Holiday Inn in Earth City, MO – “No casualties” – St Louis County OEM

There are multiple rumors on Twitter – as of yet unconfirmed – that KMOV-TV has reported a “mass casualties” event at a Holiday Inn in Earth City, MO as a result of the storms that are going through St Louis on the evening of May 31, 2013. There is not yet any photo evidence or any web page from a reliable source to confirm this.

Let’s hope this is just an Internet rumor.

I’m at Holiday Inn in Earth City.No injuries here.Damage to building, but not structurally at this time.Power out in Earth City.

— Chief Tim Fitch (@ChiefTimFitch) June 1, 2013

We have confirmed with Pattonville Fire that the Holiday Inn is cleared. No casualties.

— St Louis County OEM (@StlCoOEM) June 1, 2013

News sources that would be likely to print a story or cover it: KMOV-TV St Louis. KMOV has a live stream, which appears to be overloaded – I’m getting video but no audio.

Listening also to KMOX, CBS news radio in St Louis. They are reading from Twitter, “I’m getting very skeptical about Twitter.”

The hotel in question: Holiday Inn Airport West, Earth City MO. 

“No movement of I-70 in the Earth City area.” (KMOX)

 

Called Holiday Inn in Earth City, MO, lines down. #MOwx

— Jim Gray (@jimgrayonline) June 1, 2013

We have NO confirmation of casaulties at the Holiday Inn in Earth City yet. Pattonville Fire is on scene.

— St Louis County OEM (@StlCoOEM) June 1, 2013

University of Michigan softball team in severe weather in Oklahoma City on May 31, 2013

The University of Michigan softball team is in Oklahoma City for the Women’s College World Series games. They were caught in the May 31, 2013 tornadoes in that area. The team, along with other teams in the games took shelter in an underground parking garage.

News coverage: WXYZ/AP.

We have moves back into the underground garage as a precautionary measure #OKC

— Michigan Softball (@umichsoftball) June 1, 2013

Michigan players getting comfortable in the underground garage #OKC twitter.com/umichsoftball/…

— Michigan Softball (@umichsoftball) June 1, 2013

I’m listening to the local NBC affiliate, KFOR, which is doing live coverage of the Oklahoma City tornadoes (plural).

I’m following Greg Garno who is with the team reporting for the Michigan Daily.

#Michigan softball falls in the opening round of the WCWS as Michigan loses 7-1 and Oklahoma’s Keilani Ricketts throws a no-hitter.

— Greg Garno (@G_Garno) May 31, 2013

Here’s a snapshot of the weather map, note multiple tornado cells (purple triangles) on the radar.

Here’s preliminary tornado track maps.

RT @nwsnorman: 837pm – PRELIM tornado tracks for S OKC and Tinker AFB #okwx twitter.com/NWSNorman/stat…

— Weather Underground (@wunderground) June 1, 2013

Hacker News summary, Wednesday 29 May 2013, 5:00 p.m. EST edition

Welcome to the Wednesday version of a daily Hacker News summary. In the news today: a new Gmail interface, a Drupal security breach, how to negotiate a job offer, Bill Gates goes to India, and Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends.

I’m going to diverge a little from past practice and pick and choose a little more carefully than normally, going a little beyond the top 8 to find the stories that actually interest me.

1. Gmail is getting a new user interface, one that adds tabs and more integration with Google+. (Gmail Blog) “I know we feel the need to comment on everything right away these days, but honestly there isn’t much to say about this feature until we’ve actually used it.” (223 comments)

2. “The Drupal.org Security Team and Infrastructure Team has discovered unauthorized access to account information on Drupal.org and groups.drupal.org.” Users are advised to change their password, not to reuse passwords between sites, and to turn on two-factor authentication.
(drupal.org)
“Malicious files were placed on association.drupal.org servers via a third-party application used by that site.” – and commenters are wondering which third-party app was involved.
(7 comments)

3. For $100/node/month, Linode announces a managed IT infrastructure.
(Linode)
“If the remote hands are awesome, this is well worth $100 per node. If they are anything but awesome, this wouldn’t be worth it for any amount of money.”
(28 comments)

4. “The Magazine” has been sold by founder Marco Arment to editor Glenn Fleishman.
(Marco Arment)
Instapaper. Tumblr. and now The Magazine. Sounds like Marco is clearing house a bit.
(57 comments)

5. How to negotiate a job offer. “If you’re not currently working, and you don’t have competing offers, you’re pretty much out of luck.”
(Upstart)
“The “Pre-Reqs” piece is not right. You really don’t need to have another job offer or a current job to negotiate. ”
(44 comments)

6. Bill Gates is going to India because it has the grand challenge of extreme poverty and also the resources to attack that problem. He’s also going to pick up some dance moves from a Bollywood star.
(The Gates Notes)
“Have you seen real poverty? Just take a trip to Mumbai and visit the slums there.”
(25 comments)

