Links for Later

1. Algorithm for flocking (or swarming) behavior
2. Barbarous hair for Argentinians
3. Helmut Newton on appropriating photographic style
4. Coffee: how to make a flat white
5. 11 lessons from economic papers (via mr)

Points on a Graph of Union Bashing

There were three good articles from the New York Times today about the national debate on union rights and union bashing, with the theme running through them that the union bashing bills rely on maximizing economic uncertainty among average people to provoke a "conservative" response--pushing through a particular agenda that is antithetical to their own interests.

1. Paul Krugman: the Shock Doctrine comes to the US

The story of the privatization-obsessed Coalition Provisional Authority was the centerpiece of Naomi Klein’s best-selling book “The Shock Doctrine,” which argued that it was part of a broader pattern. From Chile in the 1970s onward, she suggested, right-wing ideologues have exploited crises to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those crises, and everything to do with imposing their vision of a harsher, more unequal, less democratic society.

Which brings us to Wisconsin 2011, where the shock doctrine is on full display.

In recent weeks, Madison has been the scene of large demonstrations against the governor’s budget bill, which would deny collective-bargaining rights to public-sector workers. Gov. Scott Walker claims that he needs to pass his bill to deal with the state’s fiscal problems. But his attack on unions has nothing to do with the budget. In fact, those unions have already indicated their willingness to make substantial financial concessions — an offer the governor has rejected.

What’s happening in Wisconsin is, instead, a power grab — an attempt to exploit the fiscal crisis to destroy the last major counterweight to the political power of corporations and the wealthy. And the power grab goes beyond union-busting. The bill in question is 144 pages long, and there are some extraordinary things hidden deep inside.

2. How union bashing plays in Columbus, OH

The heart of the problem, said Vaughn Carner, a retired risk management specialist who was drinking coffee in a diner on High Street on Wednesday night, is the rapid change that has left Americans confused, disoriented and struggling to adapt.

In Ohio, economic decline has redrawn the map, devastating towns and cities, and making some places unrecognizable. Mr. Carner, now 70, recalled making a wrong turn at night in Toledo a number of years ago, not realizing where he was because population decline had left entire blocks abandoned and dark.

“We’re just a little bit afraid, like an old man who is trying to make his way, but is lost,” he said. “We used to be the big boys on the block, but the rest of the world is catching up with us in so many ways.”

Richard Freeman, an economist at Harvard, said he saw the hostility toward unions as a sign of decay in society. Some working-class people see so few possibilities for their lives that it is eroding the aspirational nature that has long been typical of Americans.

“It shows a hopelessness,” he said. “It used to be, ‘You have something I don’t have; I’ll go to my employer to get it, too. Now I don’t see any chance of getting it. I don’t want to be the lowest one on the totem pole, so I don’t want you to have it either.’ ”

3. Proving the theses of the above two articles, here's how Chris Christie wants you to think of the union struggles.

Quote of the Day

Everyone hoping to make money selling economic analysis thinks stimulus works and austerity sucks.

-Matthew Yglesias

Bonus Argument for Strong Unions

Ezra Klein's excellent interview with Jamie Galbraith covers the importance of having organizations representing labor as part of the national political-economic conversation as a "countervailing force". This, in and of itself, is a strong argument from equity, but there's also an embedded arguement from efficiency and competitiveness in the middle of the interview that I find even more interesting:

those countries which have high union coverage manage to stay in the forefront of competitiveness in world industry. If you ask why is it that the Scandinavian countries did so well, it’s not because Sweden discovered oil -- that was Norway. Rather, having to pay decently high wages means businesses have to stay on the front of the technological curve.

"Restrictive" policies on certain business strategies make alternative strategies more likely, but may also lead to gaming of the system. What would be the effect, though, of gradually improving workers' rights in this country? Would businesses become more technologically advanced, or would they just move away entirely?

Income Inequality in America

In 11 graphs from Mother Jones, Gilson and Perot lay out exactly what's wrong with America today: poor economic equity. Biggest finding: people think incomes are more evenly distributed than they really are.

