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Nicholas Rubin, a 16-year-old programmer from Seattle, has created a browser add-on that makes it incredibly easy to see the influence of money in US politics. Rubin calls the add-on Greenhouse, and it does something so brilliantly simple that once you use it you'll wonder why news sites didn't think of this themselves.

Greenhouse pulls in campaign contribution data for every Senator and Representative, including the total amount of money received and a breakdown by industry and size of donation. It then combines this with a parser that finds the names of Senators and Representatives in the current page and highlights them. Hover your mouse over the highlighted names and it displays their top campaign contributors.

In this sense, Greenhouse adds another layer to the news, showing you the story behind the story. In politics, as in many other things, if you want to know the why behind the what, you need to follow the money. And somewhat depressingly, in politics it seems that it's money all the way down.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/08/track-whos-buying-politicians-with-greenhouse-browser-add-on/

If you want to participate or just follow along, you can install Greenhouse for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari over at http://allaregreen.us/ Grab the add-on and then follow @allaregreen on Twitter.

some recent goings on with the exec bot that generally lurks in #Soylent channel on irc.sylnt.us:

- sed supports regex through use of preg_replace (FoobarBazbot's awk script no longer running under exec)
- reserved alias for logging script
- disabled ping script for auto-restart cos it was a disaster (i think i fixed the problem by disabling the ping until connection is established but not going to bother testing for now)
- implemented support for bucket_append messages, which allows creating lists from multiple concurrent processes without fouling each other (needed for users.php which builds lists of channels, nicks and nickserv accounts using list, who and whois irc commands)
- refined the weather script a little as a result of some feedback (thanks to those involved)
- put weather and time functions into lib files to make them accessible from a new welcome script that can (if enabled) show weather and local time on joining a channel (if your nick/location is registered using ~weather-add or ~time-add)
- created switches.php in an attempt to make enabling/disabling features on a per channel basis a little more uniform (used by sed and welcome scripts)
- script created to add suggestions to the wiki, using ~suggest (appends to a section of an article, with bullet formatting)
- added stats aliases ~first, ~last, ~find-first, ~find-last and ~count that make use of cached chat logs
- added interface for adding/editing/deleting ~define sources
- added ~killall admin command to terminate all scripts/programs running under the bot process
- admin setting to ignore/unignore nicks added
- added script start timestamp template for the exec.txt file

hoping to eventually get the nickserv account checking stuff in users.php to a point where i can use it to fix up the player authentication in irciv cos i really wanna get back into that

haf fun :D

===
https://github.com/crutchy-/test
http://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/IRC:exec

exec now supports a reserved <startup> alias, which at the moment executes a script that triggers a sequence of aliases related to starting SedBot(2) in #Soylent and ##.

the <startup> trigger fires when the bot attempts to identify with nickserv, and like other reserved aliases can't be triggered from irc.

my intention is to make scripts to enable easy management of the current sedbot.awk script, unless FoobarBazbot returns beforehand in which case he'll be able to take the reigns.

the advantage of the <startup> alias is that if exec is disconnected temporarily, sedbot will restart when a connection is re-established.

a test was performed by pulling the network cable out of the machine hosting exec and leaving it unplugged for a while. when the cord was eventually plugged back in, exec came back up and restarted sedbot without any intervention.

https://github.com/crutchy-/test/blob/master/irc.php
https://github.com/crutchy-/test/blob/master/irc_lib.php

bot admins now have a little more control over scripts that are executed

to see a listing of running scripts/processes:
~ps
this will generate a list in the format:
[$pid] $shellcmd

to kill a process listed by ~ps:
~kill $pid

if the bot is restarted (~restart) or quits (~q), all processes (including any children) will be killed

bot source code is here: https://github.com/crutchy-/test

if you would like to log an irc channel, you can /invite loggie.

as a backup, exec also has a logging feature.
you can /invite exec to a channel, or if you're not op, go to another channel with exec already in it and do '~join #yourchan'
then if you want to switch logging on, do '~log on'. you can switch off logging using '~log off'

logs are publicly accessible here: http://irciv.us.to/irc_logs

if you want exec to go away, do '~part' from within channel, or '~part #mychan' from any channel with exec in it

I wonder if the criterion for defining a "hoarder" extend to collecting open browser tabs? My immediate meat space at home and work are clear but I seem to have trouble letting go of "useful" browser tabs.

Four U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration employees saw or heard a handcuffed San Diego student locked in a cell for five days without food or water, but did nothing because they assumed someone else was responsible, investigators said Tuesday. The Justice Department's inspector general faulted several DEA employees for their handling of the April 2012 incident that left Daniel Chong in grave physical health, cost the agency a $4.1 million settlement and led to nationwide changes in the agency's detention policies. The employees told investigators they found nothing unusual in their encounters with Chong and assumed whoever put him in the cell would return for him shortly. Chong, then 23, ingested methamphetamine, drank his own urine to survive and cut himself with broken glasses while he was held.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/4-dea-employees-encountered-man-forgotten-cell

Between 1776 and the present, the United States dispossessed Indians of more than 1.5 billion acres, nearly an eighth of the habitable world ( http://invasionofamerica.ehistory.org/#0 ). For most of that same period, the native population was in a free fall, dropping from perhaps 1.5 million people when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence to a low of 237,000 in 1900. After the native population and its land base bottomed out, American sports teams began adopting Indian-themed names.

Today, the Braves, Indians, Blackhawks, Seminoles, Chiefs, and the Washington NFL team claim to honor native peoples with iconography such as Chief Wahoo, arrowheads, and tomahawks. It is easy to assert that the name of your favorite team expresses solidarity with the survivors of the long, sordid history of Indian dispossession. But what if sports lore included the specifics of how the U.S. acquired the land below your team's home field ?

http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2014/07/washington_nfl_team_tribal_land_the_braves_chiefs_and_dan_snyder_s_franchise.html

everyone uses and abuses poor ol' sedbot in irc, but currently it's only working in #soylent. its also in #test but isn't working there for some reason.

for anyone who just can't live without sedbot functionality in other channels, you can do "/invite exec" and then "~sed on" to enable (or if sedbot makes a grand entrance you can do "~sed off" to disable). if you're not a chanop, you can do "~join #chan" from any other channel with exec already in it (usually #soylent).

works similar to sedbot. doesn't do vowel replacement or regex though.