Jvitak

David Freedman has a piece at The Atlantic about healthy foods, unhealthy foods — and the "healthy" foods that are actually probably not that healthy, despite coming to you all natural and un-processed. I want to like the piece more than I actually do. For instance, Freedman has some issues with misrepresenting the positions of the people he's arguing against. For instance, I think he and Michael Pollan would probably agree that downing lots of 300-calorie fruit smoothies isn't the best way to get in shape. But it's an interesting read, especially if you just focus on the key point: Healthy food doesn't have to be limited to what you buy at Whole Foods or the farmer's market.

Lasrick sends in an article from John Horgan at Scientific American explaining why he thinks engineering freshmen should make a bit of space in their course-load for the humanities. Quoting: "But it is precisely because science is so powerful that we need the humanities now more than ever. In your science, mathematics and engineering classes, you're given facts, answers, knowledge, truth. Your professors say, 'This is how things are.' They give you certainty. The humanities, at least the way I teach them, give you uncertainty, doubt and skepticism. The humanities are subversive. They undermine the claims of all authorities, whether political, religious or scientific. This skepticism is especially important when it comes to claims about humanity, about what we are, where we came from, and even what we can be and should be. Science has replaced religion as our main source of answers to these questions. Science has told us a lot about ourselves, and we’re learning more every day. But the humanities remind us that we have an enormous capacity for deluding ourselves."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday was George Orwell's birthday, and to celebrate, people in Utrecht perched little party hats atop CCTV cameras in public places.

By making these inconspicuous cameras that we ignore in our daily lives catch the eye again we also create awareness of how many cameras really watch us nowadays, and that the surveillance state described by Orwell is getting closer and closer to reality.

No one tried this in London, because there are not enough party hats in the universe.

George Orwell’s Birthday Party (via Making Light)

Ok, it's no NFL bad lip reading but this fake commentary by a British broadcaster of a baseball game is still pretty hilarious.

He runs in to bowl...Mork and Mindy, that's going for six! No! Caught by the chap in the pajamas with the glove that makes everything easier. And they all scuttle off for a nap.

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If your guinea pig routinely dashes off into armed combat (or just likes the look of scale mail), you might want to outfit him or her in this handsome suit of armor, perfect for rolly-polly rodents.

Read more...

For those fortunate to have found love, the wedding day is one of life's great milestones. But sometimes when you're trying to make everything right, things go terribly wrong.

Whether the best man pushes you into a pool or your drunken party guest (literally) brings the house down, there's always the chance that something might put a damper on your big day

Here are 10 ways to ensure some serious wedding mayhem.

1. Make a zipline entrance.

2. Take photos with your wedding party on a poorly-constructed dock.

Read more...

3. Choose your clumsiest friend as the best man.

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Everyone's all worked up at the fact that Emily Harris, 9, was able to proceed through through customs with a passport that identified her as a unicorn. What do these tabloids have against unicorns? [The Sun]

Former UK drug czar David Nutt (and author of the amazing and indispensable Drugs Without the Hot Air) has published a paper in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience called "Effects of Schedule I drug laws on neuroscience research and treatment innovation" where he, and his co-authors (Leslie A. King and David E. Nichols) call modern drug policy "the worst case of scientific censorship since the Catholic Church banned the works of Copernicus and Galileo." The Independent summarises the paper:

The paper, which is published to coincide with a conference on scientific research with psychedelics at Imperial College London, points to evidence that cannabis, MDMA and psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin (the compound found in magic mushrooms) have unexplored medicinal benefits and argues that laws should be updated.

Small clinical studies of MDMA, which was originally used in the USA in the 1970s to improve communication in psychotherapy sessions, suggested that it could play a highly beneficial role in the treatment of PTSD patients. The paper’s authors said the drug could also help with “end of life anxiety” and couples therapy”.

Medical use of marijuana is already legal in 17 US states, and the drug has been shown to have benefits such as anxiety reduction and pain relief. However, Professor Nutt said that UK restrictions had blocked development of therapeutic applications for any of cannabis’ 16 active ingredients.

LSD, meanwhile, was widely researched in the 1950s and 1960s, with more than 1,000 papers investigating outcomes for more than 40,000 patients, with evidence suggesting that the drug might be an effective treatment for alcoholism, before bans on the drug around the world ended further research.