Back to the Walled Garden with You

Don Norman has seen the future of the Internet, and doesn't like it much:

Exorbitant roaming fees and a lack of adequate technological infrastructure reduce me to idiocy. My smartphone doesn't work when I need it most -- when I am in a foreign country. Why? Because of the roaming charges and greed of my service provider and the difficulty of purchasing a temporary subscription to data services when in a foreign land.

My intelligence is in the cloud. My life is in the cloud. My friends, photographs, ideas and mail. My life. My mind. Take away my cloud and I am left mindless.

Notice that my isolation is only partially the result of technological limitations. The hotel's lack of Internet access could be overcome. They had never experienced a technology conference before so they assumed that only a portion of the attendees would be connected to the Internet, and they would primarily do email. Instead, they got a taste of the future world where everyone has multiple devices requiring Internet connection, all wanting a full experience of rich sound and images. That problem, however, is easily remedied.

The much more fundamental problem is caused by the business models of the service providers, whether they be for radio or television, cable or satellite, telephone or mobile phone. Each of these providers wish to maximize their profit while simultaneously minimizing that of their competition. They try to enforce proprietary standards, locking people into their own distribution: Think proprietary digital rights management systems for music, movies and books, think locked cellular phones, think region codes on movie DVDs, think overly restrictive copyrights on content and over-inclusive patents on inventions and ideas. Each system has some basis in logic and business, each has some legitimate reason for existence. But these systems are implemented and enforced in ways that restrict them far beyond what is necessary -- even to the point of reducing creativity and hurting individuals.

Links for Later

1. Elastic, not sticky websites, "loyalty without lock-in."

Wintersleep - Weighty Ghost

Heard this on the soundtrack of One Week. Had to play it.

Wintersleep - Weighty Ghost

Heard this on the soundtrack of One Week. Had to play it.

Quote of the Day

"This is what I mean by my constant insistence on 'moderation' in government. Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid,"

-Ike Eisenhower

Links for Later

1. Banh Mi recipe
2. Thinking "in more memorable ways"
3. Lakoff: What the assault on unions really means. Budget deficits as ruse.
4. Garance Dore and Scott Schuman
5. Krugman: Wisconsin Power Play

Tales from the Meltdown

Patrick Rodgers, the Philadelphia man who foreclosed on Wells Fargo, turning the tables nicely, is apparently also a vampire undead American. How cool is that?

Why So Many Union Buster Bills?

Why do over a dozen states have union buster bills moving through the legislature at the same time? Why do all of these bills look the same? It's not because collective bargaining is really the problem--it's because someone doesn't like unions, and that someone is apparently the Koch brothers. Firedoglake::

What’s ALEC? The Koch-brothers funded far-right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council, which is dedicated to taking over state legislatures to destroy workers’ rights and environmental safeguards (the Koches being heavily into coal and oil). As Bluestem Prairie’s Sally Jo Sorensen notes, they helped write SB 1070, the infamous “Show Us Your Papers” bill that turned the State of Arizona into a police state predicated on harassment of brown-skinned Spanish-speakers. They are the forces behind the cookie-cutter union-busting bills in various state legislatures, not just Wisconsin’s:

Wisconsin has become the critical start point for a much broader assault on worker’s rights and unions. Ohio has seen similar protests over a very similar bill. And states like Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, New Hampshire, New Jersey and New Mexico are considering additional limits on public employee rights, though not to the extent of Ohio and Wisconsin.

The origins, as I wrote about Monday, come from ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a key driver in the conservative movement. One reason why you see similar bills from Republicans pop up in multiple states is ALEC, which pushes an agenda for state legislators to pick up and run with. We know that ALEC brought together Walker and southern state Governors after the elections to discuss so-called “right-to-work” legislation. We know that ALEC commended Walker for his first successful piece of legislation, the bill slashing business taxes that created the budget deficit which he is now exploiting to take away public employee rights. They are basically behind all of this.

Mad yet?

More: from Daily Kos

The Coca-Cola secret recipe revealed by This American Life?

ReConnections

Interview with James Burke on the 25th anniversary of his series Connections. A hugely influential series on most of the tech people I know. (2004)

Links for Later

1. Yoga, not as old or as Hindu as you think
2. Anonymous on the HBGary hack
3. Wired on HBGary & Wikileaks
4. Bold choices
5. Social Security does not produce a deficit

The Girl Who Wrote the Memoir

This forthcoming memoir by Eva Gabrielsson (Steig Larrson's life partner) looks like a fun read, in between the Trotskyites and the Old Norse curses and invocations of Odin by torchlight. Also, she's still got that laptop with book 4 of the series on it.

