Subversion and friends: HodgePodge for Aug. 16

​A jury doesn’t understand computer programming, a pot head doesn’t understand social media, teetotalers misunderstand soda and more in this premature fall edition of HodgePodge.

You can’t take it with you

A cracker-jack programmer took a project he was working on with him when he left Goldman Sachs and ended up with an eight-year prison sentence. But did the people who convicted him even understand what he’d done? Michael Lewis (of Moneyball and Blind Side fame) takes a look at the case in Vanity Fair.

Big Brother is… tweeting you?

From time to time we can all be lulled into a sense of privacy on social media, since its mostly just our friends paying attention to what we say. Here’s your reminder that what you tweet is public: A Canadian man tweeted looking for drugs and got a reply from the local police, who also alerted his employer.

I knew it was a joke, I just didn’t get it right away

We’re pretty big soccer fans around here, especially of the U.S. Men’s National Team. But, as they enjoy the longest active win streak in the world (12 wins in a row!), it’s important to remember where we came from. And where we came from is perhaps the most ridiculous photo shoot ever.

Horsing around

The New York Times is out with another one of its six-months-in-the-making-multi-thousand-word-multimedia projects: The Jockey. Even if you don’t care about horse racing, this is a fascinating story in an impressive package.

What’s in a name?

From Mental Floss comes the story of how the temperance movement tried to shut down Hires Root Beer. Spoiler alert: it didn’t work.