Paul Kedrosky:

Eye-popping chart up over at The Oil Drum showing the extent of China's current cement fixation. Amazing stuff.

China's Cement Fixation

Is Keith Olbermann changing TV news?

One Angry Man

bondi (pronounced "bond-eye") is a programming language centered on pattern-matching. It supports functional, imperative, query-based and object-oriented programming styles using a single small evaluator.

bondi

Your daily McLuhan:

JEFF LEEDS, former NYT music reporter: I’m not sure that it’s so easy anymore to write about the art without acknowledging the commerce or vice versa ... I think the message and the medium are much more intertwined than they were ten years ago.

SASHA FRERE-JONES, who writes about music at The New Yorker: This behavior parallels the world of online friendships, at least in form. People who could just as easily call or e-mail each other decide to make conversations public through blogs or Twitter or MySpace comments. The platform chosen for each message changes the effect of the words, who can read them, and how long they will hang in the air. (The Web is creating a multiple-exposure version of memory: words remain, reappearing over and over, even if nothing more than cocktail chat. “Nice dress!” echoes in the hall of mirrored servers. An LOL is not an LOL is not an LOL.)

LEEDS: I think that sort of transparency, where we’re all declaring our positions publicly, is here to stay. In music it means that all these little tribes and congregations of fans can mobilize in really powerful ways. And that in turn is contributing so much to the changes you see in the relationship between the artists and the machinery, the industry underneath and around them. It’s a crucial space to watch. I always think of music as Patient Zero in all the disorder that is changing everything in entertainment and media, including, by the way, newspapers. It’s worth paying close attention.

Dept. of Smaller Departments | Sasha Frere-Jones

Publishers Weekly gives this a Starred Review.

In his charming and disarmingly serious study of the history of the nerd in popular culture and throughout modern history, Benjamin Nugent succeeds in crafting a nuanced discussion without resorting to smugness or excessive cleverness. His prose is straightforward, but the writing is never dry, as Nugent maintains a brisk pace by chasing an entertaining series of tangents across short chapters. Discrete pockets of nerd-dom are carefully observed and analyzed, with an eye for connections that lead to unusual places. While there are engaging sections about more obvious nerd subjects like the rise of online gaming and the history of American science-fiction clubs, Nugent takes his book in surprising directions, such as the ethnic implications of the nerd categorization, particularly in regard to Jewish and Asian stereotypes. In one chapter, Nugent finds correspondence between nerdiness and people with Asperger's syndrome, astutely drawing comparisons between the socializing problems experienced by both groups and positing that many of those considered nerds historically might in fact be on the autism spectrum. Another unexpected detour, this one into the intense subculture of high school and college debaters, turns into an extraordinarily poignant meditation on the friendships engendered by shared passions. Swinging ably from personal anecdotes to historical perspective, Nugent's exploration of outcasts is a triumph.

In a Q&A, the author says:

Southern California has an amazing nerd landmark, the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society in North Hollywood. It's a relic of a time when nerds physically got together in one place to discuss their interests, like sci-fi and the space race and D&D and anime.

I went through some records, and the attendance used to be larger and, more important, the average age used to be late 20s, and now it's clearly middle-aged to late-middle-aged. The people who would have been their [new] members are on the Internet.

American Nerd: The Story of My People

This site contains an archive of flyers for mostly hardcore punk gigs from the era 1982 to 1984 that took place in Tucson Arizona, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. Historical narrative and observations are included as well as photos, stickers, various handbills, MP3s, and other curiosities from the same era.

arizona hardcore punk rock flyer archive 1982-1984

Freakonomics for transportation nerds.

Would you be surprised that road rage can be good for society? Or that most crashes happen on sunny, dry days? That our minds can trick us into thinking the next lane is moving faster? Or that you can gauge a nation’s driving behavior by its levels of corruption? These are only a few of the remarkable dynamics that Tom Vanderbilt explores in this fascinating tour through the mysteries of the road.

Based on exhaustive research and interviews with driving experts and traffic officials around the globe, Traffic gets under the hood of the everyday activity of driving to uncover the surprisingly complex web of physical, psychological, and technical factors that explain how traffic works, why we drive the way we do, and what our driving says about us. Vanderbilt examines the perceptual limits and cognitive underpinnings that make us worse drivers than we think we are. He demonstrates why plans to protect pedestrians from cars often lead to more accidents. He shows how roundabouts, which can feel dangerous and chaotic, actually make roads safer—and reduce traffic in the bargain. He uncovers who is more likely to honk at whom, and why. He explains why traffic jams form, outlines the unintended consequences of our quest for safety, and even identifies the most common mistake drivers make in parking lots.

The car has long been a central part of American life; whether we see it as a symbol of freedom or a symptom of sprawl, we define ourselves by what and how we drive. As Vanderbilt shows, driving is a provocatively revealing prism for examining how our minds work and the ways in which we interact with one another. Ultimately, Traffic is about more than driving: it’s about human nature. This book will change the way we see ourselves and the world around us. And who knows? It may even make us better drivers.

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)

Thirty-one years after the invention of Dungeons & Dragons, the original role-playing game remains the most popular and financially successful brand in the adventure gaming industry.

This fact is so well established in the conventional wisdom of the adventure games industry that it's difficult to find adequate sourcing for the assertion, and it seems ridiculous to even try. In that time, D&D has introduced millions of readers to the concept of role-playing. Even those who eventually move on to other systems usually get their start with D&D. Most gamers' understanding of "what happens" in a role-playing game is therefore shaped by how D&D explains these concepts. An analysis of how D&D's manuals have explained the duties and roles of players throughout the game's many printings therefore offers a glimpse at the evolution of the role-playing form itself. If Dungeons & Dragons is the lingua franca of most role-playing gamers, its definition of the role-playing experience defines an important touchstone helpful for critical study of the role-playing phenomenon.

This article gives a broad overview of D&D in its first era, from its origins in the basements of two Midwest game designers to its evolution into a boxed set of simplified rules aimed at the mass market. By the end of this period, Dungeons & Dragons had entered the common consciousness of the American public, and all subsequent revisions (and there have been many) can accurately be described as variations on the original. But how did the original come to take form?

From the Basement to the Basic Set: The Early Years of Dungeons & Dragons

Trying to fix problems that affect vast numbers of people has an intuitive appeal that politicians and policymakers find irresistible, but several warehouses of research studies show that intuition is often a poor guide to fixing systemic problems. While it seems like common sense to pump money into an economy that is pulling the bedcovers over its head, the problem with most social interventions is that they target not robots and machines but human beings -- who regularly respond to interventions in contrarian, paradoxical and unpredictable ways.

Taking More Risks Because You Feel Safe

Benjamin Wittes’ Law and the Long War is required reading for anyone interested in the legal challenges posed by the war on terror.

A short book review.

Terror and the Law: The Limits of Judicial Reasoning in the Post-9/11 World