Laura Sydell and Alex Blumberg:

Why would a company rent an office in a tiny town in East Texas, put a nameplate on the door, and leave it completely empty for a year? The answer involves a controversial billionaire physicist in Seattle, a 40 pound cookbook, and a war waging right now, all across the software and tech industries.

The largest patent auction in history: $4.5 billion on patents that these companies almost certainly don't want for their technical secrets. $4.5 billion that won't build anything new, won't bring new products to the shelves, won't open up new factories that can hire people who need jobs. $4.5 billion dollars that adds to the price of every product these companies sell you. $4.5 billion dollars buying arms for an ongoing patent war.

The big companies -- Google, Apple, Microsoft -- will probably survive. The likely casualties are the companies out there now that no one's ever heard of that could one day take their place.

Vanessa Grigoriadis:

The meritocracy wasn't supposed to work this way.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Dave Winer:

That's really what it's about, money ... Because they want the money.

Jules Dupuit:

Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

Charles Moore:

As we have surveyed the Murdoch scandal of the past fortnight, few could deny that it has revealed how an international company has bullied and bought its way to control of party leaderships, police forces and regulatory processes. David Cameron, escaping skilfully from the tight corner into which he had got himself, admitted as much.

Noteworthy:

If you think "Russia" when you hear "oligarchy", think again.

Joe Nocera:

They just want theirs. That is the culture they have created.

Decius:

The American middle class has been thrown under the bus.

Sarah Palin:

The view is so much better from inside the bus than under it.

Julia Werdigier:

Amy Winehouse, the Grammy-award winning singer who has battled addiction problems for years, was found dead on Saturday at her apartment in London, the police said. She was 27.

Amy, from the archive:

We only said good-bye with words
I died a hundred times
You go back to her
And I go back to black

So where's my moral parallel?

Amy Winehouse Found Dead in London

Caren Alpert:

What's in our food?

What's the difference between a bird's-eye view of a remote vegetable crop and a microscopic swath from a pineapple leaf? How distinct is a pile of table salt from miles and miles of icebergs?

As a food lover and a photographer I answer these questions visually. Using scientific laboratory photo equipment, I journey over the surfaces of both organic and processed foods: my own favorites and America's over-indulgences. The closer the lens got, the more I saw food and consumers of food (all of us!) as part of a larger eco-system than mere sustenance.

From the archive, Benoit Mandelbrot on Felice Frankel's Envisioning Science: The Design and Craft of the Science Image:

In the beginning were the image and the eye. Then man-the-scientist became enamored of the word and neglectful of the image. Now the small group of those who fight back welcomes Felice Frankel as a marvelous addition, both as skillful performer and as experienced and patient teacher. Her book is priceless.

My Life with Science, Art and Food | Caren Alpert Fine Art

As is often the case in today's world, snippets of a story are presented with less than complete information and without much context. We are awash in information without context, willful deceptions disguised as opinions, and bombastic coverage of news and events that lacks the nuance and perspective it deserves. An innocuous statement can take on a different meaning without the full context of how and where and when it was said. It's an imperfect art, this reporting business. It's not that you shouldn't believe what you see or read. What is shown and printed is often the truth. But it's only part of the story. The key, for both media and consumer, is to always be aware of that.

Avaya is making it easier for the content/context of any interaction on any channel to be seamlessly transferred to another.

In fining stations for fleeting expletives the FCC has claimed that certain words are in-and-of-themselves indecent without regard to context, such that the f-word immediately and unambiguously evokes its most offensive sexual context when uttered. Broadcasters argue otherwise, noting that the context of fleeting expletives is important in judging indecency, noting that most of the time the words are not intended to refer at all to sexual or excretory function.

Things targeted to a group of friends that have the larger context but are available to the general public without that context can be skewed to a strange point of view.

We hear a lot lately about the aging of the Baby Boom generation, usually in the context of the strain all those old boomers are putting on Social Security and Medicare. But the rapid aging of the American population is good news for lots of industries, including those who make wheelchairs, bifocals and hearing aids. Consumer product strategy (CPS) professionals must leverage context to create and deliver product experiences that enhance the overall perceived value of a product. Men want context for what they buy. That information is now available. It's not, 'I'm wearing these j... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

Ashar Aziz:

The world is in this state of persistent insecurity.

The Economist:

You do not need to look like an animal in order to behave like one.

Dave Johns:

The mother who blames her son's boozebag friends for his wild behavior must face up to the fact that he prefers the fast crowd in the first place.

Bill Saporito:

They are feasting on small and medium-size businesses like wolves on lambs.

Christopher S. Stewart:

The sting was executed flawlessly, with everyone pouncing at once.

Brian Stelter:

Not too long ago, theorists fretted that the Internet was a place where anonymity thrived. Now, it seems, it is the place where anonymity dies.

Sascha Meinrath:

We're going to build a separate infrastructure where the technology is nearly impossible to shut down, to control, to surveil.

James McGirk:

The real currency of the online world is attention. With the proper keywords, information is taken up into automatic readers belonging to some very interesting entities, to the point where there can be real world consequences.

Art Coviello:

We recognize that the increasing frequency and sophistication of cyber attacks generally, and the recent announcements by Lockheed Martin, may reduce some customers' overall risk tolerance.

Steve Grand:

Clouds aren't really things -- instead, it makes more sense to think of them as regions of space in which a cooler climate prevails.

