Why @PayPal is wrong regarding @Regretsy, according to their own policies

Geek Girl explains Why @PayPal is wrong regarding @Regretsy, according to their own policies in yet another ridiculous online customer service screw up that's well documented on the Internet and goes viral.

El Bulli: Cooking in Progress at MFA in Dec

If you haven't see it, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is showing El Bulli: Cooking in Progress Dec 21-30. It's one of my favorite films of the year.

"El Bulli: Cooking in Progress by Gereon Wetzel (Germany, 2010, 108 min.). “A treat for chefs and foodies,” (The New York Times) and a sold-out success at the MFA in August, the film program brings back this behind-the-scenes documentary that witnesses the tasting, smelling, and designing of new culinary delights for heralded chef Ferran Adrià’s world famous El Bulli Restaurant. Adrià closed El Bulli on July 30, 2011 to set up an academy of culinary arts. After Adrià made this announcement, more than two million people applied for a last chance to eat there. In Spanish with English subtitles."

I saw Ferran Adria talk at Harvard last night as part of the Science and Cooking series which he helped start two years ago.

The Animals House of the Rising Sun Old School Computer Remix

Presidential Primary Infographics

The Wall Street Journal maps the Presidential Primary Calendar Shake-Up "With conventional wisdom pressuring candidates to score victories on early-voting states, Iowa, New Hampshire, Florida and South Carolina have moved their caucuses and primaries earlier in recent presidential elections. See how recent presidential primary calendars compare."

Chart Porn describes it as "An interesting comparison of state primary and caucus dates 2000-2012, both for the Democrats and Republicans. You can watch Iowa and New Hampshire keep moving back the opening day to stay before other states trying to steal the spotlight. The bad news: Super Tuesday isn’t until March 6th – so we have 3 more months to go of lame media coverage of the Republican field."

The Economist provides An interactive guide to the Republican candidates for president. "Our interactive map provides the latest polling data for the Republican candidates in each state (where polling is available). Point your cursor at a state and a bar chart will appear showing who is leading the race in that state and the date of the poll. There is also a "Zoom to" drop-down tag above the map that you can scroll to take you directly to a state."

The National Post charts Anyone but Romney: The GOP race so far. "As new Republican contenders have emerged, taken off and then crashed in the polls, Mitt Romney’s support has remained one of the few constants in the nomination race. And yet the GOP can’t seem to fully embrace him. The National Post’s graphics team takes a look at the ups and downs of the race so far."

Mapping Boston's worst towing spots

The Boston Globe wrote To avoid a tow, avoid parking in a certain strip mall in Allston. "More than 90,000 cars are towed away in Boston each year. A Globe review finds the hot spots for losing your wheels."

It included this nice three part infographic.

What's Behind A Temper Tantrum? Scientists Deconstruct The Screams

WBUR posted today What's Behind A Temper Tantrum? Scientists Deconstruct The Screams. "The trick in getting a tantrum to end as soon as possible, Potegal said, was to get the child past the peaks of anger. Once the child was past being angry, what was left was sadness, and sad children reach out for comfort. The quickest way past the anger, the scientists said, was to do nothing. Of course, that isn't easy for parents or caregivers to do."

New, Super Long-Lasting Battery Electrode

Stanford Seeks to Boost Clean Energy With New, Super Long-Lasting Battery Electrode "Using a nanoparticle of copper, copper hexacyanoferrate, the scientists developed a battery electrode that survived 40,000 cycles of charging and discharging, compared to 400 cycles for a lithium-ion electrode. Even after 40,000 charges, the battery still managed to retain 80-percent of its original charge capacity, according to Stanford."

"The Stanford team created the electrode using copper hexacyanoferratte, but is still searching for the proper material for the anode, although they say they have several candidates in mind."

25 Most Expensive Restaurants in America

bundle has a graphic of The 25 Most Expensive Restaurants in America. None are in Boston. New York City has eight and Chicago has six. Click to embiggen.

Kindle Touch compared to Nook Simple Touch, Kobo Touch, and Kindle 4

Marco Arment: creator of Instapaper writes Kindle Touch compared to Nook Simple Touch, Kobo Touch, and Kindle 4. It's the best review of e-ink readers I've seen.

Hard Times at Occupy Boston

By far the best thing I've read about an Occupy site, Hard Times at Occupy Boston by Sam Graham-Felsen in The Nation.

Trump to Moderate Republican Debate

Trump to Moderate Republican Debate.

"It’s officially a reality television Republican primary now. Donald Trump is pairing up with Newsmax, the conservative magazine and news Web site, to moderate a presidential debate in Des Moines on Dec. 27...Mr. Trump’s role in the debate, which will be broadcast on the cable network Ion Television, is sure to be one of the more memorable moments in a primary season that has already delivered its fair share of circus-like spectacle."