Love's Philosophy

See! the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea: -
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?

-Percy Bysshe Shelley

June Tabor - King of Rome

Science Friday on Ice

Featuring my aunt Mariana Gosnell as one of the two guests discussing the wonders of ice.

Pick up the book here:

"I will teach my kids to dream."

Mustafa el Gindy made an amazing speech from Tahrir Square yesterday, captured on MSNBC. This speech is the foundation stone of the new Egypt.

To the US & Obama: "For once you took the position of the people."

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Congratulations to the People of Egypt

Hosni Mubarak resigns following 18 days of peaceful popular protest. It's a bright day in Egypt.

The Skinny on Fox News

"My internal compass was to think like an intolerant meathead."

An insider speaks to Media Matters. Nothing particularly surprising, but still a fun read. The response from inside Fox on this one is going to be fascinating.

James Blake - Limit to Your Love

The Part-Time Revolution

"Twenty reasons why its kicking off everywhere" looks at the social trends that support today's uptick in street protests and shiny happy revolutions.

Links for Later

1. Nicolo Machiavelli begs for a job

2. Darryl Issa: The stimulus cannot work. We must pass a stimulus so it can work.

3. The Feltron Annual Report 2010

4. The Paul Haggis Scientology article in The New Yorker

5. The New Yorker's profile of Gulliermo del Toro, featuring a bizarre fixation on how much he weighs at various points in his life

6. The Nazi Graphic Standards Manual. Wild stuff.

The Ice Book

Davy and Kristin McGuire made a popup book with the idea of using it for a stage show, combining the papercraft stage with projections and other effects to bring the book to life. What resulted is something magical: The Ice Book.

Fast Company Design has more.

Links for Later

1. "Where will demand come from?" In praise of Old Keynesians

2. Old Postcards are More Fun When Aliens Invade Them (via Neil)

3. GOP Presidential candidates charted on the "sane" and "Mormon" axes.

Michael Moorcock and the Meaning of Life

Hari Kunzru interviewed Michael Moorcock for a short article in the Guardian and posted a much longer transcript of their conversation on his own site. They discuss the roots of fandom, JG Ballard, introducing SF writers to rock stars in the 60's, why Texas bars have the names they do, why it pays to be short when the police are around, and the political persuasions of the British publishing world.

Disaster & Disorder Week

I woke up Sunday after Ed's 42nd birthday party, suspecting that I had a hangover, but instead finding that I had the flu. Note that I am not drinking in the above photographs.

I escaped Chicago before Lake Shore Drive became a scene from The Next Day. (Photo source: Chuck Garfien). One of my friend Alicia's parents was part of a group of Gold Coast residents who went to help:

My mom just told me that people from her Lake Shore Drive building climbed through the snow drifts on the Outer Drive to get sandwiches and cupcakes and drinks to people stranded in their cars - and some took them into their homes and fed them. Community spirit rises to the occasion from the most unexpected locations - and gave my heart a little lift today.

Shortly after arriving home, power went out, and has been out for two days. Go, AEP!

In the meantime, how about that revolution in Egypt? I've been glued to Baratunde's Twitter list and Al Jazeera's live stream, watching history happen in real time.

Links for Later

1. Trends in self-publishing

2. Really great bread recipe

3. Guardian journalist caught in Egyptian police roundup of protestors

4. DOD press office incoherent on Bradley Manning detention conditions

5. Good places for angel funding

On the Street in Egypt

Montage of footage from the protests in Egypt.

(via the Daily Dish)

The Real State of the Union

Can Louis CK just give this talk as this year's State of the Union? Thanks.

Everything is amazing and nobody's happy.

Wikibloopers

Government's case against Assange, Manning, slowly unraveling as expected. Remember Captain Yee?

Links for Later

1. Juan Cole on Bradley Manning vs. Tunisian dissidents

2. Tim Ferriss interviewed by Dr. Oz

3. Which jeans are the slubbiest?

4. Goal of Quantico delays was to isolate, abuse Manning

The 50 Most Loathsome Americans 2010

From the Beast. Every year, the list gets a little better. Ready for your punishment?

