Links for Later

1. James Franco is just messing with us now


2. This is not a brothel


3. Obama prejudges the Bradley Manning case. Bad Obama!


4. Taylor Kitsch on "The Bang Bang Club"


5. Tim Ferriss at SXSW


6. xkcd: Turtles have it going on, man


7. Sebastian Junger eulogizes Tim Hetherington


8. Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros died in Libya this week


9. Tim Hetherington's last movie, Diary


10. Profile of David Hobby, The Strobist


11. Notes from Chris


12. Saturn linked to Enceladus via electron beam

Governor Rick Perry is a Big Fan of The Cure

He's declared the next three days "Prayers for Rain" days. Robert Smith must be proud.

Ezra Klein is Scared

...of Michelle Bachmann's on-air comments about the debt ceiling. He's right to be frightened--failure to raise the debt ceiling will blow a hole in the US economy like nothing you'd believe.

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

Also, his expression at 1:45 is priceless.

Motion & Emotion

The neuroscience of music.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

China's Ghost Cities

In China, there are millions of apartment buildings with 75% vacancy rates, empty cities and shopless shopping malls and more being built daily. Wow.
(via boingboing)

The Objectivist Tree

(via Andrew)

Inspirational

I'm off to drink a gallon of milk and eat a spoonfull of cinnamon.

Repair Week

Ted, my physical therapist said tonight, "It looks like all of your neck and shoulder muscles went on strike at the same time," after he'd spent the better part of an hour disentangling them from one another. I woke up at 3:30 AM a couple of nights ago with throbbing, shooting pain down my arm, the result of stress, overwork and unusual sleeping positions. Now, I'm getting my act together. Brian, my mechanic, got the starter on my car replaced in record time, after the old one finally gave up the ghost a couple of days after I'd had all the fluids in the car replaced. The old fluids came out mixed with something nasty that looked like tar, and possibly was. Taxes are up next. This promises to be equally fun.

Marcin Jakubowski's Civilization Starter Kit

50 open source devices with open source designs that can rebuild civilization.

Links for Later

1. A management consultant with a philosophy PhD talks smack about MBA's, and rightly so


2. Trying to biohack your way to a melamine detector. Compare to this list of existing methods


3. The new Humble Bundle is out. Go pick one up


4. Views from a Hudson River mansion


5. Brad Feld on building tech communities in smaller cities


6. Regular expression generator


7. Someday, you will buy an Alex Stoddard photo for big money


8. Is Barack Obama really that bad at negotiating?


9. Is a weekend with Tim Ferriss worth $10,000?


10. Library glamour shots

The Bridgewater Principles

Kevin Roose takes a look at Ray Dalio, who built hedge fund giant Bridgewater "like a cult" that favors "radical transparency" over "kindness and empathy." Would you choose to work there? More: Dalio's Principles online.

Google vs. Facebook

Chris Dixon has a good strategic rundown on how Google should face off against Facebook.

Where's Barack?

Paul Krugman notes the strange absence of the man we elected in '08:

More broadly, Mr. Obama is conspicuously failing to mount any kind of challenge to the philosophy now dominating Washington discussion — a philosophy that says the poor must accept big cuts in Medicaid and food stamps; the middle class must accept big cuts in Medicare (actually a dismantling of the whole program); and corporations and the rich must accept big cuts in the taxes they have to pay. Shared sacrifice! I’m not exaggerating. The House budget proposal that was unveiled last week — and was praised as “bold” and “serious” by all of Washington’s Very Serious People — includes savage cuts in Medicaid and other programs that help the neediest, which would among other things deprive 34 million Americans of health insurance. It includes a plan to privatize and defund Medicare that would leave many if not most seniors unable to afford health care. And it includes a plan to sharply cut taxes on corporations and to bring the tax rate on high earners down to its lowest level since 1931. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center puts the revenue loss from these tax cuts at $2.9 trillion over the next decade. House Republicans claim that the tax cuts can be made “revenue neutral” by “broadening the tax base” — that is, by closing loopholes and ending exemptions. But you’d need to close a lot of loopholes to close a $3 trillion gap; for example, even completely eliminating one of the biggest exemptions, the mortgage interest deduction, wouldn’t come close. And G.O.P. leaders have not, of course, called for anything that drastic. I haven’t seen them name any significant exemptions they would end.

