There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.
The War as We Saw It
Topic: War on Terrorism
11:15 pm EDT, Sep 13, 2007
This essay is excellent and should be considered required reading. Now it is even more heartbreaking than it was last month, as two of its authors were KIA on Monday.
What soldiers call the “battle space”... is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army ...
In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear ...
With a 98% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, King of Kong is a must-see film. Critics call it "improbably compelling, stupendously and wildly entertaining, madly arresting, hilarious and moving, taught, tense, fascinating, rousing, and laugh-out-loud funny."
As Decius said, it's pretty much about how everything everywhere actually works. I saw this on the festival circuit earlier this year; it won the best documentary award at IFF Boston.
Mitchell, 37, says he only counts his scores if they're played in a public venue, and he won't say if he can beat his cross-country competitor. He'll only say that he's planning something big and unprecedented in response to Wiebe's win.
If there's one thing to know about Billy Mitchell, it's that he does not disappoint.
The Infallible Original Derivative of the Impossibly Dreamy Work of Man
Topic: Society
9:34 am EDT, Sep 9, 2007
Through the Looking Glass:
Every hair is being numbered -- eBay has every grain of sand. eBay is serving this very, very powerful function which nobody ever intended for it. eBay in the hands of humanity is sorting every last Dick Tracy wrist radio cereal premium sticker that ever existed. It's like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement.
"For the Love of God":
It's said that the only thing an auction record proves is the existence of two dumb rich guys, competing to pay more for something than anyone else on the planet has ever thought it was worth.
Johnny Cash's dream:
I'm gonna kneel and pray everyday Lest I should become vain along the way I'm just an old chunk of coal, now Lord But I'm gonna be a diamond some day ... I'm gonna be the World's best friend I'm gonna go around shaking everybody's hand Hey, I'm gonna be the cotton-pickin' Rage of the Age I'm gonna be a diamond some day
Consider first a Baptist school in Texas whose description of a geometry course begins:
Students will examine the nature of God as they progress in their understanding of mathematics. Students will understand the absolute consistency of mathematical principles and know that God was the inventor of that consistency. They will see God's nature revealed in the order and precision as they review foundational concepts while being able to demonstrate geometric thinking and spatial reasoning. The study of the basics of geometry through making and testing conjectures regarding mathematical and real-world patterns will allow the students to understand the absolute consistency of God as seen in the geometric principles he created.
Defender of the Faith?
About two-thirds of the way into “Moses and Monotheism”, Freud makes a point that is simple and rather profound — the sort of point that Freud at his best excels in making. Judaism’s distinction as a faith, he says, comes from its commitment to belief in an invisible God, and from this commitment, many consequential things follow. Freud argues that taking God i... [ Read More (0.6k in body) ]
The third season is now available. Add it to your Netflix queue today!
A remake of the hit 2001 BBC TV series The Office (2001), this is a mockumentary that documents the exploits of a paper supply company in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Made up of head chief Michael Scott, a harmlessly deluded and ignorantly insensitive boss who cares about the welfare of his employees while trying to put his own spin on company policy. With an office including the likes of various peers who have their own hangups, The Office (2005) takes a look at the lives of its co-workers: bored but talented salesman Jim, his mildly sociopathic, butt kissing enemy Dwight, mildly righteous receptionist Pam, and indifferent temp Ryan.
Chimpanzees are our biological relatives. Never have the similarities between simians and humans been as amusingly and brilliantly captured as in “Monkey Portraits.” Jill Greenberg has spent 15 years photographing celebrities--from Clint Eastwood to Drew Barrymore--for leading publications, but has recently focused on actors of a different sort. She has been photographing monkeys and apes, many of whom have appeared on film or in television shows. Her intimate portraits of these animals convey a startling range of emotions and personalities, and evoke an almost eerie sense of recognition. These anthropomorphic photographs will cause you to wonder just how different we truly are.
The gallery is online, as well. (Be sure to check out all three pages of the gallery.) Her "End Times" gallery is also available online.
Rick Rubin says that the future of the industry is a subscription model.
After you've finished reading the Rick Rubin profile, consider the following from the invaluable Memestreams archive:
Larry Lessig asserts that over time, more and more people will opt to pay for music subscription services.
Steve Jobs: "We told the record companies the music subscription services they were pushing were going to fail. People don't want to buy their music as a subscription."
It's all part of the deal. Think of it as built-in obsolescence ...
Steve Jobs is dead wrong about subscription based services. There is a real business there.
Apple has made a very serious strategic error here that will not only undue their present leadership role in this space, but which damages the investments that their customers have made.
If you can get to the point where a lot of people are listening to your music without really needing lots of capital, the question is whether you'll need the music industry when you get there.
2007 has seen the two lowest-selling No. 1 albums since data began being kept.
Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long ...
Real's Rhapsody music service is now available as a web service. So those of you who have been avoiding it no longer have an excuse!
The problem is that Steve Jobs ignores the music-as-service model ...
There is simply no good reason why you should ever walk out of Tower Records empty handed because the clerk said, "we don't have that in stock, but we could order it for you and have it here in seven to ten business days."
