The global order is changing. The 21st century will be marked by many competing sources of global power. Across politics, economics, culture, military strength, and more, a new group of countries has growing influence over the future of the world.

Rising Powers: The New Global Reality is a Stanley Foundation project designed to raise awareness, motivate new thinking, and ultimately improve US foreign policy regarding this global transformation. Our aim is to discuss several of the countries challenging the global order, major issues which cut across national boundaries, and how all of this will impact American lives.

As this new world unfolds, America will increasingly need other nations, and they will need us in order to build a better future. Leadership and cooperation in this situation require understanding the world as it really exists.

Rising Powers: The New Global Reality

Coming this Christmas, starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. A trailer is now available.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Neal Stephenson delivered a talk entitled The Fork: Science Fiction versus Mundane Culture at Gresham College.

The Fork: Science Fiction versus Mundane Culture

Jack M. Balkin wrote:

Sandy Levinson and I have noted previously that we are in the midst of the creation of a National Surveillance State, which is the logical successor to the National Security State ...

The larger point is that two parties are not in fact dividing over the issue of Executive power. Both parties seem to like more and more executive power just fine. They just have adopted different ways of achieving it. One can expect far more Congressional cooperation if a Democratic Congress is teamed with a Democratic President. The effective result may not be less Presidential power to run the National Surveillance State. It may be in fact be more.

Decius wrote:

Much of this commentary is spot on.

Indeed, this was clear in 2005, when Thomas Powers wrote:

About the failure everyone now agrees. But what was the problem? And what should be done to make us safe?

It wasn't respect for the Constitution that kept the NSA from reading the "Tomorrow is zero hour" message until the day after the disaster. It was lack of translators. To meet that kind of problem, the Comint professionals have a default solution: more. Not just more Arab linguists but more of everything -- more analysts, more polygraph examiners and security guards, more freedom to listen in on more people, more listening posts, more coverage, more secrecy.

Is more what we really need?

In my opinion not.

But running spies is not the NSA's job. Listening is, and more listening is what the NSA knows how to organize, more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get.

RE: Balkinization: The new FISA law and rise of the Surveillance State

Tracking who's hot and who's not presents an algorithmic challenge

The Britney Spears Problem » American Scientist

From a March 6, 2001, transcript of an online chat between Bernd-Jürgen Brandes (cator99) and Armin Meiwes (antrophagus):

cator99: I’m in telecommunications

antrophagus: Oh, that sounds interesting

cator99: I believe you

...

antrophagus: It’s only a few days until March 9

cator99: Still, I would have rather met you yesterday and felt your teeth

antrophagus: One can’t have everything. There’s still some time before you really feel my teeth

From the archive:

In all his speeches, John McCain urges Americans to make sacrifices for a country that is both “an idea and a cause”.

He is not asking them to suffer anything he would not suffer himself.

But many voters would rather not suffer at all.

More on suffering:

In the 21st century, we "shy away from death," and we tend to think of a good death as a sudden one.

Not so in the 19th century. Dying well meant having time to assess your spiritual state and say goodbye -- which is difficult to do if you're killed in battle.

Continuing:

According to one who was present, Churchill suddenly blurted out: "Are we animals? Are we taking this too far?"

Bush: first of all, we have said that whatever we do ... will be legal.

My dinner with antrophagus

I once decided it would be a good idea to name a bar in San Antonio “The Basement” so tour guides at the Alamo actually have an answer when jokesters ask where the basement is. But it turns out there actually is a bar in San Antonio called The Basement. This time I’ve got a name for a bar that doesn’t seem to exist already as far as my Google Search can tell (I’m sure someone will tell me if I’m wrong). This bar would probably best be located in Silicon Valley: "The Progress Bar".

A while back, a group of us joked about opening a restaurant called The Random Wok. Nominally, it's a Chinese restaurant, but there is no menu, and there are no waitstaff to take your order. Instead, you walk in and sit down at a table, any table. People emerge from the kitchen at unpredictable intervals, arbitrarily carrying trays of unspecified foods to randomly selected tables. It's like a cross between dim sum and churrascaria, except that both the food and the service are systematically unsystematic.

Ironic Sans: Idea: A Bar in Silicon Valley

It's trendy now, but will hype and gimmickry (bacon cocktails, anyone?) spoil the great salty meat?

Is bacon the next great American food trend?

Now it’s true. The roadtrip is already a forgotten concept like a drive-in movie. And there’s no other American experience that can take its place.

Rules for an American Fantasy Road Trip

Vizuality is visual literacy. In theory, we should be able to annotate, reference and hyperlink moving images as easily as we do text. But all that is hard to do that now. Just try hyperlinking to a specific frame in a movie. You are lucky to be able to link to a small clip. What you'd really like to do is link to an object within a frame as it persists over a scene. Let's say you want to link to a fez in a scene from Casablanca. No one can't do that now.

But we should be able to do that. If we had the tools of vizuality to the same degree we have tools of literacy - like cut and paste, footnotes, summaries, dictionaries and the like -- creating a link to a fez or bow tie in a film or video would be no problem.

Motion pictures are on their way to become equally ubiquitous. With the arrival of cheap organic LEDs, moving images will soon cover every flat surface. As they do we will march from literacy to vizuality. In order to complete that great transition, we'll need a whole suite of tools, like these first primitive ones above, which permit us to manipulate, manage, store, cite and create moving images as easily as text.

Tools for Vizuality