Check It Out

Links to cool places or things.

There are 1,524 posts filed in Check It Out (this is page 82 of 153).

Dear parents, you need to control your kids. Sincerely, non-parents

Nice rant about non-parents thinking they know more about parenting than parents themselves.

Anyway, listen, I don’t think you, of all people, should be telling other folks what they “need to learn.” If you just shut up and paid attention, you’d realize that YOU could learn plenty from mothers like the one we both encountered yesterday. I know I have lots and lots to learn as a young parent, which is why I’m always prepared for a more experienced parent to take me to school and teach me a thing or two, even if they don’t know they’re doing it. Parenting is the easiest thing in the world to have an opinion about, but the hardest thing in the world to do. You shouldn’t scrutinize parents when you aren’t one, for the same reason I wouldn’t sit and heckle an architect while he draws up the blueprint for a new skyscraper. I know that buildings generally aren’t supposed to fall down, but I don’t have the slightest clue as to how to design one that won’t, so I’ll just keep my worthless architectural opinions to myself.

via Dear parents, you need to control your kids. Sincerely, non-parents | The Matt Walsh Blog.

Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy | Wait But Why

This Huffington Post repost of a Wait But Why post draws an unflattering picture of Generation Y:

Say hi to Lucy.

Lucy is part of Generation Y, the generation born between the late 1970s and the mid 1990s. She’s also part of a yuppie culture that makes up a large portion of Gen Y.

I have a term for yuppies in the Gen Y age group — I call them Gen Y Protagonists — Special Yuppies, or GYPSYs. A GYPSY is a unique brand of yuppie, one who thinks they are the main character of a very special story.

So Lucy’s enjoying her GYPSY life, and she’s very pleased to be Lucy. Only issue is this one thing:Lucy’s kind of unhappy.

Continue reading →

Hallie’s IMatterYouthNC video ad

Frank Eaton films Hallie

Frank Eaton films Hallie


Friday afternoon, we spent a few hours with Raleigh documentary filmmaker Frank Eaton at the N.C. State Arboretum. Frank volunteered to make an informational video for Hallie’s IMatter Youth NC climate-change march she’s organizing for Sept. 28th in Raleigh. Along with our friends the Maugers, we set up a shooting location among the greenery of the arboretum while Hallie recited her lines for the camera.

Frank is an expert videographer and a fun guy to be around. He really connected with the kids, too, making it a fun experience.

The video came out beautifully and Hallie’s climate change rally is quickly generating attention. We hope the momentum continues to build through 28th!

If you’d like to know more, check out the IMatter Youth NC website. And if you’d like to look good on camera, check out Frank’s Bully Documentary Company.

Car thieves rob vehicles using ‘mystery’ wireless devices

Update 11 Aug 2015: Mystery solved?

Thieves are using a mystery device to break into cars and the cops are stumped. I came across this story back in June but never posted it here:

Cops across the country are investigating a new wave of car thefts that appear to be happening with nothing more than a click of a button, the “Today” show reports.

From California to Chicago, car thieves have been caught on camera breaking into parked cars using small electronic devices that could be “cloned” car remotes.

The thieves then raid the vehicles for valuables before skulking away.

Long Beach, Calif., Deputy Police Chief David Hendricks told “Today” he’s “stumped: by the robberies.

“We are stumped and we don’t know what this technology is,” he said.

via Car thieves rob vehicles using ‘mystery’ wireless devices: report  – NY Daily News.

Continue reading →

US and UK spy agencies defeat privacy and security on the internet

Shocking, or long suspected?

The files show that the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees that internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments.

The agencies, the documents reveal, have adopted a battery of methods in their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of internet traffic – “the use of ubiquitous encryption across the internet”.

via US and UK spy agencies defeat privacy and security on the internet | World news | The Guardian.

U.S. allows states to legalize recreational marijuana within limits

This is great news. I’ve said it before but I hope North Carolina’s leaders will become enlightened and the guns will disappear from Raleigh’s streets. Yeah, that’s asking a lot but this is a huge step in the right direction.

The Justice Department said it would refocus marijuana enforcement nationwide by bringing criminal charges only in eight defined areas – such as distribution to minors – and giving breathing room to users, growers and related businesses that have feared prosecution.

The decisions end nearly a year of deliberation inside President Barack Obama’s administration about how to react to the growing movement for relaxed U.S. marijuana laws.

Advocates for legalization welcomed the announcement as a major step toward ending what they called “marijuana prohibition.”

via U.S. allows states to legalize recreational marijuana within limits | Reuters.

The NSA: “The Abyss From Which There Is No Return”

Interesting commentary.

So if we already knew that the government was spying on us, what’s the big deal? And more to the point, as I often hear many Americans ask, if you’re not doing anything wrong, why should you care?

The big deal is simply this: once you allow the government to start breaking the law, no matter how seemingly justifiable the reason, you relinquish the contract between you and the government which establishes that the government works for and obeys you, the citizen—the employer—the master. And once the government starts operating outside the law, answerable to no one but itself, there’s no way to rein it back in, short of revolution.

via The NSA: "The Abyss From Which There Is No Return".

Human Evolutionary Change 100 Times Higher in Past 5,000 Years

Fascinating.

“We are more different genetically from people living 5,000 years ago than they were different from Neanderthals,” according to John Hawks -University of Wisconsin anthropologist. “Five thousand years is such a small sliver of time – it’s 100 to 200 generations ago. That’s how long it’s been since some of these genes originated, and today they are in 30 or 40 percent of people because they’ve had such an advantage. It’s like ‘invasion of the body snatchers.’What’s really amazing about humans,” Hawks continued, “that is not true with most other species, is that for a long time we were just a little ape species in one corner of Africa, and weren’t genetically sampling anything like the potential we have now.”

via Human Evolutionary Change 100 Times Higher in Past 5,000 Years Today's Most Popular.

North Carolina’s plank roads

I was researching the new railroad that is leasing the tracks near my home and stumbled upon information on North Carolina’s first road improvement project, the plank road. It is what it sounds like, a road paved with wooden planks ranging from 8 to 30 feet wide. Plank roads were an affordable alternative to building railroads, if not as long lasting.

Below is a good summary of plank roads from RootsWeb. I’ll also reformat the text from the North Carolina Historical Commission’s 1939 story on plank roads and post it.

The Greenville and Raleigh Plank Road

Many people have noticed the historical marker for the Greenville and Raleigh Plank Road on Dickinson Avenue and wondered what it was all about. With the increased commerce and agricultural interests in North Carolina in the 1840’s, transportation became a problem. The use of plank roads in northern states had proved successful and they began to be introduced in North Carolina as the answer to its transportation difficulties.
Continue reading →

Email service used by Snowden shuts itself down, warns against using US-based companies | Glenn Greenwald

I didn’t know about Lavabit until they pulled their own plug yesterday, but I deeply respect its owners’ refusal to play along to the NSA’s excessive and unconstitutional spying.

A Texas-based encrypted email service recently revealed to be used by Edward Snowden – Lavabit – announced yesterday it was shutting itself down in order to avoid complying with what it perceives as unjust secret US court orders to provide government access to its users’ content. “After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations,” the company’s founder, Ladar Levinson, wrote in a statement to users posted on the front page of its website. He said the US directive forced on his company “a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit.” He chose the latter.

via Email service used by Snowden shuts itself down, warns against using US-based companies | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | theguardian.com.