I hope he fires them all.

BozoCrack

"BozoCrack is a depressingly effective MD5 password hash cracker with almost zero CPU/GPU load. Instead of rainbow tables, dictionaries, or brute force, BozoCrack simply finds the plaintext password. Specifically, it googles the MD5 hash and hopes the plaintext appears somewhere on the first page of results. It works way better than it ever should."

That's pretty hilarious.

Daily Show: America's Next TARP Model

Last night's opening segment was quite good. I had seen something on Facebook earlier in the day about how is it that Martha Stewart went to jail and i don't quite get the connection. She went to jail on insider trading. It may have only been for $45K, but still, it's not like she's in the 99%.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Fukushima Earthquake Moved Seafloor Half a Football Field

Scientific American writes Fukushima Earthquake Moved Seafloor Half a Football Field "The March 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake that decimated Japan and its Fukushima nuclear reactors with a monster tsunami altered the seafloor off the country’s eastern coast much more than scientists had thought. Analysis released today in the journal Science indicates the ocean bed moved as much as 50 meters laterally and 16 meters vertically. The magnitude 9.0 quake occurred close to the nearby Japan Trench that runs north to south in the Pacific Ocean."

Death to Pennies

Chick-fil-A Has Trademarked "Eat More"

Last year a friend moved to Montpelier VT and I went to visit. Walking downtown I noticed t-shirts that said "Eat More Kale". Turns out there's a big push to eat kale in Montpelier. I have another friend who loves kale and I picked her up a t-shirt. Now I see that this t-shirt is the source of a stupid trademark lawsuit.

Kale fan vows to fight Chick-fil-A "A folk artist expanding his home business built around the words “eat more kale” says he’s ready to fight root-to-feather to protect his phrase from what he sees as an assault by Chick-fil-A, which holds the trademark to the phrase “eat mor chikin.”"

My understanding of trademark law is limited but I think I know two relevant points. First, a trademark holder, Chick-fil-A must defend their trademark or risk losing it. It's not just idle. If the trademark is known generically for a class of products then the holder can lose the trademark. Examples are aspirin, escalator and zipper. Others have come close but the owners have fought and held on to them, such as Kleenex and Band-Aid. So if Chick-fil-A knew of an infringement and didn't fight, that fact could be used against them in another trademark lawsuit.

Second, in order for it to be infringement, someone would have to be confused by the use of the trademark. I seriously doubt someone is going to confuse "Eat More Kale" with "eat mor chikin". So the end result is that that big giant company sues tiny little business and if they can afford the fight, the tiny little business wins, though that is a big if. Ain't the law great?

A Club of Liars, Demagogues, and Fools

A Club of Liars, Demagogues, and Fools—By Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine) "The German newsweekly Spiegel takes the latest disclosures concerning Herman Cain and the rise of Newt Gingrich as an opportunity to offer a foreign bird’s-eye view of the current Republican Party and the American media froth around it."

"The most important observation Spiegel offers is this: At a time of mounting crisis, when much of the world is looking to the United States for leadership and initiative, the celebration of sleaze and ignorance that has marked the Republican primary is damaging the reputation of the nation as a whole. Even those who despise the G.O.P. should be concerned about the depths to which the party has sunk."

Meanwhile, as we set record high temperatures today, Al Gore reminds us that "Every National Academy of Science has confirmed the existence of climate change."

Anthrax Victim’s Family to Receive $2.5 Million in Settlement

I'm still amazed that people seem to have forgotten about the anthrax attacks. The New York Time reports, Anthrax Victim’s Family to Receive $2.5 Million in Settlement "The federal government has agreed to pay $2.5 million to the widow and children of the first person killed in the anthrax letter attacks of 2001, settling a lawsuit claiming that the Army did not adequately secure its supply of the deadly pathogen."

2011 Hurricane Season In 4.5 Minutes

NOAA releases animation that packs hurricane season into 4 1/2 minutes. "With the Atlantic hurricane season officially ending today, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released a satellite photo animation that shows the entire hurricane season in 4 1/2 minutes. Hurricane Irene is the star of the show, appearing at about 2:05 on the video."

When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality and Liberals Become So Unreasonable??

New York Magazine had a pair of interesting political articles.

David Frum wrote When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality? "America desperately needs a responsible and compassionate alternative to the Obama administration’s path of bigger government at higher cost. And yet: This past summer, the GOP nearly forced America to the verge of default just to score a point in a budget debate. In the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, Republican politicians demand massive budget cuts and shrug off the concerns of the unemployed. In the face of evidence of dwindling upward mobility and long-stagnating middle-class wages, my party’s economic ideas sometimes seem to have shrunk to just one: more tax cuts for the very highest earners. When I entered Republican politics, during an earlier period of malaise, in the late seventies and early eighties, the movement got most of the big questions—crime, inflation, the Cold War—right. This time, the party is getting the big questions disastrously wrong."