(via kottke)

Lazy Teenage Superheroes

(via boingboing)

Gibson Wear

Cayce Pollard's "Skirt Thing" makes the jump from the pages of Pattern Recognition into the real world.

Why the Chinese Mom Story is Getting So Much Coverage

Because we immediately think, yes, that's what the little shits need: some discipline.

House Porn: The Selby's Favorite Images

The Selby's favorite images of 2010. I have envy for Karl Lagerfeld's library in particular, but there are many fine interiors to be seen.

The Selby's Favorite Images

The Selby's favorite images of 2010.

Skullboy for Mugler

One of our favorite body artists, Rick Genest, aka Skullboy aka Zombieboy, is featured in this new video by Mariano Vivanco for Mugler's new collection by Nicola Formichetti , with music by Lady Gaga. So that all over skeleton tattoo thing is working out pretty well, no?

Links for Later

1. Richard Dawkins on religious education in public schools

2. Pixies Canadian tour dates

3. To quote Bugs Bunny, "what a maroon"

4. Why so many fundamentalists at Oxford?

5. The three private graves in Manhattan

6. If Obama wants to be bold, he should be bold

Links for Later

1. Extra material from Tim Ferriss's 4 hour body including DNA testing and nootropics chapters

2. Zegna's Fall 2011 fashion show. Love the chapka, Senator.

3. Quirky's multitool

4. The Dakar rally

5. Looking under the street lamp

6. Octave, an open source substitute for MATLAB

Mr. Samberg & Mr. Herman Have a Wild Night

And Anderson Cooper gets a headline.

Asked and Answered

All you ever wanted to know about female anatomy, explained: "Do girls pee out of their butts?"

Quote of the Day

More bad news for people fretting about changes in the Zodiac: Scientists have also discovered all of astrology is horseshit!

-Anil Dash

Links for Later

1. Seven early data visualization papers (via @ycombinatornews)

2. From the same blog: 3 tools for data ninjas

3. Organizational websites

House Porn 17: the Carriage House

From Apartment Therapy, a house in St. Louis. Lots and lots of lots. Tim Tucker, the owner, says: "My male friends say they would love to live like this but their wives would not let them. And my female friends say, “it’s cold in here!“"

Links for Later

1. Defending Social Security from the deficit hawks

2. Banksy interviewed about Exit Through the Gift Shop (via boingboing)

3. Trundle Manor, a wunderkammer (via boingboing)

4. Incubate at the Metropolitan Exchange building in Brooklyn

Vienna Teng - Harbor

Jon Pareles Talks to Trent Reznor

Video of the Times Talks event with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and How to Destroy Angels fame.

Links for Later

1. Mustique


2. How the Obama Administration's Online ID program would work: just like Facebook

3. The police can subpoena 6 month old emails? Online privacy needs a fix.

4. Rays of light: Muslims acting as "human shields" for Christians in Egypt

5. Why [this event] Means We Must Support My Politics With Urgency!

6. The right's politics of hate

Quote of the Day

Scientific literacy is necessary for a functioning society in the modern age. Scientific literacy is not science education. A person educated in science can understand science; a scientifically literate person can *do* science. Scientific literacy empowers everyone who possesses it to be active contributors to their own health care, the quality of their food, water, and air, their very interactions with their own bodies and the complex world around them.

-from the Biopunk Manifesto
Meredith Patterson
(via grinding.be)

Autism - Vaccine Link Shown to be Fraudulent

Brian Deer, writing in the British Journal of Medicine today, describes how Andrew Wakefield falsified data to prove a causal link between the MMR vaccine and autism. As a result of this paper, a number of parents refused to have their children vaccinated, exposing the children to increased risk of three serious diseases. One of the most significant known cases of scientific fraud in the last thirty years.

My Japanese Shirt-Folding Technique is Unstoppable

The Sartorialist

Short film from Intel. Love the projected images at the end.

