Akkam's Razor TL;DR.

All excerpts are quoted from the respective link(s).

• Social Media Today | How To: Hack like China’s Government – Fascinating study done by Northrup Grumman Corporation for the US government’s US-China Economic and Security Review Commission about the Chinese government’s Cyberwar capability.
• Majority Of Tea Party Group’s Spending Went To GOP Firm That Created It | TPMMuckraker – The political action committee behind the Tea Party Express (TPE) — which already has been slammed as inauthentic and corporate-controlled by rival factions in the Tea Party movement — directed around two thirds of its spending during a recent reporting period back to the Republican consulting firm that created the PAC in the first place.
• :::Philebrity…media, culture, music and more::: » Blog Archive » Philly Tea Baggers To Splinter Into (Possibly Hilarious Rival) North And South Groups – So when we tell you that Philly Tea Party Patriots, our region’s living monument to whatever it is that these people think they believe in, are going to be starting up separate groups in the new year for Northeast Philly and South Philly, well, it’s the shot heard ’round… my desk. This is the stuff of true revolts, folks, and we have one question: Which side are you on?
• Submit your logos for the City of Philadelphia — Technically Philly – Submit your ideas for a logo that would better suit the City of Philadelphia — yes, it can be sarcastic or heartfelt. It can even include the Liberty Bell or a cheesesteak if you think they sum Philly up well … and you can endure the taunts of your peers. We’re thinking standard display images, but we won’t begin to limit you, the audience. If it fits in an e-mail or can be linked to, we want to see them.
• Top Records Of The Decade – I've spent the past couple weeks going back and reviewing all the music that I got into this decade. I looked at the last.fm data, my top ten posts each year, and re-listened to a lot of it. And here are ten records that define the decade for me, plus another 30ish that I considered for the top ten list.
• David Galbraith’s Blog » Blog Archive » The top 10 things that defined ‘the noughties’, by category. – In terms of geo-politics, the last decade was one of immense significance, but culturally it was an era that was so artistically bland, that it had no name till it was almost over. Until 2009 almost nobody referred to the noughties.
• Body By Victoria – Secure Computing: Sec-C – Not only did Victoria's Secret not like her skin tone, arm flab, and handbag, they also did not like her chest. They digitally enhanced her bust. Compared with the other image of the model, this image appears to be at least a cup larger. (Insert witty pun here.)
• Christmas folklore: saints and demons – The Ampersand – Be good for more than just goodness' sake! Why being on the naughty list a century ago might have involved being stuffed in a sack and thrown in a river. National Post graphics editor Dean Tweed illustrates Santa's long and dark past.
• The Decade, Summed Up in Icons [PIC] – All the big trends that defined the 2000s, simplified into a pictographic chart. Wow, this Word Perfect clip art really takes me back to 1999.
• The 15 Most Epic Trolls of 2009: Pics, Videos, Links, News – In Internet parlance, a troll is defined as somebody who deliberately does or says something in order to provoke a response and create a disruption. This is a list of trolls who did their best to really piss us off this year.
• Are You Willing to Lose Your Best and Brightest Over a Bag of Pretzels? | KnowHR Blog – There’s an important lesson to be learned here, and it isn’t that you should just give everything away forever and ever. The lesson is that if you want to keep your best and brightest, you sometimes have to continue to provide the intangibles. In the example, those intangibles were simple: free sodas and a liberal dinner reimbursement policy made the company a nice place to work. The atmosphere wasn’t overly corporate or controlling, and employees happily provided the labor needed to keep the company moving. When the company stopped realizing that the relationship between doing extra work and a few extra perks were directly intertwined, things moved downhill and eventually ruined the company.
• FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: The Odds of Airborne Terror – There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.

Continue reading →