onfocus

If one were to construct an amendment to the Constitution based on a literal reading of the Bible it might well contain the following stipulations. [via lancearthur]

Audio recordings of animals and environments throughout the western United States.

"Here is a collection of some of the best photos of President-Elect Barack Obama over the past several months."

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."

Here's the ongoing voter turnout numbers for Benton County.

"Four years ago Time photographer Callie Shell met Barack Obama backstage when she was covering presidential candidate John Kerry. She sent her editor more photographs of Obama than Kerry. When asked why, she said, 'I do not know. I just have a feeling about him. I think he will be important down the road.' Her first photo essay on Obama was two and half years ago. She has stuck with him ever since." [via kottke]

"The newest and cutest exotic animals babies from zoos around the world." CUTE!

Brian Eno put together a generative music app for the iPhone called Bloom.

"Our results showed that just the very basic metric of reply length, along with the number of competing answers, and the track record of the user, was most predictive of whether the answer would be selected. The number of other best answers by a user, a potential indicator of expertise, was predictive of an answer being selected as best, but most significantly so for the technically focused Programming category." [via waxy]

Jay Rosen: "At what point does an extreme attempt to de-legitimate the press actually de-legitimate the candidate as an extremist in the eyes of the press?"

Andy Baio and Joshua Shacter whip up a political blog ideology rating system by analyzing their linking patterns and scoring with Singular Value Decomposition (SVD).

"Perhaps they know better than we do how deeply the American people long to be done with the problem of democracy...Sarah Palin represents what many people want: a retreat from reason; a regression to childhood." [via MeFi]

Netflix has an API now. It includes their movie catalog, reviews, and manipulating queues (oauth for that). [via waxy]

A talk David Simon gave at the Berkeley Townsend Center. [via sippey]

Search the Google of 2001 when my blog was the 3rd result for "Paul". I guess Pagerank and I have drifted apart over these last seven years.

The word lifestream makes me gag, but this is interesting anyway. A self-hosted, PHP, social stuffs aggregator. [via Hackszine]

Funny idea and video from Sara Silverman. (nsfw)

"The Federal Government now controls what were -- up until last month -- vast private assets. These are extreme -- truly radical -- changes to how our society functions. Does anyone have any disagreement with any of it or is anyone alarmed by what the consequences are -- not the economic consequences but the consequences of so radically changing how things function so fundamentally and so quickly?"

Lawrence Lessig gives one of his trademark presentations about Palin's experience compared with past Vice Presidents.

A startup that wants to help people raise money for their projects. (via Waxy, who's on the board.)

Oregon's Peter Defazio on the bailout.

Robert Reich rants about the bailout. And he's right.

Representative Marcy Kaptur from Ohio on the bailout: "Real reform now, or nothing."

Nice to see Obama put out an ad where he talks about his plan.

I need to read these. [via bojack]

Holy crap. A 5D with HD video capture. (Not cheap.)

An Alaskan blogging about local politics (now suddenly national politics). [via queso]

Polls got you down? Sullivan offers a pep-talk: "We can only tell the truth as fearlessly and as relentlessly and as continuously as we can until November 4. We must do our duty. And if the American people want to re-elect the machine that has helped destroy this country's national security, global reputation and economic health, then that is their choice. But I am not so depressed to think that they will."

One question that Ed misses: do we want to have a group of people whose job is to sit around and solve captchas all day? If raising transaction costs works, move it to the world of money by charging a fee instead of relying on outsourced human attention.