I warn you. Don’t start the movie unless you have time to finish it.

[ Turning a Sphere Inside Out ]

OMFG. Amazing stuff.

• Kate Tucker & the Sons of Sweden – (self-titled)
  
• Jose Gonzalez – In Our Nature

[ My iTunes Purchases Feed ]

BestLife magazine just did a great article on divorce and men. It’s about how devastating divorce is to men relative to women — especially later in life where it often comes as a complete surprise to the man.

The article is called Sudden Divorce Syndrome and I highly suggest you check it out if you are 1) married, or 2) know someone who’s married (that should cover everyone).

This is a particularly sensitive topic for me as I’ve personally seen many of my male friends crushed by divorce. Here’s a quote:

“Think of it,” says Stephen Baskerville, president of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, in Washington, D.C. “A father could be sitting in his own home, not agreeing to a divorce, not unfaithful to his marriage vows, and not abusive, and the next thing he knows, the court has taken his house, his children, and a lot of his money, and then forced him to pay his wife’s legal fees and even her psychologist’s fees. And he can be threatened with jail time if he resists.”

And people ask me why I’ve waited all this time to get married…

[ Sudden Divorce Syndrome ]

I’m not an economist, but I read a lot. Here’s what happened: greed + stupidity. Greed on the part of the lenders, i.e. taking advantage of people who can’t read finance terms, and stupidity on the part of…people who can’t read finance terms.

Here’s how it plays out:

1. Greedy, immoral people loan stupid amounts of money to people they know probably won’t be able to pay it back. They do so using loans that are variable in rate — a concept that many with subprime credit don’t grasp. The key concept here is that they knew many of these people were going to default. They absolutely knew that these people couldn’t handle what they were agreeing to, but the loans were made anyway. Greed.

2. A large number of people who aren’t educated or mature enough to have a high credit score enter into agreements that are virtually guaranteed to screw them over if economic conditions change. Economic conditions change. They get screwed over. Stupidity.

This isn’t an isolated incident. This is the way America works. The greedy and powerful take advantage of the stupid and weak. The only difference here is that this particular greed-fest was so voracious that it’s affecting the ability for the powerful to continue to rape their victims. It’s like a lab rat experiment gone wrong, “Damn…we upped the extraction rate and killed this entire group…”

This is from the front page of CNN. The guy looks like a maniacal grinch.

Sure, I recognize that this may not be too far from the truth, but it’s a bit unsettling to have a supposedly impartial mainstream media source be so blatant about their attempts to change perception.:

This vérité action series follows Tiger Team – a group of elite professionals hired to infiltrate major business and corporate interests with the objective of exposing weaknesses in the world’s most sophisticated security systems, defeating criminals at their own game.

Tiger Team is comprised of Security Audit Specialists Chris Nickerson, Luke McOmie and Ryan Jones who employ a variety of covert techniques – electronic, psychological and tactical – as they take on a new assignment in each episode.

The show will air on CourtTV Tuesday, December 25 at 11 and 11:30pm E/P. Here’s a sample:

I’m constantly optimizing how I do things, and nowhere is this more important to me than with my feed reader. I happen to use (and highly recommend) Google Reader, and what follows is a multi-tiered approach to classifying and reading your feeds using an often ignored feature of the application.

The Problem

The fundamental problem is input management. Most of us simply have too many feeds to read in a single sitting. How can we be sure we’re reading the right content at the right time? Are we reading too much? Too little? The goal is to avoid the anti-GTD state of not being sure – a state that consumes valuable brain resources and keeps you from functioning at your best.

That’s what this system helps you do: it lets you instantly choose which feeds to read at any given time – allowing you to feel fully satisfied when you’re done with a session.

The System

The first thing we’re going to do is make three categories of tags/labels within Google Reader (think folders for old-schoolers). These are:

1. Priority
2. Subject
3. Location

Mine look like this:

• Priority (general importance): Primary, Secondary, Tertiary
• Subject (classical organization): Security, Programming, Design, Humor
• Location (contextual consideration): Industry News, Important World Events, etc.

This breakdown gives us three choices for how to attack feeds. You can go by a general ranking of importance of the feed (priority), by the specific type of content that you want to read at a given moment (subject), or based on where you are (location).

So if you’re at work during regular hours you can read your “work” feeds, which include important information pertaining to your profession, key world events, and perhaps some other tidbits that may be useful during work-related conversation. And during lunch you can read your “lunch” feeds, which include your feeds that are still work appropriate during lunch but perhaps aren’t completely work related, e.g. Dilbert, XKCD, Reddit, etc.

The key to the whole system is that each individual feed can have multiple tags assigned to it. This feature is there for a reason.

What this allows us to do is put our feeds in all three categories simultaneously. This gives us the simplicity of knowing what to read at any given moment, but at the same time it links all three categories together. So if you read TechCrunch from one view it gets marked as read in the others as well.

Examples

Let’s take my Information Security News feed. It’s a Yahoo! Pipe I built that combines news from around the industry, removes duplicates, etc. It’s a fast way to get the top stories I’d find in my “security-news” tag that contains multiple individual feeds.

For my infosec pipe feed I have the following tags applied in the three dimensions (PSL):

• Primary (priority)
• Security-News (subject)
• Work (location)

The trick is that I can decide to read from any one of those categories and I’ll still cover this very important aggregation feed. But if you take my Design Observer feed it’s more likely to break down like this:

• Tertiary
• Design
• (no location because it defaults to home)

Assigning the multiple tags makes it possible to cover the same content during various types of reading sessions – whether you browsed based on time available, where you were, or a particular interest such as design or programming.

This system helps me greatly in getting through my feeds with less stress and allows me to feel confident that I’ve read precisely what I should have during my session. I hope you find it useful as well.:

Who the hell is Tom Tancredo? Don’t you have to announce that you’re running before you announce that you’re dropping out?

Maybe he would have had a chance if he’d at least mentioned he was interested in the position…

This is sickening. Fermilab, The United States’ main particle physics lab, is being hamstrung by congress’s latest omnibus bill. This is the same bill that approves billions for the war in Iraq but will result in hundreds at the lab being laid off permanently and countless others having to take extended time without work.

The bill reduces Fermilab’s budget by $62 million dollars in 2008, which is roughly 17% of the $372 million they expected. Oh, and that $372M, which is what their total yearly budget was *going* to be, is less than what it costs to stay in Iraq for a single day.

The cuts are going to halt research and development for the new International Linear Collider — a proposed multibillion-dollar facility that Fermilab hoped would secure the lab’s future and allow it, i.e. the United States, to compete with Europe’s CERN project.

But no. Instead we’re going to pull money from crucial scientific R&D programs, causing us to become an absolute non-force in the particle physics world. All for the war in Iraq. If this bothers you as much it does me, please make your voice heard by writing your congressional representative.

[ Write Your Representative ]

Here’s what I’m sending:

Dear $representative,

I am quite disappointed to hear that congress allowed the recent omnibus bill to pass with huge cuts to Fermilabs’ particle physics programs. The bill cuts their budget by nearly 17% and will result in the halting of our country’s premier effort to stay competitive with other countries in this important field.

What disturbs me most is the fact that the same bill authorizes billions of dollars for the war in Iraq, which in a single day pulls more money from the United States than an entire year of scientific research at Fermilab.

Please re-prioritize. I am tired of seeing the United States fall further and further behind in science — especially at the expense of a war that never should have happened.

Kind regards,

–Daniel Miessler

Maybe now the mainstream media will start paying attention…