Steven Pinker:

Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? And which do you think is the least admirable? For most people, it’s an easy question. Mother Teresa, famous for ministering to the poor in Calcutta, has been beatified by the Vatican, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and ranked in an American poll as the most admired person of the 20th century. Bill Gates, infamous for giving us the Microsoft dancing paper clip and the blue screen of death, has been decapitated in effigy in “I Hate Gates” Web sites and hit with a pie in the face. As for Norman Borlaug . . . who the heck is Norman Borlaug?

Yet a deeper look might lead you to rethink your answers.

The Moral Instinct

What a difference a decade makes. When I worked in Moscow in 1994 and 1995 for the National Democratic Institute, an American nongovernmental organization, I could not have imagined the present situation. The idea that the collapse of the Soviet Union would be considered the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” as Putin claims, would have occurred to only a few hard-core, extremist (loony) Communist Party members. Suddenly, this view is not only mainstream but is shared by the youngest generation of Russians— even as they drink Starbucks coffee while surfing the Internet. Alongside Big Macs and iPods, a cottage industry of Soviet nostalgia has sprung up, complete with T-shirts, books, movies, bars, and restaurants. Stores even sell postcards of Stalin.

If Russians feel nostalgia for Soviet days, the run-up to the December elections stirred my own memories of a year of living not at all dangerously in what we thought of then as the new Russia. My thoughts, and those of so many others, go back to the era not only in Russia but also in the United States— the 12 years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. The United States’s efforts to promote democracy abroad had not yet become singed by the war in Iraq, and the democratic balance in its three branches of government seemed reasonably stable.

Dreaming of a Democratic Russia

A new and remarkable energy animated the American cinema between the coming of sound at the end of the 1920’s and the strict enforcement of the 1934 Production Code censoring "unwholesome" onscreen behavior. During the pre-Code era Hollywood found commercial and critical success in a series of films that radically expanded the previously acceptable thresholds for exploring sex and crime related themes. The twilight of the Jazz Age and the Great Depression encouraged directors and screenwriters to seriously examine the moral and sociopolitical underpinnings of the changing nation through frank and, quite often, extremely graphic stories designed to titillate and shock. Encouraged by the box office, Hollywood produced startling depictions of infidelity, prostitution, drug use, crime, homosexuality and miscegenation. The injustices of corporate capitalism and the sexual experimentation of the period, particularly by women, were also newly exploited as fitting subjects for the screen.

The frequent mythologization of the pre-Code cinema as an apogee of daring and uncompromised studio filmmaking often obscures the fact that the compromise of the Production Code was, in fact, self-imposed by the studios themselves. Although Hollywood directors and screenwriters would ultimately discover a creative friction working with and against subsequent censorship rules, the films of the pre-Code era reveal the potential of a decidedly unruly cinema largely unrestrained by the mores of polite society. In tribute to and in celebration of this unique and fertile period in American film history the HFA presents a selection of films from pre-Code Hollywood designed to enlighten, shock and entertain.

Vice vs. Virtue in Pre-Code Hollywood

This is a site for large data sets and the people who love them: the scrapers and crawlers who collect them, the academics and geeks who process them, the designers and artists who visualize them. It's a place where they can exchange tips and tricks, develop and share tools together, and begin to integrate their particular projects.

Library (theinfo)

The United States at the turn of the twentieth century cultivated a passion for big. It witnessed the emergence of large-scale corporate capitalism; the beginnings of American imperialism on a global stage; record-level immigration; a rapid expansion of cities; and colossal events and structures like world's fairs, amusement parks, department stores, and skyscrapers. Size began to play a key role in American identity. During this period, bigness signaled American progress.

These Days of Large Things explores the centrality of size to American culture and national identity and the preoccupation with physical stature that pervaded American thought. Michael Clarke examines the role that body size played in racial theory and the ways in which economic changes in the nation generated conflicting attitudes toward growth and bigness. Finally, Clarke investigates the relationship between stature and gender.

