Links for Thursday June 28th 2012

The Important Lessons Imparted By Subway Steps | Best Of MetaFilter
A life lesson for those of us that design and build things, be they physical or virtual.
polis: Elements of Urban Housing Design: A Walker’s Perspective
Food for thought when designing fictional environments.

Links for Wednesday June 27th 2012

The 5 Craziest Policies In Texas Republicans’ 2012 Platform | ThinkProgress
The oppose teaching critical thinking in schools, which is just mindblowing. Critical thinking is almost the only useful thing I learned in school! Still, as someone (I forget who) remarked on Twitter – they are, at least now being open about what they want, which is basically a load of stupid people who will do what they say.

Why we are wrong to demonize Jimmy Carr. | Chiller
A superb and savage deconstruction of UK tax law, and its avoidance by the rich.

Sky City: Chinese company proposes world’s tallest building
A new tallest building is not that interesting. What is interesting is that they're saying that can build it in 90 days.

The care and feeding of software engineers (or, why engineers are grumpy) | NCZOnline
I would absolutely kill to be certain that from 1:30 to 5:30pm I would not be interrupted by anyone, and could just get on with work. If I could implement just one recommendation from this (very resonant) article at my company, this would be it. Hack days, meeting free days, these would be lovely, but the really big one would be interruption free time.

Has L.A. changed since the 90s? – losangeles | Ask MetaFilter
A hundred-year history of LA. Makes the place sound interesting.

LeakedIn: Is your password safe?
Here's a good tool that will let you check if your password was among those exposed by linked.in earlier this week. FWIW, even if your password is not in the leaked lot, I would suggest changing it anyway, as linked.in have been recently proved unsafe.

6.46 million hashed LinkedIn passwords reportedly leaked online | The Verge
Pay attention, this one's very very important: if you use linked.in, then you need to change your password, *right now*. And they you need to change the password on any accounts you have on any other online sites that use the same password, because it's just been made public, paired with your email address.
The world’s worst password requirements list
Some of these are mind-blowing. Security is a compromise between usability and safety, whch is why you get password requirements like "must contain mixed case and a number" of things like that, but most of these decrease usability without increasing safety.
Limerence – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"An involuntary state of mind which seems to result from a romantic attraction to another person combined with an overwhelming, obsessive need to have one's feelings reciprocated"
cityofsound: Essays: An edible urbanism
The design of street food culture.

EightMedia/hammer.js · GitHub
JS library to handle multi-touch inputs on mobile devices. Oh look, you've all gone to sleep. Don't care this'll be be handy for work.