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Entries associated with the tag "Commonplace links":June 11th - 11:37 a.m.
Think Progress » Report: Bush fired Karl Rove at church."When Karl Rove left his job at the White House in August 2007, he told the Washington Post, “I’m leaving on my own terms.”" Commentary Magazine - New Subscriptions"Our full-color 39" x 26" World Terrorism wall map includes detailed inset maps highlighting countries battling narco-, Maoist, and Islamist terrorism" The Book Bench: Online Only: The New Yorker"The question that begins, “Do you like to curl up with a printed book…?” seems a wee bit loaded, for instance." Flexing Your Buying Power - Dress for Less and Less - NYTimes.com"Clothing is one of the few categories in the federal Consumer Price Index in which overall prices have declined — about 10 percent — since 1998 (the cost of communication is another)." Anglo Iranian Oil - Jamd"circa 1910: Oil flowing over a derrick from one of the first wells to be drilled at Masjid-i-Suleiman in Iran"June 10th - 11:07 a.m.
stevenberlinjohnson.com: Turning 40"That’s one measure of success, right? Your continuity with your past selves; their willingness to let you buy them a beer." Remembering the Sixteen People Who've Died in Construction Accidents This Year -- New York Magazine"A 58-year-old New York native, he hated flowers and had asked that upon his death, donations be given to the Autism Society of America." The Architecture Issue - The New, New City - Life in an Instant City - Shenzhen, China - Dubai, United Arab Emirates - NYTimes.com"the 20th-century city is over. It has nothing new to teach us anymore. Our job is simply to maintain it" McCain would like to see a man on Mars"McCain said one of his favorite books as a child had been Ray Bradbury's 1950 novel "The Martian Chronicles," about humans colonizing the Red Planet." Fred Hiatt is an idiot « The Poor Man Institute"Thank you, Fred Hiatt, for boldly speaking out against Big Bumper Sticker. Edward R. Morrow is spinning in his grave with pride."
May 30th - 12:40 p.m.
Flexing Your Buying Power - Dress for Less and Less - NYTimes.com"Clothing is one of the few categories in the federal Consumer Price Index in which overall prices have declined — about 10 percent — since 1998 (the cost of communication is another)." May 26, 1908: Mideast Oil Discovered -- There Will Be BloodThe site was so remote that it took five days before D'Arcy got word by telegram in England. "If this is true," he replied, "all our troubles are over." BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Does this picture make you angry?"There has been a conspicuous trend in the last five years towards the production of negatively-valued women in the public sphere." BLDGBLOG: The Other Night Sky"We are now partially building ourselves a new night sky – and this surrogate astronomy is being put there so we can make international phone calls." Contractors Are Kept Busy Maintaining Abandoned Homes - NYTimes.com"Ms. Lang of Integrated Mortgage Solutions has started a nonprofit group, No Paws Left Behind, to find homes for abandoned pets and to offer help with pets to homeowners in foreclosure." May 27th - 10:49 a.m.
The Field » The Nightmare Ticket Is Dead"You shall know the politically inept among us by those that continue to advocate for The Disaster Ticket" Poor ticket sales, expected protests scuttle Bush-McCain fundraiser at Phoenix Convention Center - Phoenix Business Journal:"Bush's Arizona fundraising effort for McCain is being moved to private residences in the Phoenix area." Inside the Scandal That Rocked the Formula One Racing World"He proceeded to spill the strange tale of the woman with the stack of what appeared to be top-secret Ferrari documents." Bad Astronomy Blog » Birth cry of a supernova"for the first time in history, astronomers have unambiguously observed the exact moment when a star explodes." Amongst Friends x Force Of Nature Fall '08 T-Shirts"F.O.N.s mission is to cultivate the aesthetic and the Scandinavian approach to design in an unconventionel way, and often with set-off in acknowlegement of natures presence and strengh even in modern day life."mediabistro.com: TVNewser"Are the TMZ-like helicopter shots of Ted Kennedy at his home really necessary on MSNBC?"May 21st - 1:27 p.m.
ABC News: Report: U.S. Soldiers Did 'Dirty Work' for Chinese Interrogators"a 2002 arrangement between the United States and China, which allowed Chinese intelligence to visit Guantanamo and interrogate Chinese Uighurs held there" Walruses - Animals - Natalie Angier - Science - New York Times“A walrus really likes to be blown in the face.” Footnoted: Is Jodie Foster Responsible for Reaganomics? - Chronicle.com"Taxi Driver is the most important movie ever made from the standpoint of creating GDP," Mundell said. "It's the movie that made the Reagan revolution possible." YuppiePunk » A (Not So) Complete History of Literary Tattoos"That’s Henry David Thoreau on the left, William Faulkner on the right." Who's the greatest film composer of all time? - By Jan Swafford - Slate MagazineTakemitsu was an amazing figure: a first-rate straight composer, detective novelist, and fanatic of film and pop music. ("My teachers," he said, "are Duke Ellington and nature.") May 20th - 12:19 p.m.