From the Harper's Index for February 2008:

Ratio of the total square footage of the world's Wal-Marts to that of Manhattan: 9:7

These Days of Large Things: The Culture of Size in America, 1865-1930

For the Shorpy fans:

In the mid-1930s, Stephen Mitchell & Son, a cigarette manufacturer based in Scotland, joined the craze for producing cigarette cards. The firm created 'The World of Tomorrow', an imaginative series of cards that set out to forecast the future. Each of the 50 cards uses a specially commissioned illustration or a still from a contemporary science fiction film to make a significant prediction about the way people will be living in years to come: the transport they will be using; the houses they will be building; the offices in which they will be working; and the modes of communication and sources of energy they will be employing. What is astounding, some 70 years on, is the extent to which these often amusing predictions have come true. This novel gift book reproduces all 50 cards and juxtaposes them with a photograph of today's equivalent technology, proving just how amazingly accurate the original predictions were. It brings together 50 fascinating predictions of the future made in the mid-1930s, from space travel to the advent of e-mail. It is a highly original gift book for readers of all ages. It is engagingly written by a leading creative director, whose work in the field of advertising has won him numerous awards.

The author is Alfredo Marcantonio, said to be "one of Britain's most respected advertising copywriters."

Prophets of Zoom

What do road and railway systems, electrical circuits, mingling at parties, mazes, family trees, and the internet all have in common? All are networks - either people or places or things that relate and connect to one another. Only relatively recently have mathematicians begun to explore such networks and connections, and their importance has taken everyone by surprise. The mathematics of networks form the basis of many fascinating puzzles and problems, from tic-tac-toe and circular sudoku to the 'Chinese Postman Problem' (can he deliver all his letters without traversing the same street twice?). Peter Higgins shows how such puzzles as well as many real-world phenomena are underpinned by the same deep mathematical structure. Understanding mathematical networks can give us remarkable new insights into them all.

Nets, Puzzles and Postmen: An Exploration of Mathematical Connections

A hundred years ago, companies stopped producing their own power with steam engines and generators and plugged into the newly built electric grid. The cheap power pumped out by electric utilities not only changed how businesses operated but also brought the modern world into existence. Today a similar revolution is under way. Companies are dismantling their private computer systems and tapping into rich services delivered over the Internet. This time it's computing that's turning into a utility. The shift is already remaking the computer industry, bringing new competitors like Google to the fore and threatening traditional stalwarts like Microsoft and Dell. But the effects will reach much further. Cheap computing will ultimately change society as profoundly as cheap electricity did. In this lucid and compelling book, Nicholas Carr weaves together history, economics, and technology to explain why computing is changing -- and what it means for all of us.

The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google

Fighting disease, combating hunger, preserving the balance of life on Earth: the future of biotechnological innovation may well be the future of our planet itself. And yet the vexed state of intellectual property law--a proliferation of ever more complex rights governing research and development--is complicating this future. At a similar point in the development of information technology, "open source" software revolutionized the field, simultaneously encouraging innovation and transforming markets. The question that Janet Hope explores in Biobazaar is: can the open source approach do for biotechnology what it has done for information technology? Her book is the first sustained and systematic inquiry into the application of open source principles to the life sciences.

The appeal of the open source approach--famously likened to a "bazaar," in contrast to the more traditional "cathedral" style of technology development--lies in its safeguarding of community access to proprietary tools without discouraging valuable commercial participation. Traversing disciplinary boundaries, Hope presents a careful analysis of intellectual property-related challenges confronting the biotechnology industry and then paints a detailed picture of "open source biotechnology" as a possible solution. With insights drawn from interviews with Nobel Prize-winning scientists and leaders of the free and open source software movement--as well as company executives, international policymakers, licensing experts, and industry analysts--her book suggests that open source biotechnology is both desirable and broadly feasible--and, in many ways, merely awaiting its moment.

Biobazaar: The Open Source Revolution and Biotechnology

Prehistory covers human existence before written records, i.e. most of human existence. But it also refers to a field of study, the discipline through which we scrutinize prehistoric times. This book begins by looking at the gradual discovery only 150 years ago of a remote human past going back tens of thousands of years and the subsequent dramatic growth of the study of prehistory: early archaeology; geology; Darwin's ideas of evolution; cave paintings; fossil discoveries of human ancestors; museums and collections; and then in the 1950s radiocarbon dating and, in the 1980s, DNA analysis.

Colin Renfrew then looks at current issues and problems in prehistory. He challenges the conventional assumption of an all-important 'human revolution' 40,000 years ago - when Homo sapiens first appeared in Europe - and suggests that the key developments were much later. The author's case-studies range widely, from Orkney to the Balkans, from the Indus Valley to Peru, from Ireland to China, and provide fresh insights even on such landmark monuments as the Egyptian pyramids and the Valley of the Kings, Stonehenge and the sacrificial burial pyramids at Teotihuacan in Mexico. The book ends with a fascinating chapter, the transition from Prehistory to History, on early writing systems.

Prehistory: The Making Of The Human Mind