“Heartwarming” is rarely in the same sentence as “Steve Jobs,” but I think this qualifies:

A friend of mine was dying of liver disease and I was going to San Francisco to hopefully see and communicate with her while it was still possible. She was a friend from my Adobe days and was very much into technology. I thought it would be a treat for her to see an iPad. And I had one. But until the product was officially released I could not show it to anyone without permission from Apple management.

There was no way I was going to take the iPad with me unless Steve personally approved it.

One of the hardest arguments to get across in the surveillance debate is the issue of harm from too much extraneous data. The solution to finding a needle in a haystack is not to add more hay. This article came through this morning as NPR reported that Bloomberg is calling for more surveillance cameras in NYC—which might work for catching non-suicide bombers, but does nothing preventive, and nothing reactionary for suicide bombers or larger groups of attackers.

Arguably, the best reason not to radically expand government surveillance is Boston’s example that crowdsourcing individual video and photos works better and faster.

Anti-terror task force was warned of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s long trip to Russia

The warning was delivered to a single U.S. Customs and Border Protection official assigned to Boston’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, a cell of specialists from federal and local law enforcement agencies. The task force was part of a network of multi-agency organizations set up across the country after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to make sure that clues and tips were shared.

But officials said there is no indication that the unidentified customs officer provided the information to any other members of the task force, including FBI agents who had previously interviewed the militant.

It seem to me that an evidence-based and history-based approach to fiscal and economic policy should lead to Keynesianism, probably on a scale that’s never been attempted. How am I wrong?

Reinhart & Rogoff call backsies

Controversial economists Carmen Reinhart and Vincent Rogoff have a response to their critics in today’s New York Times that ought to persuade nobody. The crucial move in this op-ed, as in other defenses of their “Growth in a Time of Debt” piece, is to obscure what it was that was allegedly interesting and allegedly important about the paper.

Drowning is the cause of a quarter of a million child fatalities every year. Mark Whitaker reports from Bangladesh and Vietnam.

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/docarchive/docarchive_20130212-0905a.mp3 (11 MB MP3 download)

Well, now we know what Brian Greenberg will do if he ever quits his day job. An entire RPG written in Excel:

While the game isn’t a beauty to look at—the hero is represented by a smiley face and all enemies are all bracket-parenthesis pairs—it’s fairly complex for, well, a spreadsheet. Attacks include a range of damage-inducing and healing spells that players buy and use with “blood,” which regenerates with each turn. Players also find and can equip a range of weapons, including rocks, slingshots, bowling balls, rifles, ninja stars, and brass knuckles.

Not normally a guy who notices cute kids, but I thought this was adorable. (Also, any kid who carries around his own body weight in books, I’d probably get along with.)

The good news:

President Obama’s budget proposal will include $235 million in funding for new mental health programs, focused initiatives to help schools detect early warning signs and train thousands of new mental health professionals.

The not-so-good news:

Obama touched briefly on the importance of expanding mental health services in a Monday night speech on gun violence.

I already divide the world into people who get it and people who are clueless. There’s an additional very small category of people who are scared of me, and it doesn’t help that my diagnosis of bipolar II requires all sorts of footnotes to explain that it’s not the scary bipolar I variety. (“Oh sure, I have tuberculosis, but it’s not the infectious type.”)

Would be nice if public awareness could be raised without scaring the hell out of them first.

Here, Internet, have an accordion. Resize your browser window to play it. (Hat tip: Paul Guinnessy.)

From Marco Tabini’s article on Siri recognition: