"Don't read the comments" -- common, often-correct advice when browsing the Internet. But comments are important, if you want to build community instead of just publishing stuff.

The Guardian looked at trends in the 70 million comments they've received. Not too surprisingly, articles posted by identifiable women get more abusive comments than those posted by men -- except in the fashion category. About 2% of the comments they get are blocked by moderators as way over the line; I'm surprised it's not rather higher, actually.

People who find themselves abused online are often told to ignore it – it’s only words; it isn’t real life. But in extreme cases, that distinction breaks down completely, such as when a person is doxed, or SWATed, when nude photos are posted of the person without consent, or when a stalker assumes the person’s identity on an online dating site and a string of all-too-real men appear at their door expecting sex. As one woman who had this experience said: “Virtual reality can become reality, and it ruins your life.”

But in addition to the psychological and professional harm online abuse and harassment can cause to individuals, there are social harms, too. Recent research by the Pew Centre found that not only had 40% of adults experienced harassment online but 73% had witnessed others being harassed. This must surely have a chilling effect, silencing people who might otherwise contribute to public debates – particularly women, LGBT people and people from racial or religious minorities, who see others like themselves being racially and sexually abused.

Is that the kind of culture we want to live in?

Is that the web we want?

They talk about their research methods.

When I was in college, some people thought it was a right fun prank to sign other people up for wildly-inappropriate catalogues and suchlike. These days they use the Internet for that. Any site that blithely accepts an email address without sending confirmation email to that address is contributing to the problem, big-time.

I know that already, but reading this article about a victim of the Ashley Madison breach -- spoiler alert: not an actual user -- reminded me how problematic this still is. Definitely worth five minutes of your time.

I want to ask you, Internet, to please stop taking all of this [supposed evidence] at face value. Please stop taking things like lists of names stolen from a company as a reason to abuse others — online or offline. When you see a story about someone doing something you think is either wrong or even just lame, it’s not a reason for you to abuse, stalk or attack someone you don’t know.

A friend whom I trust quite a bit not to be using their services is also on that list. So if you don't believe a random person on the Internet, there's that.

Two items seen in rapid succession today:

• Here's why you're not hiring the best and brightest: (Jeff Atwood) talks about making telecommuting work so that you really can hire the best employees, as opposed to the best employees willing to live in a particular location. I once applied for a telecommuting position at a company that seems to get it as far as that's concerned, and a lot of the stuff they do is reflected in this article.
• What do programmers care about? (20-minute video): Joel Spolsky (Stack Exchange, Fog Creek) talks to recruiters about how to recruit programmers. If you've read Joel On Software you already know a lot of what he has to say here, but I still found it interesting to watch.

Can you help? Somebody asked a question recently on Writers about guidelines and heuristics for when to use screen shots in technical documentation. The question isn't looking for opinions or what you, personally, do but, rather, formal guidelines along the lines of what GNOME does for its documentation. So far it's only attracting opinion answers. I, too, have opinions and practices that I follow, but I can't source them either and I'd like to see the question get a good answer.

Speaking of Writers, I wrote a little something about writing good API reference documentation (like Javadoc), based on advice I've given informally over and over again -- finally wrote some of it down in a public place. Feedback welcome.

I recently saw an article with interesting-seeming observations and analysis of Modern Orthodox Judaism. I'm not all that tuned into the MO community and can't evaluate its credibility from inside, but I found it an interesting read. If any of y'all would care to tell me where on the spectrum from "yup" to "WTF?!" this is from your perspective, I'd be interested.

Finally, a little something for those who use the text editor vim (which I gather is related to vi?):

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Those of you who enjoy the religion-related posts here might be interested in this new blog (see intro post) for questions and answers about the bible, particularly the Hebrew bible (Tanakh). There's a link there for question submissions, and there are a bunch of posts there so you can get a sense of what to expect.

And while I'm plugging sites, I'd be remiss in not mentioning Mi Yodeya for all your Jewish Q&A needs. And I'd say that even if I weren't a moderator there; I'm a moderator there in part because it was already an excellent site when I found it, so I stuck around and tried to help.

In the last two weeks we lost both merle_ and pedropadrao. I will miss them both. :-(

And there's no good transition from that to, well, miscellany, so this paragraph will have to serve.

I suppose, technically, if you're not sure if a TV show has jumped the shark, then it hasn't. But, that said, I doubt I'll be back for the next season of "Once Upon a Time", a show that got off to a good start in season one, carried it through part of season two, and then started going farther and farther afield of its original context. In addition to links to "the enchanted forest", the land of fairy tales, they mixed in an Arthurian knight (short-lived), Captain Hook, I think a couple other odd ones, and now, in the season finale, it's clear that Never-Never Land is going to be a major factor. If they were doing the work to tell a Gaiman-style story about all these realms being intertwined or some such I'd be on board for that, but it sure feels like they're just making things up as they go along now. Oh well.

Links:

Full moon silhouettes, a really gorgeous video of the full moon rising over the Mount Victoria Lookout in Wellington, NZ. (Link from Dani.)