7. Amazon announces “Login with Amazon” as a single sign-on function for web sites.
(Amazon PR)
“I think this is a great idea. I don’t love the Facebook OAuth flow and the amount of access most apps ask for.”
(69 comments)

8. Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends.
(17 comments)

KPCB Internet Trends 2013 from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Hacker News summary, Tuesday 28 May 2013, 9:45 p.m edition

A late evening version of Hacker News for Tuesday 28 May 2013. I've added links to the comments for each entry, and try to pull out a useful quote from the comments if there are any that are easy to find. Of interest: Pixar raytracing, Liberty Reserve money laundering, and Harvard email snooping.

1. A breakdown of github pull requests by acceptance rate, for a variety of languages and projects. If you want to get your pull request accepted, don't write C++, write Scala; and contribute to projects like Akka and backbone-fundamentals that take 80+% of pull requests. (Paul Miller) "I'm surprised the acceptance rate is so high." (28 comments)

2. "Pixar's lighting/rendering systems were completely redone for their new film Monsters University." Correspondence with Chris Horne, who worked on MU. "So our Director of Photography went to a studio that is so clearly raytracing averse and essentially said "We're raytracing everything." (Mason Smith) (92 comments)

3. "Liberty Reserve, which was incorporated in 2006, was a "bank of choice for the criminal underworld," according to the indictment, which said the operation allegedly laundered the money through 55 million transactions before it was shut down earlier this month." $6 billion was allegedly laundered. (Wall Street Journal) The comments note the precarious legal position of various Bitcoin exchanges. (50 comments)

4. Topcoat is "CSS for clean and fast web apps". Download version 0.3 (Github). The comments compare it to Twitter Bootstrap and Zurb Foundation. (78 comments)

5. Thomas Friedman writes about HireArt, which has HR software to better match candidates with job openings by tailoring tests and quizzes to the qualifications for the job. (NY Times) (no comments)

6. Evelynn Hammonds will step down as Harvard College dean, in the wake of a scandal involving searches of Harvard faculty and staff email accounts. She will return to teaching and research in the History of Science and African and African American Studies departments. (Boston.com) (18 comments)

7. A Facebook engineer waxes poetical about his four years with the company and the engineering challenges he has faced. (Ryan Patterson) (1 comment) (why is this on the top 10)

8. You have 13 days to buy the Humble Indie Bundle 8 with 7 games for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Pay what you want. (Humble Bundle) The comments have game reviews, many of which are favorable. (53 comments)

9. Build startups and systems to help the "unexotic underclass", which lives in small town America and includes single moms, returning veterans, and others who live outside of the startup-fueled glitz of Silicon Valley (C.Z. Nnaemeka) "Condense the article down and you're left with this nugget of advice: You'll have a better chance of success if you target unsaturated, boring markets." (28 comments)

10. Pure is "a set of small, responsive CSS modules that you can use in every web project" brought to you by Yahoo! The library is tiny and works well with mobile applications. (Pure) The core developers of Pure are contributing in the comments. (106 comments)

 

Related articles

Pixar moves to raytracing

On summarization

Hacker News summary for Tuesday 28 May 2013, 7:00 a.m. edition

The Evolution Of Hacker News

Liberty Reserve shut down in $6bn money laundering case

Hacker News summary for Tuesday 28 May 2013, 7:00 a.m. edition

Here's a summary of the top stories on Hacker News at this moment, as part of daily exercise to do a closer reading of the tech news. See On Summarization for more background.

1. "Opera for desktop has not only been redesigned; it's also completely re-engineered under the hood. With the Chromium engine, users get a standards-compliant and high-performance browser." (Opera) "The price of switching to Chromium:
Opera.app = 37.8 MB,
Opera Next.app = 103.1 MB" (@maxart via @gen)

2. "The Haskell Platform is the easiest way to get started with programming Haskell. It comes with all you need to get up and running." For Windows, OSX and Linux.  Current release: 2013.2.0.0 (Haskell)

3. John Dryden, a Batavia IL teacher, is under fire from the school administration after informing his students of their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. The students were given a survey with their names on it asking about drug, alcohol, and tobacco use. (Daily Herald)

4. Sony has made a lot of money selling insurance and making movies and music, and has lost quite a bit selling electronics. Analysts wonder if Sony should exit the electronics business rather than invest in strengthening it. (NY Times)

5. There is a problem with the spacing on Facebook's display of text in the timeline, and 3 pixels of added whitespace would fix it. "I'm sorry for rageskitching about Facebook, but I can't help it." (Garry Tan)

