Dr. Norman Borlaug, agronomist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, is dead at 95. By developing strains of wheat and rice that could grow much more densely, he helped Mexico and South Asia increase crop yields by staggering margins, and in turn saved more lives than any other person in the 20th century. The Times has written a lovely obituary; it reminds me that science is a force for optimism and can help us solve the problems that we ourselves create.
Category: Links
I don’t spend much time comparing blogs — favorably or unfavorably — to the mainstream media. But Deadspin’s feature on how NBA stat crews pad their own teams’ stats is far more newsworthy than anything that happens in (for example) The Brett Favre Saga.
The Onion makes me so happy sometimes.
Yesterday, Sunlight Labs announced Apps for America 2. The follow‐up contest marks the recent launch of data.gov
by soliciting apps that find interesting ways to crunch that site’s numbers. (Not sure if I’ll enter yet; I haven’t had much time to see what data.gov has to offer.)
Michael Tyznik’s entry in The Daily Blend’s Dollar RedDe$ign Project. This is currency triumph: eliminate the penny and the dollar bill, introduce $1 and $2 coins, and get people talking about the Bill of Rights. Oh, and it uses Stag, the goddamned excellent font that I use on this here weblog.
InfoQ posted a “virtual panel” in which framework authors answer questions about HTML5. Thomas Fuchs and I, among others, answer questions about how (if?) HTML5 will make our lives easier, and what more we want out of JavaScript in the future.
I’ve had my new unibody MacBook Pro for a week and adore it to tears, but it wasn’t until just now that I was able to address my one outstanding nitpick: I kept accidentally triggering the “pinch zoom” gesture in Safari, making everything on the page awkwardlry huge. There’s no way to turn it off in the settings without disabling multitouch on the trackpad altogether. But Jeff Hawkins’s InputManager fix does the trick. Also available for Firefox and Mail.app.
In case you don’t follow Louisiana politics (and why don’t you? it’s hilarious): Republican David Vitter — prostitute patron, hypocrite, and general‐purpose jackass — is up for reelection in 2010. He’ll face a legitimate challenge from the Dems, but a grassroots movement to give Vitter a GOP primary challenge is getting pretty hot and heavy. Award‐winning adult film actress Stormy Daniels is considering a run; she kicked off a “listening tour” today in her native Baton Rouge. I hope she will do the right thing for the state of Louisiana and for my general amusement.
Dean Edwards explains how the standard “callback” pattern in JavaScript is too brittle for something like a “DOM ready” event. Prototype appears to be the one major library that handles this “correctly.” WIN!
That SXSW panel I was on the other day (I am, um, awful at self‐promotion, even on my own blog) has already been released via podcast, to my own astonishment. John Resig‘s got the slides, so as soon as he posts them I’m sure we’ll find a way to synchronize them to this audio.