tech@vedella

Scotland Yard have arrested 179 members of the ultra-right English Defense League for plotting an attack on the OccupyLondon protesters encamped at St Paul's cathedral in London. The EDL had sent a statement to the Occupy camp threatening violence if protesters didn't leave "their" church and "stop violating their religion." EDL members also posted arson [...]

After an Occupy SLC camper was found dead in his tent, the city's mayor has called for an end to the protest. "Investigators believe the man died from a combination of carbon monoxide poisoning due to a space heater inside his tent and a drug overdose." (via @apelad)

A 34-year-old inmate in a Florida prison who is serving a life sentence for sexual battery on a child says soy-based prison foods amount to cruel and unusual punishment. Soybeans, according to the convicted child sex offender, threaten his health by endangering his thyroid and immune system.

Video Link: "Lao Lai Qiao Gaga," from Hunan TV, China. (via @Theremina)

Claire Potter on the PSU child sex abuse case: "The mistake Penn State made was... a simple category error: they mistook these pubescent boys for women." (via @ncecire)

Guangdong, the Chinese province in the Pearl River Delta where practically everything you've bought in the past ten years was made, is about to see a minimum wage increase effective Jan 1, with some workers seeing increases as high as 20 percent. Guangdong has experienced high inflation. The wage increases, combined with weak western currencies, [...]

Watch Online "Hacker" Group Crowdsources Radiation Data for Japanese Public on PBS. See more from PBS NEWSHOUR.On PBS NewsHour tonight, a report I helped the program's science correspondent Miles O'Brien produce about the challenge people in Japan face of finding and sharing reliable data about radiation contamination, after the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear [...]

Poynter reports that Jim Romenesko has resigned from his long-running series of daily online reports about the business and culture of news. Apparently this was the result of some kind of weird conflict over attribution in his posts. I don't really get it, but I have long been a fan of his pioneering style of [...]

Big blow to online privacy today, and another win in the US government's war on Wikileaks. A US District Court ruled that private info on Twitter accounts of three people related to Wikileaks must be turned over to federal demands. And, those three people have no right to demand that secret government orders for private [...]

Near the Occupy Oakland site in downtown Oakland, CA, a man was shot tonight in an incident protesters say was unrelated to the protest. An eyewitness account is here.

Adam Greenfield snapped this "Occupy Legoland" piece at OWS, including a Lego QR code (!). As Adam says, 99%, but 100% awesome. Occupy Legoland!

Love the package design on this old-timey Howard Johnson's own-brand soda from the depths of yesteryear. Howard Johnsons

"Fun Home," Alison Bechdel's brilliant graphic novel memoir (review here) is being adapted for musical theater: “My father and I grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town and he was gay and I was gay and he killed himself and I became a lesbian cartoonist,” Bechdel's character says in Fun Home. Kron is a [...]

Welcome to the Hulkursion loop. [Moustair via Matt Haughey and Mike Monteiro]

Grant McCracken, a research affiliate at MIT and the author of Chief Culture Officer, writes about the appeal of "hidden messages" in popular culture. Fnord. The medieval world took for granted that the universe was filled with secret messages, placed there by God and the correspondences on which the world was built. What did not [...]

The amazing Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of the forthcoming TV sequel to Cosmos, stars in this latest auto-tune Symphony of Science. Onward to the edge! (via Imaginary Foundation)

Nassim Nicholas "Black Swan" Taleb has an NYT op-ed arguing that the best way secure the financial system from future collapse is to eliminate bankers' bonuses altogether. Taleb says bonuses reward risk-taking behavior without any counterbalancing punishment for bad risks, which provides an incentive for bankers to take stupid risks and hide their mistakes with [...]

I'm loving the works of Yoan Capote, whose paintings, drawings and sculpture are just the right mix of horror, whimsy and anatomy to tickle my aesthetic sense. If I ever need a bench, this is the one I want. ...my work has been the result of analyzing objects and their relationship with our body; studying [...]

Bret Victor's "Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design" is an eye-opening look at the poverty of the current options for computer-human interaction. Victor argues that our hands have enormous expressive range and sensitivity, but our devices accept only pokes and swipes from them, and only provide feedback in the form of a little [...]