Ben Lynn, a computer scientist and Google employee, has written an extensive set of notes on using Git, the version control system (and so much more), called “Git Magic”. There is a fair amount of documentation on Git, but Lynn’s notes are pleasant to read, engagingly personal, and usefully to the point.

The great Cool Tools website has a fine and useful article about topographic maps. These are maps that show elevation contours and are indispensable for hiking. They explain how to download free ones, how to overlay topography on Google Earth, how to order cheap ones, and how to get that nifty map paper to use in your printer.

A company plays games with units and specifications. I show them how they can play better.

Karadzic lives and acts very much in a tradition expressed in Serbian epic poetry, that quite unambiguously celebrates genocide.

A good, succinct rundown of some useful tricks for using the bash shell efficiently, concentrating on manipulating the command history. Note that not everything works on every recent version of bash. The comments on the page are also worth reading.

Simon Willison, co-creator of the Django Web framework, on debugging strategies.

From Ars Technica, a writeup of the Musopen website, whose purpose is to commission performers to record classical works and put the audio, along with the printed score, in the public domain.

According to the built-in dictionary on the Macintosh, the correct pronunciation is “burma”.

My friend sent me an email with a request to go to a petition site and sign up against an advertisement for Dairy Queen. Now if this were the usual crap about sex and violence I would not be signing, unless it were a demand for more sex and violence. But this is something else entirely.

The biggest outbreak of measles since 2001 has been caused by people refusing to vaccinate their children either because of religious reasons or an unfounded belief that vaccinations lead to autism or other diseases. Before the development of the vaccine in 1963 measles was a terrible public health problem; the vaccination program was so successful that transmission of the measles virus was completely halted in 2000. Now, partly thanks to shady opportunists like Gary Null pushing vaccination paranoia, one of the great success stories of modern public health medicine is being undermined, and we are once again facing the possibility of measles becoming endemic in the U.S. for the first time in almost 50 years.

If Gary Null and his staff took a minute off from threatening to sue me for attacking his credentials to ask me to back up my assertions, this is what I would tell them.