New work from UC Berkeley:

Opinion Space is an experimental new system for visualizing opinions and exchanging ideas. It encourages people to express their opinions and lets them visualize where they stand relative to the diversity of other viewpoints. A new rating model highlights the most insightful responses and participants.

Mark Twain:

When an entirely new and untried political project is sprung upon the people, they are startled, anxious, timid, and for a time they are mute, reserved, noncommittal. The great majority of them are not studying the new doctrine and making up their minds about it, they are waiting to see which is going to be the popular side.

It is desire to be in the swim that makes political parties.

Always remember:

There are 260 million people in America, and you are one of them.

Opinion Space

Freeman Dyson is giving a public lecture on biotechnology.

Nassau Presbyterian Church (in Princeton, NJ) will host the first of three Sunday-morning lecture series on Science and Theology and Immigration and Asylum, starting on May 3, 9:15-10:15 a.m. in the assembly room.

On May 10, the church presents "Biotechnology: From Scientific Tool to Domestic Pastime" with Freeman Dyson. Dyson, professor emeritus of physics since 1994 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, will talk about the pros and cons regarding the possibility that biotechnology will evolve like computer technology.

From the archive:

Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over.

From a while back:

I am always happy to be in the minority.

Recently:

The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people's hopes.

Biotechnology: From Scientific Tool to Domestic Pastime

William T. Vollmann:

It sprawls across a stinking artificial sea, across the deserts, date groves, and labor camps of southeastern California, right across the Mexican border. For generations of migrant workers, from Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl of the 1930s to Mexican laborers today, Imperial County has held the promise of paradise—and the reality of hell. It is a land beautiful and harsh, enticing and deadly, rich in history and heartbreak. Across the border, the desert is the same but there are different secrets. In Imperial, award-winning writer William T. Vollmann takes us deep into the heart of this haunted region, and by extension into the dark soul of American imperialism.

Known for his penetrating meditations on poverty and violence, Vollmann has spent ten years doggedly investigating every facet of this bi-national locus, raiding archives, exploring polluted rivers, guarded factories, and Chinese tunnels, talking with everyone from farmers to border patrolmen in his search for the fading American dream and its Mexican equivalent. The result is a majestic book that addresses current debates on immigration, agribusiness, and corporate exploitation, issues that will define America’s identity in the twenty-first century.

Ships July 30, 2009.

Imperial

Bella English:

They are members of a small cohort: the young and unplugged. While their friends, relatives, and colleagues have every gadget known to mankind, the Kalfs have made a conscious decision not to blog, tweet, or instant message. They e-mail only when necessary. And they say they're better off without all that stuff.

"After a while, you find [that the gadgets] erode time as opposed to saving time, and time is the only thing we've really got that is our own."

"Worshiping at the church of the pixel comes at the expense of real-life experience."

"I find the whole thing very voyeuristic."

Bruce Sterling:

"Poor folk love their cellphones!"

Andy Milonakis:

Let Me Twitter Dat

Geoff Manaugh:

Ever since a friend of mine once claimed – very late and after many drinks – that "Twitter is the death of humanism," I've been regularly thinking about how a simple note-taking technology could inspire such apparent dread in so many people.

Sage Stossel:

Hu Jintao joined the group "I Bet I Can Find A Million People Who Don't Care Michael Phelps Smoked Weed."

Robert Lantham:

Instant messaging. Twittering. Facebook updates. These 21st-century literary genres are defining a new "Lost Generation" of minimalists who would much rather watch Lost on their iPhones than toil over long-winded articles and short stories.

Wired differently

Thomas Pynchon:

Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon— private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog.

It’s been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It’s the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that “love” is another of those words going around at the moment, like “trip” or “groovy,” except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.

In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there ... or ... if you were there, then you ... or, wait, is it ...

Ships August 4, 2009.

Inherent Vice

"We need to have a Twitter strategy," he said.

Twitter seems to be, first and foremost, an online haven where teenagers making drugs can telegraph secret code words to arrange gang fights and orgies. It also functions as a vehicle for teasing peers until they commit suicide.

Swampy, boggy, inescapable connectivity: it seems my middle-class existence has stuck me here.

