• Cosmic scale
  An animated gif showing a progesssion in size of various celestial bodies, starting with the moon, and ending with the largest known star. Awesome, in the most literal sense.
  (tags: science as)
• Magnus Handwriting Font
  You know how I said I was happy with the look of Black Ink? I lied. I’m happy for values of “tweaked off the shelf”. I’m working on my own completely custom design, and I will be using this font in the new look one.
  (tags: design)

• Black Ink
  My writing site has finally been given the wash and a brush up it’s needed for years, and for the first time in ages I’m happy with it. It’s only a modified off the shelf job, but I like how it looks.
  (tags: photos fiction)

• Wikileaks
  Wikileaks is under attack by a bank whose shady dealings they’ve published info on – unable to effectively censor their hosting across multiple countries, they’ve gone after their DNS. The site is reachable by IP, and linking will help stop the bastards.
  (tags: wiki journalism wikileaks freedom information)

• Free Diz – get Cat Le-Huy out of prison in Dubai
  A friend-of-friends is currently imprisoned in Dubai on utterly fabricated charges, and facing several years in jail, and his friends are raising money for a legal defence. Please, please, donate what you can.
  (tags: corruption false_charges help appeal dubai cunts)

• FreakAngels
  New weekly webcomic from Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield
  (tags: steampunk comic free)

• Perian
  I’ve been having trouble with Quicktime not playing some video encodings properly (specifically, audio free), and I’m hoping that this might fix it, because I’ve tried updating every codec I’ve got to no avail.
  (tags: freeware software plugins OSX quicktime)

• Movement (Schulze & Webb)
  S&W talk about movement as a metaphor for the web, and in the process, introduce a means of syndicating form-type actions via a modified RSS protocol they’re calling Snap. Potentially a huge change in the way people will interact with websites, here.
  (tags: interaction webdev design internet)
• What makes a great portrait?
  A number of big name photographers answer the question. I’ve only skimmed this right now, because I’m barely awake, but it looks interesing enough to come back to when I can get more then 2 neurons to fire at once.
  (tags: photography essay)

I read The Law West Of Ealing Broadway, a magistrate’s blog, and I’m sure I’ve told you about it before, but I thought this one was worth a mention on it’s own:

Here’s a post about the way criminal justice cases are reported in this country. In it he links to a Sky news story about the sentence received by a man who has been convicted of murdering two young boys. The man received a 20 year minimum sentence. The “news” story is an interview with the parents, giving them lots of room to complain that it’s not enough, with soundbites about how the judge is supposed to serve the cause of justice, and has not done so. No counterbalancing voice is provided (and given that this is a Murdoch organ, one might suspect that one was not even sought).

As Bystander (the magistrate’s nom-de-blog) points out, that is exactly what the judge has done. He has weighed the man’s crime against the spectrum of possible offences, and come up with an appropriate punishment. That’s what justice is.

At what point did we acquire the idea that the victims should be allowed to suggest what justice is? When did we forget that however much our hearts might go out to them, they remain the worst possible arbiters of justice?

So my question is this: does anyone reading this think that a 20 year minimum sentence for murdering two children is unreasonably short? What sentence would you levy in the judge’s place? Why? (“Death” is, of course, out of the question. Please confine your answers to what the legal system allows.)