6. "Michael Markieta, a transportation planner at global engineering and design firm Arup, has spent the last year developing visualisations of flight paths crossing the globe." The maps are very pretty. (BBC)

7. "Identify a pattern, run a mask, put recovered passes in a new dict, run again with rules, identify a new pattern, etc." How password cracking is done. (Ars Technica) "Correct horse battery staple." (XKCD)

8. "I am still learning to manage my time better and would love to hear your thoughts if you’ll are a startup dad/mom." Some productivity hints from a father of a young child who runs a startup. (Sahil Parikh)

9. "These cases are covered under a new HTML5 called the meta referrer. Now a simple tag can be used, such as <meta name="referrer" content="always">, to specify the exact behaviour of the HTTP Referrer regardless of whether we're using HTTP or HTTPS." (Stephen Merity)

10. Find a set of complementary colours just by moving your mouse around. (Colourco.de) 

Recipe: Asparagus with mushrooms

This simple asparagus with mushrooms dish is served with pasta. J doesn't like linguini, so we made it with rotini. This comes together in a hurry – you can cook the whole thing up in the time it takes to boil the pasta.

Ingredients:

• Olive oil
• Two or three cloves of garlic
• Asparagus, about a pound
• Button mushrooms, about a pound
• Basil, dried or fresh
• White wine

Preparation:

Boil water for pasta. When it's hot, cook the pasta. There should be time to drain it after you've done the cooking of the asparagus.

Wash the asparagus, snap the tough ends, and slice on the bias into 1.5" pieces. Clean the mushrooms and cut each one in half.

Heat oil in a large frying pan on high. Fry the garlic until it's light brown and smells great.

Add the asparagus to the frying pan and cook, stirring frequently, until the asparagus is bright green. Add the mushrooms and keep stirring. When the mushrooms are hot, add the white wine, stir, and cover.

The recipe called for basil, but I didn't put it in because I was hurrying to get everything together.

The wine will deglaze the pan and make a nice sauce. Serve with pasta and white wine.

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Asparagus Pasta, Born and Braised in Roxbury

In less time than it takes to cook asparagus!

Quick and Easy Asparagus Soup

Recipe: Kale with corn and green onions

This recipe for kale with corn and green onions works well enough with frozen corn, but I'm sure it would be better with fresh. You cook with the ingredients you have, not the ingredients you want to have. We're lucky to have fresh kale at the farmers market!

Ingredients:

• oil for frying
• garlic
• 1 bag kale
• corn – frozen, if you must, but fresh would be better
• green onions – chopped
• soy sauce

Method:

Wash and spin-dry the kale, being careful to get dirt out of the center rib. We had a very nice bag of small kale from market that didn't require much more than this, but if you have older, tougher kales, trim them of their tough bits and cut them into pieces.

Heat oil in a large pot on medium high to high. Chop some garlic into big pieces. Fry the garlic until light brown and it smells good.

Add the kale and cook, stirring frequently, until the kale has cooked down to a fraction of its original size. Add some corn and the chopped green onions; stir. Cook until the corn is warmed through, then add some soy sauce and cover and turn down the heat to low.

One bag of kale served the family, with one person not eating it; there were a few leftovers. This recipe would multiply quite nicely.

For more kale recipes, see 365 Days of Kale.

 

Yesterbox: answer yesterday’s email, today

Yesterbox is a technique from Zappo's CEO Tony Hseih that redefines the task of email management. Rather than aim for an "inbox zero" for today's email (a never-ending task), he calls for answering today's mail tomorrow, and yesterday's mail today. Every message gets a one day delay unless it's so urgent that has to be dealt with right away.

The biggest problem with "inbox zero" is that it's impossible to be caught up for any length of time, since you need to be always on the alert for new messages. In contrast, "yesterbox" gives you a finite number of messages to work through from yesterday, and once you're done, you're done. There's no need to feel guilty, no need to feel like you're procrastinating, and no need to obsessively check today's messages. They can all be dealt with tomorrow.

Hseih estimates that it takes him three hours to plow through a day's messages, and he puts that time on his calendar in the morning to handle the previous day's correspondence. That's the world of a busy and successful CEO – you might well have a different time chunk that you'd need to commit to, probably a lot less.

Emptying the inbox is a Sisyphean task. Yesterbox tries to make it a finite problem to handle. As a bonus, every conversation becomes a slow conversation, and there's a lot of routine unimportant detail in everyone's inbox that can be ignored once a day has gone past.

(Filed under "Productivity", "Lifehacks". See also "Meaningless indicators of progress". I wonder how long it would take to process a day's worth of Twitter sent to you on one-day delay. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was condemned to empty his email inbox each day, only to find it full the next day.  See Doug Mann, The Electronic Myth of Sisyphus, 2006.)

