Seema Jilani had this experience while attending the White House correspondents’ dinner:

As I left the hotel and my husband went to the ballroom for the dinner, I realized he still had my keys. I approached the escalators that led down to the ballroom and asked the externally contracted security representatives if I could go down. They abruptly responded, “You can’t go down without a ticket.” I explained my situation and that I just wanted my keys from my husband in the foyer and that I wouldn’t need to enter in the ballroom. They refused to let me through. For the next half hour, they watched as I frantically called my husband but was unable to reach him.

Then something remarkable happened. I watched as they let countless other women through — all Caucasian — without even asking to see their tickets. I asked why they were allowing them to go freely when they had just told me that I needed a ticket. Their response? “Well, now we are checking tickets.” He rolled his eyes and let another woman through, this time actually checking her ticket. His smug tone, enveloped in condescension, taunted, “See? That’s what a ticket looks like.”

When I asked “Why did you lie to me, sir?” they threatened to have the Secret Service throw me out of the building — me, a 4’11″ young woman who weighs 100 pounds soaking wet, who was all prettied up in elegant formal dress, who was simply trying to reach her husband. The only thing on me that could possibly inflict harm were my dainty silver stilettos, and they were too busy inflicting pain on my feet at the moment. My suspicion was confirmed when I saw the men ask a blonde woman for her ticket and she replied, “I lost it.” The snickering tough-guy responded, “I’d be happy to personally escort you down the escalators ma’am.”

David’s Brisket House:

The new David—a nickname he inherited along with the deli— turned it into his family’s business, and they’ve built that business into the kind of thing you’d only see in New York: a Jewish deli, run by Muslims with Brooklyn accents, for the benefit of Bed-Stuy.

Bill Ayers defended the Weather Underground bombings over the weekend:

“To conflate a group of fundamentalist people [in Boston] who are nihilistic in some way with a group of people who spent their lives trying to oppose the murder of 6,000 people a week … and still the killing went on. And still the killing went on. What would you have done?” Ayers said. “There’s no equivalence [with Boston]. Property damage. That’s what we did.”

…

In his talk to the crowd, Ayers mentioned that in 1970, he lost three friends in the Weather Underground, including his lover, Diana Oughton. He did not explain in his talk how they died – they were killed when nail bombs they were making in a Greenwich Village townhouse blew up.

Nail bombs are a hallmark of bombings intended to damage property, and not to harm people, I’m told.

Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, prisoner at Guantanamo Bay:

I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity.

I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.

We are committing a terrible injustice against many people at Guantanamo. Yes, many of them are not innocent—but they should be tried, not left to rot away in a prison.

Burkhard Bilger has a wonderful profile of the Mars Curiosity mission:

She wasn’t wrong, exactly, just off by a few decades. All nine of Curiosity’s principal investigators were middle-aged men. Lined up behind the lectern in polo shirts or jacket and tie, they could have been spliced seamlessly into an old Apollo newsreel. But elsewhere in the hierarchy lay a horde of engineers who’d come to J.P.L. from all over the world since the moon landings. Miguel San Martín, the chief engineer for Curiosity’s guidance, navigation, and control systems, grew up in Buenos Aires and Patagonia, listening to shortwave broadcasts about the Viking missions. Vandi Tompkins, the lone woman among the sixteen rover drivers, came from a small town in India. Their work bore witness to the undimmed romance of space, and to the wonders that an epic government program can still accomplish. Curiosity had taken ten years to build and cost two and a half billion dollars. And within forty-eight hours it would crash or land.

There were a lot of true heroes in yesterday’s attack on the Boston marathon—police, paramedics, doctors, runners and spectators who rushed to help rather than run for their safety. One of them is Carlos Arredondo, who helped apply tourniquets to a man with severe leg injuries from the blast and deliver him to an ambulance.

These people saved lives yesterday. In the midst of unthinkable horror, they did what they could. Absolutely amazing.

