Author: joel
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Dollar-per-gigabyte iPhone Price Comparison
This chart doesn’t really make comparison shopping easier, but it was fun to create.
iPhone 11 prices in $/GB as of September 10th, 2019 -
Antebellum Rhetoric
Eve Fairbanks excellent essay in The Washington Post on how so-called reasonable conservatives wrap themselves in the same rhetoric used by defenders of the Confederacy before, during and after the US Civil War:
Principles like freedom and equality have functioned, through time, as the American immune system, warding off sickness. But they can also be co-opted. As they were more than 150 years ago, ideas like freedom of speech, diversity and respect are now being used to turn opponents of conservatism into helpless hosts, transmitting its ideas.
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Check your Mac for the Zoom Video Conferencing Vulnerability
UPDATE 2019-07-11: Apple has confirmed they pushed out a “silent update†to remove the offending Zoom server on Macs, the same method they use to deal with malware—no user interaction needed.
I’ll leave my original post in place, but there is no need to follow the manual removal steps detailed below, thanks to Apple taking the unusual step of treating commercial software in use by millions as malware.
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National Geographic 125th Anniversary Issue
It didn’t start out as a photography-centric magazine but as this special Photography Issue demonstrates, National Geographic came to represent the best of the medium.
October 2013 National Geographic commemorating 125 years of publication -
Leon in “Hell On Wheels” this Saturday
My brother Leon has a role in the third season of Hell On Wheels, a western-genre TV series premiering this Saturday, August 10th at 9:00 PM on AMC.
For those of us without US cable TV service, the show can be purchased on iTunes:
Scene of cavalry fording river from Hell On Wheels Season 3 promotional video. -
World Snow & Ice Cover Map
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Environmental Visualization Laboratory publishes this world map showing snow and ice cover daily.
NOAA global snow & ice cover map, updated daily. -
The Island Where People Forget to Die
Dan Beuttner for the New York Times Magazine writes about a particularly healthy lifestyle on  an isolated Greek island:Pointing across the Aegean toward the neighboring island of Samos, he said: “Just 15 kilometers over there is a completely different world. There they are much more developed. There are high-rises and resorts and homes worth a million euros. In Samos, they care about money. Here, we don’t. For the many religious and cultural holidays, people pool their money and buy food and wine. If there is money left over, they give it to the poor. It’s not a ‘me’ place. It’s an ‘us’ place.â€
The island is named after Icarus, the mythical flier whose foolish ambition led to an early demise. The inhabitants of Ikaria appear to have taken the lesson to heart.
