Linked List: November 18, 2010

Thursday, 18 November 2010

Are TSA Airport Screeners Allowed to Wear Radiation Badges? ★

Ira Flatow, a month ago:

This weekend, when traveling through the airport at Buffalo, NY I happened upon one of those new whole body x-ray scanners. Refusing to be screened that way, I chose for a full body pat-down. Upon gathering up my stuff, I asked one of the screeners if she knew how much radiation she was exposed to each day. She said she did not know and wanted to wear one of the badges that her friend wears at a local hospital, but was told “no,” that would not be permitted. She was upset with that decision.

Why do dentists, doctors, med techs, etc. who work in other x-ray environments gladly wear these exposure detectors on their clothing but TSA employees do not or cannot?

This is just hearsay, of course, but it’s a good question for TSA. Maybe someone should ask Blogger Bob: Are TSA screeners permitted to wear radiation exposure badges?

TJ Maxx Selling 16 GB Wi-Fi iPad for Just $399 ★

I don’t understand how this is possible — that’s $100 less than every other retailer. But my friend Paul Kafasis confirms that he saw them at this price from his local TJ Maxx.

Apple Seeds Developers With iOS 4.2.1 GM Build ★

The good news is, the GM seeding process worked: major bugs were found. The bad news, of course, is that the public is still waiting. Update: These aren’t really “GM” releases — they should be labeled “Final Candidate”.

Woz Interview at Engadget ★

Nilay Patel:

Some comments attributed to Steve Wozniak caused quite a kerfuffle this morning — according to Dutch paper De Telegraaf, Woz said that “Android phones have more features,” which would help Google’s OS become the dominant smartphone platform. Obviously, a statement like that from Apple’s co-founder rocketed around the web, and it’s set off yet another round of furious Android-vs-iOS debate. There’s just one problem, though: Woz never said anything like that. Turns out Woz is an Engadget commenter just like you, and when we saw that he’d left a clarification on the post, we called him up for a quick chat to sort everything out.

He’s in the comment thread on the article, too — search for “stevewoz”.

‘20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web’ ★

Web-based e-book from the Google Chrome team. Content-wise, it strikes me as a nearly perfect layman’s explanation of what web browsers are and how the web works. It’s really good.

But it’s also fascinating technically. In lesser browsers, each “page” turn is a full reload of the web page. Slow. In modern desktop browsers, though, the page turns happen via AJAX, but the URL in the location field changes too. In Firefox 3, you get AJAXy-looking URLs like “http://www.20thingsilearned.com/#/foreword/3” — a nicer experience, but still nothing I haven’t seen before. But in leading browsers like Safari, Google Chrome, and Firefox 4, you get AJAX page-turning and nice clean URLs like “http://www.20thingsilearned.com/foreword/3”. I did not know that was possible.

Here’s the JavaScript they’re using for this, and here’s some documentation on the new HTML5 history.pushState() and history.replaceState() methods that make this jiggery-pokery possible. Imagine if every team at Google built things with the same design quality and attention to detail as the Chrome team. (Via Michael Heilemann.)

Safari 5.0.3 ★

Looks like they’ve made some nice tweaks to the smart completion in the location field.

Android Game Development Sounds Like Fun ★

The Angry Birds team, on Android compatibility problems:

We are aware that a number of our fans have had trouble running the game on their devices. For example, some older and lower performance Android devices are experiencing severe performance issues.

We are preparing a new solution for the next update, but for the time being, the Android devices listed below are not officially supported by Angry Birds:

And they list about 20 Android models, including some brand-new ones like the T-Mobile G2. Don’t miss the comment thread on this one.

‘Cowboys and Aliens’ Trailer ★

I’ve got high hopes for this.

Chance of Dying From Airport Backscatter Radiation About the Same as Chance of Getting Killed by Terrorists ★

MSNBC:

Peter Rez, a physics professor at Arizona State University in Tempe, did his own calculations and found the exposure to be about one-fiftieth to one-hundredth the amount of a standard chest X-ray. He calculated the risk of getting cancer from a single scan at about 1 in 30 million, “which puts it somewhat less than being killed by being struck by lightning in any one year,” he told me.

While the risk of getting a fatal cancer from the screening is minuscule, it’s about equal to the probability that an airplane will get blown up by a terrorist, he added. “So my view is there is not a case to be made for deploying them to prevent such a low probability event.”

(Via Randal Schwartz.)

Basic Maths 1.1 ★

Nice update to Khoi Vinh and Allan Cole’s $45 grid-based theme for WordPress — now including mobile-optimized layouts.

The Staggering Size of iOS’s Game Collection ★

Richard Gaywood, writing for TUAW, on the size of the App Store’s game catalog.

Rage HD ★

Imagine going back in time just four years ago and showing this to someone, explaining that it’s running on your cell phone. Unbelievable.