Day: January 28, 2009

Links for January 27th through January 28th

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Sometime between January 27th and January 28th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Babies Know – a Little Dirt Is Good for You: "'What a child is doing when he puts things in his mouth is allowing his immune response to explore his environment,' Mary Ruebush, a microbiology and immunology instructor, wrote in her new book, 'Why Dirt Is Good' (Kaplan). 'Not only does this allow for 'practice' of immune responses, which will be necessary for protection, but it also plays a critical role in teaching the immature immune response what is best ignored.' One leading researcher, Dr. Joel V. Weinstock, said in an interview that the immune system at birth 'is like an unprogrammed computer. It needs instruction.' He said that public health measures like cleaning up contaminated water and food have saved the lives of countless children, but they 'also eliminated exposure to many organisms that are probably good for us. Children raised in an ultraclean environment,' he added, 'are not being exposed to organisms that help them develop appropriate immune regulatory circuits.'"
  • Feb. 17 Digital TV Conversion Is Still on After House Vote: "Bucking the Obama administration, House Republicans on Wednesday defeated a bill to postpone the upcoming transition from analog to digital television broadcasting to June 12 — leaving the current Feb. 17 deadline intact for now." A very welcome bookend to my grousing the other day. The Feb. 17 date has been trumpeted for a few years now, delaying it would just cause more problems and more confusion. Just flip the switch and get it done with already.
  • Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance—Now With Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!: "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton–and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers–and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead."
  • Graffiti Removal – City of Kent, Washington: "Immediate removal within 24-48 hours is the key to successful graffiti prevention. Property owners can take back their neighborhoods by helping to clean up graffiti. Any effort to remove graffiti makes a big difference. Remove graffiti immediately and work with your neighbors to ensure your neighborhood remains clean. If you have been the victim of graffiti vandalism, you may complete a case report by utilizing the Kent Police Department's online reporting system."

Everything But Marriage

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I happen to be of the opinion that we should remove marriage from the secular system entirely — that is, courts would merely deal with civil unions, which would be identical and impart identical rights to any couple, straight or gay — and let the churches handle marriage ceremonies for people who want them. If God doesn’t want same-sex couples to marry, then fine, let the churches bar their doors. But there is absolutely no reason why same-sex couples shouldn’t get all the same legal rights and privileges that heterosexual couples do.

Barring that solution, however, this is a good step forward:

State lawmakers are getting ready to introduce a bill allowing same-sex couples all the rights and benefits afforded to heterosexual married couples.

[…]

The measure makes changes to all remaining areas of state law where currently only married couples are addressed.

The bill would add same-sex domestic partners to state statutes ranging from labor and employment to criminal law, to pensions and other public employee benefits.

Print Stylesheets Return

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One of my website pet peeves is the lack of attention to how a site behaves when printed. All too often, there’s either an assumption that we live in a truly online-only world, or simply a lack of thought about how any given page will look when printed. Consequently, there are a lot of websites that look like crud when printed: navigation links and ads all over the page taking up unnecessary space, content crammed into a narrow column, an extra half page of junk after the actual content ends, etc.

Some sites give a ‘print view’ link that produces a print-optimized version of the page, but I’d be willing to bet that a lot of people never see that — especially given the number of times I’ve had to actively hunt for such a link, and found it shoved off in some corner, not obviously tied to the content at all. Besides, having a specialized page seems like unnecessary overhead on the server when better solutions exist.

To that end — and this is a project that I’ve been meaning to do for a while (I never even got around to it with my last design) — I’ve resurrected the print stylesheet for my site. Admittedly, I have no idea how often people print something they find here (and I would guess that it’s not very often at all), but at least now I know that if they do, they’ll get something useful.

There’s an older, but still relevant, more detailed look at the techniques I use in this post from 2003, but here’s a rundown of the results:

  1. No navigation links below the website title.
  2. No sidebar at all.
  3. No comment entry form.
  4. No Google ads.
  5. The content fills the page, with a wider left-hand margin to allow room for binding.
  6. Rather than coloring links (useless on a printed page), the URLs display after the linked text, using Markdown style formatting.

The only issue I’m having is the same issue I had the first time I set up a print stylesheet: the code that inserts URLs after linked items borks up the clean display of inline images (for an example, try printing this post). I’m (still) stumped on how to exclude images from the link insertion code, though, so for now, I’m just going with what I’ve got.