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There's a nice post today over at Baseball Prospectus about Barry Bonds:

“Why would a baseball player have needed an undetectable steroid when drug testing wasn’t mandated until 2003?” Conte said. “To suggest that Barry’s 2001 record of 73 home runs was assisted by ‘the clear’ is ridiculous and simply makes no sense.”

Scripting News' Readers' Meetup

Click here to check out
The Scripting News' Readers Meetup!

The meetup is tomorrow (Wednesday) night at Otto. Please join us!

Dear Ocean

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Originally uploaded by Steve1949.

Shadow's holding down the fort this Summer, I'll see you next Summer.

From Blackbeltjones' Continuous-Partial-Apology:

It turns out that nearly no-one I know is in town or wants coffee. It turns out - as so often through the twelve or so years of having a digitally-mediated social life - the noise is the signal.

In fact, the cross-time-zone river of mundanity is much missed in the new gig, where it feels a little wierd to be surrounded by mainly brits after such a long time in a multinational group of designers.

Coffee

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Haleh Esfandiari

I usually don't blog Apperceptive work over here, but this morning Katharine Daniels, the executive editor of The Women's International Perspective Internet News Service, brought my attention to Patricia Vásquez's coverage of the the case of Haleh Esfandiari imprisonment and (supposed) confession on CNN.

Here's a short bio of Mrs. Esfandiari, excerpted from the article:

Professionally, she is Dr. Esfandiari, Director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, who holds a Ph.D. from the prestigious University of Vienna. An exceptional scholar, she is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, given "to individuals …who show exceptional merit and promise of continued creative work." Without question, she is highly regarded by her peers. One scholar has described her as the "gold standard" of Middle East analysts.

Not just a scholar but also a writer, at Princeton University Dr. Esfandiari didn’t just teach her students Persian language and literature, she taught them to love it as she did. Former students say her passion for her homeland was contagious! She taught Farsi using Persian folk tales, poetry which she effortlessly recited by heart, and old black-and-white films. She even cooked them Persian food. Before coming to the States in 1979, she worked in Iran as a young journalist for the Farsi edition of Iran's leading newspaper, Kayhan.

Will a laptop power connector kill you if you put the end in your mouth?

It was a very mild shock, like licking a 9-volt battery. Just a tingle. - jjg

From the metafilter podcast.

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: The music industry nobs have finally figured out what we're doing:

The music companies are in a dying business, and they know it. Sure, they act all cool because they hang around with rock stars. But beneath all the glamour these guys are actually operating two very low-tech businesses. One is a form of loan-sharking: they put up money to make records, then force recording artists to pay the money back with exorbitant interest. The other business is distribution. They’ve got big warehouses and they control the shipment of little plastic boxes that happen to have music in them.