You might have expected the president’s team not just to reject this proposal, but to see it as a big fat political target. But while the G.O.P. proposal has drawn fire from a number of Democrats — including a harsh condemnation from Senator Max Baucus, a centrist who has often worked with Republicans — the White House response was a statement from the press secretary expressing mild disapproval.

What’s going on here? Despite the ferocious opposition he has faced since the day he took office, Mr. Obama is clearly still clinging to his vision of himself as a figure who can transcend America’s partisan differences. And his political strategists seem to believe that he can win re-election by positioning himself as being conciliatory and reasonable, by always being willing to compromise.

But if you ask me, I’d say that the nation wants — and more important, the nation needs — a president who believes in something, and is willing to take a stand. And that’s not what we’re seeing. 

Now, a few years ago, the Agonist published a short post that no one really listened to, which said, essentially, that our current President had no fight in him, that he'd rather cave every time than fight, and that he was no friend of the liberal netroots. Most of us said that this was nonsense. It looks like we should have believed him.

Joshua Radin - Brand New Day

Biodigital Jazz

Josh Nimoy describes his work on Tron: Legacy. Perlin noise generating isosurfaces, exponential functions used to animate slurpy graphics, and similar mathematical/computer graphical goodness abounds. Beautiful work.

(via core 77)

Self Help

Maria Bustillos takes a ramble through David Foster Wallace's self-help library, part of a 300 book collection of heavily annotated books in repository at the University of Texas. If you take Bustillos's gloss on the self-help books, it tells a very sad story indeed. It's also definitively the story of Hal Incandenza from Infinite Jest. The question is, though, how much of this is also DFW's story? It's tempting to say that it's exactly his story, what with the depression, the substance abuse, the florid displays of brilliance in DFW's life. The opposite is also true: it may just be his story (as we'd like to tell it), and not his life.

Wallace's notes in Bradshaw On: The Family and especially in Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child reveal a person who felt himself to be messed up totally and permanently. He felt particularly nailed and revealed to himself by the latter book, one in which he blames his mother for quite a lot of his suffering. To say that Wallace took The Drama of the Gifted Child to heart is to put it very mildly indeed. He returned to it over and over again; his notes were made at many different times, in wildly differing sizes and styles of penmanship, states of mind. Here are the markers I could more or less identify:

Red sharpie, thin Pink, thinner, like a faded red Rolling Writer? Blue thinner Rolling Writer-type Pencil Dark blue felt-tip, thin Black fine felt-tip Furious blue Sharpie, a thick one Black ball-point

This is another book that made a big splash when it appeared; Wallace's copy is an eighteenth printing, from 1993. The thesis of The Drama of the Gifted Child is that particularly high-achieving children are damaged because their mothers did not allow them to be themselves, but instead through their own insecurities gave their children the impression that only achievement could win them love. That any deviation from right behavior was unlovable, that they would be rejected unless they performed well.

So Alice Miller says the gifted child has to perform all the time, perform even to himself, and is thereby sundered from himself profoundly. "Narcissistically disturbed" is her phrase of choice for this condition. Because the child doesn't feel free to own his feelings candidly, but instead must censor and control himself ceaselessly and let only the good things about himself become manifest, all the bad feelings like jealousy, rage, envy, are driven underground and fester there and make the child secretly, existentially miserable, and in a special way, "divided" in rather the way R.D. Laing describes in The Divided Self. Miller's gifted child splits into two: one is the grandiose child, who is a super-achieving, obedient, reliable and "good" child, and the other a depressed child who never was loved, never was allowed to be a child, who was forced to perform and excel from such an early age that he has become irrecoverably lost to himself.

Images of the Week

Yoann Lemoine, Still from "Iron" Page Tsou

Stingray skeleton X-ray

Woodkid - Iron

Yoann Lemoine wrote and performed the music for this as Woodkid and directed the video as himself, I guess.

Woodkid - Iron from WOODKID on Vimeo.

