Pornography, Poverty, 9/11, Multitasking
One Lawyer’s Crusade To Defend Extreme Pornography
Edward Docx | Guardian | 9th September 2015
Myles Jackman fights pro-bono against trumped-up pornography charges. Obscenity laws rest on vague and subjective terms – "extreme images," "explicit and realistic" portrayals, "tend[ency] to deprave or corrupt" – as judged by juries who generally haven't participated in the activity in question and have no way to asses its realism. Many sex acts are legal to perform but illegal to film, distribute or watch, even by the participants themselves (7,830 words)
Broke
Spencer Hall | Every Day Should Be Saturday | 8th September 2015
Intertwining a plea to pay college football players (who are somehow "neither amateurs nor professionals, and effectively moved as undeclared contraband through the United States tax system") and a personal essay about growing up broke in America, condemning "a system that willfully commits one of the greatest insults possible: making someone poorer, and then claiming that poverty as a necessary, virtuous and good thing" (3,430 words)
14 Years After 9/11, The War On Terror Is Accomplishing Everything bin Laden Hoped It Would
Tom Engelhardt | Nation | 8th September 2015
"With a small number of supporters, $400,000-$500,000, and 19 suicidal hijackers," Osama bin Laden "pulled off a geopolitical magic trick of the first order" – he "goaded us into doing what [he] had neither the resources nor the ability to do." "Osama, it worked. You spooked this country into 14 years of giving any dumb or horrifying act or idea or law or intrusion into our lives or curtailment of our rights a get-out-of-jail-free pass" (2,170 words)
Human Task Switches Considered Harmful
Joel Spolsky | Joel on Software | 12th February 2001
A simple model of why multi-tasking is unproductive. If two 10 hour tasks are performed sequentially, the first will be finished after 10 hours and the second after 20 hours. If the same two tasks are performed by flitting from one to the other they will both only be finished towards the end of the 20 hour block. And this is only in the best case, where the switching itself doesn't cost extra time – which, for humans, it certainly does (1,120 words)
Video of the day: Foxed
What to expect: Creepy stop-motion film about nightmare foxes (4'35")
Thought for the day
Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit
Oscar Wilde