Call it Six Degrees of Separation of the Seven Deadly Sins. Fark linked to The Atlantic which linked to Neatorama which linked to MetaFilter (yay!) which linked to Las Vegas Sun article. Kansas State University geographers embarked “a precision party trick — rigorous mapping of ridiculous data,” by creating maps of the frequency of the seven deadly sins across America, per-county. Many of the techniques are debatable, which is perhaps where the “rigorous mapping of ridiculous data” comes from: envy is graphed based on burglary and theft statistics, for example, and envy is based on a ratio comparing median income to people living below the poverty line. Gluttony is based on the number of fast-food restaurants per capita, which renders just a few bright red spots in the nation. And pride is seemingly just the average of all the others, which hardly makes any sense.

Here’s the full graphics, which can be viewed much larger full-screen. Despite the “rigorous mapping of ridiculous data,” I can’t help but notice trends. Greed seems most prevalant in areas right on the water. Lust seems much more common in the “Bible belt,” but their neighbors just to the north are at the extreme opposite end of the scale. The South is high on wrath, while the North is abnormally low.

What does this data actually tell us? Next to nothing, I’d wager. And yet I can’t help but find it intriguing.

Newsweek has an interesting piece this week, entitled Walking the Beat, about Facebook’s 150 employees ranging from “porn cops” who review uploaded images to ensure they keep with the site’s rules, to site security personnel (who proactively probe for site vulnerabilities), to liaisons with the police, who handle 10-20 requests by police departments a day and, more intriguing, claim to end up being involved in almost “half the crimes that attract national media attention.” Their “undercover” division mingles in online blackhat and spammer communities to keep the site’s defenses up.

An interesting takeaway from the article: 150 of the company’s 850 employees are involved in policing site content, meaning that the division accounts for nearly 20% of Facebook employees. Another interesting aspect for me is the bit about user reactions: their proactive policing has led to many protest groups, but they’re “not too worried: users may join a protest group, but the fact that they haven’t quit the site altogether shows how sticky Facebook can be.”

Even though some would argue that I enjoy complaining, I find that I’m often reluctant to give bad reviews to companies.

But my review of Easynews? In a word, horrendous. I think I signed up for their $9/month plan in January, or maybe sooner. They were doing upgrades or something at the time, so I was only mildly annoyed that their site was practically useless and had few postings.

I meant to cancel my account, but couldn’t find any easy way so I forgot all about it. I just got my latest credit card statement and remembered, and it seems that they’re still working to get back to fully-operational status.

For any other members looking, it’s https://www.easynews.com/cancel/ and you can choose to cancel immediately or at the end of your billing period. Done.

The best of the Internet today, according to me:

• OpenBSD 4.5 comes out May 1st, but is available on their site now. Check out the changelog.
• For whatever reason, they don’t provide a torrent. (Likely because, unlike Ubuntu, it’s rarely distributed as one ISO.) I’d assume the mirrors are going to be crushed soon. I found this Pirate Bay torrent, a good reminder that not everything there is illegal. I’m downloading it now, but it’s quite lonely.
• Here’s a decent OpenBSD install guide, thought it’s not 4.5-specific. Although far from impossible to install, OpenBSD was not designed with ease of install in mind. (OpenBSD 4.5’s official install guide is available, too, of course.)
• I’ve posted about it before, but pfSense is meant to be a spiffy FreeBSD-based firewall and router platform with a good web GUI, for those of you who find OpenBSD really tough to install, or who have a pf.conf with a lengthy QoS section that doesn’t actually work. It’s got a pretty impressive list of features, too.
• For a complete change of pace, Popular Mechanics has a new post, the Top 50 Important Tools. So pointless and yet so interesting. I’ve got to say, though, that I love my Leatherman, which should really be #51, if not higher.
• Everyone is a little bit baffled, but Xapbr posts a Thank You for MySQL 5.4 Community. I think the baffling is due to several things: (1) There wasn’t much talk about MySQL 5.4 as a community release, (2) No one’s entirely sure where MySQL 5.2 and 5.3 went, and (3) Xapbr’s post makes reference to how we’re more fortunate than we realize for there being a community release for MySQL 5.4, which a paranoid person such as me takes to mean, “I can’t say it, but Sun/MySQL Corp. almost didn’t release a GPL version of 5.4.” Here’s a summary of what’s new. Based on the legalese disclaimer, I think it’s legal for me to link to it. A very incomplete summary: better performance on multi-core machines, and a Query Optimizer that’s worth a hoot when doing sub-selects. (“SELECT * FROM t1 WHERE id IN (SELECT id FROM t2)” would never, ever use an index, for example, and would often behave even worse than you’d expect.)