(via Siege)

Links for Later

1. The smart way to cut the deficit


2. Paul Ryan is lying to you about Medicare & Medicaid

Sometimes it Wiggles, Sometimes it Jumps

Kevin Dowd and colleagues do some Excel and Matlab work to come up with the fact that, assuming normality, a 25-sigma event like the ones claimed to have happened in August 2007 to several of the world's largest financial companies should occur less than once in the entire history of the universe given its apparent age. So, if Kevin Viniar's claim is that a 30% decline on several days running is a >25-sigma event according to Goldman Sach's models, then the models are wrong with a certainty approaching p=1. This is the way a financial economist would look at it, anyway. An experimental psychologist or other scientist would instead say that Something Happened in August of 2007 that was not caused by random chance. Something Happens all the time in experimental science, or at least we hope it does. The distribution moves because something moved it further than can be explained by the white noise of all of the small motive causes that make everything jitter around to form a statistical distribution. Getting overly excited about which statistical distribution it is misses the point. The probability that Something really big is going to Happen again is not dependent on the shape of the distribution, and is not calculable within the distribution. It's dependent on when the conditions are right for Something to Happen again, and relovate the distribution somewhere else. That's what a "25-sigma" event tells you.

Monty Python - Interesting People

"This is Tibbles...she flies across the studio into a bucket of water."

Rick Genest Interview

Two Great Entrepreneurship Quotes

From a post by Mark Suster: “9 women can't make a baby in a month” Also, attributed to Bruce Dunlevie of Benchmark Capital: “Good judgment comes from experience, but experience comes from bad judgment”

Links for Later

1. Econophysical effects: light speed limits to the worldwide trading network result in optimal sites for trading, spaced across the surface of the Earth


2. Jim Messina is a bad, bad man


3. Robert Lowell, "Waking in the Blue"

Strahov Monastery Library

Photo: Evan Rail/Wired

Jeffrey Martin photographed Strahov Monastery's 43,000 volume library in 40 Gigapixel panoramic view, stitched together from a series of nearly 2,500 photos from a Canon 550D. If digital storage of the image file takes up 283 Gb, is that greater or less than the content of the actual books in the photo?

Links for Later

1. Hacking the London Underground (via Alice Taylor)


2. Man with a tiny hat glued to his head


3. Collection of strange old photos


4. Collection of strange stock photos


5. Selection of strange fairy tale photos


6. Startup fantasy vs. reality

"Houston, this is Mercury"

The first image of Mercury from the orbiting Messenger spacecraft. (via boingboing)

Patrick Rothfuss, Interviewed

Patrick Rothfuss interview re: Wise Man's Fear


Patrick Rothfuss Interview by SFLTV

Links for Later

1. Sarbanes-Oxley and Tech IPO's


2. The downside of companies staying private

Goodbye, Liz

Elizabeth Taylor passed away this morning at 79.

Links for Later

1. EBook pricing power undermined by perceived value
2. Scenes from the Tea Party caucus meeting
3. Michael Fay's drawings of soldiers
4. Related: idealized vs. realistic portraiture over time
5. Startup weekend
6. Top 10 signs Silicon Valley is on tilt again. #10 really is the kicker

Muse

In this interview with Lee Carter at Hint Magazine, Nicola Formichetti talks about how (and why) he got Rick Genest (Zombie Boy) to be the face of Mugler.

You changed the whole collection?
Well, I added more, by taking stuff from him, making it a bit darker and gothicy. So basically I Facebooked him and was like, "You know, I'm doing this thing in Paris and I would love you to be there in two weeks." He emailed me back straightaway and he was like, "Yeah, sure, I would love to, but I don’t have a passport." And then I start thinking how the fuck is he going to get a passport in time?

