Ronnie Polidoro, writing for NBC News:

Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed that one of the existing Mac lines will be manufactured exclusively in the United States next year.

Great news. Sounds like the product might be the iMac.

Dante D’Orazio:

Twitter has confirmed on its support pages that Instagram has disabled integration with Twitter cards, the relatively new design feature that displays media content directly in the timeline.

Surprise, surprise.

Nilay Patel discusses what exactly free speech covers.

The First Amendment is one of our country’s most cherished institutions — and one of its most profoundly misunderstood. The confusion comes from those first five words: “Congress shall make no law.” Congress isn’t allowed to abridge your freedom of speech. That means the First Amendment only applies to the government, not private parties

In short, corporations can censor you. For instance, if I worked for a Republican think-tank in Oklahoma and my boss heard me tell everyone that Gov. Mary Fallin is an incompetent shill who lacks leadership¹, that boss could fire me.

Erica Ogg interviews iOS developer Loren Brichter:

At 28, he’s already left quite a stamp on mobile interfaces: he’s the guy who invented that neat trick where you “pull” down on an iPhone screen to refresh the page of an app. Many of the most popular iOS apps use it now, including Facebook and Apple’s own Mail app. Same with his fast-scrolling technique for apps. Oh, and he sold Tweetie, which the Verge dubbed “the best Twitter app ever,” to Twitter itself, at the age of 25.

Brichter’s new game, Letterpress, is now my favorite time-sink.

Dr. Drang:

Like everyone else in the known universe, I installed the new Fantastical for iOS on my iPhone a couple of days ago. This morning I deleted it.

Like Dr. Drang, I also tried Fantastical for iPhone and ultimately reverted to the built-in app. It’s gorgeous and well-designed. However, the shortcomings were too much to overcome.

Below are this site’s statistics following the eleventh month of regular publication. Past stats can be found for January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, and October.

Most Visited Posts

• The Oklahoman Is Full Of Shit
• Bedlam 2012
• Robert Frost On Voting
• Nike+ FuelBand Review
• Blogging With Second Crack

Most Visited Linked Posts

• The Stupid Hour
• The Quiet Ones
• Pruning
• 2012 Presidential Election Cartogram
• Shame Projection

Visitors

• 1,461 page views (24,137 for 2012)
• 907 unique visitors (14,259 for 2012)
• 70% visits were from U.S., including all 50 States + D.C.
• Top international traffic included Germany (7%), United Kingdom (6%), and Canada (5%).

Platforms

• Windows (47%, up from 46%)
• Macintosh (45%, down from 46%)
• Linux (8%, unchanged)

Browsers

• Chrome (43%, up from 38%)
• Firefox (23%, unchanged)
• Safari and WebKit (22%, down from 26%)
• Internet Explorer (6%, down from 8%)
• Mobile Safari (4%, up from 3%)
• Other (2%)

Once again, I appreciate everyone who visited the site and offered feedback via Facebook, Twitter, and email.

If you have any story ideas, suggestions, or comments, do get in touch or feel free to follow me.

Gary Marcus, writing for The New Yorker, on a future where autonomous systems - such as Google’s driverless cars - are the norm:

That moment will be significant not just because it will signal the end of one more human niche, but because it will signal the beginning of another: the era in which it will no longer be optional for machines to have ethical systems.

An interesting article with a premise that I hadn’t considered. Technology moves us all forward, but in the process it raises difficult questions.

Daniel Jalkut, spurred by a post from Marco Arment, describes the mentality behind the many justifications of media piracy:

A few years ago my wife opened my eyes to the phenomenon of shame projection. In short: assigning blame for your own shortcomings to external circumstances.

Jalkut uses the example of a driver, at fault, who nearly hits you - and then subsequently lashes out and blames you.

Brian Powell, Media Matters:

In a November 28 editorial headlined “Mixing science, politics can result in bad policy,” The Oklahoman put scare quotes around the word “science” when discussing global warming and argued that, because the science of climate change isn’t “settled,” it may as well be ignored by policymakers

The National Research Council describes climate change and the associated uncertainties in the following:

In practical terms, however, scientific uncertainties are not all the same. Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small. Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities.

Okay, fine. If you still wish to completely dismiss the entirety of climate science, ask yourself which is more likely: 1.) A global group of scientists - those comprising a wide array of ethnicities, cultures, and religions - have successfully conspired to perpetuate a hoax on the world for some untold payoff in exchange for their divorce of scientific reasoning and ethics, or 2.) a single billionaire oil and gas tycoon, Philip Anschutz, is using his newspaper as a tool to advance ideas beneficial to his personal finances?

You decide. But I’ll leave you with this from Powell:

The Oklahoman published its editorial just one week after the Washington Examiner (also owned by Anschutz) published an op-ed arguing that cutting carbon emissions is futile, raising ethical questions about the papers’ tendencies to oppose any policies that would harm their owner’s pocketbook.

As for The Oklahoman, what an embarrassment it is for a state that hosts the National Weather Center¹ and the new South Central Climate Science Center to have such a sham of a newspaper serve as its largest voice.

As the holiday season arrives, Chaunce Dolan has a very cool decoration project:

With winter upon us, we thought it would be fun to share a fun project of ours with you: snowflake designs with a Star Wars twist.