Friday lunchtime. Time to clean out the accumulated links that don’t fit anywhere else:
- Signs of the Times. Los Angeles appears to be changing its street signs again. Militant Angeleno has a nice post on the new signs, as well as a summary of the previous generations of signs.
- Getting Around the Wall. You’ve all heard by now of the upcoming NY Times Paywall. Evidently, all it takes is four lines of Javascript to get around it. Nieman Journalism Lab has a nice post about those four lines, and why the NY Times probably doesn’t care if the techo-geeks get around their wall. They are more concerned about the non-techo-users.
- But Is It Good For You. Frito-Lay is changing their chip forumulations
so they taste like their new organic bagsso they only use natural ingredients. Of course, this doesn’t make the chips any healthier, after all, oil, salt, and potatoes are all natural. - Religion in the News. A number of interesting articles related to religion. The BBC is reporting a study that religion may go extinct in 9 nations. In New York, a new musical that makes fun of religion (“The Book of Mormon”), from the creators of South Park, is getting rave reviews: not only from the NY Times critics, but from critics around the country (mark my words-this could be another Producers). The Chicago Tribune is reporting on a study on how religion can make you fat. Lastly, the American Family Association feels that those American’s who practice Islam have no first amendment rights. I wonder (actually, I can guess) what they think of the story I mentioned yesterday about more and more Muslims running for government office.
- Japan. Two articles on Japan that touched me. The first is about how a small fishing hamlet pulled together to survive after the Tsunami. The second, much sadder, about how the need to bury the dead hastily is affecting the buddhist rites of death (as an aside, I’ll note how Elizabeth Taylor was buried timely in accordance with Jewish tradition—she converted in 1959 to marry Eddie Fisher—and was late to her own funeral)
- College Planning. Two articles on the links are for my college planning purpose, but I’ll share. The first talks about how colleges are adding net price calculators to their websites; the second talks about how to decode a financial aid offer.
