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Weekly Linkage: The Long Edition
At some point in the last 2 weeks, I had 0 unread items in Google Reader. It was a short-lived, joyous experience, but this is the result of my web branching: HCG Diet Dangers: Is Fast Weight Loss Worth the Risk? – MSN Health & Fitness – Healthy Living – "But the so-called hCG diet is either a weight-loss miracle or a dangerous fraud, depending on who's talking. The plan combines drops or injections of hCG, a pregnancy hormone, with just 500 calories a day." I don't even have words for how stupid this sounds. And how unhealthy. "Yeah, I'm going to shoot up with a hormone and engage in…
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Weekly Linkage: All Over the Place
There’s no particular theme to this week’s surfing, but there are some pretty pictures and good reads here. The problem with waste – Note that the list of not-recommended screenings include things like screening for prostate cancer in men older than 75 or colon cancer in folks above 85. I glanced through the USPSTF's procedure manual, and it looks like they're taking into account a variety of factors (age, gender, race, etc.), but their information is only as good as the studies they're pulling from. How worried should we be about researchers' biases (ageism being the first that comes to mind)? "So we’re confronted with a set of screening recommendations…
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Weekly Linkage: Stockholm Trolls
Um… it’ll make sense as you read. Amanda Hocking’s Blog: Some Things That Need to Be Said – From a successful self-published author: "This is literally years of work you're seeing. And hours and hours of work each day. The amount of time and energy I put into marketing is exhausting. I am continuously overwhelmed by the amount of work I have to do that isn't writing a book. I hardly have time to write anymore, which sucks and terrifies me." The Very Rich Indie Writer – Novelr – Making People Read – Looking at the example of Amanda Hocking's financial success, will authors of web fiction start to close…
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Weekly Linkage: Passports, Robots, and Monopoly
This week’s internet cruising: No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons (Re-reloaded) » Extraordinary Claims – Dust off your scientific hats for this one. Watts does an interesting analysis of the responses to a paper showing statistically significant evidence of precognition. Other folks apparently jumped all over the precog article with some borderline dishonest critiques, which Watts chews on. The “…the fuck…” exercise. « intangible.ca – Hear, hear. "Think of the last time you had to write an About Us page. Or a FAQ. Or craft an elevator pitch. The big challenge is coming up with a clear, engaging, and succinct description of your project." Change in passport language is…
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Weekly Linkage: Google, Politics, and Bees’ Knees
This week’s internet cruising: Coding Horror: Trouble In the House of Google – Jeff isn't the first to point out the problems with Google's search results lately (the content mills are clearly winning, and I swim through a lot of mess to get good results anymore), but he's done a lot of due diligence to try to improve Stack Exchange's rankings over the content scrapers, with mixed results. Excellent post. Sphinx – A better way to write your docs – This looks like an awesome doc writing/management system–I struggle with how much documentation to produce for the internals of a system (i.e. not a publicly exposed API), but I'd definitely…