links for 2009-05-25

• mbleigh's twitter-auth at master – GitHub
  TwitterAuth aims to provide a complete authentication and API access solution for creating Twitter applications in Rails. It provides a generator and all of the necessary components to use Twitter as the sole authentication provider for an application using either Twitter's OAuth or HTTP Basic authentication strategies.
  (tags: twitter rails)
• Presentation Files: RailsConf 2009 – O'Reilly Conferences, May 04 – 07, 2009, Las Vegas, NV!
  (tags: rails presentations)
• Thin – yet another web server
  Thin is a Ruby web server that glues together 3 of the best Ruby libraries in web history:

  the Mongrel parser, the root of Mongrel speed and security
  Event Machine, a network I/O library with extremely high scalability, performance and stability
  Rack, a minimal interface between webservers and Ruby frameworks

  (tags: ruby gem web_servers)
• Amy Bennett – today and tomorrow
  These paintings by Amy Bennett from her series Neighbors look like diorama. Of course they do, she first builds miniature 3D models and then paints them.
  (tags: art painting)
• Yahoo! Placemaker™ Beta – YDN
  Yahoo! Placemaker is a freely available geoparsing Web service. It helps developers make their applications location-aware by identifying places in unstructured and atomic content – feeds, web pages, news, status updates – and returning geographic metadata for geographic indexing and markup.
  Placemaker provides geo-enrichment for the hugely significant proportion of Web content that is geographically relevant but not geographically discoverable. Provided with free-form text, the service identifies places mentioned in text, disambiguates those places, and returns unique identifiers (WOEIDs) for each, as well as information about how many times the place was found in the text, and where in the text it was found. The WOEIDs returned by the service can be passed to Yahoo!'s GeoPlanet™ API for further geographic enrichment and discovery.
  (tags: geolocation geocoding web_services maps yahoo development api)
• Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft. – By Michael Agger – Slate Magazine
• Neuroskeptic: Science vs. Free Will, Again
  (tags: neuroscience neuropsychology science research cognition free_will)
• Dan Ariely: 2008 was a good year for behavioral economics
  (tags: economics behavior psychology cognition)
• The Benefits of Distraction and Overstimulation — New York Magazine
  (tags: twitter cognition attention)
• Car crashes through City Hall
  (tags: kansas videos amusements)