napoleon Dynamite would put it, Gosh!

Blog crush.

Suw Charman recently wrote about the challenges involved in making an open source project stay in the black. Ethan Zuckerman wrote about a fundraiser to help four very worthy young Mexican-Americans to get into engineering school (he points to a very compelling story in Wired, which I recommend highly).
Both posts happened to get me thinking about an increasingly common problem…

When the tsunami happened, Amazon.com put up a fund raiser for the Red Cross. You could reload it after waiting just a few seconds, and see that someone else had felt just like you had, and had put some more wood on the fire. For about a week, for me, it was the most addictive site on the internet—the only antidote available to the constant onslaught of horrifying news. And it worked. Much, much better than the Red Cross site did.

Why? Because Amazon.com knows that customers (and contributors) want feedback.
Compare how Wired is handling this fundraiser for the kids trying to get into college:

The Phoenix Union High School District has created a scholarship fund to benefit the further education of Cristian Arcega, Lorenzo Santillan, Luis Aranda, and Oscar Vazquez. To make a donation, please send a check payable to “Phoenix Union Partnership – La Vida Robot Scholarship” at: Phoenix Union Partnership – La Vida Robot Scholarship / Phoenix Union High School District – / Attn: Jodie Baker / 4502 N. Central, Room 5 / Phoenix, AZ 85012

For further information, contact the Carl Hayden High School robotics team adviser Allan Cameron at: Cameron@phxhs.k12.az.us

That’s great, but c’mon, Wired, live up to your name. Which snailmail universe are you living in? It’s not even formatted nicely. Where’s the Kottke-esque micropayment system with Paypal? I want freakin’ bar graphs, guys! I want a damn “Robotics Whiz Kids Tuition” thermometer in Flash, already!

The point isn’t that people are vidiots and are only captivated by pretty pictures. The point is that people feel empowered by feedback. If this fundraiser (or Wordpress, the project Suw described) had a little feedback, the whole thing would stop being a faceless “charity” and become a community project. People trust things that don’t feel like bottomless wells.

The bright folks who run Wikipedia tell you just how much money they raise, down to the day. Guess what—they met their goal with flying colors.

That’s forward thinking.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”