I think I’ve mentioned here before how filthy the air was in Beijing when I visited there a few years ago. I came across a link to a fantastic web site that demonstrates quite clearly (haha) the extent of the problem.

See this page, by Michael Zhao of the Asia Society, for a day-by-day diary of just how scummy the air can get in Beijing.

What’s amazing is how you can definitely see the difference between days when the air is clean but there’s just some clouds, and the days when it’s supposedly “clear” but it looks like it’s so foggy you would have to slow down when you drive.

Beijing sits in a big bowl, so the air throughout the rest of China isn’t always this bad (though in some cities it’s worse!) If you’ve ever thought about visiting, one consideration might be whether or not you have asthma and can take the disgusting air.

I really hope everyone is paying attention to the news from Iran. Over the past few days, most of the mainstream media has done an absolutely shitty job of reporting on the story, but there are some resources that are doing good work.

One is Andrew Sullivan’s blog at The Atlantic, titled “The Daily Dish“. He’s put up all kinds of links to some amazing stuff. If you have trouble connecting, keep trying; that site has been under heavy strain and had some connection issues that might also be attacks from the Iranian authorities.

The other is the Huffington Post.

This is a people-powered revolution. Iranians have cell phones and internet (it’s said that Iran is the fourth-largest nation for bloggers) and Twitter and all kinds of stuff. They’re getting hundreds of thousands on the streets and it’s looking more and more likely that the election was rigged.

And this situation is clearly displaying the difference between the new type of media coverage, stuff like this blog (which I’ve let lapse too much) and other new, digital types of reporting directly from the people, and the old-school media that did a terrible job over the weekend of reporting the brewing situation in Iran.

Nate Silver is a baseball fan. He’s also a math geek. He combined those two passions and wrote books and was big into baseball statistics. But it also turned out that he’s a political geek (yay, political geeks!) and so he created an awesome website called “FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right” where he crunches numbers and polling and so forth. (There are 538 votes in the Electoral College, if you’re curious where the title came from.)

He’s ALSO been covering, from a pollster/stathead point of view, what’s going on in Iran. His work is demonstrating how incredibly unlikely it is that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (the incumbent whack job President of Iran) actually won the election with the announced numbers.

Anyway, if you’re curious about the Iran situation, and want to skip over the gunk on CNN and NBC and from the AP, go to those sites. You’ll find real pictures of what’s going on posted by real people, Tweets describing the situation, and breakdowns of polling information by former baseball stathead guys.

Amazing.

… turns out Adam Lambert, from this past season of American Idol, is GAY!

Who knew?

Sheesh. This is so totally not-news it’s disgusting. Anyone who seriously thought, even for a tiny moment, that Adam wasn’t gay needs a swift shot of “wake the hell up!” Plainly the guy was gay. Big deal- NOT.

The truly sad thing is that he didn’t win, because he kicked Kris Allen’s ass six ways to Sunday.