'The worst case of scientific censorship since the Catholic Church banned the works of Galileo': Scientists call for drugs to be legalised to allow proper study of their properties (via Reddit)

Five years after her three year old daughter died from malnutrition and dehydration, a woman who played World of Warcraft obsessively every day is now in prison. Rebecca Colleen Christie of Las Cruces, NM has been sentenced to 25 years in prison, almost two years after her 2009 conviction on second-degree murder and child abandonment charges.

As Owen Good at Kotaku wrote:

The case against Christie showed that the day the girl died, Christie had been playing Warcraft and chatting with friends she'd made online for 15 hours. Prosecutors said there appeared to be so little food that the girl ate cat food.

In a ruling from the US Court of Appeals Tenth Circuit (PDF) this week, judges confirmed the right of the state to search computers for evidence. The ruling contains some extremely upsetting details about the life and death of Ms. Christie's toddler (referenced in the court documents as "BW"), but if you can make it past that, there are some interesting 4th Amendment considerations.

The ruling also references Christie's former husband, Derek Wulf, a man enlisted in the Air Force who was also an avid (or, one might argue, pathologically obsessive) gamer.

An excerpt:

Because BW died on an Air Force base, federal authorities bore the responsibility to investigate and the power to prosecute. They proceeded against Ms. Christie and Mr. Wulf separately. In our proceeding, a federal jury found Ms. Christie guilty of second-degree murder, two assimilated state law homicide charges, as well as an assimilated child abuse charge. After trial, the district court dismissed the two assimilated homicide charges and entered a twenty-five year sentence on the remaining second-degree federal murder and the assimilated child abuse charge.

It is this judgment both sides now appeal.

Much of the evidence presented at trial against Ms. Christie came from the computer she so prized. From their forensic analysis, FBI investigators learned that Ms. Christie's online activities usually kept her busy from noon to 3 a.m. with little pause. They learned that she was in a chat room only an hour before finding BW near death, and that she was back online soon afterwards. They learned from Ms. Christie's messages to other gamers that she was annoyed by her responsibilities as a mother and “want[ed] out of this house fast.” When Mr. Wulf was slated for deployment, she announced to online friends that she would soon be free to “effing party.”

Ms. Christie contends this evidence and more from her computer was uncovered in violation of her Fourth Amendment rights and the district court should have suppressed it from her trial. Because the court didn't, because it admitted the proof against her, Ms. Christie says a new trial is required. To be precise, Ms. Christie doesn't question whether the government's seizure of the computer satisfied the Fourth Amendment. The government took possession of the computer in May 2006 with Mr. Wulf's consent. Everyone accepts that he was at least a co-owner of the computer—it was a gift from his father—and everyone accepts he had at least apparent authority to relinquish its control. Instead, Ms. Christie attacks the propriety of the two searches the government undertook once it had control of the computer. To justify its searches the government does not seek to rely on Mr. Wulf's consent but points to a pair of warrants it sought and received, one for each search. It is these warrants Ms. Christie challenges, arguing they were issued in defiance of the Fourth Amendment.

The judges conclude by stating:

So it is we decline to reverse the district court on this score, just as we find no other reversible error anywhere else in its careful treatment of this sad case. The judgment is affirmed.

A trailer for 300: Rise of an Empire, the follow-up to 2006 action film 300, surfaced online Wednesday. Similar to its predecessor, Rise of an Empire is filmed in a graphic-novel style, and depicts mortal-turned-god Xerxes in his bid to overtake more territory

A two-and-a-half minute trailer, above, reveals intense battle scenes between Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro reprising his role in 300) and woman-warrior Artemisia (Eva Green of Casino Royale fame) against Greek general Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton). The film is based on Frank Miller's latest graphic novel, Xerxes.

Directed by Noam Murro, 300: Rise of an Empire is slated to hit theaters on March 7, 2014. Do you plan to watch it? Tell us in the comments, below. Read more...

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Mark Blyth, a delightfully sweary Scottish economist, talks for about an hour to Googlers about the stupidity of austerity as a means of recovering from recession, describing it in colorful, easy-to-grasp language. This is brilliant, accessible and important economics:

Governments today in both Europe and the United States have succeeded in casting government spending as reckless wastefulness that has made the economy worse. In contrast, they have advanced a policy of draconian budget cuts--austerity--to solve the financial crisis. We are told that we have all lived beyond our means and now need to tighten our belts. This view conveniently forgets where all that debt came from. Not from an orgy of government spending, but as the direct result of bailing out, recapitalizing, and adding liquidity to the broken banking system. Through these actions private debt was rechristened as government debt while those responsible for generating it walked away scot free, placing the blame on the state, and the burden on the taxpayer.

