"Ping Brigade is a service that lets you measure how quickly your website loads from around the world. The time it takes to load your web pages has a huge impact on how your visitors perceive you. For example for every 0.5 second delay you may lose 30% of the visitors waiting for your website to load. Additionally, Google has recently announced that it will be taking web server speed into account when determining you website's page rank."

"Every week, you get a PDF report via email that gives you an overview of your website's stats. All you need is a Google Analytics account."

A video by fiilmaker Andrea Dorfman and poet/singer/songwriter Tanya Davis. "Society is afraid of alonedom, like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements, like people must have problems if, after a while, nobody is dating them. but lonely is a freedom that breaths easy and weightless and lonely is healing if you make it."

"A stimulus too small to significantly reduce unemployment, a TARP that didn’t trickle down to Main Street, financial reform that doesn’t fundamentally restructure Wall Street, and health-care reforms that don’t promise to bring down health-care costs have all created an enthusiasm gap. They’ve fired up the right, demoralized the left, and generated unease among the general population."

A good summary of the actions taken and what lies ahead.

"A historian traces the moment when Boston’s dour preachers embraced the market."

"Matrix of fonts bundled with Mac and Windows operating systems, Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite."

"Compatibility tables for features in HTML5, CSS3, SVG and other upcoming web technologies."

Create color schemes by doing color math.

"Adobe Photoshop tutorials, from beginner to advanced." Because I am not really much of a visual artist.

Get your Dropbox variables right in the provided script, save it as a .sh file in your ~/Library/Scripts folder, assign it to a shortcut in FastScripts, and you're a keyboard shortcut and a few seconds away from taking a screenshot and having it automatically uploaded to a public folder. Awesome, and doesn't rely on imgur like csexton's captured (http://github.com/csexton/captured), which I was also investigating.

A cute illustration.

The world and the technology by which we take it in is becoming more and more "addictive" and what can we do about it? A concerted effort to stick to basics and saying no, says Paul Graham.

A plot walkthrough and an analysis of what the movie means. Good.

A short essay on Ghandi's faith. Intriguing. I would like to study this further at some point.

Awesome. Would be a fun project to try.

How to make an background image scale without using a ton of JavaScript.

This is pretty traditionalist but she's pretty right.

"Let me think about that." In other words: with a glut of information, we're trying to form opinions and take action on it all just as fast as it's coming in, and we're suffering for it.

Why Altered Zones, Pitchfork's new MP3 blog collective, is a destructive force toward artists. However: This isn't all Pitchfork's fault. An artist doesn't get on the internet without their own considerable effort. They don't have to react to coverage. Young people are inexperienced and I don't blame us for going for fame as soon as the slightest hint thereof beckons, but there's more to this than the idea that Pitchfork is trying to co-opt all the young rebels.

"Atul Gawande gave the commencement speech at Stanford’s School of Medicine last week. Here is what he told the graduating class." On the need for building interconnected systems of care in medicine, rather than a hodgepodge of specialists not communicating with each other.

We won't spend the money necessary to prevent this from happening again.

Basically, psychological criminal profiling is a crock of shit.

An International Monetary Fund veteran explains how the US financial situation is like that of a less-powerful nation's developing economy. Oligarchy, corruption, and the financial sector's control of the government — it's not good.

This piece is incredibly sad. But it is hopeful also. The expansion of pet-based forensic science teams, the increasing intersection of psychological examinations of pet abuse and how it relates to bad home situations, and the use of animals for therapeutic practice are three wonderful things. A must-read.

"The fictional high school chorus at the center of Fox’s Glee has a huge problem — nearly a million dollars in potential legal liability. For a show that regularly tackles thorny issues like teen pregnancy and alcohol abuse, it’s surprising that a million dollars worth of lawbreaking would go unmentioned." This is a very interesting look at the frequency with which this show (that I have never seen) addresses copyright issues without actually addressing copyright issues. And it's dead-on about the potential for a television show or other media of this popularity to effect social change in the realm of copyright perception.

This guy seems to have some family issues that his addiction to incoming data via screens is severely aggravating. I experience, on a smaller scale, some of the problems outlined in this article, and, though none of this is particularly new to me, it's frightening to see these habits taken down the slippery slope. Should all of us, and especially people like Kord, make a concerted effort to make screens less a part of our lives, lest we lose our humanity? Or is trying to avoid technology's increasing integration with our every second just being traditionally biased and counter-progressive? I think there is a middle ground where one can be hooked in and focused on doing work while still not ignoring ones' children. Food for thought.

Is it?

Is Lil Wayne's 'Rebirth' really that bad?

I'm going to read and internalize all of this one day. Yes I am.