Mark Bittman:

Twelve years after the publication of “Fast Food Nation” and nearly as long since Morgan Spurlock almost ate himself to death, our relationship with fast food has changed. We’ve gone from the whistle-blowing stage to the higher-expectations stage, and some of those expectations are being met. Various states have passed measures to limit the confinement of farm animals. In-N-Out Burger has demonstrated that you don’t have to underpay your employees to be profitable. There are dozens of plant-based alternatives to meat, with more on the way; increasingly, they’re pretty good.

The fulfillment of these expectations has led to higher ones. My experience at the airport only confirmed what I’d been hearing for years from analysts in the fast-food industry. After the success of companies like Whole Foods, and healthful (or theoretically healthful) brands like Annie’s and Kashi, there’s now a market for a fast-food chain that’s not only healthful itself, but vegetarian-friendly, sustainable and even humane. And, this being fast food: cheap. “It is significant, and I do believe it is coming from consumer desire to have choices and more balance,” says Andy Barish, a restaurant analyst at Jefferies LLC, the investment bank. “And it’s not just the coasts anymore.”

Something I’ve been wanting for years is happening: quick, healthy, unpretentious and (more) affordable food. This is a big deal.

There are many insightful things in this interview with Alan Kay and I suggest you read it in its entirety. Here are two:

By contrast, it is not a huge exaggeration to point out that electronic media over the last 100+ years have actually removed some of day to day needs for reading and writing, and have allowed much of the civilized world to lapse back into oral societal forms (and this is not a good thing at all for systems that require most of the citizenry to think in modern forms).

For most people, what is going on is quite harmful.

And:

One way to think of all of these organizations is to realize that if they require a charismatic leader who will shoot people in the knees when needed, then the corporate organization and process is a failure. It means no group can come up with a good decision and make it stick just because it is a good idea. All the companies I’ve worked for have this deep problem of devolving to something like the hunting and gathering cultures of 100,000 years ago. If businesses could find a way to invent “agriculture” we could put the world back together and all would prosper.

Power of a filibuster:

A year ago, as the presidential race was taking shape, The Washington Post’s pollster asked voters whether they favored the use of drones to kill terrorists or terror suspects if they were “American citizens living in other countries.” The net rating at the time was positive: 65 percent for, 26 percent against.

Today, after a month of Rand Paul-driven discussion of drone warfare, Gallup asks basically the same question: Should the U.S. “use drones to launch airstrikes in other countries against U.S. citizens living abroad who are suspected terrorists?” The new numbers: 41 percent for, 52 percent against.

Wow.

Europa’s ocean may be rich in salt:

The composition of Europa’s ocean may thus be similar to that of Earth’s seas, researchers said.

“If you could go swim down in the ocean of Europa and taste it, it would just taste like normal old salt,” Brown said.

I can’t wait for the day we send a probe to test Europa’s ocean directly.

Along with the news that the giant squid has been captured on film for the first time (alive, anyway), this story about a New Zealand giant squid researcher/Ahab popped back up:

The currents were pulling us toward the rocks, and I could hear the massive waves crashing into them. I was holding a flashlight, and I shone it in front of us: there was a twenty-foot wall of water. I turned around, and discovered that another enormous wall was pressing down on us from behind.

“You won’t find this in New York, will you, mate?” O’Shea said.

For a moment, I wondered if O’Shea was fully in command of his faculties. But we made it through the gap in the rocks, and he skillfully steered the boat into a protected inlet. It was indeed the perfect spot.

Lovely story to file away in your read-later service of choice and read when you’ve got a moment. It’s the kind of story I loved reading as a child: a person obsessed with discovering a mystery, driven to extreme lengths despite constant failure, and the blending of myth, science and reality.

China’s increasing rate of education is astounding:

Sheer numbers make the educational push by China, a nation of more than 1.3 billion people, potentially breathtaking. In the last decade, China doubled the number of colleges and universities, to 2,409.

As recently as 1996, only one in six Chinese 17-year-olds graduated from high school. That was the same proportion as in the United States in 1919. Now, three in five young Chinese graduate from high school, matching the United States in the mid-1950s.