I mean, it's unusual to have a tattoo on your face, but is it a crime? What did you do?
I had no idea what to do. I was calling my lawyers, saying we have to get this guy to Paris. But then I thought, maybe he doesn’t need to be there physically. Maybe I can do a film or a picture. So I told him I would go to him in two days. I called my friend Mariano [Vivanco, photographer] and my manager. We got together the first week after the holidays as I was about to leave for Paris to work on the last bit of the collection. I remember thinking I have to do this, I just have a gut feeling, I have to work with this guy. Everyone said he's a freak, why would I want to do that to a luxury brand? Anyway, I didn’t listen to anyone and just went. I brought some clothes, a couple of suits, and I actually made lots of clothes the night before I left New York. I had pieces sent from Paris and was just making stuff in my house, and then took everything to Montreal and we did a photo shoot and video. The photos are the ones we just launched as a visual campaign.

(via tr)

The Lonely Forest

"Turn Off This Song And Go Outside"



Turn Off This Song and Go Outside

The Seven Sects Speech

Brad DeLong conducts a magisterial smackdown of macroeconomic errors in this multipart lecture series. (Part I, II)

Let me briefly review the right explanation for our Great Recession: the explanation that I been pushing in the past several weeks of the course, since we finished the "economic growth" section of the course. The right explanation of our Great Recession is that the downturn had three sources. First comes irrational exuberance in housing markets. Irrational exuberance in housing markets led to a substantial number of mortgage loans being made that should not have been made. These loans would not have been a problem if you had had capital market arrangements like we had in the late 1990s during the dot-com boom. The dot-com boom also saw irrational exuberance, much more irrational exuberance, in fact, than we saw in the subprime mortgage bubble.

But irrational exuberance in the dot-com boom was not accompanied by overleverage. The venture capital firms that created and issued the securities of the dot-com boom sold them off to unleveraged primary investors, rather than leveraging up and holding on to them by financing their positions with borrowed money. When the dot-com crash came, high-net-worth individuals lost their wealth. But there were no large money-center banks whose solvency was thrown into doubt by the crash.

Bruce Sterling SXSW Keynote 2011

I still miss the parties he used to throw, back when SXSW was tiny, even though I never got to go to any of them.

Links for Later

1. Danny Hillis talks about Richard Feynman
2. Stanley Kubrick photographs Chicago
3. "Sergeant Slaughter, My Big Brother" short film with Tom Hardy
4. What can't be solved with money?
5. The difficulty of making new discoveries, discussed here
6. Barry Michaels, the screenwriter's therapist
7. Not Cornell boxes, but lovely all the same

VS Ramachandran on Consciousness, Qualia and Neuroscience

Links for Later

1. The role of public sector jobs in maintaining the middle class in Gallipolis, OH
2. Alexa Sinclair's mythical royal potraits: kings, queens (a dozen of each)
3. Growing up with seven adults as a child in a big Hudson River house sounds like the premise of a great American novel

House Porn 20: The House that Blues Clues Bought

Steve Burns (Steve of Blues' Clues, and also a sometime rock god) had Eric Lifkin of Mesh Architects refurbish a former woodworking shop into a cool Brooklyn modern residence, featuring something called TheSpecialWall.

Ebben? Ne Andro Lontana

From La Wally. In this case, also from Diva.

Links for Later

1. How to be a good cavalry officer
2. Aerotropolis: a pair of conversations between BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaugh and Greg Lindsey & John Kasarda, authors of Aerotropolis.
3. The Conversation
4. John Kasich's dismal poll numbers, thanks to the anti-union bill and similar nonsense

RIP Owsley "Bear" Stanley

LSD chemist and meat eater Owsley Stanley died in a car crash in Australia today.

More: 2007 Rolling Stone Profile, NYT Obit

Links for Later

1. Bruce Sterling and others discuss JG Ballard
2. How to write a book? Start by not writing a book
3. William Hertlings' SXSW Notes on Tim Ferriss' keynote on the 4 Hour Body and Notes on Jim Coudal, John Gruber & Michael Lopp's talks (mostly on successful writing)
4. Maxim founder Felix Dennis on big ideas: excellent execution is more important than having them in the first place. More from Dennis
5. Bruce Chatwin's notebooks

Jack Dorsey

David Kirkpatrick profiles Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and CEO of Square (which sound like titles of nobility, don't they?) in Vanity Fair. In between doing the programming for a number of key tech companies over the past two decades, he's studied botanical drawing, fashion design and massage therapy, and wants to be mayor of New York City because he's energized by public transit and urban planning.

