parker higgins

Many obituary headlines follow a standard formula: “Firstname Lastname, Who You Know From That One Thing, Dies at Age.” It’s a tendency I’ve counted on before when extracting names from obituaries for FOIA The Dead, but tonight it also got me thinking about the “who phrase”: the relative clause that condenses a lifetime of context into a handful of words.

The first debate between Clinton and Trump featured the word “cyber” 11 times. With any luck, the next one will have even more. Here they all are:

In an effort to explain trigger warnings and safe spaces to people who clearly don’t understand them—like the University of Chicago’s dean of students—a few folks have compared them to the movie ratings and trailer cards that list potentially offensive material. It’s a useful analogy, but not likely to be much comfort for people concerned about trigger warnings.

I’m trying to take more pictures with my mirrorless camera, especially when I travel or walk around the city. I’ve always been a big fan of Unsplash, which curates high-res user-submitted photography and releases “packs” of images completely free to the public domain. So for now, I’ll be releasing some of my favorite shots to the public domain and hosting them there.

AOL’s “carpet-bombing” free disk campaign in the 90s and 2000s worked incredibly well. But the woman responsible for it, Jan Brandt, wouldn’t let anyone acknowledge that, for fear of encouraging copycats. And while she didn’t speak much to the press at the time, she let loose in an interview with the Internet History Podcast in 2014. (Side note: I’ve been listening non-stop to episodes of this show, and they’re amazing.)

I’ve been attending (and livetweeting) the Oracle v. Google jury trial for the last two weeks, and have had a lot of conversations and made a lot of jokes about it. One joke that went surprisingly well was an image I made and tweeted without context:

I spent Friday and Saturday at Shift CTRL, a great academic conference in Stanford. There was a little more free time to explore the campus than on previous times I’ve been down there, because I had a bike and was by myself. Fortunately, I got tips to visit the cactus garden and the Stone River sculpture, both of which I recommend very highly as quiet, beautiful, contemplative spaces. Some pictures below.

I wrote about some of the things I learned from @choochoobot’s development (and popularity) for Source for its annual #botweek. It’s a little strange writing about programming projects, because I still feel very inexperienced, but I think there are some easy lessons to pull out here.

To my tremendous honor, Sarah’s Motherboard article about instilling ethics in Twitter bots quotes me in a few places. In particular, it recounts a story I hadn’t told publicly about a bot I didn’t make.

It’s a goofy idea: After a few happy-hour drinks on Thursday, I decided to write a little Python script to make emoji “trains” of random length, combining the steam engine with the two styles of rail cars. Once I got that running, I remembered reading about Emma Winston’s “Tiny Gallery” bot, which tweets little scenes of generative emoji “art galleries.”