Best court sanctions... ever! from osewalrus. As Ose says, best use of the term "Red Shirt" in a legal decision. And you thought court decisions had to be dull...

This is great (given that such idiots exist, which is not great). Bill Walsh was riding his bike and happened to be running a helmet-cam when a cab made an illegal U-turn across the bike lane, after being warned that it was illegal, and promptly got pulled over by an oncoming police officer. The video is short and cuts out before we get to see the expression on the cabbie's face, alas.

Feast of the ravens, a photo with an interesting story behind it. What do you expect to find when a large group of ravens congregates? Not this. From shewhomust.

siderea posted an excerpt from (and link to) an essay about libraries, mandatory internet use, and the very poor that is well worth a read. As more and more stuff moves to "online only", whom are we leaving out in the cold? The ones who can least cope, it seems.

I hadn't realized that 3D printing was advanced enough to make medical implants... a year and a half ago. Ok, this was an airpipe splint, but are plastic organs in our future?

Sad cat diary, a video in the general style of Henri (but not just one cat), from Talvin over at DW.

The talmud tells us that even if the eighth day after birth is Shabbat, we perform circumcision rather than waiting a day. There is then a discussion of implementation details (e.g. you still have to prepare certain things before Shabbat to limit the violations). On today's daf Abaye repeats several things about infants that he learned from his mother (who is credited but not named), including: If an infant cannot suck this is because his lips are cold, and the remedy is to hold a vessel of burning coals near his nostrils to heat him up. If an infant does not breathe he should be fanned with a fan and he will start. If an infant is too red, it means his blood isn't absorbed in him and it is not safe to perform the circumcision; if he is green then he is deficient in blood and we wait until he is not. (134a)

Apropos of nothing: have you ever wondered what Judaism has to say about surviving the zombie apocalypse? In other words, the season of Purim Torah is upon us at Mi Yodeya; take a look. (For more in this vein, click on the purim-torah tag at the bottom of the question.)

We did Thanksgiving dinner with my parents, sister, and niece, as usual. (My nephew is currently away at law school.) Someday my parents will decide that this is too much fuss and that's what they have children for, but apparently not yet. My niece brought her boyfriend, who I enjoyed talking with. I overheard my mother say to my father "that's the most I've heard Monica talk in ages" and, well, it's because there was more to talk about. Old family tropes only get you so far, and my mother and sister, at least, share basically no interests with me and Dani.

I've decided that Felix and Oscar aren't the right names for the cats; the initial behaviors that prompted them haven't continued. I'm currently leaning toward Orlando and Giovanni, which pass the random-friends-and-relatives test and the neighborhood test (would I be embarrassed calling an escapee?). A pair of perfectly-nice Italian names will suit, and if you happen to know that I'm a fan of Renaissance music, you might correctly detect a further inspiration for those names in particular. :-) (Orlando is the brown one, who's also the lovey guy who sleeps in my lap purring loudly.)

We had a couple of people over for board-gaming this weekend. History of the World plays differently with four players than with six. We also played San Juan (a "light" version of Puerto Rico), Automobile (only our second time playing), and Pandemic. I suspect we haven't really "gotten" Automobile yet; our scores were pretty close and nobody did anything really unusual. (Well, only one player took out loans, but other than that we seemed to be playing similar strategies.)

Some links:

HTTP Status Cats: the HTTP return codes illustrated. I've seen 408 (timed out) around, but many of these were new to me. Also, I didn't know about some of those status codes (402 I'm looking at you).

Are Twinkies really immortal? Snopes weighs in.

This recipe for schadenfreude pie looks delightfully yummy. Alas, I saw it the day after the annual baronial pie competition. Maybe next year... Hat-tip to siderea.

Remember Henri, the angst-filled French cat? He's back.



(Previous videos here and here.)

Some professions require a certain amount of ongoing education every year, usually in the form of several-hour seminars. At least for the legal field, it seems like the subjects do not have to be all that closely related to American law. I routinely see advertisements for these in the Jewish press covering topics in halacha or Jewish ethics. But even so, I was surprised to see that Law and the Multiverse was offering one on superheroes, comic books, and constitutional law. If I were a lawyer I would totally go to things like that. :-) (The blog is fun too.)

Language Log recently wrote about an unusual keep-off-the-grass sign: tiny grass is dreaming. That's a neat image.

shewhomust recently posted a picture of a neat woodland "sculpture".

Everybody's probably seen is Facebook making us lonely? from the Atlantic, but I wanted to stash a link somewhere anyway so I may as well share.

And finally, Mi Yodeya (formerly known as Jewish Life and Learning) recently launched as a full-blown Stack Exchange site after a year in beta. I've enjoyed participating there -- lots of good questions and answers and discussion, but in a useful format that isn't "just another forum where you have to wade through the junk to get to the good stuff". There's going to be an online launch party on Sunday. More info:

Thanksgiving food: it's not too late! Thanks to shalmestere for pointing out this Thanksgiving dinner flowchart.

A great rant on web-service protocols (that is, SOAP versus REST) from a former coworker: the S stands for simple.

Law and the Multiverse on Once Upon a Time: is Rumpelstiltskin's contract valid?