"It was not so long ago that Texas governor Bush denounced attempts to cut the earned-income tax credit as “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.” By 2011, Republican commentators were noisily complaining that the poorer half of society are “lucky duckies” because the EITC offsets their federal tax obligations—or because the recession had left them with such meager incomes that they had no tax to pay in the first place. In 2000, candidate Bush routinely invoked “churches, synagogues, and mosques.” By 2010, prominent Republicans were denouncing the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan as an outrageous insult. In 2003, President Bush and a Republican majority in Congress enacted a new ­prescription-drug program in Medicare. By 2011, all but four Republicans in the House and five in the Senate were voting to withdraw the Medicare guarantee from everybody under age 55. Today, the Fed’s pushing down interest rates in hopes of igniting economic growth is close to treason, according to Governor Rick Perry, coyly seconded by TheWall Street Journal. In 2000, the same policy qualified Alan Greenspan as the “greatest central banker in the history of the world,” according to Perry’s mentor, Senator Phil Gramm. Today, health reform that combines regulation of private insurance, individual mandates, and subsidies for those who need them is considered unconstitutional and an open invitation to “death panels.” A dozen years ago, a very similar reform was the Senate Republican alternative to Hillarycare. Today, stimulative fiscal policy that includes tax cuts for almost every American is “socialism.” In 2001, stimulative fiscal policy that included tax cuts for rather fewer Americans was an economic­-recovery program."

I found just about everything in it to be quotable, read the whole thing. Also read Jonathan Chait's When Did Liberals Become So Unreasonable? "The cultural enthusiasm sparked by Obama’s candidacy drained away almost immediately after his election. All the passion now lies with the critics, and it is hard to find a liberal willing to muster any stronger support than halfhearted murmuring about the tough situation Obama inherited, or vague hope that maybe in a second term he can really start doing things."

"Here is my explanation: Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president. They can be happy with the idea of a Democratic president—indeed, dancing-in-the-streets delirious—but not with the real thing. The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline. Instead they compare Obama with an imaginary president—either an imaginary Obama or a fantasy version of a past president."

He goes on to tell the history of presidential accomplishments back to FDR and makes a compelling case that presidents we now think of as great, weren't viewed that way by their contemporaries and probably shouldn't have been. And any article that quotes Monty Python’s Life of Brian is okay by me. His summation of Obama's accomplishments is quite good:

"By that standard, Obama’s first term would indeed seem to qualify as gangsta shit. His single largest policy accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, combines two sweeping goals—providing coverage to the uninsured and taming runaway medical-cost inflation—that Democrats have tried and failed to achieve for decades. Likewise, the Recovery Act contained both short-term stimulative measures and increased public investment in infrastructure, green energy, and the like. The Dodd-Frank financial reform, while failing to end the financial industry as we know it, is certainly far from toothless, as measured by the almost fanatical determination of Wall Street and Republicans in Congress to roll it back.

Beneath these headline measures is a second tier of accomplishments carrying considerable historic weight. A bailout and deep restructuring of the auto industry that is rapidly being repaid, leaving behind a reinvigorated sector in the place of a devastated Midwest. Race to the Top, which leveraged a small amount of federal seed money into a sweeping national wave of education experiments, arguably the most significant reform of public schooling in the history of the United States. A reform of college loans, saving hundreds of billions of dollars by cutting out private middlemen and redirecting some of the savings toward expanded Pell Grants. Historically large new investments in green energy and the beginning of regulation of greenhouse gases. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act for women. Elimination of several wasteful defense programs, equality for gays in the military, and consumer-friendly regulation of food safety, tobacco, and credit cards.

Of the postwar presidents, only Johnson exceeds Obama’s domestic record, and Johnson’s successes must be measured against a crushing defeat in Vietnam. Obama, by contrast, has enjoyed a string of foreign-policy successes—expanding targeted strikes against Al Qaeda (including one that killed Osama bin Laden), ending the war in Iraq, and helping to orchestrate an apparently successful international campaign to rescue Libyan dissidents and then topple a brutal kleptocratic regime. So, if Obama is the most successful liberal president since Roosevelt, that would make him a pretty great president, right?"

Health Insurance Premiums, Dissected

My health insurance just went up 15% which it did last year and the year before. I found this Washington Post article from October that tries to explain why, Health insurance premiums, dissected.

"Thanks to some new insurance rate filings, required by the health reform law, we’re starting to get some answers — but also a lot of familiar finger pointing over who is to blame for growing health insurance bills."