"Poor folk love their cellphones!" he said.

Samantha Power:

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

NYT on Jan Chipchase:

What amazes Chipchase is not the standard stuff that amazes big multinational corporations looking to turn an ever-bigger profit.

The prostitute ads in the Brazilian phone booth? Those are just names, probably fake names, coupled with real cellphone numbers — lending to Chipchase’s theory that in an increasingly transitory world, the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity.

Guns are the new bubble.

The way Jay Chambers sees it, the semiautomatic weapons in his firearm collection might be the most promising investment in his financial portfolio.

If a federal assault weapons ban passes, he figures his collection could triple in value.

"A guy could easily make a lot of money," says Mr. Chambers, 47 years old, while at Autrey's Armory, a gun store about 20 miles south of Atlanta.

Flipping Guns For Dummies, coming soon to a bestseller list near you.

Recently, from Emergent Chaos:

After jokingly asking "Time to buy gold, huh?", there was a pregnant pause. Then came the response: "Buy ammunition".

Fear and Greed Have Sales of Guns and Ammo Shooting Up

Jim Kunstler:

It's a curious symptom of the consensus trance zombifying the American public and its auditors in the media that something like a "recovery" is now deemed to be underway. And, as events compel me to repeat in this space, it begs the question: recovery to what?

What's "out there" is a panorama of mutually reinforcing critical problems pertaining to how we live on this continent. Like the obesity, heart disease, and diabetes that plague the public, these problems are disorders of lifestyle habits and the only possible "cure" is a comprehensive revision of lifestyle.

It will be interesting to see, for instance, if there is any uproar over the evolving story of Goldman Sachs's latest raid on the US Treasury.

As long as the stock markets seem to rally -- no matter what else is really going on in America -- nobody will pay much attention to the disgusting irregularities.

Since it is that time of year, and I am haunting the gardening shop, one can't fail to notice the many styles of pitchforks for sale.

From 2003, Scott Adams:

PHB, to Dogbert: We need to hire the best marketing expert we can find. Your résumé says you've won the Nobel prize in marketing, and five Olympic medals in the marketing biathlon. What's a marketing biathlon?

Dogbert: You ski up to people who won't buy your crap and you shoot them.

The Coming Siege of Austerity

Stewart Brand:

Job description: I design stuff; I start stuff; I found stuff. On the passport I put “writer.”

Current project: With the Long Now Foundation, I am helping to build a 10,000-year clock inside a mountain in Nevada. We are trying to get people to think long-term, because civilization’s shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems.

From Brand's interview with Freeman Dyson:

We're building a 10,000-year clock, designed by Danny Hillis, and we're figuring out what a 10,000-year library might be good for. If the clock or the library could be useful to things you want to happen in the world, how would you advise them to proceed? For instance, if you want to see humanity move gracefully into space, you have to accept it's going to take a while.

On the Waterfront

Edmund Phelps:

Widespread ignor­ance of the hazards of capitalism has made imprudence in markets and policy neglect all the more likely. Regaining a well-functioning capitalism will require re-education and deep reform.

Well into the 20th century, scholars viewed economic advances as resulting from commercial innovations enabled by the discoveries of scientists - discoveries that come from outside the economy and out of the blue. Why then did capitalist economies benefit more than others?

Friedrich Hayek portrayed a well-functioning capitalist system as a broad-based, bottom-up organism that gives diverse new ideas opportunities to compete for development and, with luck, adoption in the marketplace.

From the outset, the biggest downside was that creative ventures caused uncertainty not only for the entrepreneurs themselves but also for everyone else in the global economy.

Unfortunately, there is still no wide understanding among the public of the benefits that can fairly be credited to capitalism and why these benefits have costs.

Now capitalism is in the midst of its second crisis.

Why did big shareholders not move to stop over-leveraging before it reached dangerous levels? Why did legislators not demand regulatory intervention? The answer, I believe, is that they had no sense of the existing uncertainty.

Over at The Week, Brad DeLong offers a history lesson about The Panic of 1825:

This was the birth of central banking as we know it.

When politicians wash their hands of a financial system in crisis and fail to intervene on a large scale, things do not turn out well.

Uncertainty bedevils the best system