I was saddened yesterday when I read that A Brave New World was removed from from the reading list of a high school just several blocks away from where I live. The majority of the story may be found here for those of you interested.I won't reiterate what is written there, but one thing that really angered me was how quickly the book was removed from the school's reading list because of an objection from a single student and parent.

I've always had a love-hate relationship with JavaScript. On one hand, JavaScript will let you easily implement any multitude of sins - similar to languages like Ruby, Python, etc. On the other hand, you can also pull of some pretty neat tricks with an expressive language like JavaScript. As the level of interactivity that people expect from the web continues to increase, much of the logic that used to run on the server side has transitioned to the client side - e.g. executed in the browser via JavaScript. Usability features like auto-complete, date pickers, accordians, etc., can be easily accomplished with JavaScript and libraries like Jquery or MooTools.

Since it's election season, and our country's political landscape is turning redder than Santa Claus eating a tomato, I thought it'd be nice to post one of my favorite new "viral" (can I still use that word?) campaigns. I have no idea who it's funded by, but my guess is that they didn't vote for Obama.

Enjoy Friday!

I'm a daily reader of Hacker News, a website pretty much devoted to interesting entrepreneurial and computer science topics. This morning I read an apologetic post from Mailchimp, my preferred email messaging platform, where one of Mailchimp's developers explains their reasons for using PHP as their core langauge for development to another language.

I was flipping channels when I caught a Science Channel special on Stephen Hawking. The documentary following Stephen Hawking's life from his days at Cambridge, all the way up to present day. I enjoyed learning more about Hawking's contributions to science, but in the middle of the documentary, I noticed something new that I'd never thought to acknowledge before: despite the major improvements made in speech synthesization software since the 1970's, Stephen Hawking's voice still sounds pretty much identical to what it did 25+ years ago. Why is that?

*Chart compliments of The Guardian

It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. While impressive in their value for describing ideas, images aren't the most valuable asset into today's info-driven culture - that honor belongs to the URL. The URL can be worth millions of possible words, images, and content from around the world.