Sprinkles Around the Web 6/11-7/01/10

Sprinkles from around the web

Links I’ve enjoyed from around the web. Your mileage may vary.

Me

A photo of me from Seattle’s Gay Pride Parade 2010 on Sunday, June 27th.

Environment

Is the BP Gusher Unstoppable? Read the forum of geologists and oil professionals that has the science community buzzing. This is just beyond depressing, but is a must-read as it explains the science behind the gushing well.

Sea Turtle by Mauro Luna
Sea turtles are our friends and adorable. Also endangered.
BP’s burning sea turtles. A video of a boat captain talking about how BP stopped him and his crew from trying to find sea turtles in oil BP was setting on fire.

“We Don’t Need This on Camera”: BP’s Crappy Cleanup Job. BP continues to block reporters’ access to beaches affected by the Gulf Oil Spill. In some cases, beaches and wildlife are completely neglected.

From the Ground: BP Censoring Media, Destroying Evidence.

“BP doesn’t want the media taking pictures of oil on the beaches. You should see the oil that’s about six miles off the coast,” he said grimly. We looked down at the wavy orange boom surrounding the islands below us. The pilot shook his head. “There’s no way those booms are going to stop what’s offshore from hitting those beaches.”

Oil soaks miles of Pensacola Beach. The more I read about the Gulf Oil Spill, the more I’m so saddened that I never got the chance to visit the southern shores of the United States before this disaster.

BP-Hired Mercenaries Keep Reporters From Interviewing Workers. Why does this not surprise me? Maybe I just don’t trust corporations.

Expert suggests BP is hiding oiled animal carcasses. “People who walk the beaches at night, they’ve seen little baby dolphins wash up dead, flashlights, people descend out of nowhere, carcass gone in 15 minutes.”

Fandom

Officially Our Best-Ever Cease and Desist. Think Geek gets a c&d from the National Pork Board for unicorn meat. Ummm… Unicorns aren’t real and neither is this product, National Pork Board.

Why Iron Man Is The First 21st Century Superhero.

The first 21st century superhero is a hedonistic, narcissistic, even nihilistic, adrenaline junkie, billionaire entrepreneur do-gooder. If Peter Parker’s life lesson is that “with great power comes great responsibility,” Tony Stark’s is that with great power comes a shit-ton of fun. You can’t get any more Gen Y than that.

Rescue. On why Kelly Sue DeConnick’s Rescue one-shot was so fabulous and why the fangirl cabal and boys auxiliary declares that DeConnick needs to write a series about Pepper Potts as Rescue.

Dad and son build AMAZING backyard Stargate. This is pretty neat and really geeky. I can also see a lot drunken tripping over the Stargate at family gatherings.

Feminism

That Ole Glass Ceiling Still Isn’t Cracked. Personally, I’m rather tired of seeing the only advice columns being “women need to ask more” to solve workplace gender-based pay discrimination. As a society, we need to smack down those companies who continue to pay discriminate based on gender. Women can’t just fight institutionalized discrimination alone in small conversations with employers. Society has to change.

G. Willow Wilson: On Women, the Media, and Islam. I haven’t read the book Wilson’s interviewed about, but it’s now on my list. I have read her comic book Air and really loved it.

Butterfly Mosque came out of the emails I wrote to family and friends back home after moving to Egypt. Several people suggested I turn them into a book. So the memoir really started out as more of a travelogue, but grew and refined as I thought about it and edited it. The final product is much more emotional and spiritual than my original draft–much more a Muslim coming-of-age story than a travelogue.”

Inspirational

Paint on hands by dalydose
Get creative. Times to excersize the right brain.
Try to Do Something Creative: 35+ Ideas. As a creative person, I find that I get into ruts of non-creativity. And this article has some great ideas about how to engage that creativity.

You can’t get rid of your fears, but you can learn to live with them.

Local (Seattle)

New city ordinance has restaurants going green. Go, Seattle, and the ordinance to make restaurants use compostable or recyclable materials for takeaway containers.

Recipes

Semantic Recipe Finder Will Save You Time in the Kitchen. Create a profile with this, and it will match recipes to your desired preferences, whether it’s taste, allergies, or other dietary restrictions. Don’t wade through recipes with ingredients you don’t like, can’t eat, or can’t find locally.

Science

Butterfly Wing Colors Come From Space-Age Structures. Science explains what we’ve always wondered about the very unique structures that make up butterfly wings.

Technology

WordPress 3.0. It’s a CMS of beauty.

Google Launches “Commerce Search 2.0”. Google has their own merchandising and search software for e-commerce shops. It used to be pretty basic and also rudimentary. However, they’ve lowered the price and upgrade the technology. As someone who does merchandising for e-commerce, this looks pretty slick.

Search Old Scanned Documents By Uploading Them To Google Docs. When I used to work at a newspaper back in 2001-02, I used to scan in typed and/or printed letters to the editor and also type up handwritten letters. This would’ve been so amazingly handy. It’s probably about a billion times more advanced.

Google Activates Android “Kill Switch,” Zaps Useless Apps. The iPhone’s had a kill switch on apps it doesn’t like forever. Google’s been much more open-source and open-minded about their apps. However, it is killing useless apps, apps which were once scams, but have been deactivated, only to carry dead weight on a phone’s memory. As long as they continue to use their powers for good…

New Network Design Could Make the Internet 100 Times Faster. By converting memory storage from optical to an electrical signal, the internet can go 100 times faster. That’s right, soon we’ll be able to watch videos of cats even faster.

WordPress Now Lets You Phone in Your Blog Posts. Hopefully, they’ll add this to the open-source version as well. Seems like a really basic technology considering for years Livejournal has done this.

Web Design

If doctors were treated like web designers. This cartoon is so true about all the things web designers are expected to be able to do and know about. And how little people expect to pay.

Search Engine Optimization Tips 29 Worst Practices & Most Common Failures: SEO Checklist Part I. Full of reminders about those little SEO common practices that we may accidentally forget when building websites.

15 Google Chrome Extensions for the Avid Designer. Very handy and nifty tools.

Have Fun with Borders – Beveled, Pressed, & More! Tricks of the trade to make your CSS layout just a little snappier and more professional looking.

Work Processes

Getting Organized with Evernote. I love using Evernote to keep track of my to-do lists, places I want to visit, notes for blog post, drafts, etc. If you’ve never heard of Evernote or don’t really know how to use it, this is a great primer.

Reducing Stress: Zebras Don’t Hang Around Lion Filled Watering Holes. An interesting article on how humans hold stress and have in many ways lost our instinctual animal reaction to run away and let go of stress. And how we don’t realize how harmful stress really is in our lives. I do think the author relays on some pseudo-science to arrive at her conclusions, especially some of the things she recommends for further reading. However, I think her base argument about letting go of stress is very valid.

11 Creative Ways to Avoid Becoming a Workaholic. I’m not a big fan of Zen Habits. In fact, usually, they raise my blood pressure. However, I think our culture is so into the quantity versus quality that we forget if we burn ourselves out, our work is going to be substandard.

This is Why I’ll Never be an Adult. A humorous comic strip on how no matter how accomplished you are, sometimes you just get burnt out on being an adult. Which reminds me, I think it’s time for ice cream.

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