Startup Stacks

Startup Stacks

Building startups quickly and effectively depends on using prebuilt operational components, just like rapid web development uses technology stacks

Download this whitepaper at the Windcastle Venture Consulting site.

Capital requirements for startups (at least in the technology industry) have been falling steadily. One major reason for this is the existence of stacks: technology stacks, strategy stacks and marketing stacks. Stacks are a set of preexisting components that can be snapped together, quickly reconfigured and dynamically repurposed depending on the particular challenges of the moment.

An example of a technology stack is the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP or Perl) commonly used for web applications. These components provide a prebuilt and commonly used operating system, HTTP server, database and scripting language, respectively. Together, these and similar stacks for Windows and OSX operating systems form the basis for many web applications.

Know where the money is going

At the bottom level, the strategy stack is so noncontroversial and universal that it’s almost invisible. This first layer is the double entry accounting method in use since the Middle Ages. It’s applicable to any type or size of business—although modern GAAP has a number of features better suited to atoms than bits—and is widely understood. The figures and metrics generated by this system provide an invaluable resource to the founders and managers. I’m not going to talk about good accounting here, except to say that if it’s done well, it gets a lot of trouble out of the way, freeing up efforts elsewhere in the startup—so get a copy of Quickbooks or Peachtree and someone who knows how to use them, and learn how to read a financial statement yourself so you can tell what’s going on with the business.

Wasted time is worse than wasted money

Lean Thinking provides a strong, middle layer. Adapted from Toyota’s production management model, lean thinking focuses on reducing wasted time, work or money. Again, this is a suite of tools, methodologies and mindsets adopted from traditional manufacturing, but eminently suited for the technology startup.

The need for lean stems from the scarcity of capital and the high discount rate for any capital that is available. In the context of DCF/NPV valuations: For a normal, stable business with full access to open debt and equity markets, a dollar delivered in a year might be worth spending $.90-.95 today. For a privately financed startup in an industry with a 30-50% annual failure rate, next year’s dollar is worth perhaps $.50 today. The non-zero chance of failure results in a situation where it is more important in many ways to save time than to save money.

At the same time, Lean Thinking and Lean Management are extremely congenial to startup culture, which has made a strength out of mobility, flexibility and bootstrapping. Every startup in history has started without a history, meaning that it’s got a lot less baggage to lose. It can pivot faster, and run faster in a new direction than a company with more resources (which are also more firmly dedicated toward minding the existing business). YCombinator’s funding model, Eric Ries’ Minimum Viable Product concept, prototyping, virtual company models and agile programming methodologies are all built on top of a lean mindset.

Discover the Market Fit

The choices for the next component are somewhat more broadly varied. Steven Gary Blank’s Customer Development model seems to be quite popular at the moment for consumer, mobile and web apps in particular. A few years ago, Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm was the similarly big hit for enterprise marketing and sales technologies (among others).

The basic issue of entering a market with a new product or service is this: how do I efficiently find enough of a customer base for my product for my company to survive and grow? Finding the answer to this question often consumes as much time, cash and effort as actually doing the coding for a software project, and involves finding the right product/market fit. Both target customers and products go through a number of rapid iterations until a match is found—some products will never actually exist (vaporware, Escher products), and some will never find a real buyer (phantom customers, zero marginal value markets). Some products do poorly because they’ve found the wrong prototypical customer (nonrepeatable sales) or because the market is obscure (unfindable sales) and cannot be accurately targeted.

This is actually quite rare. With the possible exception of defense/aerospace products, if there’s one findable customer, there will almost always be many findable customers. A more common problem is that the first customer is so idiosyncratic in their requirements that an overspecialized product emerges. That means that a sale to your mom doesn’t count. A sale to the world’s largest widget maker doesn’t count. Your prototypical sale should be to a complete stranger, or the eighth largest widget maker—someone who doesn’t have a motive to make you feel good, or more market power than anyone else is exactly who you want as a first customer. Get the exceptional customers as you get everyone else.