That burden now takes the form of a global turn to austerity, the policy of reducing domestic wages and prices to restore competitiveness and balance the budget. The problem, according to political economist Mark Blyth, is that austerity is a very dangerous idea. First of all, it doesn't work. As the past four years and countless historical examples from the last 100 years show, while it makes sense for any one state to try and cut its way to growth, it simply cannot work when all states try it simultaneously: all we do is shrink the economy. In the worst case, austerity policies worsened the Great Depression and created the conditions for seizures of power by the forces responsible for the Second World War: the Nazis and the Japanese military establishment. As Blyth amply demonstrates, the arguments for austerity are tenuous and the evidence thin. Rather than expanding growth and opportunity, the repeated revival of this dead economic idea has almost always led to low growth along with increases in wealth and income inequality. Austerity demolishes the conventional wisdom, marshaling an army of facts to demand that we recognize austerity for what it is, and what it costs us.

Mark Blyth: Austerity - The History of a Dangerous Idea (via Memex 1.1)

With each new announcement about the upcoming launch of the Xbox One, Microsoft seems to be making a few more enemies.

Gamers and industry observers have become increasingly skeptical of the next-gen gaming console thanks to features that seem catered far more to piracy-paranoid game publishers than to game buyers. For example, Microsoft said today that users won't be allowed to play games if their consoles are disconnected from the Internet for more than 24 hours. (Laughably, the brand says you can still "watch live TV" while disconnected, though I'm not sure defaulting to a cable box is a great selling point.) Reddit's Gaming community has exploded today with posts mocking the Xbox One's unpopular features and requirements. As of this writing, 23 of the top 25 posts on the Gaming subreddit are anti-Microsoft (check out several of the best after the jump).

It's not all a reaction to the required-connection announcement, either. Despite Microsoft's assurances that you'll be able to turn off the motion-detecting Kinect's microphone and camera, gamers still see the mandatory peripheral as an potential invasion of their privacy. Players also weren't thrilled to hear that the ability to buy or sell used games will be determined by the game publishers, who might require you to pay full price when you install one of their titles, even if you buy the disc used.

The infuriated response by gamers is definitely a PR nightmare for Microsoft, but here's the real question: Will Sony manage to keep looking like a hero? So far, Sony has revealed relatively few details about the PlayStation 4, and there's a good chance that as gamers learn more about Sony's own anti-piracy measures and hardware requirements, much of the brand's recently garnered goodwill could erode. Or as today's most popular Reddit Gaming post puts it, "Don't screw this up, Sony, and you will own the next generation."

Are you working on a startup? If so, I hate to break it to you, but there's a good chance it will fail. In fact, recent research shows that 75% of startups fail (based on a study of 2,000 startups that received VC funding from 2004 to 2010). Odds are, you won't be a Brin, a Zuckerberg, a Systrom, a Karp or a Fake.

But hard as it may be, don't let that statistic discourage you. Some startups are destined for failure. Perhaps the team is working on a product that really isn't that great or useful. Maybe they're trying to tackle too many problems at once. Or maybe the co-founders have a poisonous relationship that will hinder the company's growth. Maybe they never thought about product-market fit. Whatever your company's "fatal flaw" may be, you can likely avoid it in your own venture if you take some advice from people who've gone through the early startup phase before. Lucky for you, time-strapped entrepreneur, we've gathered some tips from the pros to help you avoid some of the most common, game-ending mistakes committed by young startups. Read more...

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Twitter user Darth polled followers for satirical, surveillance-oriented kids' book parodies, and created illustrations for the best. They're collected by the Guardian.

NSA surveillance as told through classic children's books

FRANKFURT- In a rare display of professional consensus, an international consortium of anthropologists, archaeologists, and molecular biologists have formally released an exasperated sigh over the popularity of the so-called "Paleo Diet" during a two-day conference dedicated to the topic.

The concept of failure is all too familiar to founders today. It's almost a mantra: Fail fast, fail often, fail early, fail cheap - sometimes, it seems like there are far more ways to fail than to succeed.

But every once in a while, startups make a pivotal decision that creates an undeniable shortcut to the finish line. We asked eight successful entrepreneurs from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) to share the single best decision they ever made with their startup.

