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The best stories of the day, chosen by you.
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Let's Waterboard Sean Hannity Properly
By yuo in Politics
Sat Apr 25, 2009 at 03:58:59 PM EST
Tags: Politics, waterboarding, sean, hannity (all tags)
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Sean Hannity has apparently volunteered to be waterboarded for charity. If you'd like a brief primer on what exactly it means for a celebrity to be waterboarded, I suggest watching Christopher Hitchens succumb to this advanced interrogation technique. A reasonable person might ask why they would willingly submit to any unnecessary interrogation of any sort, but Hannity wants to prove a point that waterboarding is not a form of torture, and he has the idea that he can do it for charity somehow. Mr. Hannity, I believe that the way you imagine getting waterboarded will only lead to further criticism, and I would like to make a few charitable contributions to planning your advanced interrogation technique experience that will silence the critics.
Full Story (34 comments, 559 words in story)
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Grad Student Cuisine Part I: The Pressure Cooker
By JackStraw in Culture
Mon Apr 13, 2009 at 09:21:07 AM EST
Tags: pressure cooker, food, cuisine, cooking (all tags)
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This post is about pressure-cooking, how to do it, and what it's done for me. But first, some background:
Like most on this site, I graduated college with a taste of triumph, ecstatic to start my new life. I would follow my dreams, live on my own. I'd be out of the dorms, making my own choices, shaping my new life. And, even though I was going to graduate school, I'd finally have my own kitchen. No more dining hall food for me.
Yep, that dream lasted until about a week into graduate school. Where did it end? It starts with doing the dishes... goddamn, cooking a three-course meal makes a lot of dishes. And, it takes a lot of time. Then, there's the money: fresh vegetables get expensive, quickly. With my lifestyle, conventional cooking was unsustainable. I took the obvious approach: go old school.
Part I of that adventure is chronicled here: the pressure cooker (an old-school tool that cooks food very quickly at high pressures). It's cheap, it's fast, it's healthy, and it's delicious. I'll explain what it is, why it's great, and how to use it. I'll give some fast, cheap, and fantastic recipes for Bean Soup and Cajun Red Beans with Rice. And, I'll make sure you have the resources you need to adapt your own recipes to this underappreciated but fantastic tool.
Full Story (32 comments, 1833 words in story)
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Agnosticism and the theological question through open hypotheses
By LodeRunner in Op-Ed
Fri Apr 03, 2009 at 04:40:12 AM EST
Tags: agnosticism, abstention, god, deity, possibility, hypothesis, logic, op-ed (all tags)
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Strictly speaking, agnosticism is the only acceptable line of thought for people of a scientific mentality in what pertains to the theological question. The agnostic argument that it is simply not possible to prove in a final way the existence or not of God is, in fact, irrefutable. However, far too many times the appeal to this argument sounds to me like an "easy way out", employed especially by scientists who limit themselves to applied science and avoid the implications of issues which, when unfolded, invariably lead to more fundamental domains, such as philosophy of science or metaphysics. But we don't need to focus on unfoldings of this kind to justify the importance of the theological question (even though they do exist and are perhaps the most important ones). The direct influence that this question has on the course of lives of a significant part of the world's population -- and, by political extension, the humanity as a whole (influence which manifests itself in a wide variety of fields of human relations: political, economical, social, cultural, etc.) -- makes me see agnosticism as an unacceptable abstention.
Full Story (153 comments, 914 words in story)
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The Jarmidor: Parts one and Two
By GhostOfTiber in Culture
Wed Mar 18, 2009 at 11:48:06 AM EST
Tags: Jarmidor, DIY, Pipes, Smoking (all tags)
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The Jarmidor at one week is working well. For those not in the know, the jarmidor is a project to keep small amounts of high quality tobacco for enough time to please the casual smoker. The project is supposed to be cheap, and work with a minimum of fuss, instrumentation, or maintenance. I wish I had a hygrometer, but the smaller ones which are accurate (read: digital) are expensive ($25+), while you can find big ones for $7 - but you can't calibrate them or fit them into the jar. I've resigned to "do it by feel". Since I have a fair bit of pipe smoke (cheap - 4oz costs $10 most places, which is a lot of tobacco) I decided it would be my guinea pig. HOWTO make one below the fold, and observations at one week. If the format is pissing you off, complain to Rusty for image tags. If you want to read the original, click the link at the top which includes pictures.
Full Story (35 comments, 1653 words in story)
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For the therapeutic use of benign infectious organisms in the treatment of immunological disease
By luckbeaweirdo in Science
Tue Mar 17, 2009 at 05:50:16 PM EST
Tags: helminthic therapy, hookworm, hygiene hypothesis, old friends hypothesis, epidemiology, multiple sclerosis, crohn's, ulcerative colitis, allergies, asthma (all tags)
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Because of my experience going to Cameroon, first written about here in 2006, to infect myself with hookworm to deal with my allergies and asthma, and because of my role as the founder of the world's first company offering infection with human hookworm and whipworm to the public, I was approached by a documentary film maker a while ago. I agreed to be filmed but quickly became unhappy with the direction they were taking. They were more interested in our personal lives and an Oprah-like approach to the story than in the science or the implications for the practice of medicine.
