onfocus

"Unicode 5.0 encodes exactly 98,884 graphic characters on different planes...we collect information on every single character."

Cartoon intro to Neil Postman's book.

Some samples of single-pane comics by H.T. Webster. Sadly, his collections appear to be out of print and there aren't any at nearby libraries.

Scan of the 1955 book with wonderful caricatures by Ronald Searle. [via peacay]

"So, this is why I say white supremacy is the only functional form of racism; the only kind that actually works."

"...you’re just making a fool of yourself when you go around telling users of singular they that they’re wrong, because they’re not."

It's going to be that time of year again soon. These Thule chains look nice, but I'd rather see real people putting on chains in freezing weather in the demo, not spinning/floating CG.

Eight rules for writing a short story. [via merlin]

"The fundamental problems with the American health care system are all linked, directly or indirectly, to the fact that the vast majority of folks get insurance solely through their employers." Amen, and go Wyden! [via Kattullus]

"The problem is Twitter isn’t really open. For Twitter to be truly open, it would have to be possible to use “Twitter” without an any way involving Twitter the institution. Instead, all data goes through Twitter’s centralized service." I'm not a fan of people pushing content to Twitter like it's an RSS reader for social reasons as well, but that's probably just me.

All Unicode characters in a handy table. Includes snowman. [via waxy]

"On May 21st, 2009 the City of Vancouver passed a motion that directed City Staff to begin sharing the data and information the city collects, to share this data in open standards and to place open source on an equal footing with proprietary software." [via cshirky]

Lakoff is brilliant. A move from calling health care reform the "public option" to "The American Plan" would help build support. We've been comparing our options with what Canada, UK, France, and other countries have, but we like things invented here.

Some good ways to improve ColdFusion application performance. Doing a lot of these already, but picked up a few new coding practices I should follow.

Umberto Eco on the features of Eternal Fascism. "In spite of some fuzziness regarding the difference between various historical forms of fascism, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism." [via MeFi]

"TweetPsych uses two linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets." Interesting analysis. What I don't like is that it was built by a "Social Media Scientist" who is probably using the results to find better ways to sell things.

Michal Migurski is doing some interesting tagging with delicious to tease out his friends' top subject areas.

"In its final days before crashing into the surface of the moon on June 11, Japan’s KAGUYA explorer has been shooting high-definition footage of the lunar terrain from low altitude."

A father teaches his children the ancient art of rhetoric. "It was as if I’d given them advertising immunization shots."

It's a good time to revisit this Lakoff article on framing taxes. Basically, taxes are an investment, our fair share, patriotic, and our dues for enjoying our high standard of living.

You deserve this!

This is spectacular. They're suggesting high speed rail between Eugene and the Canadian border.

Funny image demonstrating the difference in Google's suggested queries for various phrases. "how 2..." yields different suggestions from "how might one...".

This reminds me of a great line by Borges where he said monkeys could talk if they wanted to, but if they did humans would put them to work.

Need to type an extended character? Just point and click the symbol you need at this single serving site.

ha! Find out how annoying someone is *before* you follow them on Twitter.

Anil shows Palin's use of code switching by bypass media analysis. "Sarah Palin's conduct has gone far past the bounds of decency, and far past even the most dangerous efforts of any previous candidate for such high office."

Find domain names for your projects beyond the big three.

This animated gif shows the change from the Greek alphabet to the Latin alphabet over time.