An interesting study from the Department of Defense (PDF). About 9,500 servicemembers have been “separated” from the U.S. military (read “discharged,” although that’s one of English’s Official Nastiest Words) in the past 10 years for being gay or lesbian. The D.O.D. commissioned this study to see how much their fear of the gay was costing them to recruit new servicefolks. For the Army, Navy and Air Force, the cost turned out to be about $95 million, over the past decade. (The total for the Marines couldn’t be counted.) Eh, not so much $$. Discriminate away!

OK, this Nick Denton blog may actually make it into my bookmarks. (Sorry, AMC … I love u but I don’t trust u.)

LivePlasma is a super-shiny recommendation engine. I tend to distrust these things, but then I entered “Rufus Wainwright,” and a cloud of fellow musical artists I’ve come to adore popped in and orbited his name. And the interface is Google-good (although not Google-fast).

Shorter Jay Rosen: NYT.com should have open archives. Shorter Jeff Jarvis: The NYT should bring bloggers in for bagels.

Agreed on both counts. I want bagels.

Every hour of every day for a year, this man filmed himself punching a time card. (AskMe.)

Aeons ago, Clive Thompson wrote up this humdinger about the economies of virtual worlds — MMORPGs and the like. Because people have begun assigning real-world monetary value to in-game items, the article explained, it’s possible to study these games as if they were real economies.

So we can, for example, calculate the Gross National Product of Everquest, as Thompson’s economist Edward Castronova decides to do — it’s $2,266 U.S. per capita. (“It was the 77th-richest country in the world,” Thompson writes. “And it didn’t even exist.”)

And of course, we can actually profit from our in-game activities, Thompson reports, enough to pull in a six-figure salary or even power a whole company, with 100 full-time staff members.

The 6,200-word article is somehow chock full of fascinating little revelations. My favorite moment is when Thompson points out that Everquest began as a perfect meritocracy, “the world’s first truly egalitarian polity,” making it the economist’s ideal social laboratory. That realization leads to this:

Read more…

Via MetaFilter, check out the cornucopia of Flashtasticness that is The Greatest Story Never Told digital storytelling contest. Including such greats as Craziest and Help.

Is The New York Times celebrating the Presidents Day weekend with touchy-feely stories about Presidents and their buddies?

Wondering where I’ve been for the past two weeks? (Feel free to not answer that.) I haven’t abandoned Snarkmarket; just the opposite, in fact — I’ve been hard at work, in consultation with Robin, on a new design for the site.

We’ve tried to make a page that looks distinct, but respects its roots. We’ve been brainstorming ways to bring more attention to the ever-excellent discussion, so you’ll see some experiments in that direction in the new design. We wanted to separate some of our longer, more thoughtful discursions from our quicker pass-alongs, so we’ve given those shorter items their own look.

And there isn’t enough paisley on the Web.

But before we make the design official, we want to take some time with it, use it for a while and see what we like and don’t like, and most of all, solicit your feedback on what works and what needs work in the new layout.

We have two very similar versions of the page available for testing. When you first see the page, it will look totally janky. Click on one of the two links at the bottom of the black sidebar at right — either “change to ornate layout” or “change to simple layout” — and it will pull in one of two stylesheets.

We would love it if people would try out each one for a few days and give us their thoughts. If you bookmark the redesigned page, it should store a cookie remembering which stylesheet you viewed last time, so you don’t always have to pick one.

With your help, we’ll solidify a final layout over the next couple weeks, change over the individual pages, and take over the world continue to dish out those actually-not-that-snarky ditherings we’ve been dishing for a year and change.

Thanks, sports fans.

A more rational mind than mine would begin fearing the power of Google.