Hullabaloo"Immigrants of the past quarter-century have been assimilating in the United States at a notably faster rate than did previous generations, according to a study released today." Send in the Latrines - New York Times"In our sanitary, plumbed lives, the toilet — an engineering marvel — removes waste out of sight and out of mind. As Steven Pinker recently wrote in “The Stuff of Thought,” the vocabulary of excretion has sneaked in and taken the taboo place previously held by religious words, and this switch parallels the rise of sewers and the sanitizing of excrement." The surprising popularity of Bach's complex, esoteric The Art of Fugue. - By Jan Swafford - Slate Magazine"Just about everything that's possible to do in music, Bach could do as well as, or better than, anybody else. But he loved leaping self-imposed technical hurdles, the more fiendish the better. Thus The Art of Fugue." Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation » Portishead Videos by Nick Uff"This article from the Bournemouth Echo says that the 44-year-old Uff makes his living as a gardener, which helps to explain why I’ve never heard of him or seen his beautiful hand-drawn animation before." United Airlines News | Chicago Business News, Analysis & Articles | United, US Airways tank in customer survey | Crain's"US Airways had the lowest score at 54, down from 61 a year ago. United was second-lowest at 56, the same as 2007."May 19th - 12:04 p.m.
Instant messaging 'a linguistic renaissance' for teens - tech - 15 May 2008 - New Scientist Tech"teenagers risk the disapproval of their elders if they use slang, and the scorn of their friends if they sound too buttoned-up. But instant messaging allows them to deploy a "robust mix" of colloquial and formal language" Reason Magazine - Hit & Run > Reforming Forensics"Controlled studies have shown that the bias forensic experts absorb even by such seemingly innocuous interactions as speaking with police and prosecutors before running tests can have a disturbingly significant impact on their results." How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power | World news | The Guardian"The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator's action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy." Jason's Journal: Grief Bacon"the Germans have a word, Kummerspeck, for the excess weight one gains from emotion-related overeating. It translates literally as “grief bacon.”" Eschaton"And that made me realize that it's all about the endowment. Everything. They want genders about even so most of the kids can have fond memories of college sex. They have sports teams to create lifelong bonds. Campuses create a sense of permanent community" The Cost of Smarts - New York Times"Is there an adaptive value to limited intelligence?"May 14th - 11:51 a.m.
TPM Election Central | Talking Points Memo | GOP: Mailer Attacking Our Guy As Confederate-Friendly Is False -- Kind Of"Prill explained that when Memphis was getting rid of Confederate statutes under pressure from civil rights groups three years ago, Davis had simply offered to accept the statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis -- but not the one of Forrest." Os Pássaros on Flickr - Photo Sharing!"Papel de parede para a Casa Rima" Will your iPhone destroy the Internet? - Gadgets- msnbc.com"Professor Jonathan Zittrain says the latest must-have devices are sealed, "sterile" boxes that stifle creativity and turn consumers into passive users of technology." Top Ten Bipolar Blogs - World of Psychology"A lesbian psychiatric nurse who has bipolar, “Crazy Tracy” depicts life from both sides of the gurney." Oreos' British debut sets off Battle of Biscuits :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: World"‘It’s very dark. It’s almost black." VetVoice:: Bush Finally Speaks to the Ultimate Wartime Sacrifice"Actually, it is far more likely that Bush quit playing golf because he was suffering from knee problems throughout the latter half of 2003." May 13th - 11:48 a.m.
Things younger than Republican Presidential candidate (oh, and did I forget to mention “war hero”?) John McCain » Alaska."Alaska - the freaking state - is younger than John McCain." Ron Paul's forces quietly plot GOP convention revolt against McCain : Top of the Ticket : Los Angeles Times"In Indiana, McCain got 77% of the recent Republican primary vote, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, who've each long ago quit and endorsed McCain, still got 10% and 5% respectively, while Paul took 8%." alicublog - Retro Fit"Maybe that explains our culture in general these days: the cynicism of the audience has caught up with that of the advertisers." Good Is Dead. The Learners in finer bookstores everywhere."No, I swear to God that this can only be His cosmic trickery, so to speak. If it starts to rain blood in Moscow this afternoon, none of us should be surprised." The end of time | Science | The Guardian"Presuming they leave the Earth well before the sun fails in about 6bn years from now, they will find themselves in a dying galaxy increasingly isolated from its celestial neighbours." May 7th - 11:48 a.m.
Armando Iannucci: It's one small step for chumps in my brave new world | Comment is free | The Observer"the bulk of us achieve enough but nothing special, while historians propagate the myth that the course of mankind is set by pioneering brilliance" Websites Go Crazy Tracking Urban Eccentrics"I don't think Juan the Frye Apartment Guy wants to be a celebrity in any way" ESPN - Rouse in oblivion five years after Baylor scandal - Men's College Basketball"The conversation exposed Bliss' plan to paint Dennehy, the murder victim, as a drug dealer in order to cover up Bliss' NCAA-violating payment to Dennehy." Sadly, No! » Ramengate Comes To A Boil"Let the diamond-studded plutocrats sip their boughten Kool-Aid." Irvine Housing Blog - The Ultimate Post"There are bad loans, there are really bad loans, and then there are loans like this one. It boggles the mind. If this property sells for its asking price, the total loss to the lender will be $648,700 assuming a 6% commission." Economic Troubles Affect the Vegas Strip - New York Times"Las Vegas has a huge inventory of new casinos and hotels due for completion in the next few years, and a long national recession could send the city reeling."May 6th - 8:50 a.m.
