NYT pays tribute to Joybubbles.

The boy decided to talk back to the phone. Not to other people, not right away: to the phone line itself, and in its own language. At 7, with his perfectly pitched ear, he heard through the receiver the tone that controlled long-distance connections, 2,600 cycles per second. “I started whistling along with it,” he said, “and all of a sudden the circuit cut off, and I did it again, and it cut off again. And gradually . . . I figured out — back in the mid-’50s — just how to do it.”

Dial-Tone Phreak: Joybubbles | The Lives They Lived

Pakistani former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated in a suicide attack.

BBC NEWS | World | South Asia | Benazir Bhutto killed in attack

Quietly, insiders are perusing an obscure paper by Fed staffers David Small and Jim Clouse. It explores what can be done under the Federal Reserve Act when all else fails.

"The kind of upheaval observed in the international money markets over the past few months has never been witnessed in history," says Thomas Jordan, a Swiss central bank governor.

The ECB's little secret is that it must never allow a Northern Rock failure in the eurozone because this would expose the reality that there is no EU treasury and no EU lender of last resort behind the system.

Crisis may make 1929 look a 'walk in the park'

In a private session with lawmakers, ... Mr. Bush conceded the war is "sapping our soul," but he said he intended to pursue his plan to send more troops to Iraq.

America will be a more secure country once it discards the notion that secrecy is equal to strength.

If you consider the motivation and methods behind the attacks of September 11th to be mainly a puzzle, for instance, then the logical response is to increase the collection of intelligence, recruit more spies, add to the volume of information we have about Al Qaeda. If you consider September 11th a mystery, though, you’d have to wonder whether adding to the volume of information will only make things worse. You’d want to improve the analysis within the intelligence community; you’d want more thoughtful and skeptical people with the skills to look more closely at what we already know about Al Qaeda. You’d want to send the counterterrorism team from the CIA on a golfing trip twice a month with the counterterrorism teams from the FBI and the NSA and the Defense Department, so they could get to know one another and compare notes.

Dive into the sea, or stay away.
-- Nizar Qabbani

This is no less than a clash of civilizations -- the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both. It is crucially important that we on our side should not be provoked into an equally historic but also equally irrational reaction against that rival.

“We’re all flabbergasted,” one European diplomat said of the report generally.

The country is drifting "towards a warlord state, along a Basra model, with power devolved to local militias, gangs, tribes, and power-brokers, with a purely nominal central state."

“No one can stop it,” Abu Ali said. “Corruption runs from top to bottom.”

"We wanted the best, but it turned out as always."
-- Viktor Chernomyrdin, Russian prime minister, 1992-1998; now, a billionaire oligarch

"Mom, we killed women on the street today. We killed kids on bikes. We had no choice."

Their plans may have been dreamy. But at least, they had plans.

He called her "an incompetent fool," but said he would vote for her anyway.

Our first sight of death was a man and his wife both ripped open and dismembered, their intestines strewn across shattered boxes of candy bars.

Many people will use this terrible tragedy as an excuse to put through a political agenda other than my own. This tawdry abuse of human suffering for political gain sickens me to the core of my being.

"Children in the back seat, lower suspicion, we let it move through," Barbero said. "They parked the vehicle, the adults run out and detonate it with the children in the back."

We sign these treaties to protect us from ourselves, not from them.

This change looks reasonable at first, but it could create huge long-term security risks for the United States.

Romney is fond of PowerPoint and terms like "strategic audits" and "wow moments."

People do not like to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility and trust.

He was overwhelmed by what he saw at a Houston supermarket, by the kaleidoscopic variety of meats and vegetables available to ordinary Americans.

"We will disrupt their workday with a mildly offensive blinking neon light!"
"Death to America!!!!"
"Death to America!!!!"

For many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

Back in the day, I was in Jersey. I don't know if it was the center of the BBS world; it was probably the ass-end of it, like it was of everything else. But it felt like the center.

Social networks conceal a trivialization of interaction ... at a time when we need discussion and argument to be more effective than ever.

Call it stalking, procrastinating or friend collecting, it doesn't build real connections.

... Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs.

What was once the mark of utter uncoolness, a veritable byword of selling out, has become the norm.

What the company is trying to do is prevent the passengers who can pay the second-class fare from traveling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich ... And it is again for the same reason that the companies, having proved almost cruel to the third-class passengers and mean to the second-class ones, become lavish in dealing with first-class customers. Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

It's the best kind of pop album imaginable.

