Daring Fireball is a site I fre­quently read. John Gruber links to, and com­ments on, a lot of inter­est­ing things on Daring Fireball. Just the other day, John linked to and com­men­ted on an inter­est­ing piece in Good Magazine. The piece describes the base meas­ure­ment of the met­ric sys­tem (the meter) in a series of info graph­ics. Here is what he said:

What’s a Meter? ★
Good Magazine on the his­tory of the offi­cial defin­i­tion of the meter. Includes this humi­li­at­ing nug­get: “There are only three coun­tries that do not use the met­ric sys­tem: Liberia, Myanmar, and the United States.”
(Thanks to Rab Barari.) #

It’s con­cise, clear and even has a friendly nod to Rab Barari, who ostens­ibly mailed him the link.

For those of you who haven’t read Daring Fireball, you should know that John Gruber fol­lows Apple. He calls journ­al­ists out when they write up silly biased art­icles about Apple’s products.That’s a good thing. He does it so much in fact, that he even has a fea­ture “Jackass of the week” for very silly journ­al­ists. It can, and has been, awar­ded sev­eral times a week. But — John Gruber can be a Jackass too.

He recently wrote the following:

Adobe Adds H.264 Support to Flash Player 9 ★
My bet is that it per­forms like total crap, at least on OS X, but I’d love to be proven wrong. #

And bam! He slams a great devel­op­ment in video on the web in one sen­tence — just like that. Sure, Flash reportedly per­forms weakly on OS X. The Flash Player Beta — which includes the H.264 — is right there to down­load.

He could have, at the very least, tried it and repor­ted his find­ings before slam­ming it. Otherwise, it’s just weak con­jec­ture. Just like the con­jec­ture from the hack journ­al­ists or (shud­der) hack sci­ent­ists he so rightly calls out.