Michal Cierniak

"Gay rights activists in India say a ruling by the Delhi High Court decriminalising homosexuality in the country is a landmark. The judgement overturns a 148-year-old colonial law which described a same-sex relationship as an "unnatural offence"." - Michal Cierniak via Bookmarklet

"No doubt several factors contributed to the "missing hyphen" narrative and its longevity, even in official accounts from technical cognoscenti at JPL and NASA. Among the factors cited (or obvious enough): * The overbar's resemblance to a hyphen. * The difficulty of explaining the real error to the American public and its elected representatives." - Michal Cierniak via Bookmarklet

"The high definition DVD format war between Blu-ray and HD DVD is over and the winner is…HD DVD? That’s the implication based on a recent Harris poll, which found that penetration of HD DVD players, a discontinued product, has actually increased, from 6 percent of households in 2008 to 11 percent this year." - Michal Cierniak via Bookmarklet

"The sanitizing was a team effort, led by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, along with Wikipedia administrators and people at The Times. [...] The Wikipedia editor in that case was Michael Moss, an investigative reporter at The Times and friend of Mr. Rohde who has written extensively about groups like Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Like many Wikipedia editors, he adopted a user name that hid his true identity. [...] With his editors’ blessing, Mr. Moss had already made similar changes to Mr. Rohde’s “topic page” on The Times’s Web site, and in both cases he omitted the name of Mr. Rohde’s former employer, because it contained the word Christian." - Michal Cierniak via Bookmarklet

"The best optical illusion I have seen all year" - Michal Cierniak via Bookmarklet

"AZUL Beach Hotel by Karisma Quiet boutique resort just twenty minutes from the Cancun airport. Three pools, including one for kids; beach butlers. For babies, the resort provides strollers, cribs, in-room play-pens, bottle warmer, and lots of other gear. Azulitos kids program, for kids under five, was created with Fisher-Price, and has activities for babies 6 to 18 months, toddlers 18-36 months,and little kids three to five. Toy lending library, and kids club for ages 4 to 12." - Michal Cierniak via Bookmarklet

Just saw an ad for this in our My Gym. - Michal Cierniak

"There are a ton of great, free applications that have been created in less than 1Mb - I didn't fully realize just how many until I started putting this list together." - Michal Cierniak via Bookmarklet

"Rather than go for facebook.com/christine.shipley or even facebook.com/shipley, she went with facebook.com/default.aspx" - Michal Cierniak via Bookmarklet

I truly regret not having done something similar - j1m

Me too. I wonder what Bobby Tables (http://xkcd.com/327/) picked for his. - Michal Cierniak

"this has gotta be one of the most brilliant, creative, darling, type-a-licious, as-unique-and-personal-as-it can-get invites" - Michal Cierniak via Bookmarklet

"the archetypical American child is Huckleberry Finn, who had little taste for formal education. Another is complacency. American parents have led grass-root protests against attempts to extend the school year into August or July, or to increase the amount of homework their little darlings have to do. They still find it hard to believe that all those Chinese students, beavering away at their books, will steal their children’s jobs." - Michal Cierniak via Bookmarklet

"This has been a contentious issue for many years, and while state law bans sidewalk parking, it's often ignored on 19th Avenue. The city conducted a safety study recently and received numerous complaints about sidewalk parking from pedestrians, the disabled and 19th Avenue residents — which led to the ticketing notices you spotted." - Michal Cierniak via Bookmarklet

Here's the quote from the California Vehicle Code: "22500. No person shall stop, park, or leave standing any vehicle [...] (f) On any portion of a sidewalk". See: http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs... - Michal Cierniak

"Cc:Betty is a service that routes, parses, and organizes email conversations in a simple at-a-glance dashboard so you never have to scour your inbox to find the bits and pieces of a long thread. If you cc “betty@ccbetty.com” on any email, “she” will create a mailspace, which is a webpage, for your entire email thread and will divide important things such as dates, times, people, places, and files and will format them all in one place." - Michal Cierniak via Bookmarklet

"After being criminally investigated, placed on leave, fired, reinstated and finally allowed to retire in good standing, former Palo Alto Children's Theatre director Pat Briggs stood in council chambers Monday to accept an apology from the city council and a standing ovation from the audience." - Michal Cierniak via Bookmarklet

"Sweden's Pirate Party, striking a chord with voters who want more free content on the Internet, won a seat in the European Parliament, early results showed on Sunday. The Pirate Party captured 7.1 percent of votes in Sweden in the Europe-wide ballot, enough to give it a single seat. The party wants to deregulate copyright, abolish the patent system and reduce surveillance on the Internet." - Michal Cierniak via Bookmarklet

"Nadal's serves, which were then clocked at an average speed of 99 mph, are now traveling an average of 16 mph faster -- and he regularly hits the upper 120s on the radar gun." - Michal Cierniak via Bookmarklet

"Reading this book again, like reading Maria Montessori, fills me with a certain sadness that such clear vision, brilliant insight and profound understanding of the needs of children should have been offered time and again, for so many years, to be so largely ignored." - Michal Cierniak via Bookmarklet

"This is a very dangerous book. It contradicts all the conventional wisdom about dropouts and the importance of a formal education. It is funny and inspiring. Do not, under any circumstances, share this book with a bright, frustrated high-schooler being ground into mind fudge by the school system. This writer cannot be responsible for the happiness and sense of personal responsibility that might [result]." - Michal Cierniak via Bookmarklet

"Children born on 31 December start school a year earlier than those born on 1 January – even though they are almost exactly the same age. This provides an exogenous separation between age and school-starting age. Our measure of performance is the military enrolment IQ test scores (when students are around age 18), which is taken by almost all children. This allows us to compare children of the same age but with different school starting ages." - Michal Cierniak via Bookmarklet

"more utopian than dystopian, the story focuses on egalitarian, sociological, and scientific advances made on Mars, while Earth suffers from overpopulation and ecological disaster." - Michal Cierniak via Bookmarklet

"In 1980, computer engineering was based on starting with clearly-defined things (primitives or small programs) and using them to build larger things that ended up being clearly-defined.  Composition of these fragments was the name of the game. However, nowadays, a real engineer is given a big software library, with a 300-page manual that’s full of errors." - Michal Cierniak via Bookmarklet