July 08, 2008
Kiva, Heifer -- following on the discussion of Bill Gates' philanthropy, it's worth noting that the long tail of piggy bank philanthropy well outweighs what the plutocrats plump in. I highly recommend Nick Kristof's article last week recounting the remarkable cascade effect direct giving to a well-chosen charity can have. Even if you aren't in a position to donate money, though, you're probably in a position to loan it (see inside).
The most appalling thing I saw while I was in Africa was the rice distribution center in Ethiopia [pic after the jump]. About a hundred people wait around for hours until the trucks come by to unload food; the cycle repeats. We're doing it all wrong -- these infantilizing handouts deter local food production, feed corruption and bureaucracy as much as they feed the indigent, incentivize (as you see) standing around for food rather than earning it, and gift food at a sustenance level but skills at a starvation level. It's the development equivalent of feeding tubes for a persistent vegetative state.
Continued... [more inside]
June 08, 2008
Arsonist sets fire to TX Governor's mansion - large parts of downtown blocked off. You can see the roof buckling in the article's photo. [more inside]
June 03, 2008
Austin PD wants to know what you think about traffic problems in Austin. [more inside]
May 29, 2008
May 24, 2008
Welcome to the World's Least User-Friendly Tumblog, author: we. The officially unofficial AE tradition for the "Mildly hmmmworthy but I don't want to make it a front-page post" has been to necromance some tangentially-related old thread with a comment at the bottom. As an experiment, here is a second option. We've stickied this post ("Quick Hits") for you to dump anything you'd like noted in passing below. Continue to front page post anything you want, and to keep doing the tangential-reply thing if there's a good match, but post here if you're too lazy or too nonlinear to find one. [more inside]
May 09, 2008
Google's Proposal for new Alkaline Earth topic categories - from their corporate "Web Security" app, a list of categories that can be blocked and/or logged. Other than 'Food' and 'Science', all of our current categories are on the list.
March 30, 2008
Google Maps' Street View comes to Austin
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Let the hunt for examples of Austin Weird-Keeping begin.
March 07, 2008
Infochimps.org - free redistributable datasets.
Exploring rich data is fun, but inding it, formatting it, tagging it with metadata is drudge work barely fit for a trained chimp. We need a site where you can find a century of hourly weather, every major league baseball game, decades of stock prices, or every US patent filing -- and where you can share back data you gather or enrich.
So here's infochimps.org, a community to assemble and interconnect a giant free almanac with tables on everything you can put in a table. Built by data nerds, used by data nerds, come find the information you need.
(This is the site I've been building the last few months. If the servers fling poo or you otherwise see something horribly broken please email me or post.) yay!
February 12, 2008
In anticipation, here's a thanks. Andy and I would love to move back to Austin and we've been looking for jobs. We were wondering if any of you Austin folks had any ideas on job opportunities or head hunters that could help us with the job search. I have some info on our skills inside. [more inside]
February 07, 2008
Our recent marathon "Insane Politics" thread got me wondering whether that had become our most-commented post yet. While waiting for some code to finish I jumped in and SQL'ed up the answer... [more inside]
What Chinese New Year is like in actual China. Yowza.
February 05, 2008
Vote for new Texas standard license plates. There are four new designs up for vote or you can choose the current design. New plates will be available in 2009.
January 23, 2008
I've been really enjoying this cleverly-named blog, "Little Trouble in Big China" -- the adventures of a brave young lady who has moved to China, mostly for the adventure of it. She reports on issues like "can I watch Terps basketball in my apartment" (yes) and "Things You Don't See Every Day (But I Might)" (mittened scooters, 20 foot flagpoles transported by bike)
January 06, 2008
Those of you at lunch on Thursday got to see the incredible amount of work put in to saving some trees near the ESB renovation. There is an article in the latest issue of The Alcalde about trees in UT's history and the current effort towards creating a more tree friendly plan for new construction. [more inside]
November 14, 2007
HEB gives away free re-usable grocery bags So if you have a ton of pesky plastic bags sitting around, tomorrow is your chance to do something useful with them.
November 05, 2007
Opening soon in Austin is a franchise of TechShop. Pay your monthly fee, take a few training courses, and get access to sweet laser cutting, injection molding, plasma cutting and other construction tools.
October 30, 2007
The Texas Book Festival is this weekend. It more or less consists of a bunch of free panels, Q&As, and discussions with authors about their books and it's entirely free (except the books you won't be able to stop yourself from buying). They also have lots of used books on sale around the capitol square. Here are the lineups for Saturday and Sunday. Things I thought were interesting were...
[more inside]
October 24, 2007
Crystals instead of the Brentwood Tavern? [more inside]
October 17, 2007
September 24, 2007
UHaul Box Exchange - like Craigslist but /just/ for moving boxes.
National Organization for Rare Disorders - apparently some pharmaceutical companies mitigate costs for the (really expensive) drugs that treat rare disorders, a fact not widely known even among health-care providers. If you know anyone who has an 'orphan' or rare disease, and their insurance refuses/incompletely covers the medication, point them to the National Organization for Rare Disorders.
A friend has been paying $250/mo out-of-pocket for a medicine not covered by his crappy insurance; none of the doctors he consulted knew about the program.
September 21, 2007
This is why we can't have nice things. Linkspammers took advantage of a little-used feature ("trackbacks") and stuffed the poor little AE database full of 150MB of linkspam. I cleared it out, disabled the feature (which I'd done, and then undone without knowing it) and now things should be more worky again. Except for trackbacks -- that's gonna stay busted for the forseeable future.
September 13, 2007
IF YOUR PAGE LOOKS WEIRD PLEASE HIT SHIFT-RELOAD
It's always bugged my that the AlkalineEarth (MetaPhilter) code doesn't handle lists, blockquote's or pre's correctly: it inserts newlines even where they don't belong. So for the people who know what that means, you can now do so safely.
[more inside]