Today's the day for Byrne's new album.

Brian Eno and I recently finished our first collaboration in about 30 years. The name of the new record is Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. For the most part, Brian did the music and I wrote some tunes, words and sang. It's familiar but completely new as well. We're pretty excited.

The album is available exclusively from this Web site. You can stream all of the songs for free and purchase it in a variety of digital and physical formats, including a limited edition Deluxe Package designed by Stefan Sagmeister. All formats can be downloaded immediately and physical CDs will be shipped in the Fall.

David Byrne
Midtown

They'll be at the Chastain Park Amphitheater on September 20.

From the archive:

The symphony of Manhattan Island, composed and performed fortissimo daily by garbage trucks, car speakers, I-beam bolters, bus brakes, warped manhole covers, knocking radiators, people yelling from high windows and the blaring television that now greets you in the back of a taxi, is the kind of music people would pay good money to be able to silence, if only there were a switch.

The other day, in a paint-peeling hangar of a room at the foot of the island, David Byrne, the artist and musician, placed his finger on a switch that did exactly the opposite: it made such music on purpose.

David Byrne & Brian Eno - Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

Gape upon the greatness that once was presidential campaign slander ... something old and something new — but none of it was impromptu ...

Money and vision are inseparable. The enduring question is where the money would come from ... an exclusive enclave on the outskirts of Islamabad ... the mega-budget tent-pole movies ... looming above the ocean, like dusty mushrooms ...

Texas is going through a dry spell ... Effective government was never this region's strong suit.

The Chinese must not understand the cheesy side of capitalism yet, because someone has clearly missed a big chance to cash in.

He has become a middle-management cultural icon -- vulgar, puerile and needlessly gross, a feisty and jovial mood -- who has been exceedingly gracious with his valuable time. The hero, in his porn days, had "buttocks ripe like the plump half-melons for which Japanese businessmen will pay a small fortune." All of this was the result of neglect that was politely called deferred maintenance. Old-school journalists may bemoan the changes, but viewers do not necessarily suffer. My skin was as soft and clean as undisturbed yogurt.

Mr. Schmidt was impressed by Mr. Obama. "He listened more than he talked, which is always a good thing," Mr. Schmidt says. "He clearly sees himself as a clever synthesizer of other people's ideas. And I think that is an important skill in a president."

Or, in the blunter words of Gov. Phil Bredesen, Democrat of Tennessee: "Instead of giving big speeches at big stadiums, he needs to give ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

What reflects the human-size soap opera that is the life of a real teenager are all the casually stinging asides, the surge and abrupt decline of social power, the unforgivable betrayals and gnawing insecurities that the kids experience.

There is rage. And most important, there are rules.

This is like a parking lot. But it is what it is.

"Students are desperate for hands-on experience," says Neil Gershenfeld.

"All I know is, there is water where it didn't used to be."

"This new reality," she added, "is a lot more pleasant."

She knew how to exploit a rich idea.

"I didn't think it was possible for her to do it, or anyone to do it, for an entire year."

We Americans demand too much from our athletes, particularly our girls.

"Only the real special ones can do this kind of thing."

They blame "imperfect" systems for monitoring such problems.

And then there are the culprits of a more conceptual kind.

Instead, we leap at the chance to deem someone — anyone — responsible.

Parents were alarmed. Blogs buzzed.

"You can't stop them and ask them what their names are."

"The consensus was that we should just let it peter out," he said.

School is school, you know. "Looters are looters," said Pyotr Taslagan.

It's not the problem, and it's not the answer.

The hulking timbers illustrate Gehry's obsession with "big wood" ... which probably says more about ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

She compared herself to a "plump caterpillar" waiting to break free of its cocoon.

Jenny has had a hard life, even by elephant standards. Now, Jenny has become the focus of a boisterous debate about what to do with an aging elephant with a troubled mind.

Where they stopped, they were met by throngs of people who crowded at the windows, hoping to be given a plastic bag that included breads, sausage and canned goods.

"She worried about being shlumpy, and the word 'shlumpadinka' was thrown around a lot."

That could happen if passengers reach a personal tipping point.

Some, though appalled, emphasize that there is a danger in opting out as well.

The most poignant scene was the triple burial of a petite woman lying on her side, facing two young children.

So the converse is clearly not a good idea either.

Is the oil business the new whaling business? And, if so, is that a good sign or a troubling one?

What about women’s gymnastics?

The performances are incredible and fearless, but it isn’t the athleticism that draws me in.

