And this is their response to the election of an extremely moderate half-African American candidate, who speaks better English than most and who has a model family. Revolted by this development, huge numbers of white people choose to demonstrate their independence and superiority by putting themselves eagerly at the disposal of a tear-stained semi-literate shock jock, and by repeating his list of lies and defamations. But, of course, there’s nothing racial in their attitude …

—Christopher Hitchens on the national embarrassment that is the tea party.

The Godfather Mansion is for sale

For a mere $3 million. It’s located in Staten Island so I’m hoping that The RZA scoops it up as a new Shaolin base of operations.

This is pretty amazing – a choropleth map from 1861 showing the distribution of slavery across the American south. It’s certainly arresting in what it shows but also wouldn’t be at all out of place alongside a modern map visualization. Kudos to the Times for digging this one up and adding some historical context.

Amazon is beta testing SDK’s to connect your mobile app to their web services

Build Android and iOS apps that can use Amazon’s storage, authentication and messaging infrastructure.

The New York Times talks a little about their election results on the iPad

I was really impressed with how their election pages looked on the iPad, down to the map working sans-Flash. Sadly, this blog post is pretty paltry on details, other than a few obvious pointers (use WebKit transforms for better animation!), but it is nice to see the Times embracing the web across platforms.

Give an unemployed person a dollar, and she tends to spend it, because she needs to. (By definition, she has no other source of income.) Give a rich person a dollar via a tax break, she tends to save it. (By definition, she has a lot of other assets.) Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s, has found that $1 in unemployment benefits generates $1.61 in economic activity. (That’s the second most-stimulative form of government spending, behind food stamps.) A dollar in tax cuts—not just to the rich, but to everyone—generates about 32 cents.

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It turns out that giving unemployed people a little money is the best way to help get the economy back on track. This is, of course, the exact opposite of what the Republican obstructionists are preaching – that rich people go out and hire when they get the tax cuts they paid for this past election.

I’ve never understood that line of tortured logic. Companies hire when they have a job that needs filled, like when people are out spending on goods and services, not because the people on their corporate boards get a tax break. The fact that Republicans get away with this lie is absurd.

Using Stage Video, we’ve seen laptops play smooth 1080p HD video with just over 0% CPU usage.

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The 10.2 Flash player beta is focused on performance but this seems like a bold claim indeed.

I hear the internal builds were called “win Gruber back, we promise, baby, we’ve changed”.

Twitter hires a Hollywood outreach guy

Because if there’s anything the world needs, it’s another megaphone for celebrities.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with the Twitter media team and they’re some of the sharpest people I know, which makes this particularly disappointing. It’s probably more of a reflection of my own naïveté, and that I hold the social network a little too close to my heart, but I actually believed Twitter wanted to change things.

I’m sure teaching celebrities how to tweet from the red carpet of some vacuous awards ceremony makes all kind of strategic sense in their quest for profitability but it just makes me kind of sad.

Let me tell you a secret: Grade A maple syrup is shit. It’s light and boring. You want good maple syrup you get Grade B. It’s got a much stronger and darker maple flavor to it. It’s made from the musk of the tree. Now, Vermont they grade their syrups on a higher standard than the rest of the US. And New Hampshire doesn’t grade theirs at all.

—Say what you will about whoever is behind the @vincent_gallo twitter account, the guy knows his maple syrup. He could’ve written that for Unwrapper!

iPhone and iPad now support TrueType font embedding.

iOS 4.2 officially supports Trutype fonts instead of just SVG outlines. This is awesome.