1. Choose The Right Co-Founder

People often liken a co-founder to a spouse: You spend more time with them than anyone else in your life, you have to be uncomfortably honest about difficult topics and, if all goes well, you stick together through thick and thin - or at least until a successful exit. I trust my co-founder completely and rely on her to provide a balancing perspective in all our important decisions. We've certainly made mistakes along the way, but we've borne the consequences of those mistakes together. We also genuinely enjoy spending time together, which makes the whole startup adventure a lot more fun! Our relationship has provided important business advantages since our clients, employees and investors can sense the mutual commitment we have to the company and each other. - Martina Welke, Zealyst

2. Get A Subscription At Mixergy

When we started our business in China, I noticed that many of the mistakes we made could have been easily avoided if we were surrounded by a community of entrepreneurs or mentors who could coach us or share their experiences before we went through the pain. Meeting them in person was impossible given none lived in China. I searched online for a community that would be able to share stories, conduct classes or give practical advice that would help our business. I came across Mixergy and, after watching three interviews, I signed up immediately. I can tell you the ten interviews/classes changed our business and my life. Mixergy gave me a place to generate new ideas and implement effective strategies, motivating me to continue fighting for financial freedom. - Derek Capo, Next Step China

3. Put Your People First

The best decisions we've made have revolved around people in almost every way. Great people make or break your startup, and bad hiring decisions can break it quickly. I feel like thus far we've made some great decisions around people. From my co-founder to early hires, everyone involved in Speek is here because they're capable, passionate and willing to take a risk at some level to make Speek happen. - Danny Boice, Speek

4. Say 'No' To The Wrong Clients

Early on, we discovered that clients who were not in alignment with our core values sapped 80% of our time and energy, leaving less room to amplify and scale what was working. Developing a process to weed out clients who were not in alignment and then empowering our staff to say "no" to those clients made room for us to say "yes" to the rights kinds of customers so we could serve them brilliantly and with joy. - Corey Blake, Round Table Companies

5. Find Underserved Markets

We have always been opportunistic about finding markets that are underserved where we do not face entrenched competition. For example, in the early days, we focused on serving clean tech companies, first in San Francisco and now, in the last year, in LA. We aggressively pursue new markets and new opportunities. Because we commit ourselves to these new markets and put a lot of resources into them, we are able to get first-mover advantage and become the dominant player. - David Ehrenberg, Early Growth Financial Services

6. Do Your Own Market Research

At Star Toilet Paper, we have an obviously unique concept where there is no easy answer. That being said, in the beginning, my brother and I ensured that we did not outsource market research and business plan writing. We wanted to learn the ins and outs of our business and how we could enter the market. By doing this initial work ourselves (but making sure we let others do legal work effectively and ask questions when necessary), we understood our company like the back of our hand prior to entering the market. - Bryan Silverman, Star Toilet Paper

7. Focus Your Market & Prioritize Sales

As with most founders, we had ambitious plans but soon realized that to build market share, we needed to define "market" more carefully to demonstrate traction. Our initial goal was to launch in every physician's office, but in some traditional industries like health care and education, no one wants to be the first to try new technology. On the other hand, they will speak with you once you have proven credibility. We chose one market, one product and one focus. This helped us lead the team toward one goal and march in one direction together before we started adding features and other offerings. Focusing on market share through one customer base and product also allowed us to prioritize selling, receiving feedback, iterating and selling again to align with market needs rather than just building beautiful products. - Shradha Agarwal, ContextMedia

8. Just Start

I started. Sure, launching your own business can be a daunting task. There are a million reasons not to; you don't have enough money, you're current job is "secure," the success rate of startups seems scary and so forth. But at the same time, if you don't jump in, your success rate will be zilch. Plan carefully and think things through, but remember: You can't learn to swim if you don't get in the water. - Nicolas Gremion, Free-eBooks.net

If you have any ideas on what a guy can do when his family is out of town, please let us know on Facebook.

Also, if you have a name (Akylle, for example) and you had a birthday yesterday, happy birthday!