Maps and Models

At the top of the stack, it’s important to have a strategic view of the startup. Not a fussy, detailed one, but one that lays out the important assumptions, capabilities, attitudes and moving parts that go into your idea of how things are going to come out. This enables you to test your own thinking cheaply, and to have a feeling that you’ve got options in any situation.

A lot of good ideas are only good while they’re in your head, and getting them outside of your head in some form or other is going to let you find out which are really viable, which are viable only with optimism, and which ones shouldn’t really be tried at all.

Third, it gives you the ability to see where problems may arise, and what might be done about them as they do. This gives you a full range of responses and a greater degree of robustness for the business than you would otherwise have.

The Chicago Entrepreneurship faculty have come up with a lot of useful tools in this area: Steven Kaplan’s OUTSIDE/IMPACTS model for investable ideas, Scott Meadow’s Unit Model, and Jim Schrager’s New Venture Strategy provide excellent tools for building strategy maps.

The concept of the “business model” as commonly discussed in Web 2.0 circles is a less attractive variant. Too often, business models as described are actually elaborate work-arounds that arrive at the solutions of “somebody else is going to pay” or “somebody else is going to do the work”, when they should really be saying, “I’m going to make something that my potential customers will value enough to pay cash for. Here’s how.”

The “Here’s how” component.

This one is up to you. There are a lot of books and experts that can tell you better ways to and how. They can’t really tell you how to in the first place—otherwise, why are you involved at all?

Links for Later

1. Novelists talking on the Internet (via Wired)


2. Errol Morris on "The Ashtray", a five part essay. Genius.

Fregoli Delusion

A rare neurological condition in which the patient believes that several other people are, in fact, the same person in disguise, or all look like the same person. Part of a larger group of delusional misidentification disorders, in which the patient experiences a disjunction between the actual identity of persons, places or things, and their perceived identity. Capgras syndrome, in which loved ones are believed to have been replaced by impostors, is another member of this group of disorders.

From Wikipedia:

[This group of disorders] is usually considered to include four main variants:

• The Capgras delusion is the belief that (usually) a close relative or spouse has been replaced by an identical-looking impostor.
  
• The Fregoli delusion is the belief that various people the believer meets are actually the same person in disguise.
  
• Intermetamorphosis is the belief that people in the environment swap identities with each other whilst maintaining the same appearance.
  
• Subjective doubles,... in which a person believes there is a doppelgänger or double of him or herself carrying out independent actions.

However, similar delusional beliefs, often singularly or more rarely reported, are sometimes also considered to be part of the delusional misidentification syndrome. For example:

• Mirrored self-misidentification is the belief that one's reflection in a mirror is some other person.
  
• Reduplicative paramnesia is the belief that a familiar person, place, object or body part has been duplicated. For example, a person may believe that they are in fact not in the hospital to which they were admitted, but an identical-looking hospital in a different part of the country, despite this being obviously false.
  
• Syndrome of delusional companions is the belief that objects (such as soft toys) are sentient beings.
  
• Clonal pluralization of the self, where a person believes there are multiple copies of him or herself, identical both physically and psychologically.
  

Anti-Union Bill Shoved Through Conference Committee

Video from last night's intense, possibly illegal conference committee meeting in Wisconsin.

Marco Brambilla - Cathedral (2007)

Chocolate eclair recipe from Raymond Blanc.

The Shock Doctrine Hits Michigan

Wow, just wow. From Rachel Maddow and AmericaBlog:

The Teabag-enabled plan in Michigan: Use the budget to starve cities and towns, then put in an "emergency town manager" who could (1) kill any contract the town entered into AND (2) dismiss elected officials AND (3) "disincorporate" the town itself. Oh, and the emergency manager can be a corporation. (Imagine the bribing for that contract!)

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

House Porn 19: The Industrial Loft

A 3,200 sq ft home built into a 300,000 sq ft complex outside of Cologne by Tilman Paas, with the help of a foundry and woodshop built into the factory's smokestack.

Click through for more.

