More on Flying 101 here. More pics after the jump.
O'Reilly, the world's largest publisher of tech books, decided in 2008 to remove digital rights management — copy prevention software — from its ebooks. The result? In the 18 months since, ebook sales are up 103%. Long Island's Newsday, the 11th-largest-circulation newspaper in the US, is one of the first non-business newspapers to put its website behind a pay wall — a step The New York Times and all of Rupert Murdoch's papers are said to be considering. The result? In three months, Newsday's $5-a-week website has attracted 35 paying subscribers. Hat tip: SP....
An apparently random swab test of Contrarian's new MacBook Pro at the Stanfield International Airport screening area this morning detected traces of nitroglycerin. The CATSA agent who conducted the test summoned a supervisor who explained, pleasantly, that the machine had triggered an alarm. She proceeded to check my identification and ask a series of questions about medication, chemicals, and hand creams. My negative answers turned up no obvious source of nitro, resulting in a further swab test of my iPhone, a complete physical check of every item in my carry-on bag, and a rigorous, 90% pat-down.* In all, my case drew upon...
In response to Google's dramatic announcement that it is reconsidering its presence in China after a series of disquieting acts of censorship and sabatage, the Information is Beautiful website produced this clever graphic of word searches and websites blocked in China: Incidentally, China hand James Fallows, whose Atlantic Magazine blog has interesting and measured posts on the Google announcement here and here, tells me that publishing a list of the banned words is itself a crime in China....
From a story by Alexandra Zayas in the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times: TAMPA — For the first time in history, it allowed a human to tap a backspace key and make a mistake go away. Called "Selectric II," it was conceived when Richard Nixon was president, when IBM made typewriters and when a hand-typed card catalog tracked every book at Tampa's downtown library. Librarians got machines for the public, giving each a room of its own with walls the shade of an avocado. The workhorses spit out labels for spines of books and stamped Dewey decimals on paper cards. They typed resumes, got...
The UK Guardian, a trailblazer in the quest for newspaper survival in a digital era, has an Advent calendar of its best datablog entries for 2009: Hat tip: Cheryl Cook....
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know," said Google CEO Eric Smith, "maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Smith's cavalier assessment of browser privacy issues in an MSNBC interview so incensed the main developer of the Mozilla Firefox browser that he urged Firefox users to abandon Google for a search engine with a better privacy policy, namely Bing, by Google arch-rival Microsoft: Asa Dotzler's outburst raised eyebrows on the net, because the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, maker of Firefox and the Thunderbird email program, depends on Google for about 97 percent of its revenue. Various bloggers...
One of Contrarian's favorite websites, FlowingData, has produced a year-end list of the five best data visualization projects of 2009. Topping the chart is Britain From Above, a UK-based visual effects and animation company. FlowingData's Nathan Yau describes the result: GPS traces from taxi cabs and airline flights scurried to locations; telephone communications glowed in the sky; ground lights twinkled as if the roles of sky and earth were switched; and internet traffic burst from computer to computer. With all that data on display, patterns emerged - zero air traffic in no-fly zones and taxis taking alternate routes to avoid heavy...
A highly scalable map [5 meg .pdf] of offshore wind farm installations in northwestern Europe shows how far behind Canada is in exploiting this renewable energy source. The map detail at right is a static screen capture, at far less than maximum enlargement. (The map is reminiscent of various offshore petroleum maps of Nova Scotia's, an example of which can be downloaded here [400-k .pdf].Hat tip: Colin May....