Signs of the times - The Boston Globe"What Paul Pierce's hand gesture - and his $25,000 fine - say about the fast-evolving world of gang signs" Japan Steadily Becoming a Land Of Few Children - washingtonpost.com"Japan, now the world's second-largest economy, will lose 70 percent of its workforce by 2050 and economic growth will slow to zero" Audio: This Is It: The New YorkerLouise Erdrich reads Lorrie Moore’s short story “Dance in America” Bloomberg.com: Science"The number of suicides among veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may exceed the combat death toll because of inadequate mental health care, the U.S. government's top psychiatric researcher said." Georgia says war with Russia 'very close' - South and Central Asia- msnbc.com'"We literally have to avert war," Georgian State Minister for Issues of Reintegration Temur Iakobashvili told a news briefing' History: Persico's New Book on FDR and Lucy Mercer | Newsweek Culture | Newsweek.comFDR orchestrated "accidental" meetings while driving through the Virginia countryside. Informed Comment: Obama: Clinton on Iran Obliteration: Bush Clone'I mean, it is surreal to have Democrats discussing whether it is appropriate for the US to "totally obliterate" another country.' May 5th - 1:50 p.m.
VF Daily: The Decline of the Wasp Establishment"For the next month, I will be writing weekly dispatches for a VF Daily series on the collapse of the Wasp—or White Anglo-Saxon Protestant—establishment." The "Amen Break" and Golden Proportion"Having looked at the geometry of the Golden Ratio a great deal, and its expressions in worldwide art, I have a decent sense of its place along a line. The Amen Break had that feel." Vietnamese nail down the U.S. manicure business - Los Angeles Times"The story of how the Vietnamese fell into the nail industry is one of pure chance -- of how 20 women who fled their war-torn country happened to meet a Hollywood starlet with beautiful nails." Science Journal - WSJ.com"Studies of schoolchildren who read in varying alphabets and characters suggest that those who are dyslexic in one language, say Chinese or English, may not be in another, such as Italian." BeyondChron: The Politics of Homelessness and the “Quality” of Urban Life"An agenda originally targeted at uplifting the nation’s poor became a buzzword for addressing the daily problems of transit, crime, and pollution affecting the urban middle-class." MoMA exhibit dies five weeks into show - The Art Newspaper"I’ve always been pro-choice and all of a sudden I’m here not sleeping at night about killing a coat...That thing was never alive before it was grown."
May 2nd - 12:21 p.m.
When Elite Get Tough - The Washington Independent - U.S. news and politics - washingtonindependent.com"Resentment against the swells became a staple of presidential politics in the 1820s, when Andrew Jackson, a former general and substantial slaveholder, become king of the common man." The Bonddad Blog: Food Prices Starting To Hit Subsidies"ethanol has royally screwed up the food supply in fundamental ways" The New Economics of Hunger - washingtonpost.com"within a few weeks, the traders discerned an ominous snowball effect -- one that would eventually bring down a prime minister in Haiti, make more children in Mauritania go to bed hungry, even cause American executives at Sam's Club to restrict sales of large bags of rice." Kraft Reformulates Oreo, Scores in China - WSJ.com"Research in Russia showed that consumers there like premium instant coffee, so Kraft is positioning its Carte Noire freeze-dried coffee as upscale by placing it at film festivals, fashion shows and operas." Nico Muhly » God Only Knows"I think that it’s a pretty brave move to use unmanipulated references either from literature or the Bible; it speaks to a growing awareness of the power of orthodoxy and a greater facility to pay attention both in creators and audiences." Radar Online : Daniel Radosh tours the Christian comedy circuit in Rapture Ready: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture"Once again, being Jewish gave me a certain cachet, this time as both the theological older brother and as a member of a group that does have a reputation for being funny."April 30th - 12:12 p.m.
banana nutriment » your dad had a van for a reason"More to come later today on the pastoral dad-sex ad campaign of canadian club blended whiskey. that and the unhealed wounds of modernity." Searchers may be near fabled Amber Room :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: World"He and others have speculated that the cache, if found, could include remnants of the Amber Room, famed for its amber panels emblazoned with gold leaf and mirrors." Why Jean Nouvel’s 75-Story Tower Is Exactly What 53rd Street Needs -- New York Magazine"Why is it so much easier in New York to erect a dreary tower than a marvelous one?" The Arts and Faith Top 100 Spiritually Significant Films™Dogville? The Big Kahuna? Stevie? Interesting. Cato-at-liberty » Views of the U.S. in the Islamic World"Below are a couple of interesting slides from Shibley Telhami’s latest polling in the Islamic world" Men who explain things - Los Angeles Times"Credibility is a basic survival tool."April 29th - 11:55 a.m.
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : The vanishing personal site"But outsourcing the publication of our own content has long-term implications that point to more traffic for the web services we rely on, and less traffic and fewer readers for ourselves." BLDGBLOG: Space as a Symphony of Turning Off Sounds'One by one we took away these continual noises, which together created a kind of drone there... Hess was very interested in this and said things like, "From now on maybe I should do a performance of turning off sounds."' How to sing like a planet / Scientists say the Earth is humming. Not just noise, but a deep, astonishing music. Can you hear it?"Indeed, scientists now say the planet itself is generating a constant, deep thrum of noise. No mere cacophony, but actually a kind of music, huge, swirling loops of sound, a song so strange you can't really fathom it, so low it can't be heard by human ears"Airoots » Global Riot in Koliwada"What happens when you spike the practice of activism with the spirit of a reckless party? The decades old clichéd word – drained of life and blood by do-gooders and well-meaning social workers – turns into a constructive riot." Neighbors Project: Mean girls don't know their neighbors"Well-socialized doesn't mean you're good at talking to people (or even that you like people). It means being able to walk into your bodega and responding with ease when a stranger in line asks for the time, or being able to share a bench at the park" The new oases | Economist.comThe fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions such as studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, means that there is “a huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces” such as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously “a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces”.April 28th - 11:33 a.m.