Rick Rubin says that the future of the industry is a subscription model.

Gray matter is the new black of the hip social scene.

Cable news has a habit of treating viewers like children on a long car trip.

Everyone else started with the bloody diarrhea. Maybe that was the wrong way to think about it.

In my opinion, the double helix is much too simple to be the secret of life. ... Replication is clean while metabolism is messy. By excluding messiness, they excluded the essence of life.

Failure is an essential part of the process. "The way you say this is: 'Please fail very quickly -- so that you can try again'," says Mr Schmidt.

The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

Any good programmer in a large organization is going to be at odds with it, because organizations are designed to prevent what programmers strive for.

“Many times the problems you see that you try to correct are not the root causes of the problem,” he said.

"A lot of people who are not conventional are not serious. But the real breakthroughs in science are made by serious thinkers who are willing to work on research areas that people think are too controversial or too implausible."

“Think of the kids you don’t have,” Mr. Levchin quoted them as saying. “Think of your unborn grandkids.”

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

Ninety percent of the time things will turn out worse than you expect. The other 10 percent of the time you had no right to expect so much.

"This enemy is better networked than we are.”

I predict that the domestication of biotechnology will dominate our lives during the next fifty years at least as much as the domestication of computers has dominated our lives during the previous fifty years.

"The social dimension turns out to be as essential as the scientific."

“You gave your life to become the person you are right now. Was it worth it?”

In every age, taboo questions raise our blood pressure and threaten moral panic. But we cannot be afraid to answer them.

Unlike baby mammals, a meme cannot expect to go from conception to birth in a standard, more or less fixed period of time. Some memes are born immediately, whereas others may linger in gestation for years on end. Because prenatal care is so poor in the meme world, miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant mortality rates are quite high. Even worse, abortion and infanticide of new memes are commonplace in some quarters.

The idea of peacefully replacing our ruler through a legal process is still a wild, alien thought for us. The powers-that-be are above the law and they're unchangeable by law. Overthrowing them is something we understand. But at the moment, we don't want to. We've had quite enough revolution.

The process of tying two items together is the important thing.

Ideas don't explode; they subvert. They take their time. And because they change the way we think, they are less visible than a newly paved national highway or the advent of wall-sized television screens. After a while, someone notices that we're not thinking about things the way our parents did.

Some ideas are reeled into our mind wrapped up in facts; and some ideas burst upon us naked without the slightest evidence they could be true but with all the conviction they are.

From curious children, hackers were born.

The computer world is like an intellectual Wild West, in which you can shoot anyone you wish with your ideas, if you're willing to risk the consequences.

The idea was to erect an island of intellectual freedom where young people could probe and question and develop their own ideas before reality closed in and everybody went to work for a private equity firm.

A good idea that doesn't happen is no idea at all.
-- Louis Kahn

Ideas are abstract. They become books only when they are clothed with people and narrative.
--V.S. Naipaul

Learning history isn't mostly about "a-ha moments." It's about laboring through a lot of information and ideas that are often less than magical. Therein lies the real trouble. Learning is labor. We're selling the fantasy that technology can change that. It can't. No technology ever has. Gutenberg's press only made it easier to print books, not easier to read and understand them.
-- Peter Berger, The land of iPods and honey

SFJ:

This is all vaguely unexpected stuff, perhaps, but, over the weekend, things got positively French.

Great albums, BTW.

La Vie

Are We in a Recession?

Six experts assess the current state and forecast the future direction of the American economy.

Here's Morgan Stanley's Stephen Roach:

Home prices are likely to fall for the nation as a whole in 2008, the first such occurrence since 1933.

Here is Laura Tyson, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors:

The economy faces a vicious downward spiral of foreclosures, declining property values and mounting losses on mortgage-backed securities and related financial assets.

... huge waves of foreclosures will depress the price of residential real estate still further. Plummeting real estate values and escalating foreclosures will cause further losses on mortgage-related securities and will further burden American consumers already dealing with higher energy prices and substantial debt.

Here's the current president of NBER:

There is a substantial risk of a recession in 2008.

More:

Even if the economy avoids a recession, the road ahead will be rocky.

And more:

Easy money, it seems, was an illusion. Society was not so rich as it seemed.

You Can Almost Hear It Pop