"Flip through the filings and you see that, on average, insurers attribute about 60 to 70 percent of any given insurance rate increase to the growing cost of delivering health care."

"But the hospitals say its not their fault: The cost of treating patients, as new and more complex medical options become available, necessarily pushes prices up. “There’s better technology that’s demanded by patients and physicians,” says Caroline Steinberg, vice president of trends analysis for the American Hospital Association."

"Where do the rest of the costs go? Most companies say that a smaller portion of their premium increase, usually hovering around 15 percent, will cover growing administrative expenses. This part of the premium is facing downward pressure from the health reform law, which bars insurers from spending more than 20 percent on anything that’s not medical treatment."

"As for profits, its a pretty mixed bag. I found a pretty even split between plans that expect to earn money next year, usually about 3 or 4 percent, and those who expect to take a loss."

I'm not sure I believe that there are all these new expensive treatments in each of the last few years that everyone is getting. As far as I know, new drug treatments have stalled and MRI's are still the big diagnostic equipment. I thought it was that as the population ages and becomes more obese we have more conditions to treat like diabetes and hypertension. That means we're spending on more treatments (and not spending on keeping people healthy by changing the farm bill and paying for gym memberships), but not that individual treatments are more expensive. But they are and I thought it was because hospitals and doctors amortize the costs of treating those that can't pay by raising rates on those that can. Also I know that ICU care is expensive and I'm pretty sure end-of-life care has stretched out to be much more than it was 20 years ago and I think that's raising general hospital costs too. Maybe I'm wrong.

Barney Frank didn’t cause the housing crisis

The Washington Post reiterates Barney Frank didn’t cause the housing crisis "So was Barney Frank to blame for our woes? There are two lines of argument here, and neither is all that compelling. The first contention is that Frank failed to exercise diligent oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as the housing bubble swelled. There’s something to this, though it’s worth noting that Frank was in the congressional minority for most of the period in question. The second argument is that Frank and other Democrats — by promoting policies to boost affordable housing — somehow caused the subprime mess and financial collapse. That argument is especially hard to square with the facts."



"Still, Fannie and Freddie were starting to act recklessly in other ways. As Jeff Madrick and Frank Portnoy detail in the New York Review of Books, Fannie Mae “aggressively minimized federal regulation of its activities and it fought off attempts to tax its profits, partly through extravagant favors to influential lawmakers.” Frank was one of those favored lawmakers — between 1989 and 2008 he received $42,350 in campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie. Frank even helped get his then-boyfriend a job at Fannie Mae. And yet, for the bulk of this period, Democrats in Congress were in the minority. Even if Frank wanted to help out Fannie and Freddie, he wasn’t in a position to lead these efforts until 2007. (In 2005, when Frank helped sponsor a bipartisan House bill to create an independent regulator for Fannie and Freddie, it died in the Senate.)"

Secret Software on Android Phones Logging Everything

Wired blogs Researcher’s Video Shows Secret Software on Millions of Android Phones Logging Everything

"The Android developer who raised the ire of a mobile-phone monitoring company last week is on the attack again, producing a video of how the Carrier IQ software secretly installed on millions of mobile phones reports most everything a user does on a phone.

Though the software is installed on most modern Android, BlackBerry and Nokia phones, Carrier IQ was virtually unknown until 25-year-old Trevor Eckhart of Connecticut analyzed its workings, revealing that the software secretly chronicles a user’s phone experience — ostensibly so carriers and phone manufacturers can do quality control.

But now he’s released a video actually showing the logging of text messages, encrypted web searches and, well, you name it."

Update: Apple fanblog Cult of Mac makes a good point, Steve Jobs Was Right, Android Logs Everything. "This is absolutely insane. Apple was practically crucified over LocationGate, which was just a cache of GPS locations stored on user’s home machines. Meanwhile, almost every Android phone out there is reading people’s emails and logging their passwords, while no one bats an eye."

Where in the World? A Google Earth Puzzle

In Focus presents a puzzle, Where in the World? A Google Earth Puzzle - Alan Taylor - In Focus - The Atlantic "Looking at the world through via Google Earth offers striking images of the diversity of our planet and the impact that humans have had on it. Today's entry is a puzzle -- part 2 in a series (part 1 here), this time offering multiple choices. We're challenging you to figure out where in the world each of the images below is taken. North is not always up in these pictures, and, apart from a bit of contrast, they are unaltered images provided by Google and its mapping partners. So I invite you to have a look at the images below, make your guesses, and see your score at the end. Good luck! [25 images]"

Opening quotes from The Wire

Opening quotes from The Wire "The beginning of each episode of The Wire featured a short quote of dialogue from that episode...here are the characters saying all those quotes:" (via kottke.org)