Critics Cost Muslim Educator Her Dream School - New York TimesShe added that the media attention had led to a “chaotic experience” for students. “Adults have created this, and children are the ones who have had to endure,” she said. Paul Krugman - Op-Ed Columnist - New York Times Blog"The Bush administration faked its numbers by pretending that it wanted the tax cut to expire — but hey, they didn’t really mean it, so we shouldn’t consider extending the Bush cuts as something that imposes any new revenue loss. The Bush administration pretended that nothing needed to be done about AMT, but hey, everyone knows that was fraud, so we shouldn’t consider abolishing the AMT a real cost. So most of the McCain proposal isn’t really a tax cut!" 50 best cult books - Telegraph"The book that gave 1970s idealism a bad name, the nauseating story of a seagull who defies his fellows to soar into the heavens. "The only true law," the bird solemnly tells us, "is that which leads to freedom." Richard Nixon's FBI director, L Patrick Gray, ordered all his staff to read it." A Farewell to Arms - The Current"Viktor Bout, the arms-dealing sociopath alleged to have supplied weapons to almost every conflict in Africa, has a point when he says that he is just a taxi driver: no one expects a taxi driver to scrutinize his fare and decide whether he's on a morally righteous outing." The Detritus Review: Composer of the Day!"Some people like atonal music! To wit: a recent French production of his opera Il Prigioniero, a meditation on contemporary Fascism and freedom vis-a-vis an analogy with the Spanish Inquisition."
April 25th - 3:02 p.m.
a machine for broadcasting | serial consign"Andy Stanford-Clark, a "Master Inventor" for IBM has wired his home automation system to post updates to twitter." Life: Dismembered again"How does a town become known as Nub City? Why did more than two-thirds of all loss-of-limb accident claims in the United States in the late '50s and early '60s come from the Florida Panhandle?" Dissent Magazine"I'm talking about a new breed of liberal writers who have emerged on the web—a network of writers who are bringing together reformism and idealism in a way we haven't seen in many years." BBC NEWS | UK | England | Toilet up for architecture prize"The toilet, in Parrock Street car park, Gravesend, was designed by London-based Plastik Architects." Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm"Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget." oh my pod! - a set on Flickr"Awesome mid century Taiwanese vacation homes. Now abandoned."April 24th - 12:49 p.m.
Petraeus Wins - The Current"That they will again constitute a team overseeing the Iraq war, now at an even higher level of command, means the Bush administration is going for victory in Iraq over all other priorities" Bad Gods | Alt Text: Twitter Your Life Away"like an elderly woman keeping the television on for some semblance of company" The Bonddad Blog: We're Nowhere Near the Bottom In Housing"Dealers are slashing prices (which probably doesn't include incentives) and yet sales are still down big. That means we have a massive inventory overhang." Pruned: The 25-Year Riverine Journey of a Wooden Boulder Carved out of a Felled 200-Year-Old Oak Tree"Beginning in 1978, when a spherical chunk of oak got lodged in a stream as he was moving it to his studio, the sculptor David Nash has documented its long riverine journey." The Most Officialest SkiFree Home Page"SkiFree was intended to run on a 386 PC with VGA display." Archinect : News : RIP Gehry's Santa Monica Place"Just so the titanium jaded kids don't forget, FOG spent the first 25 years of his career doing pedestrian projects like this mall." Iraqis bristle as U.S. opens huge embassy :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: World"The 104-acre, 21-building enclave - the largest US Embassy in the world, similar in size to Vatican City in Rome"April 23rd - 9:04 a.m.
Foreign Policy: Design for Despots"At more than 2 miles long, Beijing’s new Terminal 3, the world’s largest building, boasts strategically placed skylights to give it the appearance of a dragon from the air." Dinosaur Gardens » Steve Ditko: Avenging World"Why did you deny what truth you did know as true?… How did you expect your dishonesty to lead to an honest gain… a worthy end?" 266 - Where News Breaks « Strange Maps"Especially when considering metropolitan areas, Chicago/Illinois should be half the ‘news size’ of New York City/New York, while in fact it seems to be less than one fifth." How Valid Are T.V. Weather Forecasts? - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog"Until the public demands change in the form of lost ratings from this hollow practice of “placebo forecasting,” T.V. weather forecasts will continue to blow smoke up our … upper-level-lows." The War on the Times: Entertainment & Culture: vanityfair.com"The New York Times Company is currently worth just a bit less than $2.8 billion, down from almost $7 billion in 2002." Divine Comedy- All Covers on Flickr - Photo Sharing!"I was inspired by Dante's use of mathematics and architecture in describing Hell, Heaven and Purgatory." Wired 3.06: A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain"Teilhard saw the Net coming more than half a century before it arrived. He believed this vast thinking membrane would ultimately coalesce into "the living unity of a single tissue" containing our collective thoughts and experiences." April 22nd - 10:25 a.m.
