The problems with using Twitter as a model for the general population are simple. You don’t have to be a pollster to understand that searching for tweets that match some keywords hardly constitutes proper probabilistic sampling. We might display a map that shows colors mentioned by Americans on Twitter, but nobody would say this is an accurate map of favorite colors for each region of the USA. Naturally, most graphics play it safe and say overtly that they are only representions of Twitter and are not meant to provide deeper insight beyond that into the general population.

However, the distinction is lost on a lot of readers. I think many of us find these graphics so appealing because we see ourselves reflected in our data streams.

—Jake Harris, one of the smartest news nerds in the biz, on the perils of polling Twitter.

That is jaw-dropping. It is an assertion of judicial supremacy over the people’s Representatives in Congress and the Executive. It envisions a Supreme Court standing (or rather enthroned) at the apex of government, empowered to decide all constitutional questions, always and everywhere ‘primary’ in its role.

—

If you had “a condemnation of the Supreme Court overturning a key provision of the voting rights act” as a guess to the origin of this quote, you’d be close, but, sadly, wrong.

It’s actually Antonin Scalia, apoplectic that five of his fellow justices found the abhorrent Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional.

The highlights of Scalia’s DOMA dissent are schadenfreudetastic.

There is a tendency among those who grew up under the rule of law to treat it like the Rock of Ages, an immovable substrate in which all the institutions of the state are forever anchored. And so even ordinarily skeptical people tend to assume that the government obeys its own laws when no one is looking. To an astonishing extent, and to the great credit of American civic life, this is actually true.

But I think a better metaphor for the rule of law is that it is the soil in which democratic institutions take root. Like the soil, it can be depleted. And once depleted, it is not easily replenished. Secrecy erodes the rule of law because it makes democratic accountability impossible. Secrets can’t be held too broadly, so secrecy concentrates responsibility and asks too much of human nature. That is why every intelligence agency, unless given rigorous outside oversight, commits terrible excesses.

—Maciej Ceglowki’s response to David Simon’s shrug about the NSA’s domestic spying system is vitally important.

Global cities are turning into vast gated communities where the one per cent reproduces itself.

—Priced out of Paris

It’s important to bear in mind I’m being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.

—Edward Snowden

We love what we know and we’re afraid of what we don’t, so we don’t want to see our old friend replaced with this new thing. It’s irrational, but it’s human nature. When we look at our parents and grandparents we don’t see a crowd of pudgy gray-haired wrinkle factories… we see our history. We love them even when they start smelling weird and wheezing all the time. We wouldn’t dream of replacing them.

Our mistaking a familiarity bias for inherent superiority is where our gut reaction against iOS 7 comes from. It’s a kind of xenophobia. Apple took our beloved iPhone and gave it back to us a stranger. Still walks and talks the same, still the heart and soul we love; just not the face we knew.

—Chris Clark has some advice for everyone freaking out about the new iOS.

Retiring Chrome Frame

Google is retiring Chrome Frame, the plug-in that let Internet Explorer act like Chrome. I was pretty excited about Chrome Frame when it debuted and even though it never really saw much use, I see this as a victory. Late model versions of IE are quite good and the web of 2013 has little need for these small, if elegant, hacks.

daniel sinker: Tapped out: Phone monitoring, young love, and me.

apophatic:

you will never look cool wearing google glass, especially when taking pictures. 

Apple’s tax bill is a window into the global post-industrial economy, and all its problems

I was trying to think of what to write about today’s Apple and taxes Congressional hearing, as it intersects both my political and tech partisanship, and but Quartz wrote this excellent analysis.

I will say this whole story seems to be engendering a fair amount of cognitive dissonance — who would imagine a supporting quote from Rand Paul on Daring Fireball, for instance. While I do think it’s a bit unfair that Apple seems to be singled out for doing what nearly every multinational corporation in America is also doing, I’d prefer Apple hewed a bit more closely to the spirit of the law.

That said, I genuinely believe Tim Cook wants to do what’s right and is committed to helping fix some of the more glaring problems with the tax code so that Apple, and its competitors, can do the right thing.