Mile
Zero

The tags your tags could link like.

• Jay Rosen argues that Wikileaks is a "stateless" news organization, by which he means "decentralized." It's an interesting parallel to my own thinking on information-age activism. Of any group in existence today, Wikileaks probably best embodies what it would mean to do decentralized advocacy, for better or worse.
• My new favorite blog is Awful Library Books. I mean, come on: The Burt Reynolds Hotline? Your Three-Year Old: Friend or Enemy? A New Look At Dinosaurs--from 1983? Awesome.
• In the future, we will get our meat protein from insects. Or as I like to think of it, we will "become vegetarians."
• There's kind of a big gap in Time's best blogs of 2010.
• I love scripting languages, and I especially love this series on using JavaScript--highest of the high-level--to emulate the original GameBoy. It's kind of an amazing learning tool, if you think about it. Someone should do this for X86.
• Never say no to Panda.
• While it's true that b-boys and b-girls love correcting people who call it breakdancing, I actually think it's more depressing that most people think the dance is entirely about acrobatics--flares, windmills, and backspins--to the exclusion of toprock and footwork. That's not their fault, of course: that's how the dance has been sold in mainstream culture since the eighties. But check out this video by Zeshen of Havokoro, and consider how much people are missing. He starts out with some pretty standard stuff, and then about a minute in starts going off on impressive combinations of strength, flexibility, and creative movement. It's one of the coolest footwork displays I've seen.

• Consider this part of an infinite series titled "Innovative, Magical, and Stupid." Long story short: an iPhone developer wants to make a service for doing enhanced copy-paste functionality, but you're not allowed to do that on the iPhone. So instead, they have to play music (or an .mp3 of silence) the entire time that they're backgrounded in order to pass muster. They refer to this "a very elegant solution," but let's call it what it really is: an awkward hack required by a patronizing, artificial requirement.
• Finally, this Washington Monthly story is a fascinating read on how Google Maps has touched off a new generation of border disputes--especially interesting for the crisis-mapping crowd. People in developed countries, and particularly urban areas in developed countries, tend to forget how political and contentious seemingly-neutral documents like maps can be. But of course, this is only the start. In a world where our surroundings are tagged with metadata by a combination of community processes and automated spiders, we're going to see these kinds of scuffles a lot more often.