In June 2009, a 24-year-old woman in Sweden ran for a seat on the European Parliament as part of the Pirate Party…and won: As you may have imagined, the Pirate Party’s goals concern reforming copyright laws, specifically allowing p2p networking and file sharing, and doing away with patent laws altogether. … As for the patents, [...]

Turns out the US has been going to hell in a handbasket for a while: “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy [...]

Those people who know me and my usual stridence regarding any and all social issues also know that I’ve been almost conspicuously silent on Occupy Wall Street. Much as with the WikiLeaks debacle, I’ve felt like there was more nuance to the issue than most people were willing to engage in, and wanted to reserve [...]

Oh boy, has it really been three weeks since the last round-up? Turns out full-time work actually, uh, takes up your time. Anyway, I’ve tried to organize these thematically because I still posted a lot of links to Twitter and G+, and three weeks of links is, well, you get the idea. For those of [...]

Mike Jungbluth is a game developer who has worked on, among other things, Lord of the Rings: War in the North and Singularity. He also talks eloquently about the harrowing life of a game developer, never knowing how long your currect contract will hold out: “Is this how it’s always going to be? Is this [...]

The New Yorker, on the world that Tolkien created: Modernist ambiguity, or realist emotional ambivalence, is unknown to Tolkien—the good people are very good, the bad people very bad, and though occasionally a character may be tossed between good and evil, like Gollum, it is self-interest, rather than conscience, that makes him tip back and [...]

Andy Baio of Waxy.org has a really neat post about Supercuts up at his page: For the last few years, I’ve tracked a particular flavor of remix culture that I called “supercuts” — fast-paced video montages that assemble dozens or hundreds of short clips on a common theme. Many supercuts isolate a word or phrase [...]

I’m a big fan of Excel. Not just because I use it at work all day–in fact, you’d think that would make me hate it more–but because the degree of neurotic categorization and organization it offers delights my not-so-inner obsessive. Pivot tables? If functions? Bring it on! Eddie of Practically Efficient, however, thinks they’re on [...]

Johnson has had a couple of posts lately about the ways in which British and American English influence each other. This, in particular, discusses the ways in which British expats adopt American terms and pronunciations, to either pride or chagrin, and invited readers to take an informal survey on their use of language. The results [...]

An update on the One Laptop Per Child program I talked about a while ago: The organization plans to drop the touchscreen computers from helicopters near remote villages in developing countries. The devices will then be abandoned and left for the villagers to find, distribute, support, and use on their own. OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte [...]