The Grey Lady Learns Pivot Tables: NY Times J-Course Data, Part 1 | spreadsheetjournalismThis just in: The newspaper of record is rebranding itself into the newspaper of records. The Times – the one from New York, that is – has moved to evangelize the data-journalistic thing among its staff, and towards that admirable end has crafted an extended in-house workshop, syllabus and practice files/exercises made available to all the rest of us in Google Sheets here and here, respectively (ok, ok, call me the Luddite; I’m downloading the files into Excel). AltSchool’s out: Zuckerberg-backed startup that tried to rethink education calls it quits – SFChronicle.comNow, the 21st century schoolhouse, created by a former Google executive and backed by titans of tech like Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel, is essentially shutting down. AltSchool is being retooled as Altitude Learning, a startup that will sell software and professional development services nationwide. Track This | A new kind of IncognitoLet us open 100 tabs of pure madness to fool trackers into thinking you’re someone else. bellingcat – Lord Of The Flies: An Open-Source Investigation Into Saud Al-Qahtani – bellingcatThe individual identifying themselves as al-Qahtani in emails to Hacking Team in 2012 and 2015 used two email addresses (saudq1978@gmail.com and saud@saudq.com) and a phone number (+966 55 548 9750) that can be definitively linked […]

youtube-dl/README.md at master · rg3/youtube-dl download youtube videos with many options from terminal h/t Wes Bos Typography in ten minutes | Butterick’s Practical Typography : if you learn and fol­low these five ty­pog­ra­phy rules, you will be a bet­ter ty­pog­ra­pher than 95% of pro­fes­sional writ­ers and 70% of pro­fes­sional de­sign­ers. (The rest of this book will raise you to the 99th per­centile in both categories.) Pollen: the book is a program Pollen is a publishing system that helps authors make functional and beautiful digital books. The Bet I Made with Teachers All Around the United States Last Year – dy/dan My point in all of this is that math teachers have names for their numbers, much in the same way that ornithologists have names for their birds. And much in the same way that ornithologists haven’t given me a reason to care about the difference between a Woodlark and a Skylark, math teachers often fail to motivate the difference between rational numbers and integers and whole numbers and imaginary numbers and supernatural numbers. The difference is that ornithology isn’t a course that’s required for high school graduation and university enrollment and labor market participation. Kids aren’t forced to study ornithology for twelve years of their childhood. So I’m inviting us to ask ourselves: “Why did we invent these categories of […]

Your drain on drugs: Meth seeps into Baltimore’s streams – CNN.com Here’s why: These plants and bugs are the base of the aquatic food web. Birds eat the bugs, as do frogs and fish. As emergent contaminants such as pharmaceuticals and endocrine disruptors become more common in ground and drinking water, they could affect humans. Scientists say the direct health effects are pretty much unknown, and more research will need to be done. h/t Jon Becker Handwriting Just Doesn’t Matter – The New York Times A month later, Alabama required the teaching of cursive in public schools by the end of third grade by way of “Lexi’s Law,” named for the granddaughter of the state representative Dickie Drake; Mr. Drake believes “cursive writing identifies you as much as your physical features do.” In other words, our script reveals something unique and ineluctable about our inner being. For most of American history, cursive was supposed to do the opposite. Mastering it was dull, repetitive work, intended to make every student’s handwriting match a standardized model. In the mid-19th century, that model was Spencerian script. It was replaced by the Palmer Method, which was seen as a more muscular and masculine hand suitable for the industrial age — a “plain and rapid style,” as Austin Palmer described it, to replace the more […]