CJR: Recovering Reality: Errol Morris on Abu Ghraib"One hundred years from now, we will think about the Iraq war in terms of Gilligan on the box with the wires, or Gus on the leash." Monsanto's Harvest of Fear: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com"in 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court, in a five-to-four decision, turned seeds into widgets, laying the groundwork for a handful of corporations to begin taking control of the world’s food supply" Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Cyberconsciousness"What is cybertheology doing on a geography web site?" PRINT Magazine - Drawing Fire"While there are still no mainstream comics set on the battlefront in Iraq, some of the best, and most popular, current series unflinchingly address the conflict and its effect on American culture by looking at both through transforming allegories." Nico Muhly » Before I get into it"It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal." Inside Zaha Hadid's East London apartment - Times Online"I was thrilled by the mirror and it started my love of asymmetry. When we got home, I reorganised my room." Dan Froomkin - Who's the Moral Relativist? - washingtonpost.com"Here's video of Bush telling the pope, after his remarks: 'Thank you, your Holiness, awesome speech.'"April 21st - 11:51 a.m.
Orcinus - Are FLDS women brainwashed?"this is just one example of the ways that ignorance of the backstory cheats the rest of us out of a real understanding of what's going on here" things magazine"The recent scandal in Texas has had a relatively minimal impact on UK news, but we were struck by the genuine strangeness of the architecture. " BLDGBLOG: Hotels in the Afterlife'They are resorts that never quite happened, then, with names like Sultan's Palace and the Magic Life Imperial. This makes them "monuments to failed investment."' OCAPA, Oregon Concrete & Aggregate Producers Association"Two leading structural engineers pick their favorite feats of man-made wonder." Calculated Risk: Grubb & Ellis expects large increase in Office Vacancy Rate"The CRE slump has arrived." Home Prices Drop Most in Areas with Long Commute : NPR"For residents who work in the city, their commute is around an hour on trouble-free days. But that can extend upward toward two hours." Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand - New York Times"Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air."April 18th - 10:24 a.m.
BLDGBLOG: The mathematics of preservation and the future of urban ruinsA little bit of roadwork, and that mathematical object would be gone. "I don't want to encourage more cars onto the roads," New Scientist wrote, "but if topology and beauty mean anything to you, get out there and enjoy I-95/695 now. It may soon be too late." The Iraq wars - The Boston Globe"Today Iraq is embroiled in three separate civil wars, only one of which has involved US troops in a significant way. These three conflicts have generated most of the country's violence, and are intensively reported on in the Iraqi press" Report Finds Air Force Officers Steered $50M Contract - washingtonpost.com "Goldfein even arranged for President Bush to videotape a testimonial in the White House Map Room that was included in the SMS contract proposal as a demonstration of the company's credibility and access." How Sportswriting Lost Its Game - Utne Reader"By and large, however, it’s precisely these workaday pros we relegate to the background." Youth! - The New York Review of Books"And in order to ensure a permanent left majority...we'd have many left-wing babies." What to expect when you're expecting better stats"They were convinced that the failure of 53 to appear in a given week actually made it more likely to appear the next. And so the bets grew larger." Music Thing: The surprising and wonderful history of Acme Whistles"The company has been responsible for every major advance in whistle technology since 1860." April 17th - 8:56 a.m.
gardenhistorygirl: Bellwood Plantation and the Southern Swept Yard"The swept yard is a unique vernacular landscape tradition once common in the deep South: a bare dirt area denuded of any grass, kept 'clean' by sweeping with a broom made of twigs." Is That Legal?: How Times Have Changed!"Which very prominent lawyer penned this endorsement of Michael Dukakis for the Democratic nomination in 1988, praising him for, among many other things, his repudiation of Al Gore's "militaristic foreign policy"? (answer below the fold)" Architecture and fashion | Life and style | guardian.co.uk"Yet even a glance at your garden-variety modern architect proves this is a group who are just as style-conscious as fashion designers." Our Local Correspondents: Up and Then Down: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker"The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war." BLDGBLOG: Cairo Sound City"This is not like London or New York, or even Tehran, another car-clogged Middle Eastern capital. It is literally like living day in and day out with a lawn mower running next to your head, according to scientists with the National Research Center." Gasoline and Diesel Fuel Update"What we pay for in a gallon of gasoline" Mennonites and Mammonites..."But now they're at the center of one of the strangest phenomena in South American politics, a saga of corruption and faith that has left these world-renouncing Anabaptists in control, for a time, of the highest worldly offices in Paraguay" Annotation - Boston Globehow to read the coat of arms of Pope Benedict XVI (PDF) April 16th - 12:33 p.m.
Is the Renaissance scholar dead? | comment | EducationGuardian.co.uk"The second is that we think education stops around the end of the second decade, and that people will then get on with the next stage of conformity, as both cogs in the wealth-production machine and consumers of its outputs." Don't Stop with Katie Couric"O.K., out there: Raise your hand if you've caught any of the Big Three's evening news in the past year? I know I haven't. Like most folks I know, I'm not home when it airs at 6:30 p.m." The Idolatry of America - The New Republic"On some of them, "the president's name appeared in full at the places where Jesus's hands were nailed" to the cross. At these rallies, which took place all over the country, the blending of politics and religion was complete." "Both Read the Same Bible" - Books & Culture"Above all, they were willing to question whether the combination of individualism and a lack of centralized religious authority—the democratic and voluntary features of American Christianity that had contributed so much to its dynamic growth—might also be primarily responsible for the civil strife that had divided the country." Encode data in 2D on your T-shirts, business cards and stickers ! - Instructables - DIY, How To, craft, offbeat"Follow me then and you'll have Y2010 business cards also." Jon Henley on the fate of the semicolon | World news | The Guardian"That country is France, which is currently preoccupied with the fate of its ailing semicolon." Nope. - The Agitator"The dance was meant to be a celebration of [Thomas] Jefferson. No one thought there would be a confrontation."April 15th - 12:06 p.m.