Emotional Synesthesia

Whenever Francesca closes her eyes and touches a particular texture, she experiences a vivid emotion: Denim, extreme sadness. Silk, peace and calm. Orange peel, shock. Wax, embarassment. She sometimes feels subtle nuances of emotions. Grade 60 sandpaper produces guit, and grade 120 evokes "the feeling of telling a white lie".

-The Tell Tale Brain p.75
VS Ramachamndran

Autotune your Sheen

Epic Winning!

Time, I Think, for a Bit of Billy Bragg

It Says Here

Links for Later

1. Richard Freeman on unions & labor economics (via marginal revolution)
2. Cute video of the day: A Slow Loris with a Tiny Umbrella
3. Walter Kirn: "The Uses of Charlie Sheen: A Wittgensteinian Investigation" (via John Crowley)
4. Philosophical cage match (Ayn Rand vs. Carl Jung)
5. VS Ramachandran interview
6. Meet the Baers: CIA Agents in Love
7. How Thomas Jefferson Prepared for Meetings (Clue: Plan beats no plan. Big plan beats good plan.) (via Ben Casnocha)
8. Also good, from the same blog: St. Augustine, A Canticle for Leibowitz, and evolution
9. 37Signals' Jason Fried on 6 ways to practice making money (via kottke)

REM ÜBerlin

Single from their forthcoming album, featuring the footwork of Aaron Johnson of Kick Ass fame.

Quote of the Day

Do something, and then do something to that, and then do something to that.

-Jasper Johns

Michael Moore to the Wisconsin Unions

"America is not broke" (a short message about economic distributive justice)

No Rest for the Wicked

Ohio Republicans propose drilling for oil and gas in state parks.

Greedy Teachers

I've been hearing a lot about how much teachers are overpaid, and I'm here to say it's true.

Always remember that there's no surer or faster way to wealth, fame and fortune than to become a teacher. Many of my friends are leaving their jobs at Goldman Sachs because there's no way for private institutions to match the financial incentives of teaching Kindergarten in a public school.

Links for Later

1. Are things better now than in 1973? An economic analysis by a leading Kurdish-Swedish economist at the University of Chicago.

2. The Renaissance Man of Oman

3. Vitamin B2 / Cryptochrome involved in photoreception in Drosophila

Successful eBook Business Models

Author Amanda Hocking sold over 100,000 books last month, made vastly more doing "that writing thing" than most authors with major publishers, and did most of it by selling eBooks at a few dollars a pop. Here's her advice on how she did it. Here's Joe Konrath's blog on indie self publishing, which she recommends in her FAQ.

Clearly, it helps to be in the right place at the right time, but it also helps to just do it. Showing up isn't half the game, it's the only way there's a game at all. So get that book out of the drawer & pop it on the Interwebs, people.

Oh, yeah, and edit the heck out of your writing:

My biggest word of advice to any new/future writers thinking about diving into Kindle: Edit. I don't care what you think, you didn't edit enough. Some people won't care that there's errors, its true, but enough of them will. And they paid for it, so they have a right to. So edit more. And then again. Really.

Infographic Infographic

From ThinkBrilliant a brilliant infographic about infographics (via Felix Salmon)

Just Relax

A moment of relaxation with Andrew Johnson.

Ohio Union Rally

Photos from today's rally against Senate Bill 5 in Ohio at the Statehouse in Columbus. Somewhere between 8,000-20,000 people were there at any given time, depending on whose figures you'd like to use. My sense from talking to people at the rally is that this is only going to get bigger as time goes on--it's already about 50% larger than last week's rally, and it still feels like it's just getting started.

Photos of the Week

Tyler Durden High School

Photo: Nevver

Startup emotional curve
Diagram: Jason Baptiste

Union Thug
Photo: Dave Weigel

Quote of the Day

I don’t know if I’m the right person to be doing jokes about religion; in the past few months, I’ve become religious, I’ve started to believe in god, creationism and intelligent design, and the reason that I now believe in god and creationism and intelligent design is because of Professor Richard Dawkins. Because when I look at something as complex and intricate and beautiful as Professor Richard Dawkins, I don’t think that just could’ve evolved by chance! Professor Richard Dawkins was put there by god to test us, like fossils. And facts.

-Stewart Lee

(via lone gunman)

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.