His version is especially touching since he can’t enjoy his own concoction, as Moore is diabetic.

I’m unsure of his selection of Noilly Prat, and even with his unfortunate choice of Tanqueray, it’s still a much better Martini than the trash that Jim Coudal calls a Martini (made with Vodka and violently shaken: Terrible, terrible, terrible).

(Hat-tip to Daring Fireball.)

In this Investors Business Daily article on Pandora’s acquisition of TicketFly was this tidbit that Pandora

[…] would become the exclusive streaming partner for season two of hit podcast “Serial.”

The launch date for Serial’s season two wasn’t disclosed, and that podcast will still be available for download from other sites. Pandora will make Serial’s season one available in its entirety for listeners starting Nov. 24 […]. Each episode will be broken into five-minute chunks, allowing listeners to more easily pick up where they left off, go back to re-listen, or skip ahead, Pandora said.

What does this mean, five minute chunks? Do they mean each episode will be broken into separate five minute chunks? That there will be built-in end points every five minutes to make it easy to pause and resume?

Wired says the show

will be available in five-minute chapters on Pandora, tailored to listeners accustomed to the length of a song, rather than an hour-long podcast.

That strikes me as odd. Will season 2 be written to accommodate that five minute structure? Will each “chapter” have an opening and closing? Will their be ads on each one of the chapters? (“Chapter 4 of Season 2 of Serial is brought to you by….”)

The Pandora press release says

Pandora engineers focused on bringing “chapterized” content to the platform for the first time.

So engineers did something to make this work; is this automatic? How will that affect the flow of the story? Will you “break” in the middle of a sentence or (worse!) an ad?

And what’s with this whole “exclusive streaming partner”? Almost every podcast player app will stream content if the hosting server supports byte-range requests; are they saying they’ll be hosting Serial season 2 on a server that doesn’t?

Everything about this is confusing to me.

Dallas Morning News:

Ahmed Mohamed — who makes his own radios and repairs his own go-kart — hoped to impress his teachers when he brought a homemade clock to MacArthur High on Monday.

Instead, the school phoned police about Ahmed’s circuit-stuffed pencil case.

So the 14-year-old missed the student council meeting and took a trip in handcuffs to juvenile detention. His clock now sits in an evidence room. Police say they may yet charge him with making a hoax bomb — though they acknowledge he told everyone who would listen that it’s a clock.

In the meantime, Ahmed’s been suspended, his father is upset and the Council on American-Islamic Relations is once again eyeing claims of Islamophobia in Irving.

This kid may well be scarred for life, all because he has a Muslim name and is brown-skinned. If a young white boy had done this, there’s no doubt in my mind that none of this—none—would have happened.

Andy Ihnatko is infuriated, rightly, and there’s a hashtag (#IStandWithAhmed) supporting the young inventor.

The world I live in continues to depress me. How may brown-skinned kids are going to read about Ahmed and decide it’s too risky to pursue something different, to stay away from technology or engineering?

This is not the way to encourage more diversity in STEM.

Newsweek’s recent cover story:

[…] fortunes being made now and business models and corporate cultures forming today will be with us for a century to come—and women are for the most part sidelined. Zuckerberg, Gates, Thiel, Musk—these are our Carnegies and Morgans and Rockefellers, whose names will be on museum wings and university halls 100 years from now. And there’s not a female among them.

Too many talented women being forced from the field (or never allowed in) by boors and sexist jerks. A depressing counterpoint to Grace Hopper’s contributions to computer science. Where would we be without her dedication and intelligence? Let’s hope her name is remembered in a hundred years.

Grace Hopper was utterly charming. Oh, and she wrote the first programming language compiler.

(Also: A reminder of how long Dave has been on TV, and why he’ll be missed.)

I’m not at all shocked.

I detest sites with requirements to include “one lower case character, one capital letter, one number, no multiple identical consecutive characters, at least eight characters…”

(These are actual (partial) requirements for an Apple ID password.)

The whole username/password thing needs to be abandoned. They, along with stupid security questions are little more than security theatre.

(The article is from 2013, but the sentiment remains.)

Rob makes beautiful art, full of atmosphere and personality. The characters in “Groomsman” look like they’ve stepped out of a video game. I’m proud to call him a friend.

Lyndsey Scott, Victoria’s Secret supermodel:

[My glasses are] really broken right now… I fell asleep in them one too many times. I had been putting tape in the middle, but that hasn’t been working so well.

She has a dual-degree in computer science and theater.

Smashing stereotypes is fun.

Also this, from her brother:

If I had to liken her to someone, I’d say she’s like Gisele Bundchen mixed in with Bill Gates. I can’t imagine those two combined but if they did it would probably be Lyndsey.

With that exhortation near the end of a prepared speech, Mahalia Jackson inspires one of the great extemporaneous speeches in history, according to Clarence Jones:

He moves the text of the speech to the left side of the lectern, grabs the lectern, looks out on those more than 250,000 people assembled and thereafter begins to speak completely spontaneously and extemporaneously.

Watch the whole speech here.

An interesting side note: Jones was MLK’s personal lawyer and hand wrote the copyright symbol on every copy of the speech. That tiny decision may be worth millions to MLK’s estate today.

From the Tampa Bay Times, in October 2010, Arthur Hayhoe, executive director of the Florida Coalition to Stop Gun Violence:

They say this law hasn't made Florida the Wild West. But how many bodies does it take?

Trayvon Martin wasn't the first and sadly, it's unlikely he'll be the last.

Peter Hamm of the Brady Campaign:

How many killers getting off scot-free is enough to change the course of society?

George Zimmerman wasn't the first and sadly, it's unlikely he'll be the last.

Marion Hammer, NRA's Florida lobbyist says

There is nothing wrong with the law

She's wrong. We need to fix this broken law and we need to fix it now.