Take your armies, take 'em from my door, your battle's built on doom

Friday links

1. Mapping the Nation is neat

2. "I don't want to be right"

3. Death by Caffeine

4. Daft Punk soundboard

So that weird rapper Lil B hates Kevin Durant (?)

Apparently this has been going on for years??

not that I'm on fire, but what has the Capn been up to lately?

All the people gave and the poor got paid

Top Ten Current CFB Coaches Likeability Ranking

1. Steve Spurrier
2. Tommy Tuberville
3. Bill Snyder
4. Gus Malzahn
5. Mike Leach
6. Dana Holgorsen
7. David Cutcliffe
8. Bronco Mendenhall
9. Mike Gundy
10. Les Miles

Tuesday links

1. You're getting old

2. The best way to win an argument

3. E. coli long-term evolution experiment

4. How to make a rope hammock

an old favorite

Cars

TThere’s an open secret in America: If you want to kill someone, do it with a car. As long as you’re sober, chances are you’ll never be charged with any crime, much less manslaughter. Over the past hundred years, as automobiles have been woven into the fabric of our daily lives, our legal system has undermined public safety, and we’ve been collectively trained to think of these deaths as unavoidable “accidents” or acts of God. Today, despite the efforts of major public-health agencies and grassroots safety campaigns, few are aware that car crashes are the number one cause of death for Americans under 35. But it wasn’t always this way.

Murder Machines

Must be broken

Why must I feel like that? Why must I chase the cat?

Approximate World Cup Rooting Rankings

Subject to drastic and frequent change:

USA
England
Costa Rica
Ghana
Switzerland
Cameroon
Honduras
Belgium
Australia
 Japan
Germany
Algeria
Croatia
France
South Korea
Netherlands
Portugal
Greece
Nigeria
Chile
Brazil
Uruguay
Ecuador
Argentina
Spain
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Ivory Coast
Columbia
Italy
Mexico
Iran
Russia

Some stuff

1. Here is a weird story about Chris Anderson and cat fishing and other things.

2. How to use Tinder

3. As Court Fees Rise, The Poor Are Paying The Price

4. Johnny Cash Has Been Everywhere

5. Ayn Rand's Harry Potter

Tank Man

Perhaps even more importantly, the internet itself breeds an ethos of transparency and healthy skepticism of power. The first generation that can’t remember a time before the internet is a generation that craves information, loathes censorship, and revels in exposing abuses of power. We seem to have reached a tipping point, at least in the developed world, where technology has surpassed and by all appearances will continue to outpace government efforts to contain information. It’s hard to envision a time when we won’t have an Anonymous, a Snowden, or a Manning who have the technical know-how and the ideology to bring abuse to light. And the internet generation generally sees that as something to celebrate.

The beautiful thing about all of this is that today, anyone can be Tank Man, at least metaphorically.

Be your own Tank Man | Dan Luvisi Art

Link dump!

1. Wet dog

2. Interesting article series on the "Traditional City"

3. Time traveling rules

4. Now That's What I Call Songs Sung To The Tune Of "Two Princes" By The Spin Doctors 5

5. The '90s Alt-Rock Vocal Hook Supercut

and if you want beef then bring the ruckus

Execution

Frantz Schmidt hanged his first thief when he was 19, on a June day in 1573. Either his father or another master executioner pronounced the hanging “executed adroitly,” concluding Frantz’s apprenticeship and certifying him as a master in his own right. Over the next four decades, Frantz would hang, behead, or otherwise kill 394 people, and flog, maim, and torture confessions out of hundreds more. He began as a traveling freelancer around Bavaria, and then, from 1578 until his retirement in 1618, served as the full-time executioner of the jewel of the Holy Roman Empire, the populous, prosperous, and cosmopolitan city of Nuremberg. In elaborate sentencing rituals behind closed doors, the patrician judge and jurors of Nuremberg’s “blood court” pronounced who should die and by what means. Before crowds of hundreds, it was Frantz and his assistants who carried out the punishments, embodying the legal authority of empire. For Frantz, there was no special skill in hanging someone: just tie the noose and push. Beheading, by contrast, required an exact position of the feet, eagle eyes and a steady hand, a fluid swing of the arm. One blow must neatly and completely sever the head, lest the crowd erupt in anger: in a few instances, spectators had responded to a miscarried execution by stoning the executioner himself to death. Frantz, then, took pride in his near-flawless record. In almost 200 beheadings, he required a second stroke only four times.

More inexplicable than the persistence of capital punishment is the rest of America’s carceral iceberg. In the 1970s, the United States not only revived the death penalty but also embarked upon a penal experiment without world-historical precedent in a democracy. This complicated and interlocking array of state and federal laws, programs, and construction projects has vastly increased the number of prisons, the number of people sent there, and the number of years they stay. By 2008, for the first time in history, one in a hundred American adults was either in prison or jail. The numbers have since declined slightly, but remain very high in both historical and international perspective. With 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States holds 25 percent of its prisoners, often in brutal and sanity-threatening conditions that most Americans would not hesitate to label torture if they encountered them somewhere else.

Progress and Execution

I'll be trapped and here I'll have to stay

College-related links

1. A is for Adjunct Part 1 and Part 2

2. Toss out abusive college administrators

3.Why I Teach Plato to Plumbers

Crocodile Chop