curtwoodward writes "Amazon has been delivering groceries to people in its hometown of Seattle for a half-dozen years, but the experiment has never spread any further. But this year, rumors about Amazon Fresh expanding to new cities are coming out every month — Reuters just reported that Amazon could start the service in L.A. within a week, and in San Francisco in the coming months. What gives? Why expand now? Look no further than Amazon's long-running battle with state and federal governments over sales tax policy. After more than a decade of resistance, Amazon has spent the last two years cutting deals to collect sales taxes in states all over the country. And it's pushing for a national online sales-tax system, which appears to be within reach. That's the last obstacle to Amazon getting into the grocery-delivery game — a step that should worry not only grocers, but UPS and FedEx, too."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My latest Guardian column is "Data protection in the EU: the certainty of uncertainty," a look at the absurdity of having privacy rules that describes some data-sets as "anonymous" and others as "pseudonymous," while computer scientists in the real world are happily re-identifying "anonymous" data-sets with techniques that grow more sophisticated every day. The EU is being lobbied as never before on its new data protection rules, mostly by US IT giants, and the new rules have huge loopholes for "anonymous" and "pseudonymous" data that are violently disconnected from the best modern computer science theories. Either the people proposing these categories don't really care about privacy, or they don't know enough about it to be making up the rules -- either way, it's a bad scene.

Since the mid-noughties, de-anonymising has become a kind of full-contact sport for computer scientists, who keep blowing anonymisation schemes out of the water with clever re-identifying tricks. A recent paper in Nature Scientific Reports showed how the "anonymised" data from a European phone company (likely one in Belgium) could be re-identified with 95% accuracy, given only four points of data about each person (with only two data-points, more than half the users in the set could be re-identified).

Some will say this doesn't matter. They'll say that privacy is dead, or irrelevant, or unimportant. If you agree, remember this: the reason anonymisation and pseudonymisation are being contemplated in the General Data Protection Regulation is because its authors say that privacy is important, and worth preserving. They are talking about anonymising data-sets because they believe that anonymisation will protect privacy – and that means that they're saying, implicitly, privacy is worth preserving. If that's policy's goal, then the policy should pursue it in ways that conform to reality as we understand it.

Indeed, the whole premise of "Big Data" is at odds with the idea that data can be anonymised. After all, Big Data promises that with very large data-sets, subtle relationships can be teased out. In the world of re-identifying, they talk about "sparse data" approaches to de-anonymisation. Though most of your personal traits are shared with many others, there are some things about you that are less commonly represented in the set – maybe the confluence of your reading habits and your address; maybe your city of birth in combination with your choice of cars.

Data protection in the EU: the certainty of uncertainty

An example of fantastic, whimsical bio-tableware from sculptor Etienne Meneau. Holds a full bottle.

If it looks difficult to pour from or clean, Meneau has an FAQ for that.

Via the good folks at The Annals of Improbable Research

Photo by Boing Boing reader Captain Tim, shared in the BB Flickr Pool.

A provocative article from the Netherlands published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine says people who like to participate in bondage-discipline, dominance-submission, and sado-masochism erotic play are "characterized by a set of balanced, autonomous, and beneficial personality characteristics.”

Practitioners of BDSM report “a higher level of subjective well-being” when compared to people who tend to have more boring forms of sex.

These sexual practices have long been "associated with psychopathology," the paper says. "However, several more recent studies suggest a relative good psychological health of BDSM practitioners."

The results mostly suggest favorable psychological characteristics of BDSM practitioners compared with the control group; BDSM practitioners were less neurotic, more extraverted, more open to new experiences, more conscientious, less rejection sensitive, had higher subjective well-being, yet were less agreeable.

The conclusion: BDSM is "recreational leisure," not pathology.

"Plain old vanilla sex," by the way, is what Hustler's Larry Flynt once told me he was into, during an interview I did for NPR. True story.

More: PSMAG, and here's the study. (via @vaughanbell)

Matt sez, "Maya Weinstein is an artist who just finished her MFA at Parsons, with the awesomest thesis ever: a DIY kit for making your own High-Fructose Corn Syrup, the industrial sweetener that is, well, let's say problematic these days.

"Amazingly, HFCS is not available for consumers to buy, and as Weinstein discovered, making it yourself requires some pretty unusual (and expensive) components, like Glucose Isomerase. But it's a totally fascinating process, and only the first in what Weinstein hopes will be a series of 'citizen food science' kits."

DIY High-Fructose Corn Syrup by Artist Maya Weinstein

In the 20th Century, meaningful education was all about learning your ABCs. Today, it's centered on Alphas, Betas and C++.

Programming skills are becoming ever more important, quickly turning into the core competency for all kinds of 21st Century workers. That inescapable fact is leading individuals to seek out new ways of learning to code, startups and non-profits to find ways to help them and businesses to search for innovative approaches to finding the coders they so desperately need.

When daily deal site Living Social couldn't find the coding help it needed, for example, the company took matters into its own hands and successfully created its own qualified programmers. Through an experiment called Hungry Academy,  Living Social paid 24 people to learn computer programming within five months. All two dozen passed the class and became full-time developers at Living Social following their graduation. 

