Malcolm X debate at the Oxford Union, on December 3, 1964. Say what you will about Malcolm, but he was eloquent, intelligent, and stood by his convictions. I’m been increasingly interested in him lately, after reading his interview in Playboy from 1963.
I’ll have to pick up a copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X soon, since I didn’t learn a bit about him during any history course I’ve ever taken.
← Archer's "Mulatto Butts" Ringtone
Oh god, I love Archer. And now I can offend/amuse random people on the bus. This ringtone in addition to the Portal ringtone completes my collection.
It’s about that time of the year—you know, the one where I wander around late at night and take pictures of Capitol Hill minutia.
← Streaming Criterions
About a year ago, I wrote a blog post where I basically just pasted the results of some manual work I had done; I put together a list of all the Criterion Collection films that were available to view via Netflix Instant Streaming. The post got (and still gets) quite a bit of traffic for my site, but there’s a problem: it was almost immediately out of date.
This sucked, obviously, and I finally got around to creating a machine-generated, auto-updating version of this list. So every night, the code talks to the Criterion web site, and it talks to the Netflix OData API, and it munges the data.
So now you can get a live view of this list, which is primarily useful for when Netflix adds/drops streaming availability, and also nice for the once-a-month that Criterion adds new titles to their collection. Honestly, I made the list for myself, but I tried to make it pretty in case anyone else wanted to look at it.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Dyme Def — LetItBe
I dare you to find a better Beatles hip-hop mix… and yah, I love The Grey Album too. This song is filthy.
All complex systems contain parasites. In any system of cooperative behavior, an uncooperative strategy will be effective — and the system will tolerate the uncooperatives — as long as they’re not too numerous or too effective. Thus, as a species evolves cooperative behavior, it also evolves a dishonest minority that takes advantage of the honest majority. If individuals within a species have the ability to switch strategies, the dishonest minority will never be reduced to zero. As a result, the species simultaneously evolves two things: 1) security systems to protect itself from this dishonest minority, and 2) deception systems to successfully be parasitic.
…
The term “dishonest minority” is not a moral judgment; it simply describes the minority who does not follow societal norm. Since many societal norms are in fact immoral, sometimes the dishonest minority serves as a catalyst for social change. Societies without a reservoir of people who don’t follow the rules lack an important mechanism for societal evolution. Vibrant societies need a dishonest minority; if society makes its dishonest minority too small, it stifles dissent as well as common crime.
—
Bruce Schneier, sharing the thesis for his next book.
I’m particularly interested in this type of macro-level view of security. In fact, it sounds like Schneier is certainly within the realm of sociology and probably anthropology as well. I’ve only ever read Applied Cryptography before, so I’m looking forward to this new book. It sounds like it will be on the opposite end of the spectrum.
Overcoming the Lack of a Hulu API
Today I’m building a web app that provides a live listing of all available Criterion films. There are two places (mainly) that stream these movies: Netflix and Hulu.
Doing searches against Netflix is very easy, thanks to their incredible openness and the APIs they make available. I specifically use their OData provider—all I have to do is structure a URL which contains a query. I wrote the function to do this search in under 5 minutes!
Querying Hulu is, however, much more difficult. They don’t have any sort of official API, unfortunately. After some digging, though, I found out that they support oEmbed. I’d never heard of oEmbed, but it is meant to convey the metadata about any particular item offered on a site. I eventually found an old Hulu blog post from 2008, announcing oEmbed support.
This is a long post. Read the rest →
Tuba Skinny — Don’t You Feel My Leg
A nice 40s or New Orleans style street busking. I’ll have to figure out who they are…
This guy is amazing. For comparison (via kottke):
The first ascent of the north face of Eiger, a mountain in the Swiss Alps (13,025 feet tall), happened in 1938 and took three days. Watch as Ueli Steck climbs it in 2 hours, 47 minutes, and 33 seconds.
I usually don’t read Youtube comments, but I couldn’t help but laugh at this one:
if he fell he would probably land on his gigantic balls and survive.
This is me getting riled up for climbing season to start in earnest…