They have very little choice but to increase the number of people receiving a college education at a dramatic rate because China must transition from infrastructure investment and low-cost labor-fueled growth to an economy based more around consumption and higher-value work in the next two decades.

Their challenge, though, is that finding qualified people to teach is very difficult, and that while they may be increasing the quantity of students receiving a college education, they are not necessarily receiving one of the same quality as international schools provide.

In Guangzhou, China, journalists for the Southern Weekend newspaper are striking in opposition to censorship of an op-ed that called for rights in China’s constitution to be better respected.

After passing through China’s censorship process, the op-ed was altered to praise China’s current political system.

Significantly, many people have showed up to support the protest, and a number of famous actors have voiced their support. This could end up being a major test for the new regime led by Xi Jinping, and an indicator of how he intends to rule. If he sides with the protestors (in some form), it should indicate that he seeks to decrease censorship of China’s news media. Or he could side with the government and maintain China’s status quo.

Follow this story. It may quiet down, but it could also end up being important.

I came across this article by Stacey Higginbotham for GigaOm while doing research for Basil:

An open data standard for food has emerged on the web. With such a tool, restaurants, food apps, grocery stores, the government and other interested parties can tell that arugula is also called rocket salad, no matter where on the web it occurs or what a restaurant menu or recipe app calls it. Right now, that’s an impossible task, which leads to inefficiencies in both consumer-facing apps and the supply chains of restaurants and grocery stores.

A group of folks concerned about sustainable foods have built the seeds of an open food database hosted on Heroku, with the code pertaining to it located at Github.

Really, really cool idea, and something we absolutely need more of. Theoretically, this sort of thing would allow Basil to do a lot of very powerful things. For example, it could have much smarter tagging; rather than just tag recipes with ingredients it uses that happen to be in a built-in list of ingredients or user-added ones, Basil could use the service’s list of ingredients, so you’d get a much fuller tagging system. But it could also be more intelligent about it; if one recipe says it uses “coriander” and another recipe says it uses “cilantro,” Basil could use this service to see oh, they’re the same thing, and to tag both recipes with “cilantro.” Or, if this service ends up providing translations of food names into different languages, Basil could be language-independent: whatever language you save a recipe in, it would display the tags for it in the user’s native language. That’s awesome.

There is huge potential here to do something incredible, and it shows the potential for what open and linked data could do. Imagine if we then take this data-set and link it up to a data-set which provides nutritional information for foods. It would then be quite simple to create a rough estimate of the nutritional content for any recipe, even if the information isn’t provided. From there, we could link up to another data-set which provides the user’s health data (say, Fitbit’s API), and from there, to a service which tells you how many calories, carbohydrates, et cetera someone with that health profile should have each day. All of the sudden, we have a very, very concrete way to recommend recipes to people that meet their health needs. And if they tell Basil that they cooked that recipe today, Basil could update their Fitbit account.

Think about how big a deal that is. We have all of this data already—we just need to unlock it. Open data has the potential to be even more important than the web browser and hypertext.

Cuba has allowed farmers to grow and sell crops privately in an attempt to boost production, but the changes haven’t been a success:

Mistrust is widespread. To get the growth Mr. Castro wants in agriculture and the economy, people need to trust the government, analysts say. But after half a century of strict control, many Cubans doubt proclamations from officials, who insist that this time, despite previous crackdowns, private enterprise will be supported.

Some farmers still wonder when the government is going to swoop in and take what they have built.

“What concerns me is that in a place like this, after five or six years the state might need the land to complete some kind of project,” said Reinaldo Berdecia, who is raising cows outside Havana.

This shows is just how important the rule of law is in allowing a market system. Without trust that the land and output will remain theirs, few farmers will take the necessary steps to make use of it.

Another problem farmers run into is that while they now can effectively own land, they don’t have the resources to effectively farm it due to other restrictions still in place, like tractors (the government maintains a monopoly on selling almost all new equipment, so farmers use decades-old, unreliable equipment) and fertilizer.

Without the rule of law and relatively unfettered access to other goods, too, it’s difficult for a market to emerge.