Get Pitted

Brought to you by Colorpulse, the musician behind Symphony of Science

Photos of the Week

Guo Pei's 1002nd Night collection

Kowloon Walled City Map

Flounder x-ray, false color

Amsterdam

17th Century map of Amsterdam from Frederik de Wit's Stedenboek. More at BibliOdyssey

Links for Later

1. Come the revolution, a hard rain's gonna fall...

2. Bach's Cello Suites

3. 20something gunrunner gets four years, plus maybe another decade added for gun possession while indicted for the first offense.

The Win Compilation

Wins in 2010


Good Luck in 2010

Arkansas Bird Rain

It's being reported that over 5000 birds (primarily blackbirds, grackles and starlings) rained down on part of Arkansas on New Year's Eve. Explanations include fireworks, disease, stress and "repeated blunt trauma". Meanwhile, in another part of the state, 1000s of fish died off in the streams. Apolcalypse now, or just another day in the Midwest?

More: A day later, 500+ birds die in Louisiana.

Links for Later

1. Andrew Gelman's five recommendations for statistics books (via Alex Tabarrok)

2. Bruce Sterling's annual State of the World conversation on the Well

3. Calcio Fiorentino, "the manliest game on earth". Basically a brawl with a ball, played while wearing 16th century pants.

4. Cross sectional map of Kowloon Walled City, with annotations in Japanese. (via @greatdismal)

5. Chinese haute couture from Guo Pei's 1002nd Arabian Nights collection. Amazing and almost certainly unwearable (via Bruce)

6. First fights over the separation of church and state: the Anti-Federalists lost big time.

Math Behind Everything

Tyler Cowen points us to this interview with Roger Penrose in Discover Magazine. Along with telling us why he is sure that quantum mechanics isn't the final theory of physics, he also talks about how he and his father influenced the art of MC Escher:

The artist M. C. Escher was influenced by your geometric inventions. What was the story there?
In my second year as a graduate student at Cambridge, I attended the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam. I remember seeing one of the lecturers there I knew quite well, and he had this catalog. On the front of it was the Escher picture Day and Night, the one with birds going in opposite directions. The scenery is nighttime on one side and daytime on the other. I remember being intrigued by this, and I asked him where he got it. He said, “Oh, well, there’s an exhibition you might be interested in of some artist called Escher.” So I went and was very taken by these very weird and wonderful things that I’d never seen anything like. I decided to try and draw some impossible scenes myself and came up with this thing that’s referred to as a tri-bar. It’s a triangle that looks like a three-dimensional object, but actually it’s impossible for it to be three-dimensional. I showed it to my father and he worked out some impossible buildings and things. Then we published an article in the British Journal of Psychology on this stuff and acknowledged Escher.

Escher saw the article and was inspired by it?
He used two things from the article. One was the tri-bar, used in his lithograph called Waterfall. Another was the impossible staircase, which my father had worked on and designed. Escher used it in Ascending and Descending, with monks going round and round the stairs. I met Escher once, and I gave him some tiles that will make a repeating pattern, but not until you’ve got 12 of them fitted together. He did this, and then he wrote to me and asked me how it was done—what was it based on? So I showed him a kind of bird shape that did this, and he incorporated it into what I believe is the last picture he ever produced, called Ghosts.

Just a nice little footnote in the history of art. The rest of the interview is worth reading as well.

2010 in Review

High points of the year from a personal perspective:

1. Taught a freshman biology course at the local community college. Nice to get back into it, hope I did more good than harm. Two thirds of the students would recommend that others take the course, which I'm told is a stellar review, so that's something.
2. Spent the second half of the year as Chief Marketing Officer of a startup software company.
3. Traveled a lot for business: Chicago, Pittsburgh, Miami, Toronto, Detroit, Toledo, Munich, Nuremberg. Narrowly avoided being groped & scoped by the TSA.
4. Recovered some of my long lost German language skills, although the Germans are speaking more English than ever before, about as much as the Dutch were speaking 20 years ago. The Dutch are now almost universally perfectly bilingual.
5. Met lots of interesting people, and have several prospects for new customers, clients and friends for the coming year.

Quote of the Day

I drink it when I'm happy and when I'm sad. Sometimes I drink it when I'm alone. When I have company I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I'm not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise, I never touch it, unless I'm thirsty."