There is a world of difference between subscribing to XM or Sirius and subscribing to Rhapsody.
Real hopes that exposing consumers to digital music though the relatively familiar pay-per-song model will ultimately whet appetites for the all-you-can-eat model of its $10 per month Rhapsody service.
Fortune: Rhapsody, not iTunes, in my opinion, is the future of music.
In terms of value proposition, there can be no comparison; Rhapsody comes out leaps and bounds ahead.
In May, Rick Rubin, who resembles a medium-size bear with a long, gray beard, officially became co-head of Columbia Records. They didn't want him to punch a clock. They wanted him to save the company. And just maybe the record business.
David Geffen: "... it's no longer about making music, it's all about how to sell music."
Rubin: "There's just a natural human element to a great song that feels immediately satisfying."
"For some reason, most people will write 10 songs and think, That's enough for a record, I'm done. When they play the songs for me, invariably the last two songs they've written are the best. I'll then say, 'You have two songs, go back and write eight more.'"
"What's important now is to find music that's timeless."
"The kids all said the biggest thing in their life is word of mouth. That's how they hear about music, bands, everything."
"So many of the decisions at these companies are not about the music. They are shortsighted and desperate. For so long, the record industry had control. But now that monopoly has ended, they don't know what to do. I thought it would be an interesting challenge."
"Columbia is stuck in the dark ages. I have great confidence that we will have the best record company in the industry, but the reality is, in today's world, we might have the best dinosaur. Until a new model is agreed upon and rolling, we can be the best at the existing paradigm, but until the paradigm shifts, it's going to be a declining business. This model is done."
The "word of mouth" department will spread commissioned buzz through chat rooms across the planet and through old-fashioned human interaction.
Rick Rubin says that the future of the industry is a subscription model.
"My primary asset is I know when I like something or not. It always comes down to taste."
Computer security has recently imported a lot of ideas from economics, psychology and sociology, leading to fresh insights and new tools.
I will describe one thread of research that draws together techniques from fields as diverse as signals intelligence and sociology to search for artificial communities.
Evildoers online divide roughly into two categories - those who don't want their websites to be found, such as phishermen, and those who do. The latter category runs from fake escrow sites through dodgy stores to postmodern Ponzi schemes. A few of them buy ads, but many set up fake communities in the hope of having victims driven to their sites for free. How can these reputation thieves be detected?
Some of our work in security economics and social networking may give an insight into the practical effects of network topology. These tie up in various ways with traffic analysis, long used by the signals intelligence agencies which trawl the airwaves and networks looking for interesting targets. I'll describe a number of dubious business enterprises we've unearthed.
Recent advances in algorithms, such as Newman's modularity matrix, have increased the robustness of covert community detection. But much scope remains for wrongdoers to hide themselves better as they become topologically aware; we can expect attack and defence to go through several rounds of coevolution.
I'll therefore end up by talking about some strategic issues, such as the extent to which search engines and other service providers could, or should, share information in the interests of wickedness detection.
Yet for many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end ofa more genteel era, when we all had time to share.
Following the thread:
The (somewhat dubious) prime symbol of academic knowledge, and more-or-less exclusively masculine educational attainments, was the Classical languages Greek and Latin, to which a great deal of time was devoted in "genteel" boys' education, but which few women studied.
The sheer amount of sewing done by gentlewomen in those days sometimes takes us moderns aback, but it would probably generally be a mistake to view it either as merely constant joyless toiling, or as young ladies turning out highly embroidered ornamental knicknacks to show off their elegant but meaningless accomplishments. Sewing was something to do (during the long hours at home) that often had great practical utility, and that wasn't greatly mentally taxing, and could be done sitting down while engaging in light conversation, or listening to a novel being read.
For women of the "genteel" classes the goal of non-domestic education was thus often the acquisition of "accomplishments", such as the ability to draw, sing, play music, or speak modern (i.e. non-Classical) languages (generally French and Italian). Though it was not usually stated with such open cynicism, the purpose of such accomplishments was often only to attract a husband; so that these skills then tended to be neglected after marriage.
Customer at Market in Springfield Cuts Off His Hand
Topic: Health and Wellness
8:27 pm EDT, Aug 28, 2007
This story is over a year old, but for some reason the New Yorker decided to mention it last week. I now pass it along to you.
Igbal Asghar reached across the counter at Super Halal Meat market and passed two butchered chickens to the man with the familiar face. Then he ducked into the walk-in freezer to fetch the customer's second order, goat meat.
When the butcher stepped out seconds later, the customer's severed left hand lay on the floor by the meat saw, Asghar said. The customer ran down the Springfield store's center aisle and into the front parking lot, leaving a trail of blood and yelling repeatedly that he was "not a terrorist." Outside, another witness said, the man announced that he had used the meat saw to cut off his hand "for Allah."
If you are in the general area, I recommend Kabob Palace in Crystal City. I have eaten there more than once and have never seen anyone leave the restaurant without their left hand. Or their right hand, for that matter.
