On the last day of 2009, The San Francisco Chronicle inexplicably noted Violence Dominates 2009 Headlines, a self-indictment given that with three days left in the year San Francisco was on track in 2009 to have its lowest murder rate in 50 years.

Despite that SF was more peaceful than it had been in half a century, the SF Chronicle hyped the year as one of its most violent. Great going, SF Chronicle.

Buy the fear and stay for the Kool-Aid.

Here’s hoping that in 2010 the editors at the Sf Chronicle heed their ethical obligation to provide news about the real world in which we live rather than writing ledes that bleed and, in the process, distorting reality to look like a first-person shooter.gore »

(source)«

Couched in terms of sacrifice, the linked NYTimes article partially reveals the extent to which the US is openly conducting war as a covert operation whereas in times past covert wars were hidden from general view.1 As with the notoriety and renown of the secret prisons run by the CIA to render suspected terrorists, keeping the presence of CIA operatives in Afghanistan a secret is a liability. When the secret of a secret becomes an open secret, public backlash is all but eliminated.

With the secret known as a secret, the public can mourn the death of US Intelligence officers without being outraged those officers were there to be killed in the first place.

Speculation regarding a tablet computing device designed by Apple is at fever pitch. Last month Amazon sold more ebooks than paper books. Two great tastes that taste great together?

All I know for sure is that I want one, too.

I expected to sneer my way through Sara Markham’s pseudonymous account of how raising a guide dog puppy helped repair her relationship with her three boys. I can’t exactly pinpoint where my feelings changed, but changed they had by the time I reached the following (three-sentence) paragraph.

We’ve all seen by now virtual reality panoramas stitched togther from many smaller pictures. The linked 360° panorama of Prague contains a boggling level of detail, calling to mind the following scene from Blade Runner.» Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott. 1982.«

In an extraordinarily thoughtful NYTimes article, David Carr notes some of the ways in which Twitter can be useful, getting far past the objection I don’t need to know someone is eating a donut right now. Carr explains that

Additionally, Carr’s thoughtful article explains some of what makes Twitter valuable in clear and specific terms.

I’ve tweeted a handful or fewer times so far, and I have never checked my Twitter stream while logged in. I intend for this to change once I’ve settled on a standalone Twitter client.

With the exceptions of Radiohead’s Kid A and Moby’s Play, I don’t own any of these albums. I also wonder about the inclusion of the Rushmore soundtrack and the complete absence of The Colour and the Shape (Foo Fighters), Homogenic (Björk), In Sides Orbital, Mezzanine (Massive Attack), and U.F.Orb (The Orb).»Even if ten is a good number for a list, maybe it’s a meaningless number in the age that birthed Napster.«

How can any list of albums that defined the Dot-Com era fail to at least mention one of the hundreds of techno compilation albums that practically was the musical zeitgeist when Netscape and Microsoft duked it out?, especially when these albums and the anonymity and interchangeability of its artists were part and parcel of the fragmentation of musical markets due to electronic distribution?

I suppose nothing makes a good top ten list like a top ten list that’s just plain wrong.1 2

The linked thread presents in dialogue form the distinctions among the end of the aughts, the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and the end of the millenium. Great if you like your information in flamewar form.

Given how much there’s there, I’m working through these only a few at a time. Lots of good stuff. So far, I’ve come across untold riches in Dustin Curtis. And from Shit My Dad Says:

Looking forward to checking out the list’s remaining five sixths.

Can you feel it? The frenzied hype machine? The blistering urgency to just get your eyes and hands on the device of the decade, the one that will forever change how we read texts?

As long as I’ve been watching Apple, the rumors about Apple’s tablet device»iSlate?« this go-round feel palapably different. John Gruber puts his finger on its pulse when he notes

If you don’t have time to read anything except one more thing about the tablet, read Gruber’s remarks about The Tablet OS. Peering at the opaque black box of Apple product development, Gruber intuits the most important point of what we all know is coming, which is that If Apple’s starting with a hardware size where the iPhone OS can’t be used one-handed, then [. . .] they’re designing a new interaction model.

Apple Tablet Frenzy Roundup

• Apple to Ship Tablet Device in March»I’m especially curious that Yair Reiner, an analyst for Oppenheimer & Co., said in a research note last month that the tablet would be priced at about $1,000, citing sources.« (The Wall Street Journal)

• Apple Scheduling Jan. 27 Media Event»Macworld’s Dan Moren notes that news on a next version of the iPhone is not likely to come before summer, though we may start to hear about iPhone 4.0 before that, if Apple runs true to form, bringing some needed antipyretic to the fevered masses even as he confirms the likelihood of a tablet product being announced.« (Macworld)

• Major Apple Product Announcement Set for Wednesday, Jan. 27 (John Paczkowski at Digital Daily)

• Apple Orders 10 Million Tablets? (PC World)

• Apple Orders 10 Million Tablets? (Slashdot thread regarding previous link)»For your inner fanboy.«

There really is no good way for BeatifulPeople.com to spin this. Fat people can’t also be beautiful people? Thin beautiful people aren’t attracted to fat people? Your fat is my beautiful?

BoingBoing is rightly having a conniption.

Maybe BeautifulPeople.com will nuke the accounts of anoyone who is not blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and at least 6 feet tall. I mean, that is the definition of beautiful, right?

These days Gallgher is bitter and he hates Detroit.

Feeling cynical about the possibilities for social interaction on the web? Demoralized by the enforcement of arbitrary standards of beauty? Bewildered by the digital detritus of people you know and love?

Try unfriending everybody by commiting Web 2.0 Suicide.

Movable Type 5 has been released. A cribbed list of new features include

Lucid and example-filled introduction to over a dozen new input types that you can use in your forms.

I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.

An ambitious project» The URL of Every Bar in San Francisco is changing. The links in this entry will correspondingly change once everything’s been updated.« to see if one person can actually drink at every bar in the City. I laud the unnamed principal’s decision to start with bars in the Tenderloin because if anyone in SF deserves libation props it’s bar-goers in the Tenderloin.

The principal also doesn’t appear to be a drunken sot and seems to have her wits about her. In response to a commenter about her slow pace, the principal explains

Case in point: On Sunday, October 11, Every Bar in SF wrote up five bars. They haven’t posted since the end of that week.