Christopher Blizzard

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Category: Long Attention Span

on software patent absurdity

A set of people have put together a really wonderful set of interviews and footage about the patent system and its effects on the software industry in the US. Most of the story centers around The Bilski case, recently heard by the Supreme Court which could have broad effects on patents in software. [...]

mark bittman on food

Yet another post on my series on Food. This time it’s a video by Mark Bittman who talks about our food system, what we’ve lost and what we should be doing. (I love his focus on real food – not most of the imitation food we have today.)

Original Post. Licensed as CC-BY-NC-ND.
(Thanks [...]

artificial sweeteners

Recently, I’ve been doing some posts on food. This is another one.
A friend of mine recently posted a link to a pretty interesting article about an animal model meant to observe the effects of artificial sweeteners on rats. Here’s the money quote:

Even though the saccharin-sweetened yogurt group actually got fewer calories from their [...]

HTML5 video and H.264 – what history tells us and why we’re standing with the web

For background on the free software angle on this story please check out Robert O’Callahan’s post on this topic. Also check out Mike Shaver’s shorter background post as well. This post differs from theirs in that I want to talk about network effects, why codecs should be considered a fundamental web technology and [...]

sugar

I’ve been posting recently about food and nutrition and I feel like the information in this video was a huge piece that I was missing.
In this video, Dr. Robert Lustig goes through the science behind how sugar and its component parts, glucose and fructose, are processed in the body and what that means for everything [...]

food on thanksgiving

Today is Thanksgiving in the United States. A day where we say thanks for all of the good things that we’ve been lucky enough to be graced with over the last year.
It’s also a day that we eat a lot of food.
Earlier today I watched this talk on Deep Agriculture given by Michael Pollan [...]

patents as part of the american experience

Ahh, 2006. It seems like such a long time ago! Back then I was working at Red Hat on OLPC and Microsoft had just accused free software of being Unamerican and communist. It was a good time, honestly, to know that you were working on important things and that you were still [...]

understanding climate change on earth day

It’s earth day so I thought today might be a good day to post this.  I’ve been sitting on a set of tabs in my browser for a long time now – months I think – and I think that it’s enough to be able to share with people.
Over the last few months I’ve been [...]

five writing resources

I’m going to list five little writing resources that I’ve found to be useful over the last few months. Many of you have probably seen many of them, but I thought it would be useful to put them all in one place.
1. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Outstanding TEDtalk on John’s weblog.  Elizabeth Gilbert talks about the [...]

why open video?

[ Note: Mike Shaver gives the short version of this post.  I have done a great job of burying the lead here. There's a post from the Wikimedia Foundation on the topic and a post in the Mozilla Blog as well. ]
[ Update: There's a good note on ajaxian, the most important of which is [...]