Paul M. Jones

I understand funerals can be awkward for those not directly grieving, but over-exaggerating your pretend sadness is of no benefit to anyone, it merely obligates the survivors to manage your fake concern.  If you feel compelled to speak in all caps or explain how terrible this all is to a person who knows first hand and way better than you how terrible it all is, don't.  Stay home.  When you find yourself in the presence of mourning, simply say,  "I'm sorry for your loss.  If there's anything I can do for you, please let me know," and if he happened also to have been a great man you can add, "he was a great man," then bow your head and fade to back.   That's all that's necessary.  The system will take care of the rest.

via The Last Psychiatrist: Funeral.

Something else is odd about the sociology of the anti-inequality crowd. They seem to be unfazed by inequality created by government.

Take the recent Powerball outcome. At $588 million, it was the largest lottery prize in history ? to be shared by two ticketholders. In essence, hundreds of millions of dollars are being transferred from mostly low-income families in order to create a few super rich individuals.

via The Anti-Capitalist Mentality | John Goodman's Health Policy Blog | NCPA.org.

Today EFF posted several thousand pages of new drone license records and a new map that tracks the location of drone flights across the United States.  These records, received as a result of EFF’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), come from state and local law enforcement agencies, universities and--for the first time--three branches of the U.S. military: the Air Force, Marine Corps, and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).

Perhaps the scariest is the technology carried by a Reaper drone the Air Force is flying near Lincoln, Nevada and in areas of California and Utah. This drone uses "Gorgon Stare" technology, which Wikipedia defines as “a spherical array of nine cameras attached to an aerial drone . . . capable of capturing motion imagery of an entire city.” This imagery “can then be analyzed by humans or an artificial intelligence, such as the Mind's Eye project” being developed by DARPA.

via Vox Popoli: Federal spies in the sky.

I saw a woman on Stossel tonight who works for McDonald's. She said she was paid $8 an hour, but felt she deserved $15. I thought: Wait a minute, McDonald's isn't the only company not paying you $15 an hour: neither you nor I are aware of anyone willing to pay you that much. So why is your problem with McDonald's?

via Blaming the Person Offering you the Best Deal, David Henderson | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

Gov. Bill Haslam announced Monday that Tennessee will not set up its own health insurance exchange under the Affordable Care Act.

Haslam said in a speech to Nashville’s Downtown Rotary Club that he’s decided not to set up an exchange because he’s received insufficient information about how it would operate from the federal government. In just the last month, officials in Washington have released more than 800 pages worth of draft regulations, Haslam said, leaving him unclear whether Tennessee would be better off operating its own exchange or leaving the task to the federal government.

“I'm more and more convinced that they are making this up as they go,” Haslam said. “We weren’t told enough to be able to run this on our own.”

The decision comes days after tea party groups rallied near the state Capitol to oppose a health insurance exchange. Speakers, including a few Republican lawmakers, said Tennessee should block the exchange to send a message that the state continues to oppose the Affordable Care Act.

Right on. Via Haslam says Tennessee will not set up health care exchange | The Tennessean | tennessean.com.

1) Fox News loves a good on-air rumble. NPR is Lawrence Welk for baby-boomers.

2) Fox News thinks that in the US, lefties, while few in number, punch far above their weight culturally. Lefties agree.

3) Fox News think that the Democratic Party's form of an expanded social services net & interference in the corporate world is but a prelude to socialism. Lefties hope that's the case.

NPR, on the other hand, is basically the urban white wing of the Democratic Party in front of a microphone. It really doesn't want to give Lefties a platform to ask liberals embarrassing questions (like, "Gosh, just how long does it take to close Gitmo?") or to spout off with some Lefty hate-speech (e.g. New Black Panther Party), which might remind NPR listeners that their side is no where near as rational & nice as they think they are.

via Althouse: "Five Bloggers I’d Like To See On FOX News.".

Senior White House and Justice Department officials are considering plans for legal action against Colorado and Washington that could undermine voter-approved initiatives to legalize the recreational use of marijuana in those states, according to several people familiar with the deliberations.

Even as marijuana legalization supporters are celebrating their victories in the two states, the Obama administration has been holding high-level meetings since the election to debate the response of federal law enforcement agencies to the decriminalization efforts.

Marijuana use in both states continues to be illegal under the federal Controlled Substances Act. One option is to sue the states on the grounds that any effort to regulate marijuana is pre-empted by federal law. Should the Justice Department prevail, it would raise the possibility of striking down the entire initiatives on the theory that voters would not have approved legalizing the drug without tight regulations and licensing similar to controls on hard alcohol.

Hey, Mr Obama? In those states, more people voted for pot than for you. Via Radley Balko: In Which Harold & Kumar Go Into Hiding.

I did an email interview with the folks at PHP Magazin; their German version is here. What follows is our original email exchange in English.

First of all, congratulations for releasing Aura 1.0!

Thanks! Most of the packages are at 1.0, but there are still three that are in beta; I expect them to go "stable" soon as well.

Why did you do it?