Great Schism - The Current"One of the largest and most powerful of the "black holiness churches," TUHOPFAP is known for its street brass bands, cheap and delicious soul food, and mass outdoor baptisms, which involve fire-hoses and huge tanks of water imported from the River Jordan" Research monkeys languish in a state of limbo - Los Angeles Times"The inbred clans of traumatized monkeys have managed to survive long years of war, hunger and science, tucked away in the oblivion and isolation of a breakaway republic most people couldn't find on a map." Battleground Chicago: The Police and the 1968 Democratic National Convention by Frank Kusch, an excerpt"Waiting for signs of trouble in the suburbs would be 6,000 army troops, including members of the elite 101st Airborne Division. The men were to be equipped with bazookas and flamethrowers." TheStar.com | Ideas | Enlightenment, wrought in glass"By the time Abbot Suger built his church at Saint-Denis in the 12th century, God had been removed from darkness and bathed in light." The New Atlantis » The Moral Life of Cubicles"Sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote of office workers, “Whatever history they have had is a history without events.”" Dan Froomkin - Bush OK'd Torture Meetings - washingtonpost.com"If you consider what the government did to be torture, which is a crime according to U.S. and international law, Bush's statement shifts his role from being an accessory after the fact to being part of a conspiracy to commit."April 14th - 11:35 a.m.
New York Press - GREG BURGETT - Someone's Listening In: How indie rock morphed into adult contemporary"So settle down, dear reader, as I am not intending to upset, to confound or to insult. I have come not to shame Indie Adult Contemporary but to praise it. The indie set, at last, have something that reads more like literature" HullabalooWe looked at the scenes of abuse and immediately accused those inside the frame of responsibility, instead of those outside the frame demanding that these acts be undertaken. "The Iraq war," said Morris, "was essentially a war of sexual humiliation."A New Reason to Frown | Newsweek Health | Newsweek.com"Oops. In a reversal of the usual sequence in science, researchers have discovered, after millions of people have received the drug, something fundamental about how Botox can act. Contrary to what turned up in preclinical testing, botulinum toxin can travel along neurons from the injection site into the brain, at least in lab animals." ESPN - Leaf embraces place in history - NFL"I kind of got out of the spotlight and life's never been this good." Barry Crimmins : Political Satirist"In Rocky's first title bout he lost to a black man with a funny name. Oh wait, that's another parallel." OFF MESSAGE: Measure For Pleasure (04/11/2008)"As we spend a larger and larger portion of each day staring at screens, we are effectively redefining our priorities and thus our lives. And the question remains: Will it make us happy?" More Reasons For Spiking Food Prices - Bonddad"In the American Midwest, land prices have jumped, along with the cost of energy and chemicals. The price of diammonium phosphate, a common fertilizer, is about $1,200 a ton in the U.S., up from about $450 a ton a year ago."April 11th - 12:10 p.m.
Then and now - Harold, Daily"Then, as now, rapacious corporations strode over the land, corrupting politics, exploiting aggrieved workers and leaving citizens at large appalled by the damage that the untrammeled pursuit of profit had done to their cities and civic values. The difference is, back then the new biz schools hoped to bring civilized values to the running of business." This Thing Isn't Over By a Long Shot - Bondad"Here's the central problem: the Fed is pouring money into the financial system. Yet interest rates are still spiking" The Newseum, Designed by Polshek Partnership Architects, Occupies a Prominent Site in Washington - New York Times"Despite its lofty tone, the design reeks of parochialism, not bold ideas. Its galleries, stuffed with mostly superficial exhibitions, seem engineered to accelerate the flow of crowds rather than for patient contemplation. If the building reveals anything about the state of journalism today, it conveys the industry’s anxieties over the shrinking attention span of the average American." Desert Getaway - BLDGBLOG"The Guardian reports this morning that Donna Vassar, "part of the Vassar education dynasty, has launched plans to build a $300m (£150m) private getaway for stressed-out presidents and prime ministers who want to 'reconnect with their unique purpose in life'." Frog Without Lungs Found in Indonesia -- chicagotribune.com"Bickford says the species is the first frog known to science without lungs and joins a short list of amphibians with this unusual trait, including a few species of salamanders and a wormlike creature known as a caecilian."April 10th - 8:50 a.m.
Talking Heads on economics and space"They don’t work for money anymore! Or to earn a place in heaven—which was a big motivating factor, once upon a time, believe you me. They’re working and inventing because they like it! Economics has become a spiritual thing." The Plug - Stranger Photos Have Happened"I attached this camera to the bench so you could take pictures. Seriously. So have fun. I'll be back later this evening to pick it up." Decision '08"Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the WPA to build 78,000 bridges, 650,000 miles of road and 800 airports during the 1930s and 1940s. What FDR did for public works projects--during the Depression, no less---the next president must do for public and mass transit." TPMMuckraker | Talking Points Memo | Today's Must Read"Last Halloween, at a fundraising event for charitable organizations held at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Headquarters Building, they held a costume contest. And the winner was a white lawyer dressed in dreadlocks and prison stripes." Bloomberg.com: Worldwide - Rice Jumps to Record on Philippine Imports, Curbs on Exports"Unless prices decline, 'you will have huge problems of daily nutrition for half the planet.'" Cheeta turns 76"Cheeta turns 76 today, continuing his run as the oldest living non-human primate."April 9th - 11:58 a.m.