 

Related articles

Meaningless indicators of progress

Yesterbox: answer yesterday's email, today

Use the Yesterbox Technique to Regain Control of Your Email Inbox

How Tony Hsieh Gets to Inbox Zero

12 successful entrepreneurs share their best productivity hacks

On summarization

I've been writing summaries of the day's Hacker News, after a challenge from Kyle Mulka to do the same. Here's some observations summarized from that effort.

Writing summaries is easier with practice. If you know what you're looking for, you can reduce a long article to some pithy bits just by finding the one quotable sentence in the whole thing that stands in for the whole. If there's no pithy bit, then you hope that the title or the first paragraph is good enough. You might have to stitch together bits of several sentences to get one that describes the whole thing.

Summarization is active reading, and it improves recall. There's nothing quite like looking through a piece of text for its inner core to give you a real sense for what it's all about, and if you have to synthesize something new you recall that better than if you just hit the "like" button. 

I'm skeptical of automated summarization, mostly because there seem to be enough people in the world interested in doing it by hand to make machine-aided cognition superfluous at least for popular articles. Machine reading works I suppose if you have so few eyes on the text that you have to crunch on it to make sense of it, but if there's an internet crowd to do that work the machine can simply tally human efforts instead of doing complicated automated text processing.

Hacker News is a challenging news stream to summarize because it turns over so quickly. In 12 hours or less, the top of the front page is fully new, and it's time to summarize again. I've been doing it daily rather than 2x daily because the yield of interestingness just isn't there to call for more. There are other tech newsfeeds and newswires that are worth digesting, but not all of them are sufficiently different from Hacker News to provide a divergent task. For example, the top "popular" links on Pinboard overlap substantially with Hacker News, as does the front page of TechMeme.

Pinboard looks like it has the right kind of infrastructure to support summarization as a part of a workflow. The path would be to identify an interesting article, clip the good bit, hit "pin", paste in the good bit, add a few tags, and save. To extract the useful stuff out you'd run a report on the tag that you used that was unique to the category you were summarizing.

Summarization lends itself to pointless numbered bullshit (cf. #4 on this list). Lots of articles are written with teaser headlines (5 best ways to do x) and can be unpacked by undoing the tease (The 5 best ways to do x are a, b, c, d, and e). You might take as your goal producing a summary that either dispenses with the need to read the original or that points the reader towards the best of what you have gone through and digested for them.

Hacker News summary, Monday 27 May 2013, 3:00 p.m. edition

A summary of Hacker News from 3:00 p.m. on Memorial Day. It's getting faster to produce these, but it still takes at least a minute or two per each.

I wonder about the churn rate of the Hacker News front page. How long do you have to wait to ensure that the top 10 posts have all cycled out? Every day is clearly enough, but I'm suspecting that it might take as little as 12 hours to cycle through what passes for news. A useful bit of code would monitor the site, send off a batch of 10 articles to be summarized, and then wait checking periodically until those 10 have all fallen from favor to send out a new batch of 10.

1. Google has plans to outfit high-altitue blimps with telecommunications gear to serve Africa. "Small-scale trials are underway in Cape Town, South Africa," using TV "white spaces" between channels as frequencies. (Wired UK)

2. Matt writes a love letter to WordPress after 10 years of working on it. (Matt Mullenweg)

3. "When not even a Stanford or MIT engineering degree is good enough to keep an engineer employed at 60, there is genuinely no market for engineers that age. Plan accordingly." (Lion of the Blogosphere)

4. Haxe 3.0 is out. Haxe is a multi-platform, strictly typed modern language for cross-system and mobile development. (Haxe)

5. "The hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up." (George Packer, New Yorker) Not so fast; "many of the hottest tech start-ups are solving the problems of being a business, because that’s where all the money is." (Ezra Klein, Washington Post)

6. "Unless you put time and effort into reading about and implementing exploits, your home-grown cryptography based security mechanisms don't stand much of a chance against real-world attacks." You are dangerously bad at cryptography; some examples follow. (Ali, Happy Bear Software)

7. If you're looking for open source clones of your favorite games, you've found it here. (Open Source Game Clones) 

8. Some silly new annotations for you if you are written Java code, from the Google Annotations Gallery. (GAG) Start with @Noop and end with @Palindrome.

9. "It's nuts that to make a new laptop relatively unthreatening and accessible for an enthusiastic 90-something requires going across a dozen System Preferences panes and sub-panes, and simply having to accept certain things as inevitably confusing." Setting up a Mac for Grandma is an exercise in appreciating the accessibility problems of the Internet. (Accursed Ware)

10. An explanation of SQL joins in Venn diagrams from 2007. (Jeff Atwood) Inspired by a previous post (Ligaya Turmelle). Stack Overflow takes on the more complicated questions where the relationships don't fit into Venn diagrams so neatly. (Stack Overflow)