jlet.org — Jack Letourneau

Delicious

• Why Conservatives Should Care About Transit

  “Support for government-subsidized highway projects and contempt for efficient mass transit does not follow from any of the core principles of social conservatism.” Then again, few social conservatives pay much thought anymore to core principles other than “screw you, got mine.”

  March 10

• The Unpersuadables

  A column on the difficulty of getting through to climate change denialists. I’ve always liked the saying “you can’t reason someone out of a belief they didn’t reason themselves into.”

  March 9

• Basic Mechanisms in Fire Control Computers

  U.S. Navy training film from 1953: pure analog computing awesomeness. The integrator is a brilliant piece of equipment: a rotating disc, a bearing, and a rod, and that’s it. Does continuous summation of one-dimensional input.

  February 22

• HD Mandelbrot Set zoom

  Ten-minute video on Vimeo of a zoom of 214 orders of magnitude into the Mandelbrot Set. If you gaze at the center point for the whole video, the visual aftereffects when it’s over are eerie: strange fluxing and twisting of stationary objects around the room.

  February 17

• Obama’s 2011 Budget Proposal: How It’s Spent

  Visualization of the proposed 2011 federal budget. This sort of thing is super-handy for showing to people who complain about budget items on the scale of tens or hundreds of millions (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Peace Corps, scientific research, etc.). See if you can even find them behind the mammoth expenditures on the Pentagon and Social Security and Medicare.

  February 17

• In the Name Of the Father (or the troubles with L-caron)

  Kafka-esque Dutch bureaucracy meets typographic diacritic design. This gentleman has more patience than I would have.

  February 11

• Crowded Wet Mushrooms: A Beautiful Thing

  Everything you know about sautéeing mushrooms is wrong! The traditional orthodoxy has it that mushrooms must not be soaked in water and preferably should not even be rinsed, lest they become soggy. But it turns out that absorbed water keeps mushrooms from drinking up all the oil in your sauté pan as they cook down, and thus mushrooms that are soaked end up less oily than dry ones after sautéeing.

  February 4

• How to Make the Best Chili Ever

  Serious Eats blog entry from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, who does stellar Cook’s Illustrated-style recipe writeups online when he’s not actually working for Cook’s Illustrated. I’ve been meaning to make chili at some point this winter, but access to good dried chiles here in upstate NY is hard to come by.

  January 22

• Text input speed testing

  Six-way time trial pitting pen and paper against a standard QWERTY keyboard against four portable devices: the good old Apple Newton, a couple of Palm PDAs, and the iPhone virtual keyboard. Surprised how well the iPhone fared; I’m kind of slow at typing on my iPod Touch but it could just be for lack of practice.

  January 21

• Flight Delays

  Infographic comparing the percentage of delayed or cancelled flights at ten U.S. airports from last year and this year. It’s good information to know, but Edward Tufte would shiver at the chartjunky decision to make bar graphs out of airplane window shades.

  January 15

• Easy Web data collection with mechanize and Beautiful Soup

  I’ve done some web scraping with Python before to pull weather conditions and forecasts down to my computer at home; if I need to get fancier than that, a proper library for maintaining state across multiple HTTP requests may be the better way to go.

  January 8

• Adrian Beltre’s Fielding 2006–2009

  Clips of the new Red Sox third baseman flashing the leather with the Mariners. The new pitching and defensive emphasis of the Sox will be something to watch in 2010.

  January 5

• The Up-To-Date Primer: A First Book of Lessons for Little Political Economists

  An introductory text written (almost) exclusively in words of a single syllable, on the topic of Georgism: the idea that government should be funded solely by a tax on land value (exclusive of improvements), rather than income taxes, sales taxes, and so forth.

  January 2

• Ninth Circuit Says Police Officer Can Be Sued for Tasing

  One hopes this ruling won’t be yet another 9th Circuit decision that gets overturned by SCOTUS. The “tasers keep people from getting shot” message is terribly disingenuous; police seem very comfortable using tasers at the slightest whiff of perceived disrespect or lack of compliance, not just in situations where they would otherwise have drawn their firearms on citizens.

  December 30

• The Language of Food

  Very interesting blog touching on culinary topics through the lens of linguistics and historical research.

  December 19