It’s not that they tippy-toe around either.

Mothers living near highways are more likely to give birth to preterm or low-birth-weight babies, but contrary to previous studies it found the association only in wealthy neighborhoods.

But minor drama is the lifeblood of suburbs.

Can all these often contradictory reports be right? Yes.

Who is buying Zunes, and why?

There are even those who suggest humanity should collectively decide to turn away from some new technologies as inherently dangerous.

And those who are obsessed have a whole new range of technological tools to indulge their obsession.

“Design stupidly produces more things, and for years I’ve spoken about the importance of living with fewer things. But my position is a little ambiguous.”

Americans are as addicted to bandwidth as they are to oil. The first step is facing the problem.

Elvis Presley’s most treasured performance costume, a peacock jumpsuit, was sold to an unidentified bidder on gottahaveit.com for $300,000. The white costume is decorated with an embroidered blue-and-gold peacock emblazoned on the back, with blue peacock feathers trailing down both flared pants legs.

Yes! That’s what I was experiencing, too. Those garish colors, that craziness and freedom, that painfully stark clarity about what was important and what was not.

One mother says: “We shouldn’t blame the Americans for everything. There is something wrong with us too.”

The American video game ... [ Read More (0.7k in body) ]

Atlanta is just as hosed as Georgia.

The Web site of the president of Georgia, the small nation that is battling Russian forces over a breakaway enclave, was moved to a US hosting facility this weekend after allegedly being attacked by Russian hackers.

Georgian president's Web site moves to Atlanta

Jerome Groopman:

“There are now a growing number of reports of cases of infections caused by gram-negative organisms for which no adequate therapeutic options exist,” Giske and his colleagues wrote. “This return to the preantibiotic era has become a reality in many parts of the world.”

A recent assessment of progress in the field, from UCLA, concluded, “FDA approval of new antibacterial agents decreased by 56 per cent over the past 20 years (1998-2002 vs. 1983-1987),” noting that, in the researchers’ projection of future development only six of the five hundred and six drugs currently being developed were new antibacterial agents. Drug companies are looking for blockbuster therapies that must be taken daily for decades, drugs like Lipitor, for high cholesterol, or Zyprexa, for psychiatric disorders, used by millions of people and generating many billions of dollars each year. Antibiotics are used to treat infections, and are therefore prescribed only for days or weeks. (The exception is the use of antibiotics in livestock, which is both a profit-driver and a potential cause of antibiotic resistance.)

From the archive:

What, at bottom, is a toilet?

Eating meat, something I have always enjoyed doing, has become problematic in recent years. Though beef consumption spiked upward during the flush 90's, the longer-term trend is down, and many people will tell you they no longer eat the stuff. Inevitably they'll bring up mad-cow disease (and the accompanying revelation that industrial agriculture has transformed these ruminants into carnivores -- indeed, into cannibals). They might mention their concerns about E. coli contamination or antibiotics in the feed.

The urbanization of the world's livestock is a fairly recent historical development, so it makes a certain sense that cow towns like Poky Feeders would recall human cities several centuries ago. As in 14th-century London, the metropolitan digestion remains vividly on display: the foodstuffs coming in, the waste streaming out. Similarly, there is the crowding together of recent arrivals from who knows where, combined with a lack of modern sanitation. This combination has always been a recipe for disease; the only reason contemporary animal cities aren't as plague-ridden as their medieval counterparts is a single historical anomaly: the modern antibiotic.

Forgetting, or willed ignorance, is the preferred strategy of many beef eaters, a strategy abetted by the industry.

In all his speeches, John McCain urges ... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

Superbugs

I've rarely felt compelled to award a Gold Star to a Comment in the New Yorker. But this latest piece by Elizabeth Kolbert earns it.

High energy costs are here to stay. People need to cowboy up and accept reality.

How important is it for candidates to tell the truth? Throughout his long career in politics, McCain, who called his PAC Straight Talk America, has presented frankness as his fundamental virtue. If his positions—on campaign finance, on immigration reform, on the Bush tax cuts—were unpopular with either the White House or the Republican Party faithful, that just showed that he was willing to tackle the tough issues. When his campaign very nearly collapsed and then revived, in December, McCain attributed his rally not to the fact that voters liked what he was saying but to the fact that they didn’t. “I’ve been telling people the truth, whether I thought that’s what they wanted or not,” he said. After his crucial victory in New Hampshire, in January, he again credited his candor: “I went to the people of New Hampshire to tell them the truth. Sometimes I told them what they wanted to know, sometimes I told them what they didn’t want to know.”