40th Anniversary: The New York Books Canon -- New York Magazine“our fabled ‘texture’ of foreign / and native poverties.” Outsourcing at Home"Three years ago, it didn't make sense for Assembla to hire anyone in the U.S. because labor costs were so low in India. But now, "as costs change, we end up with a lot more Americans," Singleton says." Dissent Magazine"Left to their own devices, financial institutions will choose high-risk, high-return lending opportunities. Partly that’s because executive compensation is tied to quarterly profits, but it’s also because investors want the highest return." Why Things Cost $19.95: Scientific American"something fundamental might be going on, that some characteristic of the opening bid itself might influence the way the brain thinks about value and shapes bidding behavior." The Bonddad Blog: Why Transports Matter"A good report from a transportation company indicates the economy is doing well. The converse is also true." Antiquity was richer than we think"On the basis of that evidence it appears likely that at its peak the classical economy was almost as large as that of Western Europe on the eve of the Industrial Revolution." An Orthodox Messiah - The Current"We might condemn Kuznetsov by the standards of normal people, but by the standards of Messiahs, so far so good."April 8th - 12:33 p.m.
Richard Dreyfuss on Charlton Heston on National Review Online"Millions of Jewish kids grew up with the confusion that A) Charlton Heston was Moses B) Charlton Heston was not Jewish. I believe that films like Ben Hur were conceived because Heston was there to make them." Charlton Heston : Edward Champion’s Filthy Habits"Heston was one of those dependable melodramatic actors, blessed with a wonderful and often ridiculous voice that opened the floodgates for the pleasantly overbearing masculinity one now sees in Harrison Ford, William Shatner, and Dennis Quaid." CRITICAL MASS: Reviewing 101: John Updike's rules"Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt." The Frontal Cortex : Art and Science"But you don't find out you're an artist because you do something really well. You find out you're an artist because when you fail you have something within you--strength or belief or just craziness--that picks you back up again." Starbucks and 'Laissez Faire' - WSJ.com"I wondered just what the company's standards were. If "laissez-faire" is unacceptably political, how could the socialist slogan "people not profits" be acceptable?" Legacies of the Riot - washingtonpost.com"Though most traces of the riot have been erased from 14th and U, the government building and the gentrification movement are products of the riot's twin legacies -- legacies that shape the city's social and political dynamics still."April 4th - 12:25 p.m.
Light posting again today. All-Terrain Vehicle Fatalities --- West Virginia, 1999--2006"This analysis determined that lower socioeconomic status, lower level of education attained, and single or divorced marital status were associated with higher rates of ATV-related deaths in West Virginia during 1999--2006." The Smart Set: Tour of Duty - March 29, 2008"Why travel, I thought, if not to be disabused of propaganda?" Cat Found « Newscoma"You don’t have to live in rural America to appreciate the absolute wonder of this poster." things magazine"Architectural media has a habit of creaming off the most interesting work, a tiny percentage of a percentage, casting an almost wholly skewed and inaccurate portrait of any contemporary scene." BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | First movie of 'tsunami' on Sun"Astronomers have captured the first footage of a solar "tsunami" hurtling through the Sun's atmosphere at over a million kilometres per hour." The Violent, Passionate Life Of An Octopus, The Sea Creature's Complex Mating Rituals Can Involve Jealousy, Deception, Death - CBS News"wild octopuses are far from the shy, unromantic loners their captive brethren appear to be"April 3rd - 11:42 a.m.
Endangered Turtle To Get Bionic Flipper, Scientists Give Prosthetic To Atlantic Sea Turtle Found With Three Missing Flippers - CBS News"Somehow, she swam with just one flipper, even though she can only move in counterclockwise circles and has to push her now 10-pound body off the bottom with her head to breathe." A 'perfect storm' of hunger - Los Angeles Times"White beans at $1,160," the white-haired Belgian, 52, cries in despair over the price of a metric ton. "Complete madness! I bought them two years ago in Ethiopia for $235." Fogonazos: Scott and Shackleton's abandoned huts in Antarctica"the World Monuments Watch describes it as one of the hundred most endangered sites in the world, and New Zealand's Antarctic Heritage Trust (AHT) has been working in the last years to preserve it from corrosion." The Royal Mint - The New Designs Revealed"The winning designer is 26-year-old Matthew Dent, originally from Bangor who now lives and works in London as a graphic designer." Hate the Game, Not the Player | The Media | The American Scene"Surprisingly, one thing that 21 made clear was that card counting isn’t an IQ test, it’s a character test." things magazine"Architectural media has a habit of creaming off the most interesting work, a tiny percentage of a percentage, casting an almost wholly skewed and inaccurate portrait of any contemporary scene."April 2nd - 11:47 a.m.
The Chicago that never was"The story of what didn't get built is as compelling, if not more so, as what did get built in Chicago" Inside the Black Budget - New York Times"It is, according to a new book, part of the hidden reality behind the Pentagon’s classified, or “black,” budget that delivers billions of dollars to stealthy armies of high-tech warriors. The book offers a glimpse of this dark world through a revealing lens — patches — the kind worn on military uniforms." Annals of Religion: Project Trinity: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker"“I have never seen so many white people here in my life!” It was Good Friday on the South Side of Chicago, at Trinity United Church of Christ, which has been Senator Barack Obama’s church for about twenty years" Free the Piano Player"What few of today’s concertgoers know is that there was once a time when classical recitals were very different—less straitlaced, more improvisational, and, above all, more populist in tone. But just as the playing styles of classical performers changed with the coming of modernism, so did the way in which performers learned to present themselves to the public." Six Insane Online Games With Political Agendas | Jewcy.com"Craig experienced everything from Faith Fighter's non-denominational, one-on-one, beat 'em up appeal to Eternal Forces' Christian evangelism to the hysterically fanatical Jihadi simulator Night of Bush Capturing." The Frontal Cortex : Head Cases"There's no shortage of books on neurological patients with brain injuries, but Head Cases, the new book by Michael Paul Mason, is one of my recent favorites."April 1st - 11 a.m.
