antimeria

• For Tony, a Wired article about Internet addiction in China. I’ve read a bit about this phenomenon in Korea, and have wondered if it’s a legitimate concern, or if it’s just the fact that 43% of China’s 1.3 billion citizens are under 29–a cohort which outnumbers the entire United States population.
• For Scott, a blog about clouds. Update: link broken, server problems.
• For just about everyone else, the Voltaggio brothers’ website is definitely drool-worthy. They also have a bunch of Youtube videos.

HT: Andrew Sullivan and Ezra Klein

I share links on Facebook, Twitter, GReader and this blog.

I just downloaded Firefox 3.5, and I already love it. I never made the switch to Chrome or Safari, partly out of inertia, but mostly because of the huge array of available add-ons. Since I haven’t done a list in a while, here’s my list of nerdery:

• Adblock plus. No more of those stupid dancing-woman ads for mortgages or shitty diploma mills.
• Better Gmail 2. This is one of my favorite add-ons. In addition to little things like highlighting the email you’ve moused over, it includes the truly outstanding Folders4Gmail, which allows you to create hierarchical (nested) labels. Doesn’t require a separate Greasemonkey install.
• Forecastfox. Since I’m on a PC at work, I don’t have a handy little weather widget. Or should I say… I didn’t, until I found this. Has options for multiple areas.
• Various PageRank checkers. I used Live PageRank, but they don’t have a version for FF3.5 yet. Currently using SearchStatus, which is more fully-featured.
• Ubiquity. Get this. I’m not even kidding. This is the first thing that gets added to any FF install. It’s a command-line type interface that lets you do just about anything you want, including:
  • Search Google, Wikipedia, Youtube, Google Maps, Flickr, Yelp, Weather.com, Yahoo (how far you’ve fallen, Yahoo), Amazon, and probably a bunch more.
  • Tweet, Digg, StumbleUpon or create TinyURLs.
  • Send email in Gmail. Yep. You can highlight some text on a page, or the url bar, then type ‘email this to martin’ and, hey presto, I just got some email.
  • Translate selections or pages.

You can just hear the rimshot, can’t you?

Anyway, Dan Deacon’s upcoming album, Bromst, is streaming in its entirety on NPR’s site. I already love it (that might have something to do with not opening with a cut like “Woody Woodpecker”).

Today’s Yesterday’s (fuck, I should keep up on my feeds) “The Two Progressivisms” post on 538 is interesting, and mostly dead-on:

[Rational] progressivism has its philosophical underpinnings in 18th Century, Enlighte[n]ment-era thought. It believes that politics is a battle of ideas. It further believes that through the use of reason and the exchange of ideas, human society will tend to improve itself through scientific and technological innovation. Hence, it believes in progress, and for this reason lays claim to the term “progressive”. … The project of rational progressivism, then, is to propagate good ideas and to convert them, through a wide and aggressive array of democratic means, into public policy.

Radical progressivism is more clearly distinguishable from “conventional” liberalism and would generally be associated with the “far left” — although on a handful of issues such as free trade, it may find common cause with the “radical” right. Radical progressivism embraces the tradition of populism and frequently adopts a discourse of the virtuous commoner organizing against the corrupt elite. It is much more willing to make normative claims than rational progressivism, and tends to view conservatism as immoral and contemporary American liberalism as amoral (at best). Its project is not reform but transformation.

The full post is really interesting, but if you don’t feel like reading there’s also a nifty little chart. In the spirit of facile dichotomy,  here’s where I landed on the progressivist spectrum:

I guess I’d call myself a  “depressive progressive” or something.