To try and persuade them to do a movie I was interested in watching, and that I was willing to continue to participate in filming, I wrote the following, believing that doing so would compel them to take a different approach. Who would not prefer to make the first documentary about something historic? I am still waiting for their response but it occurred to me that what I had written was a nice summation of my perspective on what I have learned since I started down this path and of my thinking about this approach to medicine.
Full Story (81 comments, 3383 words in story)
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West Africa on the Potomac
By anaesthetica in News
Tue Mar 17, 2009 at 05:43:27 AM EST
Tags: aids, hiv, washington dc, africa, epidemic (all tags)
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The capital of the United States, a small, shattered diamond nuzzling the Potomac, has now exceeded an HIV/AIDS infection rate of 3%. When infection rates rise above 1%, that is deemed a 'generalized and severe epidemic.'
Shannon L. Hader, director of the District's HIV/AIDS Administration, stated that, "Our rates are higher than West Africa. They're on par with Uganda and some parts of Kenya." Hader would know: she once led the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's work in Zimbabwe.
Full Story (26 comments, 1048 words in story)
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The Grass-Mud Horse fights the River Crab in the Ma Le Ge Bi desert
By circletimessquare in Internet
Fri Mar 13, 2009 at 10:56:35 PM EST
Tags: censorship, china, humor (all tags)
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Some Chinese citizens are fighting censorship with subversive humor. To any native Mandarin speaker, the video of the grass-mud horse is at first shocking, then hilarious, and has been viewed over 1.4 million times in 2 months. With disneyfied children's chorus, the video tells of the grass-mud horse's triumph over the invading river crab as it encroaches on its habitat, the Ma Le Ge Bi desert.
There is no such horse, nor such desert.
Full Story (36 comments, 565 words in story)
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Attacked from Within
By anaesthetica in Internet
Fri Mar 13, 2009 at 11:17:19 AM EST
Tags: k5 isn't dying, community, society, scaling, internet, forums, group dynamics, moderation, tl;dr (all tags)
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Traditional methods for protecting community from the effects of scale and poor behavior are now manifestly unfeasible. Raising barriers to entry, relying on the assumption that users will maintain only one registered account, and placing faith in the ability of admins and user moderation to reproduce a forum's organic culture are all easily circumvented, gamed, and/or ineffective when faced with the problems of scale. Moreover, they tend to reinforce self-destructive behaviors, by increasing returns to the most persistent rather than the most constructive, reinforcing groupthink, and providing ample targets for trolling and griefing.
This article attempts to fundamentally rethink what constitutes community and society on the web, and what possibilities exist for their maintenance and reconstruction in the face of scale and malicious users. The recommendations reached, after analyzing the weaknesses of the web forums we all know and love, are:
- User anonymity should be forced.
- Barriers to participation should be as low as possible.
- Moderation should not focus on users or on comments in isolation, but on the relational quality of comments.
- Passive moderation filters can mitigate problems of scale.
- Preservation of community must shift from being based on exclusion to being based on demonstrated constructive interaction.
- Forums should discriminate between content types: original content, links, and personal content.
- Story promotion and front page position should be driven by conversation, not voting.
Full Story (76 comments, 9119 words in story)
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Deep Throat: A Retrospective
By GrandWazoo in Media
Sat Mar 07, 2009 at 01:23:31 PM EST
Tags: media, culture, deep throat, Mark Felt, Linda Lovelace (all tags)
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Recently an old friend passed away and since his closest relatives were over 2000 miles away it would take some time for them to arrive in town to attend services and handle the few remaining affairs he left dangling. He knew this and one day before he passed on, told us as we sat around drinking a few beers and smoking cigars; "When I die I want you to come in and get this stuff out of here. Do it before any of my relatives arrive." We gave him our word that we would.
The "stuff" he was referring to was a huge collection of porn video tapes he had collected since the late 70s and early 80s that covered one wall of his apartment. He had told us we could throw it all away or take it and add it to our collections as we saw fit. It wasn't surprising to me that one of the movies I came across were several copies of "Deep Throat".
Full Story (20 comments, 821 words in story)
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Sunday, February 22nd
 Clinton to China: Human Rights Not Really That Important (51 comments)
Friday, February 6th
Proposal for Passive Private Browsing (74 comments)
Wednesday, February 4th
K5 Book Review: 'Clinical Presentation of Stalking in the Enchinoed Schizoaffective Male' (46 comments)
Monday, February 2nd
BIND, Active Directory and DDNS (22 comments)
Monday, January 26th
How to game the U.S. higher-education system (127 comments)
Thursday, January 22nd
K5 Roll Call: You still reading? If so, why? (306 comments)
Thursday, January 8th
The Magic Head (28 comments)
Tuesday, December 23rd
Fuck Christmas, we aren't having it this year. (99 comments)
Monday, December 15th
A Mini-Guide To Surviving the Holidays (41 comments)
Friday, December 12th
Isopod Attack Formations Engage (49 comments)
Monday, December 1st
An Appeal To Moderate Islam (302 comments)
Wednesday, November 26th
The Making of a Mash/Lauter Tun (65 comments)
Sunday, November 23rd
QNX 6.4 > 6.3 (36 comments)
Saturday, November 22nd
GOD IS GOOD (26 comments)
Thursday, November 20th
Beefeater's holocaust (40 comments)
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