It’s not that Sarah Palin is inexperienced. It’s that this is gross political misconduct.

Robert J. Elisberg: The Worst Vice-Presidential Nominee in U.S. History

MSNBC’s Hurricane Tracker is a pretty awesome use of Flash provides information I’ve been looking for. I really do hope Hurricane Gustav doesn’t kill any more people, but if it does, there can be no better time than during the Republican National Convention.

…seeing and hearing Hilary invoke the legacy and the words of Harriet Tubman to describe this political campaign elides the importance of race. It also seems like the classic white-person move to look backward in time and identify with the oppressed…

racismreview.com: Hilary and Harriet Tubman

Radar Online has named my mother’s alma mater, Drexel University, the ugliest college campus in the US. I don’t disagree that the campus is ugly, but the article makes one assertion I want to rebut. It says, “Spread out on the wasteland fringes of Philadelphia, Drexel is not only impossibly hideous, it’s also not safe.” Drexel is hardly on the fringes of Philadelphia. It’s just a few blocks west of the central post office and 30th Street Station, Philly’s main train station. Nestled between those landmarks and the University of Pennsylania, it’s about as central as anything can be in West Philly, and the city proper extends another thirty blocks west. Still, I remember being stunned at it’s 1960s institutional blandness when I would walk through it when I lived in West Philly.

Blog Action Day 08 looks like an interesting project to bring attention to poverty.

On an email list, I saw a call for papers by a journal called Neo-Victorian Studies and thought, “Has Steampunk joined the academic mainstream?” The call solicits papers about the film Sweeney Todd, which is not Steampunk writ large, but a larger cultural turn toward the early industrial age is perhaps even more interesting.

Over on Matt Haughey’s PVRblog, a post on The Daily Show and their TiVos drew a comment from a former Daily Show researcher about the array of devices used to capture clips for the program. John Teti says, “it’s literally 15 rack-mounted TiVos of various models, many from the pre-Series 2 era.” It sounds like it’s baling wire and duct tape: they don’t even have capacity for archiving. The whole comment is certainly worth reading, as is the New York Times story that spawned the conversation.

Sherwin Siy provides a good explanation of the differences between IP contracts and licenses in a post at Public Knowledge. The recent Jacobsen vs. Katzer case upheld an open software license, and the decision hinged on this distinction. If a license is violated, distribution reverts to copyright infringement.