“We believe that intelligence and passion are far harder to hire for and much more important than a specific technical skill,” Chad Fowler, LivingSocial’s senior vice president of technology, told the Washington Post last year. “We have enough of the kind of DIY sort of mentality here and, maybe it’s a little bit of hubris, we can teach faster than the industry.”

Likely due to Living Social’s larger troubles, the company won’t be repeating the experiment. However the concept it nurtured - teaching untechnical people technical skills - is gaining in popularity in a wide variety of ways. Learn-to-code programs bent on teaching anyone, even children, programming skills are on the upswing, at non-profits, at startups and at companies that need to hire programmers.

See also:

• This Is What The Next Generation Of Programmers Looks Like
• How To Raise The Next Zuckerberg: 6 Coding Apps For Kids

Plenty Of Ways To Learn Programming

Mark Lassoff, founder of Learntoprogram.tv, believes it’s not the place you learn to code that counts. It’s the portfolio you can show potential employers.

“People think you have to go back to school to learn programming and other computer skills, but you don’t,” he said in a statement. “There’s also the myth that you have to be some kind of math or science genius to learn it. Not true. You just need to learn the process, and then practice it. You can build a portfolio by doing volunteer work for a church or charity.”

Ordinarily, newly minted developers would be less desirable than experienced ones for employers. But the current developer drought means there are far more jobs that require programming skills than people who have those skills.  So companies are more accepting of programming newbies.

Lots Of Coding Jobs Going Begging

(See also Don't Look Now, But We Might Be In A Developer Drought.)

The number of coding jobs is only expected to increase over time. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 913,000 computer programmer jobs in 2010. That number is expected to jump 30% from 2010 to 2020. Meanwhile, the average growth of all other U.S. jobs is predicted to be just 14%. 

“There aren’t enough people to fill these jobs because technology and the job market are moving much faster than education in high schools and colleges,” Lassoff said. 

How Coding Can Boost Everyone's Career

Developer and mentor Joe O’Brien believes that computer skills are essential even if you’ve already got a non-technical job. 

“We all interact with computers in such a way that they’re no longer this extra thing you do on the side,” O'Brien told ReadWrite. “Computing is a vital part of what everybody does nowadays.

"Not that we want everyone to go out and create Web programs and write the next Twitter, but I think having a base understanding of what happens behind the curtain can be huge,” he added.

O’Brien never graduated from college, but he did recently sell Edgecase, the software development company he founded and operated himself. He thinks that his programming skills made him a better CEO than he would have been without them. Today, he mentors aspiring programmers in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio. 

“Even if a CEO never codes for her company, just understanding what is happening is going to be huge for her from a risk standpoint, from an understanding standpoint,” he said. “CEOs need to have a lot of knowledge of a lot of different things and programming is a large part of that.”

Teaching Programming Is Big Business

CEOs who think like O’Brien might be the reason that learn-to-code startups have been able to fundraise millions in venture capital. Investors seem to realize that companies like Treehouse and Codecademy don’t just train the next generation of developers, but that the skill they teach are essential for managers, too. 

(See also There's A Boom In Teaching People How To Code.)

Whether to boost your career or just to keep pace with the rest of the world, learning to code has never been more important or more accessible. If you haven’t started yet, what’s stopping you?

Second image courtesy of Team Round of APPlause. Final image courtesy of Girls Who Code.

Joanna Rohrback uploaded the video you see above to YouTube back in December, but it received the social web's full viral attention this week. The clip, introducing a form of exercise called "Prancercise," shot up from just over 10,000 views at the beginning of the week to more than 2.7 million as of Friday evening

There's just one problem, however: Much of the attention has been negative, full of snark and mocking Rohrback's unique workout regimen.

Rohrback describes Prancercise as "a springy, rhythmic way of moving forward, similar to a horse's gait and is ideally induced by elation." She's also got a Facebook Page set up now and available book on Amazon Read more...

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Luis Briones, 25, blew through a red light in Albuquerque and crashed, resulting in his female passenger being ejected from the car. Briones was allegedly drunk. Oh, apparently he was also having sex with the woman at the time of the crash. She was naked. From KRQE:

According to the criminal complaint, Briones tried to drive away, leaving the woman behind.

A witness was able to grab his keys.

Police found Briones with one shoe and his shorts on inside out.

"Naked woman thrown from car after crash"