Dispatches

The New York Times reports that a Seattle-based company has announced that they will be increasing the minimum wage for all of their employees to $70,000 per year. “The market rate for me as a C.

Swatting is the disturbing practice of calling in an anonymous police report in order to trigger a SWAT response to a person’s home. It’s been in the news more and more recently, with a number of prominent feminists in the tech industry being targeted in particular.

Tegiminis does a great job breaking down the issues behind sealioning in this article. However, it’s easy to ask a question in bad faith using reasoned, good faith practices. Neutral phrasing does not always guarantee a question is asked in good faith.

Nika Harper’s recent post is gettig a lot of attention, as well it should.

I struggle with the notion of app-evangelizing. In the past, I was as guilty of it as anyone. I would proudly proclaim such-and-such as the ultimate app for something or other. Part of that is an aspect of nerdy fandom, and another large part of it was learned behavior from other online writers. However, I think we can all agree that such statements are disingenous and certainly not an accurate representation of any given market.

One thing that parents can always bond over is irritation over children’s programming on television. For my wife and I, the primary focus of our irritation is the cartoon adaptation of Curious George in all of its incarnations, but we each hate it for different reasons.

I do so love to tinker… One thing that has annoyed me about using a static site generator for my blog has been the lack of scheduled posts. It’s a feature I relied on quite a bit back when I used Wordpress, and also when I built my custom Django CMS.

Interesting piece from PBS that makes a strong case that while Millennials have been raised to be more inclusive of diversity, the framework in which they’ve been instructed blinds them to the systemic racism present in our society.

This piece is a response to Chuck Wendig, who was wishing for an Easter Bunny story with a bit more detail to tell all of our children.

Chris Kluwe takes a look at the NFL retirement program, and provides some blistering commentary on what happens to athletes when they leave the game. An intense drive to be the best, no matter the cost, now unsure what to strive for.

I don’t actually set out to write political pamphlets. I’m always writing story first, and even before that I’m always writing character first – everything is born of character. But I think that I have some very strong feelings about some things; in particular, ideas of fairness and justice.

Big news on the anthropology front. A new dating technique has raised serious doubts about whether humans are related to Lucy at all. It all comes down to the age of Little Foot, a fossil which now seems to indicate that either species might have been the human ancestor.

An interesting, and apparently well-researched post from io9 on the status of research related to depression that illustrate how little we actually know. Though the title is little too linkbaity for my tastes.

Fascinating piece on both the legal and illegal sand trade, and the immense criminal industry that has grown up around the latter. Today criminal gangs in an estimated 70 countries, from Jamaica to Nigeria, dredge up tons of the stuff every year to sell on the black market.

Second Life has always been one the pioneering efforts for Virtual Reality, and its in-sim economy has always been really impressive. Now, it sounds like the folks at Linden Labs are getting ready to prep its platform for integration with gear such as the Oculus Rift.

This article from Ars Technica covers some interesting new research on the science of memory, and why our memories deteriorate over time. It is because we push them out of the way in order to integrate new ones.

This old post from Anil Dash has been making the rounds again this week, and for good reason. As it turns out, we have a way to prevent gangs of humans from acting like savage packs of animals.

Ryan C. Burch has published an interesting piece on Geek Speaker about how Wizards of the Coast used principles from Magic the Gathering to save D&D from itself. His contention is that 2E was inaccessible to most gamers, and that TSR had made management decisions that had seriously hampered future development.

Ars Technica has successfully completed a public records request that allowed them to acquire 4.6 million records from the Oakland Police Department’s automated License Plate Reader (LPR) system. Using their custom built visualization tool, they are able to extrapolate a shocking amount of information about the travel patterns of individual vehicles.