-Lily Bollinger

on champagne

The Books of 2010

1. Steven Brust—Iorich
2. Robert Skidelsky—Keynes: Return of the Master
3. Neil Gaiman—Violent Cases
4. Gregory Maguire—Making Mischief: a Maurice Sendak Appreciation
5. Malcolm Gladwell—What the Dog Saw
6. Richard Kadrey—Sandman Slim
7. Richard Holmes—The Age of Wonder
8. Robert Crais—The First Rule
9. Colum McCann—Let the Great World Spin
10. Matthew B. Crawford—Shop Class as Soulcraft
11. Larry McMurtry—Literary Life
12. Vaclav Havel—To the Castle and Back
13. Sam Sheridan—The Fighter’s Mind
14. Patti Smith—Just Kids
15. Josh Waitzkin—The Art of Learning
16. Mark Lamster—Master of Shadows: The Secret Diplomatic Career of the Painter Peter Paul Rubens
17. Chandler Burr—You or Someone Like You (reread)
18. Chandler Burr—The Emperor of Scent (reread)
19. Gary Rogowski—The Complete Illustrated Guide to Joinery
20. Gregoire Bouillier—The Mystery Guest
21. Michael Pollan—A Place of My Own
22. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro—Burning Shadows
23. John Greenlee & Saxon Holt—The American Meadow Garden
24. Samuel R Delany—Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand
25. Stewart Copeland—Strange Things Happen: a Life with the Police, Polo and Pygmies
26. Robert & Cortney Novogratz—Downtown Chic
27. Jim Butcher—Changes
28. Samuel R. Delany—Dhalgren
29. Ellen Bass—The Human Line
30. Nassim Nicholas Taleb—“On Robustness and Fragility”
31. Luca Invernizzi—Ultimate Tropical
32. Alberto Manguel—A Reading Diary
33. Lee Child—61 Hours
34. Peter Greenaway—Prospero’s Books
35. Alberto Manguel—A History of Reading
36. Stieg Larsson—The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
37. Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson—ReWork
38. Jane Lindskold—Nine Gates
39. Michael Pollan—Second Nature
40. Cathryn M. Valente—This is My Letter to the World: the Omikuji Project Year 1
41. Joseph Campbell—The Hero’s Journey
42. Ozzy Osbourne—I am Ozzy
43. Bret Easton Ellis—Imperial Bedrooms
44. Bob Hicok—Words for Empty and Words for Full
45. Elizabeth Gilbert—Eat, Pray, Love
46. Andre Aciman—Call Me by Your Name
47. Nicholas Basbanes—Editions & Impressions
48. David Lipsky—Although of Course you End up Becoming Yourself (A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace)
49. Josh Kilmer-Purcell—Bucolic Plague
50. Josh Kilmer-Purcell—I am not Myself Right Now
51. China Mieville—Kraken
52. Paul Graham—Hackers & Painters
53. Neal Pollack—Stretch
54. Neal Pollack—Alternadad
55. Lawrence & Nancy Goldstein—The Friar and the Cipher
56. William Gibson—Zero History
57. Glen Cook—An Empire Unacquainted with Defeat
58. Garr Reynolds—Presentation Zen
59. Alex Ross—Listen to This
60. Alice McMaster Bujold—Cryoburn
61. Lee Child—Worth Dying For
62. Steven Johnson—Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
63. Jim Butcher—Side Jobs
64. Glen Cook—Gilded Latten Bones
65. Ricky Martin—Me
66. Jay Lake—Pinion
67. Joshua Braff—Peep Show
68. John McPhee—Conversations with the Archdruid
69. Eric Chase Anderson—Chuck Dugan is AWOL
70. Kathe Koja—Under the Poppy
71. Lev Grossman—The Magicians (reread)
72. GD Trudeau—40: A Doonesbury Retrospective
73. Patrick Hennessey—The Junior Officers’ Reading Club

The Year in Reading 2010

Notable books, or a Best Of list, though not all of these were necessarily published this year, out of the 70-odd books newly read over the past twelve months:

Bookending the year in reading, Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, which revolved around Philip Petit's tightrope walk across the World Trade Centers and a group of finely drawn characters kicked off the year that ended with Kathe Koja's excellent Under the Poppy.