The past few weeks have seen a change in McCain. He has hired new advisers, and with them he seems to have worked out a new approach. He is no longer telling the sorts of hard truths that people would prefer not to confront, or even half-truths that they might find vaguely discomfiting. Instead, he’s opted out of truth altogether. “Well, that certainly didn’t take long,” the Times observed.

Of course, public-opinion surveys do not alter the underlying reality. The Department of Energy estimates that there are eighteen billion barrels of technically recoverable oil in offshore areas of the continental United States that are now closed to drilling. This sounds like a lot, until you consider that oil is a globally traded commodity and that, at current rates of consumption, eighteen billion barrels would satisfy less than seven months of global demand. A D.O.E. report issued last year predicted that it would take two decades for drilling in restricted areas to have a noticeable effect on domestic production, and that, even then, “because oil prices are determined on the international market,” the impact on fuel costs would be “insignificant.” Just a few months ago, McCain himself noted that offshore resources “would take years to develop.” As the oilman turned wind farmer T. Boone Pickens has observed, “This is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of.”

Recent history suggests that Presidential campaigns don’t reward integrity; the candidate who refuses to compromise his principles is unlikely to have a chance to act on them. Still, McCain’s slide is saddening. That he has sunk to the level of “Pump” a full month before Labor Day really doesn’t leave him—or the race—far to go.

Changing Lanes

A federal appeals court in California is reviewing a lower court's definition of "interception" in the digital age.

The case, Bunnell v. Motion Picture Association of America, involves a hacker who in 2005 broke into a file-sharing company's server and obtained copies of company e-mails as they were being transmitted. He then e-mailed 34 pages of the documents to an MPAA executive, who paid the hacker $15,000 for the job, according to court documents.

The issue boils down to the judicial definition of an intercept in the electronic age, in which packets of data move from server to server, alighting for milliseconds before speeding onward. The ruling applies only to the 9th District, which includes California and other Western states, but could influence other courts around the country.

In August 2007, Judge Florence-Marie Cooper, in the Central District of California, ruled that the alleged hacker, Rob Anderson, had not intercepted the e-mails in violation of the 1968 Wiretap Act because they were technically in storage, if only for a few instants, instead of in transmission.

The redacted brief can be found here. Here is a story from CNET News on the appeal. See also, EFF's amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs-appellants.

"It could really gut the wiretapping laws," said Orin S. Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and expert on surveillance law. "The government could go to your Internet service provider and say, 'Copy all of your e-mail, but make the copy a millisecond after the email arrives,' and it would not be a wiretap."

E-Mail Hacking Case Could Redefine Online Privacy

The engineering enterprise is a pillar of U.S. national and homeland security, economic vitality, and innovation. But many engineering tasks can now be performed anywhere in the world. The emergence of offshoring the transfer of work from the United States to affiliated and unaffiliated entities abroad has raised concerns about the impacts of globalization.

The Offshoring of Engineering helps to answer many questions about the scope, composition, and motivation for offshoring and considers the implications for the future of U.S. engineering practice, labor markets, education, and research. This book examines trends and impacts from a broad perspective and in six specific industries software, semiconductors, personal computer manufacturing, construction engineering and services, automobiles, and pharmaceuticals.

The Offshoring of Engineering will be of great interest to engineers, engineering professors and deans, and policy makers, as well as people outside the engineering community who are concerned with sustaining and strengthening U.S. engineering capabilities in support of homeland security, economic vitality, and innovation.

The executive summary begins:

Spurred in part by a decades-long decline in manufacturing employment, the implications of globalization for the United States are a source of considerable debate. The emergence of "offshoring" -- the transfer of work from the United States to affiliated and unaffiliated entities abroad -- has raised additional concerns about the impacts of globalization. Among the occupations subject to offshoring are highly paid professions, including engineering, that are essential to US technological progress, economic growth, and national security.

The National Academy of Engineering recognizes that offshoring raises significant challenges not only for engineers themselves, but also for industry, educational institutions, government, and professional societies. Many engineering tasks can now be performed anywhere in the world by qualified professionals with access to appropriate connectivity. To sustain and strength US engineering capabilities in this new environment, the United States may need to consider new approaches to education, career development, management, and policy, and make changes where appropriate.

The Offshoring of Engineering: Facts, Unknowns, and Potential Implications