Links January 2013

AreWomenHuman has an interesting article about ViolentAcrez and the wide support for trolling (including by media corporations) [1].

Chrys Stevenson wrote an important article for the ABC about the fundamentalist Christians who are trying to take over the Australian education system [2].

Tavi Gevinson gave an interesting TED talk titled “A teen just trying to figure it out” about her work starting Rookie magazine and her ideas about feminism [3].

Burt Rutan gave an interesting and inspiring TED talk about the future of space expploration [4]. One of his interesting points is that “fun really is defendable” in regard to tourism paying for the development of other space industries.

Stephen Petranek gave an interesting TED talk about how to prepare for some disasters that could kill a significant portion of the world’s population [5]. Some of these are risks of human extinction, we really need to spend some money on it.

John Wilbanks gave an intresting TED talk about the way that current informed consent laws prevent large-scale medical research [6]. He says “I live in a web world where when you share things beautiful stuff happens, not bad stuff“.

Joey Hess was interviewed for The Setup and the interview sparked a very interesting Hacker News discussion about workflow for software development [7]. Like most developers I prefer large screens with high resolution, I have an EeePC 701 which works reasonably well for an ultra-portable system but I largely don’t use it now I have an Android phone (extremely portable and totally awful input usually beats moderately portable and mostly awful input for me). But Joey’s methods are interesting and it seems that for some people different systems give the best result.

Jeff Masters gave an insightful TED talk about the weather disasters that may seriously impact the US in the next 30 years [8]. Governments really need to start preparing for such things, some of them are really cheap to mitigate if work is started early.

Bryan Stevenson gave an inspiring TED talk about the lack of justice in the US justice system [9].

Wouter Verhelst wrote an insightful article about some of the criticisms of Linux from Windows users [10]. He references a slightly satirical post he previously wrote about why Windows isn’t ready for desktop use.

Paul Carr wrote an interesting article comparing “disruptive” business practices of dot-com companies to the more extreme aspects of Ayn Rand’s doctrine [11]. In reading some of the links from that article I discovered that Ayn Rand was even more of a sociopath than I had previously realised.

Lindy West gave an amazing Back Fence PDX talk about dealing with nasty blog comments from the PUA/MRA communities [12]. After investigating them she just feels sorry for the trolls who’s lives suck.

Hang from the Vlogbrothers explains gender, sex, sexual orientation, etc [13].

Rick Falkvinge wrote an interesting article about recent political news from Brazil, they had a proposed law that was very positive for liberty on the Internet but it was sabotaged by the media and telcos [14]. We should try to avoid paying any money to the media industry so that they can go away sooner.

Amy Cuddy gave an interesting TED talk about body language, power, and the imposter syndrome [15].

Caleb Chung gave an interesting TED talk about toy design which focussed on Pleo a robotic dinosaur with a SD card and USB socket to allow easy reprogramming by the user [16].

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