The next group consists of memoirs by rock stars: Ozzy Osbourne's I Am Ozzy, Stewart Copeland's Strange Things Happen: a Life with the Police, Polo and Pygmies, Ricky Martin's Me, and the best of the group, Patti Smith's Just Kids, about her early life in New York and her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. What comes through more than anything is the sweetness and innocence of this part of their lives, and possibly of life in general at the start of the 70's. This was the best non-fiction read of the year.

William Gibson's Zero History was the fiction read of the year. The conclusion of the Pattern Recognition or Blue Ant trilogy, ZH takes the techniques of science fiction and applies them to the immediate past in the context of a search for clothing and designers with very unusual properties. I want me some Gabriel Hounds.

Another great discovery was to flash back to the past with some Samuel R Delany: Dhalgren and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand are the kind of high grade science fiction that seemed to peak in the late 60's. Disorientation through language and imagery, fiercely drawn characters and invetive worlds to explore. That's the stuff.

Quote of the Day

“People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.”

— Bob Dylan

The river is story, it goes on.

Greer Gilman's parting tale for and about her mother, recently passed.

Elegy for Geek Culture

Patton Oswalt on the death (and inevitable Jean Gray-like resurrection) of geek culture. He hits the high notes of 80's haut-nerd life, and then spirals into a glorious fantasia of otaku:

Since there’s no going back—no reverse on the out-of-control locomotive we’ve created—we’ve got to dump nitro into the engines. We need to get serious, and I’m here to outline my own personal fantasy: We start with lists of the best lists of boobs. Every Beatles song, along with every alternate take, along with every cover version of every one of their songs and every alternate take of every cover version, all on your chewing-gum-sized iPod nano. Goonies vs. Saw. Every book on your Kindle. Every book on Kindle on every Kindle. The Human Centipede done with the cast of The Hills and directed by the Coen brothers.

Possibly the best essay of the year.

Endless Divers

(via boingboing)

Links for Later

1. 100 verses of A Bang on the Ear

2. Mixergy interview with AngelList's Nivi

3. So long, PayGo

4. Bon Iver plays Peter Gabriel's Come Talk to Me. Kelly Deal sez: "YOU PEOPLE AND YOUR GODDAMN BON IVER, I SWEAR TO GOD."

5. A Guide to the Market Oligopoly System (Economic art)

Krugman Critiques Obama

Part of an ongoing series. Paul Krugman is (rightly) angry at how Obama has misplayed his hand over the past two years, leading to needless Democratic losses and hard won accomplishments that could have been more easily, rapidly and frequently won.

Links for Later

1. Molecular biology of the phylotypic bottleneck. More here.

2. Last night, The Invisibles saved my life. (via linkmachinego)

3. A response to Bruce Sterling's Wikileaks/Bradley Manning/Julian Assange piece, "The Blast Shack"

The Future Is Now, Vol. LXXXIV: Village Greens

The Peace Corps reports on the growth of green power generation among remote villages, including solar, water, biofuel and wind generators that power hyperefficient lighting and other low-wattage, high-value appliances.

White Wine in the Sun

Tim Minchin



(via Neil)

Christmas Wars and Pagan Trees

Obsidian Wings traces the DNA of modern Christmas, by way of Washington crossing the Delaware and a lot of pagan celebrations:

To have a green tree in the house, filled with light, in the darkest and coldest time of year, as we feel the year turn from old to new -- how can that not be numinous? When we decorate with green branches and red berries, this isn't from Christian iconography --

"I remember hearing," said Susan distantly, "that the idea of the Hogfather wearing a red and white outfit was invented quite recently."

NO. IT WAS REMEMBERED.

(from Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett).

The rising of the sun and the running of the deer, seeing our families and having enough to eat: all of these things are worth celebrating. Such celebrations don't have to be either secular or religious, in the usual sense: they are pagan in the sense of "rustic, countrified, what the common people do". Human, in other words.

So we do have a Yule Tree in our house, and at its top is the sun

Links for Later

1. David Foster Wallace and the philosophical perspective

2. W G Sebald

3. Paris flea market

4. Barack Obama on the DADT win

5. They're made out of data

Bam, Pow

Of course Seattle has superheroes. Why do you ask?