Why Blog? Reason No. 92: Book Deal - New York Times"Gawker.com spawned the book, “The Gawker Guide to Conquering All Media,” which has sold fewer than 1,000 copies since its release in October 2007." frontline: who was lee harvey oswald? - Don Delillo"What's at stake is our trust in a coherent reality."swissmiss: Pixel Couch"Royal College of Art graduate (UK) Cristian Zuzunaga has devised a fabric based on a 'pixel' concept" ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive: Illustration: The Sistine Chapel of Golden Books"Titled "Animal Circus", this stunning mural fills the walls in the small room, creating an enveloping cartoony environment." Coudal Partners-Calumet City"A terrific modern noir on a raw Chicago cityscape harboring too many untold stories. If you try to set it down, this book will kick you in the teeth." The Agitator » Blog Archive » In the May Issue of Reason: My Story on the Colomb Family"To believe the federal government, you’d have to buy the idea that this working class family living in a modest, one-story bungalow was buying $500,000 worth of crack cocaine per week over the course of several years. The total street value of the drugs was somewhere around $70 million."March 31st - 11:09 a.m.
BLDGBLOG: Forgotten Architects"Many of the buildings these architects produced were absolutely extraordinary – and, frankly, it seems impossible not to look at these images and judge 20th century Germany in light of the catastrophic stupidities that led to its murderous exile of the creative classes, whether those were physicists, novelists, abstract expressionists, or even architect members of the Bauhaus." DISCOVER.com Science, Technology and The Future"That creative process –kinesthetic– is perhaps immunizing children from nature and therefore creating a social environment that entails less caring for the outdoors and all its splendors, people said." The Frontal Cortex : The Illusion of Streaks"Someone should really tell the NCAA tournament television commentators that "the hot hand" doesn't exist." Victim 'Hood"But the real scandal of Love and Consequences isn't so much the fact that its author is a liar: it's that she trafficked so skillfully in lies the literary establishment desperately wants to be told about the racial character of our common life." Robert Fagles, Translator of the Classics, Dies at 74 - New York Times"Some days were Iliadic, he said — you felt you were in a war — and some were more like the Odyssey, when all you wanted to do was go home." Philippe Starck tells magazine design is dead"I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact," Starck told Die Zeit weekly newspaper. "Everything I designed was unnecessary." BLDGBLOG: Earth Evolves"And though plate tectonics may actually cease someday, let's say that a healthy billion and a half more years of continental rearrangement are still in store for this world; what fantastic inland seas and archipelagos might yet be waiting to form?"March 28th - 12:35 p.m.
Reason Magazine - Hit & Run > Creators of The Wire: "We'd Nullify""If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented." BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How 'gay' became children's insult of choice"I have interviewed scores of school kids about this and they are always emphatic that it has nothing at all to do with hostility to homosexuals" Liberty of Conscience - Martha C. Nussbaum - Book Review - New York Times“Should we really say that a display that everyone likes and that isn’t stirring up trouble, because the offended minorities are too powerless to make trouble, is for that reason constitutional?” Review: Girls on the Run: A Poem"The poem is inspired by Henry Darger’s work rather than demonstrative of it–a distinction, I think, of some importance. Like a Warhol or Lichtenstein, Ashbery’s Girls on the Run reimagines the naïve, illogical, sexy worlds of our childhoods–the realms we shared in comic strips, coloring books, nursery rhymes, games–in order to recreate an innocence that once felt true, but which now, as the book illustrates, is long since lost." Archinect : News : Hitler Rebuilding Berlin"What if Hitler and his helpers had been successful in their aggressive striving for world power? A new exhibition in Berlin attempts to answer this question in part by looking at the devastating architectural consequences Hitler's success would have had" Companies that use Gmail abroad break the law because PATRIOT makes it possible for US spooks to spy on Google - Boing Boing"Google offers universities, hospitals and companies Gmail, calendar and document collaboration tools, but all the material hosted on Google's servers can be legally spied upon by the US government under the loosest of controls, thanks to the USA Patriot Act."March 27th - 10:03 a.m.
Secondary Screening: What's the Frequency, Peter? "the seams cracked and Jennings nearly broke down on the airwaves when he took, not one, but two live calls from well-spoken Iraqis in Baghdad who were none too happy with the coming invasion" From hell | Features | guardian.co.uk Film "To be honest, that is the reason I became a critic in the first place; criticism seemed to be a way to channel my unwholesome fascination with train wrecks and fires into a socially acceptable framework." Essays: 'Writing the nation' by Philip Hensher | Prospect Magazine April 2008 issue 145 "Put it down to the lack of a national epic." Oldest known human fossil found - Science- msnbc.com "That would be 500,000 years older than remains from a 1997 find that prompted the naming of a new species: Homo antecessor, or Pioneer Man, possibly a common ancestor to Neanderthals and modern humans." English Russia - Darvaz: The Door to Hell "So they ignited it so that no pois |