You are like a cloud: Something that persists over long periods, while simultaneously being in flux.

Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you.

Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made.

Roger Highfield:

The reality is that, despite fears that our children are "pumped full of chemicals", everything is made of chemicals.

An exchange:

Ernie: Is there anything fluffier than a cloud?

Big Tom: If there is, I don't want to know about it.

Bryan Sartin:

If you think financially motivated breaches are huge now, just wait another year.

Ed Tom Bell:

You can say it's my job to fight it but I don't know what it is anymore.

More than that, I don't want to know. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He would have to say, okay, I'll be part of this world.

Cordelia Dean:

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

Mark Foulon:

It has become clear that Internet access in itself is a vulnerability that we cannot mitigate. We have tried incremental steps and they have proven insufficient.

Decius:

I said I'd do something about this, and I am.

Fear not:

We're going to be okay, aren't we Papa?
Yes. We are.
And nothing bad is going to happen to us.
That's right.
Because we're carrying the fire.
Yes. Because we're carrying the fire.

Bellovin, Blaze, Diffie, Landau, Neumann, and Rexford:

Architecture matters a lot, and in subtle ways.

Tim O'Reilly:

We need to move away from a Maginot-line like approach where we try to put up walls to keep information from leaking out, and instead assume that most things that used to be private are now knowable via various forms of data mining. Once we do that, we start to engage in a question of what uses are permitted, and what uses are not.

Noam Cohen's friend:

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

Decius:

One must assume that all garbage is monitored by the state. Anything less would be a pre-9/11 mentality.

Charlie Savage:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.

The manual clarifies the definition of who qualifies for extra protection as a legitimate member of the news media in the Internet era: prominent bloggers would count, but not people who have low-profile blogs.

Decius:

My blog post is not important, but it is important that people have a right to blog without worrying about receiving legal threats when they haven't done anything wrong.

Libby Purves:

There is a thrill in switching off the mobile, taking the bus to somewhere without CCTV and paying cash for your tea. You and your innocence can spend an afternoon alone together, unseen by officialdom.

David Sanger and John Markoff:

The International Monetary Fund was hit recently by what computer experts describe as a large and sophisticated cyberattack whose dimensions are still unknown.

The concern about the attack was so significant that the World Bank, an international agency focused on economic development, whose headquarters is across the street from the IMF in downtown Washington, cut the computer link that allows the two institutions to share information.

Undersecretary of Commerce Mark Foulon:

It has become clear that Internet access in itself is a vulnerability that we cannot mitigate. We have tried incremental steps and they have proven insufficient.

Rebecca Brock:

People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything.

Sanger and Markoff:

The fund's database includes communications with national leaders as they negotiate, often behind the scenes, on the terms of international bailouts. Those agreements are, in the words of one fund official, "political dynamite in many countries."

Eric Schmidt:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

Cory Doctorow:

The real reason to wear the mask is to spare others the discomfort of seeing your facial expression ... To make it possible to see without seeing.

Danger Mouse, Norah Jones, Jack White ...

From the Rhapsody review:

The word "prolific" doesn't do Danger Mouse justice. For Rome, the Grammy-winning producer gathered a cast of superstars to capture the mystique of the spaghetti Western: It's a natural progression, as hints of the dusty and desolate sound have popped up in his previous work with Beck, Sparklehorse & David Lynch, and Broken Bells. With help from composer Daniele Luppi, Rome features musicians who played on the original Ennio Morricone scores (how's that for authenticity?) and grants blockbuster starring roles to Jack White (the suave rebel) and Norah Jones (the soulful seductress).

Try track 3, "Morning Fog (Interlude)".

From the archive:

Like a Morricone-style dirge recorded by The Mamas and The Papas, Violent Femmes' cover of Gnarls Barkley's infamous "Crazy" is like nothing you've heard from the legendary alt-rock trio before. Their oft-imitated folk-punk sound is flavored with surf-rock guitar and Theremin, creating a tranquility that is somber and otherworldly.

A Word:

I never had this problem
with nobody in the government
I guess I always figured
they never mean what they meant
and GOD help us all
not to be so stone surprised
when we wake up in the stars
with the skies in our eyes
if we keep tellin'
lies lies lies

The Onion:

After nearly four months of frank, honest, and open dialogue about the failing economy, a weary U.S. populace announced this week that it is once again ready to be lied to about the current state of the financial system.

ROME

Simon Johnson, in May 2009:

The conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump "cannot be as bad as the Great Depression."

This view is wrong.

Pete Flint, of Trulia:

There was a time when owning a home was a symbol you had made it. Now it's O.K. not to own.

Adam Lyons, a manager at IBM:

I don't think we're ever going to see the prosperity our parents did.

David Streitfeld:

Housing is locked in a downward spiral, industry analysts say, not only because so many people are blocked from the market, but because even those who are solvent are opting out.

The market's persistent weakness runs the risk of feeding on itself. Buyers are staying away despite the lowest interest rates and the highest affordability levels in many years, which in turn prompts others to hesitate.

Decius:

No one wants to try to catch a falling knife.

Streitfeld:

Susan Lindsey, a San Diego software programmer, was once eagerly waiting for the housing market to crash.

With prices now down by a third, however, she is content to stay in her $2,500-a-month rental. She prefers to invest in gold, which she has been buying since 2003.

w1ld:

Got gold?

Chris Walsh:

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

New Low in House Prices