Links for Later

1. The insanity of secession

2. Josh Stieber: from enlistee to conscientous objector to blogger

3. Amazing camera tricks with DIY methods

4. JQuery Sparkline app

5. A gay soldier's letter before leaving for Afghanistan

Khameleon808

More from the editor of the Apple Tree compilation video

Rerezzed (Tron/Glitch Mob remix)

Digital Nativity

Nicholas Was...

39 Degrees North: Christmas Card 2010 from 39 Degrees North on Vimeo.

A new adaptation of Neil Gaiman's short short story.

Ho. Ho. Ho.

Happy Birthday, Bill

The late, great Bill Hicks would have been 49 today.

Happy Birthday, Bill

The late, great Bill Hicks would have been 49 today.

Links for Later

1. Stem cell cure for baldness in 5 years

2. Borromean rings as a foundation for new forms of matter

3. Talking about spycraft with Jeff Stein: "I hope this spawns more Wikileaks."

4. Anybody with the time on their hands to write a 43-page dress code should be fired

5. How to write like an undergraduate male.

xkcd: Dammit, Julian

Bradley Manning

How long can a prisoner be kept in solitary confinement without their brains turning to jelly? The US is trying to find out the answer to this question using Wikileaks enabler Bradley Manning as a guinea pig. He's been kept isolated 23 hours a day in the US Marines brig in Virginia. No charges have yet been filed. What's going on in there? Glen Greenwald has some answers.

Time Now and Passing

Boys on the East Side insist on hanging to every passing sleigh, and if the owners protest, volleys of abuse are hurled after them.PA1878

-@Tweetsofold

This news item makes me melancholy, as it drives home the moment captured here so vividly happened 132 years ago. Everyone in the passing sleighs, the boys hanging on the sides, the writer of the piece, and everyone who knew them is dead and gone long ago. The sleighs themselves, for that matter, are long gone to dust, and maybe the streets where this happened.

The Year in Film 2010

15 Year Old Tells Establishment to Stick It

After the student protests last week in the UK.



(via Dangerous Minds)

Links for Later

1. The ghost town at Cairo, IL

2. Using GPUs for matrix calculation

The Tax Deal

How did he go from being Mr. Hope and Change to being as tough as a wet doily? As Anthony Weiner pointed out yesterday, liberals don't wish he was more ideological, rather that he was more of a pragmatist. The White House doesn't seem to grasp the fact that they're in a fight, whether they like it or not.

What a shameful performance on the part of the President. Absolutely disgraceful.

Cut The Tax Cuts

What Krugman said.

Not Such Wicked Leaks

Umberto Eco in Presseurop on the Wikileaks "scandal": it's a fake scandal filled with empty secrets, and the biggest scandal is that the secrets are empty.

But let’s turn to the more profound significance of what has occurred. Formerly, back in the days of Orwell, every power could be conceived of as a Big Brother watching over its subjects’ every move. The Orwellian prophecy came completely true once the powers that be could monitor every phone call made by the citizen, every hotel he stayed in, every toll road he took and so on and so forth. The citizen became the total victim of the watchful eye of the state. But when it transpires, as it has now, that even the crypts of state secrets are not beyond the hacker’s grasp, the surveillance ceases to work only one-way and becomes circular. The state has its eye on every citizen, but every citizen, or at least every hacker – the citizens’ self-appointed avenger – can pry into the state’s every secret.

How can a power hold up if it can’t even keep its own secrets anymore? It is true, as Georg Simmel once remarked, that a real secret is an empty secret (which can never be unearthed); it is also true that anything known about Berlusconi or Merkel’s character is essentially an empty secret, a secret without a secret, because it’s public domain. But to actually reveal, as WikiLeaks has done, that Hillary Clinton’s secrets were empty secrets amounts to taking away all her power. WikiLeaks didn’t do any harm to Sarkozy or Merkel, but did irreparable damage to Clinton and Obama.

Sweet Dreams

(are made of shamisen) Awesome.

(via Siege)

NASA Discovers Arsenic-Based Life on Earth

Today, NASA announced the discovery of a life form that has arsenic instead of phosphates in its genetic backbone. This is the most biochemically remote lifeform found to date on Earth.

Update: Or maybe not