Stock­holm Syn­drome Soci­ety.

A splen­did break­down of how the Stock­holm syn­drome model may be applied to var­i­ous aspects of human soci­ety from Strange Blue Planet, react­ing to a blog entry by Mat­tias Jenny prepara­tory to his essay “Dif­fu­sion of reac­tion and obe­di­ence to author­ity” that I reacted to here:

Experts may argue over if the Stock­holm syn­drome really exists. One needn’t go to the experts to ascer­tain a plainly vis­i­ble phe­nom­ena. Human beings tend not only to accept life within oppres­sive social struc­tures, but to love and cher­ish it. They invent fan­ci­ful rea­sons jus­ti­fy­ing their sub­or­di­nate posi­tion and go to the extent of pun­ish­ing those who refuse to accept their assigned posi­tion. Such a per­son is gen­er­ally con­sid­ered “well adjusted” in human soci­ety. Human soci­ety as we know it is Stock­holm syn­drome at a gigan­tic scale.

Well worth a read, and even more so for the Cthulhu bonus.

Read: Stock­holm Syn­drome Society

[nostate.com]

Sev­eral good posts on the way nearly every­one is will­ing to blindly obey those who present them­selves as “authorities.”

del.icio.us goes through over­haul, domain change. Social book­mark­ing site Deli­cious on Thurs­day announced it has refined its ser­vices greatly, while also adding a new domain name through which the site can be reached, Delicious.com. Accord­ing to a post on Deli­cious’ blog, the var­i­ous refine­ments have allowed the com­pany to enhance speed, search capa­bil­ity, and over­all lay­out of the site. The domai… [The Mac­in­tosh News Net­work]

The domain name change report­edly stems from con­fu­sion among users in the spelling of del.icio.us, but the site can still be accessed through its for­mer moniker.

Good choice on their part. My first thought when I heard of that ser­vice (right before “what’s the point?”) was that the name was impos­si­ble to remember.

Python’s “lambda” really needs bet­ter documentation.

“I’ve Been to Chuck E. Cheese with a Gun”.

What hap­pens when a Mid­dle Eastern-looking man and a young black man walk into a Long­Horn with loaded pis­tols on their belts?

“Wel­come to Long­Horn, will it just be the two of you?”

The host­ess told us there would be a 20-minute wait. We stood at the door­way and talked. Nobody said a word or even looked at us funny. A few peo­ple glanced down at my belt as they walked up, but hon­estly, a new iPhone would have caused a big­ger fuss than our guns.

At Cre­ative Loaf­ing Atlanta, vaguely lib­er­al­ish sen­si­tive guy Andisheh Nouraee traipses around Atlanta and its envi­rons with a gun and waits for reac­tions. Take­away: No one even says “boo.”

In April, Geor­gia passed a law that expanded the list of places that it’s A-OK to carry a gun to include restau­rants, includ­ing those that serve booze, and those that don’t, like Chuck E. Cheese, plus pub­lic transit:

“So I just want to be clear,” I asked [Atlanta pub­lic tran­sit sys­tem] MARTA police Chief Wanda Dun­ham. “If I had a turkey sand­wich in one hand and a gun in the other hand, MARTA police would ticket me for the turkey sandwich?”

“If you’re eat­ing it,” she replied. “Only if you’re eat­ing it.”

An inter­est­ing study in the robust minding-one’s-own-business ethos that makes Amer­ica great. Read the whole thing.

[Hit and Run]

The cable box plugged into my tele­vi­sion is more than twice the size of my Mac­Book Pro. It came with a remote con­trol that’s per­haps four times the size of a Black­berry. So why should I need to know what “chan­nel” some­thing is on? There should be a minia­ture key­board on the remote. If I want to watch HBO, I should be able to do so by typ­ing HBO. If I want to watch a par­tic­u­lar TV show or movie, I should be able to type the name and have the cable box auto­mat­i­cally show me the chan­nel (or chan­nels) cur­rently show­ing things that match what I’ve typed.

@hot­dogsladies Per­haps which it is will depend on the size of the tip…

M 5.8, Greater Los Ange­les area, Cal­i­for­nia. July 29, 2008 18:42:15 GMT [USGS M>2.5 Earth­quakes]

Just the right size for an earthquake–small enough that noth­ing fell over, but big enough to be fun.

Update: the LA Times has more infor­ma­tion.

There’s an iPhone app called Emer­ald Chronome­ter which mim­ics a fancy mechan­i­cal watch on your iPhone (or iPod Touch). It’s a pretty clever idea–especially since real mechan­i­cal watches with all those fea­tures are very, very expensive.

We just had an earth­quake here. They’re always more fun above the ground floor…

The PRAM bat­tery on my Pho­to­shop Mac appears to have died. I guess that’s Apple’s lit­tle way of say­ing “buy a new com­puter already!”