If girls realized the consequences of sex, nobody would be having sex. Trust me. Nobody.

—

Bristol Palin, who didn’t get to go to prom because she was taking care of her newborn.

While Ross is fomenting spit-up gate, I honestly couldn’t get past this quote. I realize things like “reason” and “faith in science” aren’t highly coveted values in the Palin family, but there are plenty of happy, healthy people the world over who are having happy, healthy sex without unwanted, out-of-wedlock children. It’s a natural, zesty enterprise.

The federal government today launched data.gov, a clearinghouse for data generated by the federal government; OMB director Peter Orszag has more details at the White House blog. Unfortunately, and somewhat ironically, the news coverage of this event seems to have been usurped by former Obstructionist in Chief Dick Cheney. Considering the potential impact data.gov may have on Americans’ every day lives, it’s unfortunate this story is getting a short shrift over sour grapes and fear mongering.

I haven’t had much time to dig into the details, but so far it looks excellent. The data is searchable, rather rich and in a variety of parsable formats, like CSV and XML. This is going to be a boon to media organizations, watchdog/good government groups and ordinary folk interested in how the sausage gets made.

Time will tell how useful and complete the data turns out to be but the fact that data.gov even exists is a landmark achievement. Can anyone seriously imagine the Bush administration, or even his predecessor, opening up government databases like this? Even allowing for the fact that we are living in a gilded age of technology (though, I would argue that data.gov isn’t doing anything that wouldn’t have been technically possible in, say, 2000), this kind of initiative required a political will that has been missing in modern times.

Now that the data is out there, it’s our job to do something with it.

Infinite Summer

Some of my favorite writers (Matthew Baldwin and Avery Edison amongst them) are reading Infinite Jest this summer. This is a swell idea, one I’ll happily try to participate in.

Explaining the popularity of Wired-style theses should keep sociologists busy for years to come

—Andrew Orlowski, who has declared Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory dead.

Pope encourages young to use internet

Well, now that the Pope’s behind it, I’m sure this internet thing will take right off

“Every year we lie to you and every year you come back for more,” Jimmy Kimmel told advertisers at the ABC upfront presentation. “You don’t need an upfront. You need therapy. We completely lie to you, and then you pass those lies onto your clients.” [via lostremote]

Frank Lloyd Wright, the lego edition

Perhaps you’ve encountered this situation. You find someone online, via tumblr or twitter or some such, and you form the sort of casual friendship that comes very easily these days, starring their tweets, hearting their tumbls, etc. You get to know them, in a way, and suddenly, it occurs to you, that they have to {read|listen to|experience} this {book|CD|thing} that totally changed your life. You find the thing on Amazon and get ready to ship it off and then you realize, of course, that you have nowhere to ship it to. Because you don’t know where they live and because you only know this person online you think it might be, well, creepy to ask.

Amazon could solve this problem though with a “ship to any email address” feature. Here’s how it would work:

• At checkout, you would pick a new address and one of the options would be to enter an email address
• The recipient would then get an email, from Amazon, that would say something to the effect of “Someone would like to send you a gift!” and would contain a link where the gift recipient could tell Amazon, but not the sender, their shipping address
• Once that happens, the gift gets shipped, the sender gets charged, all without anyone having to get weirded out

Amazon has something like this already with their wishlist, but maybe your new friend isn’t a total narcissist or never bothered to create a wishlist or used an old email address.

I realize this is a somewhat passive-aggressive, overly technical solution to what is, fundamentally, a social problem. And I can already hear Neven berating the idea for adding an unnecessary layer of communication when all you need to do is ask for a stupid address (“somethingk somethingk reinventing ways to talk to each other somethingk somethingk”). But it does solve a problem, fleeting though it may be, inherent in the disconnect between our virtual and analog lives.

UPDATE This idea is officially Mrgan-approved. “Inventing new ways to be nice and give gifts is awesome. Inventing new ways to lie and be passive-aggressive is, well, not.”

“An expanded study of bicycle behavior in Midtown Manhattan has found that ‘a large number of cyclists routinely disobey many traffic laws.'"

I hate bad drivers because their carelessness can seriously injure people but clueless cyclists aren’t much better.

Threadless gets in on the tweets as tees idea

Submit tweets that get voted on, winners get $500 or $140. Unlike twitshirt, not any tweet can be a tee.