Sunday, November 8, 2009

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Toronto Star copyeditor edits memo announcing the elimination of copyeditor jobs

Posted: 07 Nov 2009 10:25 PM PST


A copyeditor at the Toronto Star greeted the news that union copyeditor jobs were being eliminated in favor of freelancers by heavily editing the publisher's memo announcing same, pointing out all the ways in which the publisher could benefit from editorial aid.

This is very funny stuff, but having looked at the markup, I have to say that I would ask for a different copyeditor in future. A lot of these edits ("avoid simplistic qualifiers" for "very") fall under the heading of "creative disagreement" not "helpful suggestion" or "correction." I've generally benefitted from copyeditors who know the difference, but on the rare occasion where I've had to deal with a couple hundred pages of redlines by a copyeditor who thought that he was my co-author, it's been quite a struggle.

Disgruntled Star Editor Takes Constructive Revenge (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Zoomquilt II: Flash zoom-through painting

Posted: 07 Nov 2009 04:43 PM PST

Zoomquillllltt

The Zoomquilt II, a 2007 sequel to the jarring Zoomquilt of 2004, is an even more hypnotic Flash zoom-through collaborative painting with bits from more than 30 different artists. Zoomquilt 2 (via @Chris_Carter)

What MP3 player should I buy?

Posted: 07 Nov 2009 07:28 AM PST

I'm in the market for a new MP3 player -- my second-gen iPod Nano is finally dead, and I don't want to buy another iPod, or any other player with DRM built in. I figure that any company that wants to devote its engineers to figuring out how to frustrate my desires doesn't really want my business.

Who'd got a suggestion? I'm looking for something:

  • * small (Nano-sized or smaller),

  • * low-capacity (8GB is fine, all I use it for is podcasts),

  • * chargeable and connectable with a standard USB cable,

  • * reasonably rugged,

  • * with an LCD,

  • * capable of marking some files as podcasts or audiobooks and remembering where you stopped playing them, and,

  • * most importantly, I'm looking for something that can be connected to a set of lanyard headphones like these
I don't care if it has WiFi or Bluetooth, or if it plays games, or if it has a "store" on the net that lets me get music for it directly. I just want a chunk of solid-state storage with a headphone jack and a decent menuing system and headphones I can wear around my neck so that they don't get tangled in things.

Suggestions? Feed the comments, below (don't send email, I'm taking a break from it for the weekend).

Tiny jack-o-lanterns carved in seed-pods

Posted: 07 Nov 2009 07:16 AM PST

Master haunt modeller Ray Keim sez, "After a little bit of experimentation and a lot of patience, I figured out how to carve Putka Pods [ed: small, pumpkin-like dried seeds] into extremely tiny jack-o-lanterns!"

Putka Pod Possibilities! (Thanks, Ray!)

Previously:


Saturday Morning Science Experiment: Surgery On a Beating Heart

Posted: 07 Nov 2009 06:50 AM PST

And Now, Some Ripped-From-the-Headlines Context.....

First, why a beating heart? Traditionally, if you had a clogged artery on your heart and doctors wanted to sew in some "bypass" arteries to get around the sluggish ones, the surgeon would shut your heart down, using a heart and lung machine to pump your blood instead. Less than a decade ago, though, doctors started collecting evidence suggesting that being on the pump could, occasionally, lead to strokes, memory loss and personality issues. Off-pump, beating-heart, bypass surgery became an alternative.

I'd had this video planned for the last couple of weeks. But, on Thursday, a big study came out that suggests off-pump isn't as great as everyone was hoping it would be--nor was on-pump as bad as everyone was worried about. The New York Times explains it thusly:

In the study, published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, 2,203 patients were randomly assigned to have their bypass surgery on pump or off. Because the study was sponsored by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the patients were mostly men. A year later, those who had had off-pump surgery had poorer outcomes. Fewer bypasses stayed open and patients were more likely to have needed a repeat operation or to have had a heart attack or to have died. They were no less likely to have had strokes or difficulty thinking.

Older 'Pump' Heart Bypass is Best, A Study Finds, from the New York Times

Thumbnail image courtesy Flickr user Gustty, via CC

Danish anti-piracy group gives up

Posted: 07 Nov 2009 06:03 AM PST

Christian sez, "Just now it has been announced in the press by the official Danish Anti-Piracy agency, Antipiratgruppen, that they are throwing in the towel and will seize their operations completely; to find and prosecute music copyright offenders. Here is a translation of the first published article in today's Danish press."
"We have to, because it is has been announced by the state court, that it takes very strong and concrete evidence to have these people prosecuted. We have simply not been able to establish the necessary evidence..."

An overview of Danish trials shows an extremely small possibility of getting sentenced - unless the the accused confesses. Four principal state court trials last year lead to three acquittals and only a single sentence for illegal file sharing. And this sentence only came into place because

"Out of the four cases we can establish, that the courts do not sentence owners of Internet connections simply because of technical identification of IP-adresses and technical recognition of files," they say.

Danish anti-piracy agency throw in the towel (Thanks, Christian!)
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

CrunchyTech

Blog Archive