Geekeries

I know and love most of the comedians on this tour, but let’s be honest:

In the link above, I rewrote this entire press release for brevity and importance to maximize interest.

Dave Chappelle is doing a comedy tour this fall

That’s it. That’s all you need. The rest is icing.

Dave.

Chappelle.

npr.org

Week­end Edi­tion Sat­ur­day Host Scott Simon talks with bioethi­cist Arthur Caplan of New York Uni­ver­si­ty about Thurs­day’s Supreme Court rul­ing that iso­lat­ed human genes may not be patent­ed — and the impli­ca­tions for that rul­ing.

No, it won’t. It will require pharma to patent the techniques with which they isolate substances instead of patenting naturally occurring substances outside the purview of the patent system’s constitutional authority and mandate.

I’m not always a fan of Gawker, but this is a great post about why they block certain commenters. My philosophy has long been that if you have something to say you should say it in your own space. See the “Comments” section of my other site, Constant & Endless, for more explanation. I occasionally leave a comment on one of my favorite sites, but usually I end up writing a quick post like this one. This way, my thoughts are publicly accessible, I control their availability, and no one has to deal with having what I say on their site.

This is a moving post by Adam Schragin, on the degradation of Austin blog Austinist by its publisher, Jake Dobkin and Gothamist LLC.

I was once an editor with Phillyist, another Gothamist LLC property - until I wasn’t. Some of us created KeyPulp, until we couldn’t keep that going, either. It’s hard to do something awesome that takes a lot of time to get right when it’s not the source of your income. It’s even harder to convince others to do the same.

Gothamist and its network of sites are managed by someone who has only gotten where he is because others were willing to express love for their cities without pay. That’s something that deserves gratitude, not incompetent management.

You don’t manage a successful website about Austin from New York without leaning heavily on the experience and insight of your Austin team. You can’t. You don’t know the city, you don’t know the people, you don’t know the writers. All you have are numbers, and arbitrary goals, and apples-to-oranges comparisons. And ego. None of those things are useful when you’re trying to build something bigger than a website.

Something like, as Schragin puts it, a family.

This post by Peter Spiro, international law scholar and professor at Temple Law, flags the Bangladeshi Fire Safety Accord as an important development in what is essentially industrial self-regulation.

I wonder whether something like this may be of use in the healthcare sector. The levels of care available to the insured and uninsured and to citizens and non-citizens vary widely throughout both the developed and developing worlds.

To what extent is some base level of universally affordable care a possibility, perhaps with cost determined as a function of local GDP or median income or something else? This is all thinking-out-loud, and it would take economists and medical professionals and legal scholars to discuss whether it is absurd or something potentially viable.

See the Accord itself here (PDF).