Cake in a mug is the new omelette in a bag.

These simulated favelas created by Spanish artist Dionisio Gonzalez are magnificent. The simulations echo the ad hoc architecture of the shantytowns of Sao Paulo. As well as the pure imaginative chaos they evoke, I like that they come across as thoughtful without seeming either to exploit or glorify the real favelas.

(Metafilterrific.)

After the ABC News site auto-reloaded the page three times while I was trying to watch an 18-minute segment from This Week, I went hunting for a way to make Firefox prevent this. Fortunately, it’s wonderfully easy. Go to about:config, bypass the warning message, and look for “accessibility:blockautorefresh.” By default, this is set to false. Set it to true, and Firefox will prompt you for approval whenever a site tries to refresh itself.

If you’re wondering why so many sites auto-refresh these days, it’s basically a cheap and easy way to inflate our pageview counts. What we tell you, of course, is that we want to make sure that if you keep the site open in a tab while you click away, we want to make sure you see the freshest content when you click back. I strongly suspect if that were really our primary motive, we’d find a way to update our pages with AJAX, thereby preventing a severely annoying disruption of the site experience.

Obama shouted it out early in his speech. (Love this.) A splendid time to revisit the original:

Oh, and why the heck not taste it again for the first time:

On the occasion of Snarkmarket’s fifth year

On November 3, 2003, Robin posted Snarkmarket’s first post. Two-thousand, two-hundred and seven posts later (excluding the 103 unpublished drafts), here we are.

We intend to mark the occasion by finally migrating this blog from a dusty old Movable Type installation to a sleek new WordPress install, so pardon our dust over the next couple of weeks as we make that transition. And since it’s always wise to do a CMS transition and redesign at the same time (ha), we’d welcome your feedback on our imminent new look as well.

But most importantly, we want to extend a warm welcome and happiest of birthday wishes to a third Snarkmaster, for whom this is less a promotion than merely an official acknowledgment of his contributions: Mr. Timothy Carmody.

Lightly-edited sentimental ruminations posted over Google Chat (concerning Snarkmarket, blogging, time, destiny and all that) can be found in the extended entry.

Thank you again for reading, and most of all, for sharing your thoughts. To the next five years, and beyond.

Read more…

We all know I’m a giant fan of Michael Pollan, and his recent NYT Magazine piece is no exception, containing a bevy of ideas for how the next President can transform U.S. food policy. But it seems to me his locavore-cheerleading and attacks on factory-farm monoculture are in direct conflict with the claims Paul Collier makes in this month’s Foreign Affairs.

Two parts of Collier’s thesis – that we should promote factory farms in developing countries and work to overcome Third-World opposition to GM foods – seem to run counter to Pollan’s ideas. (They agree on a third argument – that US farm subsidies are wack.) Re-reading Pollan’s article after reading Collier’s, I’m struck by how quickly Pollan glosses over the effects of his policy recommendations in the developing world. (A characteristic line: “To grow sufficient amounts of food using sunlight will require more people growing food

I laughed, I cried, I read the whole thing.

A propos of nothing, I’m going to point you to the best song we performed in high school choir, Randall Thompson’s “The Last Words of David,” as interpreted by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Man, that’s some great stuff.

Slate redesigns. Again. For the last year or so, I’ve debated doing a follow-up post on my snark-out of their 2006 redesign, just to verify that I never got over my initial awful reaction to the site. I’ve got some problems with the new design, but they’re minor compared to my feelings on the former look.

I have this funny feeling that the separation between the “Today in Slate” and “Slate Blogs” tabs isn’t going to last …

Marc Ambinder’s right, this piece on the Obama campaign’s organization in Ohio is fascinating.