• 1,500 Indian Farmers Commit Mass Suicide: Why We Are Complicit in these Deaths | Water | AlterNet
  Indian farmers keep killing themselves. Horrifying, really.
• Long Now Foundation: Michael Pollan Presents "Deep Agriculture" (May 5th)
  For my San Francisco peoples.

• Thinking paper and I might not have a long future together, what with the lovely Times Skimmer and now the graceful new WSJ iPhone app. #

• Genes Show Limited Value in Predicting Diseases
  The argument, it seems, is over whether it's worth pursuing the search for conditions caused by small numbers of gene variations, given that many diseases are triggered by the interplay of many genes. No mention of phenotypic research, though, on the presentations of genetic variations.

• Re: last "ring and run" note — Was researching after some kids did it to our house yesterday and I couldn't remember what the point was. #
• Today's useless fact: "Ring and run," as I know it, started in the 19th century and is a.k.a. "ding dong ditch" and "knock, knock, Ginger." #
• Fox News is really rocking the tight shot to fill the screen on the Lafayette Park #teaparty event. #
• An interesting part of #amazonfail is no one (a) is in a position to decide proportionate response and (b) has incentive not to participate. #
• Taking a break from divining Bezos' intentions to create #fail tag for the fact that, 13 years in, I'm still checking "single" on IRS forms. #
• Ken Starr is coming through as the eloquent voice of reason in this Harold Koh situation: http://bit.ly/starr_koh #

• Editorial — Food Safety, One Pistachio at a Time
  NYT advocating for a single food agency.
• New Foundation Takes Aim at Urgent Threats
  Larry Brilliant leaves Google.org to head up a new foundation funded by Jeff Skoll.

From his weekly address a few weeks back, which I happened to miss:

Obama certainly seems to have the contours of the food oversight debate down cold. Why, it's almost as if he's read this piece.

Seriously, though, without making any claim as to the quality of a piece of my own writing, I did hear from people that it was a relatively painless introduction to the details of how our federal food system in the United States currently works. So, if you're interested, hope you have a read. You might also check out the Safe Food Act long championed by Rep. DeLauro and Sen. Durbin.

• Studying Twitter and the Moldovan protests
  Excellent case study on doing research on Twitter.

• Not quite ready to give up reading the New York Times in its paper form, but the Times Skimmer is growing on me. http://bit.ly/times_skimmer #

• Getting Past the Pie Chart
  On remembering not to forget that visualizations are meant to convey information, not just look good.

• Just got robocall about Sebelius' affair with an alien or something. You read about it, but the ridiculous hits home when it's on your VM. #
• Just learned that John Wilkes Booth's father's middle name was Brutus. When coupled with that "sic semper tyrannis" bit, that's kinda weird. #
• Ooh, they're (naturally) on Twitter: @votereportindia. #
• Um, this is kinda insane. Twitter Vote Report has begotten Vote Report India, for monitoring the upcoming elections: http://ow.ly/2bmR #

• Just got robocall about Sebelius' affair with an alien or something. You read about it, but the ridiculous hits home when it's on your VM. #

• How a nuanced president uses exaggeration
  Fair point.
• First lady's organic garden concerns chemical firms
  Ag industry doesn't like the message a chemical-free garden sends to the world.

• Just learned that John Wilkes Booth's father's middle name was Brutus. When coupled with that "sic semper tyrannis" bit, that's kinda weird. #

• Ooh, they're (naturally) on Twitter: @votereportindia. #
• Um, this is kinda insane. Twitter Vote Report has begotten Vote Report India, for monitoring the upcoming elections: http://ow.ly/2bmR #

• Jacek Utko: Can design save the newspaper?
  Well worth a watch.

• Why it sometimes rocks to have a writer-president: "How about replacing the word 'recognize'…with the word 'note?'” http://bit.ly/1AUpXy #
• Iowa Supreme Court elegantly ties marriage equality decision to state motto: “Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain.” #
• Thinking I might just have to dig up this Iowa marriage-equality amicus from "Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality." #
• Prepping for class on digital nativism has me thinking back to making mix tapes by holding up a tape recorder to a boom box playing Z100. #
• If anyone got one of them "Andy Stern lists you as a friend" FB messages and wants to share/discuss it, please lemme know. #
• Heh. This wise-assy Guardian report on going Twitter-only is actually very nicely done. http://bit.ly/jp1UE (ht @AriMelber) #
• A #fooeast takeaway: Some journalists cling to the idea that the value of what they do goes without saying. It doesn't, so start saying it. #

• On the World Stage, Obama Issues an Overture
  Copy-editor-in-chief: Why it sometimes rocks to have a president who is a writer. "…Mr. Obama escorted both men, one at a time, to a corner of the room, to judge the dispute. How about replacing the word 'recognize,' Mr. Obama suggested, with the word 'note?'"

• Why it sometimes rocks to have a writer-president: "How about replacing the word 'recognize'…with the word 'note?'” http://bit.ly/1AUpXy #
• Iowa Supreme Court elegantly ties marriage equality decision to state motto: “Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain.” #
• Thinking I might just have to dig up this Iowa marriage-equality amicus from "Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality." #

• The New York Times on the Precipice

The Nexus Friend Grapher taps into your Facebook social connections and, with a couple clicks of the mouse, maps them out spatially. In short, it's really, really cool. The Grapher uses the nature of your and your friends connections to one another to chart out how closely — in what ways — you're interconnected. I found it to be an almost frighteningly accurate representation of my social history, going all they way back to about the sixth grade, New Jersey circa 1989. Facebook certainly does know a tremendous amount about us and our places in the universe, which really becomes clear when you ask it questions like we're doing here.

The brightest constellation on the right side of the display is made up of what I might loosely term my Washington DC crowd. That is, people I either worked with or regularly drank beers with after work back when I was living in the District. You'll notice that connections between nodes there run every which way, connecting everyone to everyone else. That closely matches how things are in real life, where you regularly have conversations that go, "Do you know Bob? Oh, of course you know Bob!" Most of that crowd knows much of the rest of that crowd. And to the top and right of that blob are my Waxman people, representing my time spent on Capitol Hill.

The bright star that attaches that dominant group to that second largest network on the left is my partner, Jane. Flowing off of Janie are all of her family, her hometown friends, and our mutual friends here in New York. Flowing up and to the left of that are my old high school friends. The inner band represents my core group of fellow troublemakers in my graduating class. Slightly farther out of the center is a second band made up of those good friends from, mostly, graduating years other than my own. To the left and below are a smattering of people with whom I kicked it back in grammar school. Making up the outer ring of that area of the chart are what we used to call "school friends," those people who you got on well with but only really had a social connection between the hours of eight o'clock and two o'clock each day.

And that, in a chart, is more or less my first three decades of social existence. Get your own here. It's pretty neat.