Aura is essentially a second major version of the Solar Framework. (Solar was the first E_STRICT framework for PHP 5; its development pre-dates that of the Zend Framework.) One of the repeated questions we got regarding Solar went like this: "I want to use just one part of Solar; can I do that without having to download and configure the whole framework?" Of course the answer to that was "not really." It was a monolithic framework, where all the pieces were designed to work with each other in a relatively dependent fashion.

So with Aura, we started out from the other direction. We wanted the pieces to be usable on their own, without any other dependencies. Only after that would we build a framework out of the pieces. We called this our "libraries first, framework second" principle. This means you can use just one Aura package if you want, and you won't get a lot of of other packages as dependencies; each one is completely self contained, including its tests. Each one uses separated interfaces and data transfer objects as necessary to move information across package boundaries.

In addition to that, we wanted to take all the lessons we learned from Solar and break backwards compatibility to start over again. The single biggest BC break has been moving away from a Service Locator implementation and the universal constructor, toward a more formal Dependency Injection oriented system. That one change has made for gigantic improvements in decoupling, testability, and package independence. (I have to thank Jeff Moore here for being patient with me and slowly getting me on the dependency injection track.) We don't even use superglobals within the packages; everything from the environment has to be copied into the objects, which makes things really easy to test.

Why did you decide it has to be PHP 5.4? What's the advantage?

When we started the Aura project in 2010, we targeted PHP 5.3, since it was the most recent PHP version at the time. Closures and traits especially have a lot of powerful uses if you approach them wisely. Then PHP 5.4 came out in January 2012. Almost all of the Aura packages were still in development at the time, so we figured we might as well target PHP 5.4, with its short-array [] syntax and "callable" type hint. Those things seem small, but once you start using them, they are *so* convenient (and frankly they make the code look prettier :-).

You seem to love small packages. What do you think of the microframework approach Ed Finkler published in the beginning of the year?

I think Ed has a strong point, although to be clear I don't think he's so much about "microframework" as he is about "micro-PHP" in general.

It used to be, back in the PHP 3, 4, and early 5.x days, that the word "framework" was a dirty word in PHP land. (The word "CMS" was OK though.) Then, right after Ruby on Rails came out, suddenly a "framework" was a good thing. Lots of developers got on board with that, and we did the same with Solar.

So in a way, I think moving back to a library-oriented approach is a natural tendency for the PHP world. Frameworks still have value, especially for early-to-mid-career developers, or for teams where you need a standardized development process but don't have a strong senior-level architect on staff. But a lot of senior developers want to be able to pick and choose between libraries, and they want to be sure they understand what the library is doing (and why, and how). And they want to be able to replace the pieces they end up not liking. That's a lot easier when you have independent libraries than when you have a monolithic framework.

What can one do better with Aura than they can with Zend or Symfony?

A lot of PHP developers are stuck with codebases they didn't build themselves, or that they need to improve carefully over a long period of time because the business is dependent on it for revenue. For those PHP developers, switching the project to a framework isn't an option. The Aura project, being composed of independent packages, lets these developers use just the individual independent parts they need for their existing projects, and slowly improve the quality of their codebase. It's easier to refactor your project one part at a time using Aura than it is to start all over again with a monolithic framework.

If you're lucky enough to be able to start a brand-new project, Aura also provides a framework system that glues all the other packages into a cohesive whole. If you're the kind of developer who wants to use a full-stack framework, but you also want to be able to pull out parts of the framework and replace them with your own implementations, Aura (because it was built with a "libraries first" approach) makes that a lot easier for you than Zend or Symfony does. There are no cross-package dependencies like there are with Zend and Symfony, and we use separated interfaces for things that should have replaceable implementations. (The framework package is still beta, but it appears to be working just fine.)

Thank you very much and keep up the good work!

Thank you for your interest and attention!

Last year the journal Nature reported an alarming increase in the number of retractions of scientific papers -- a tenfold rise in the previous decade, to more than 300 a year across the scientific literature.

Other studies have suggested that most of these retractions resulted from honest errors. But a deeper analysis of retractions, being published this week, challenges that comforting assumption.

In the new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, two scientists and a medical communications consultant analyzed 2,047 retracted papers in the biomedical and life sciences. They found that misconduct was the reason for three-quarters of the retractions for which they could determine the cause.

via Study Finds Misconduct Widespread in Retracted Scientific Papers - NYTimes.com.

Lynette Lee of Clarksville, Tennessee first told police on November 23 that she had been raped in a hotel room by a man she had met through the dating website MeetMe.com. “Lee said once at the hotel the man removed her clothes and, despite her protests, had sex with her,” according to newschannel5.com.

The rape suspect told police that his sexual experience with Lee was consensual. But apparently it was nothing to write home about.

Lee asked police to drop the rape case four days later, on Nov. 27, claiming that she lied about the rape because “she did not enjoy (the sexual encounter) and it was bad,” according to police.

Be careful reading the original article; it has a picture of the woman who lied. My eyes! My eyes! Via Woman claimed rape because the sex was bad | The Daily Caller.