John Sterns:

I hear voices (“auditory hallucinations”, technically). Before my treatment, hospitalisations and incarcerations, these voices were all separate and distinct, with individual sounds, tones, rhythms and pitches. Now they are one voice--my voice. Once a chorus, they have become a soloist, though attacking me with the same message. Treatment has meant that I have finally found a “self”, a “me”, after four decades. But the me I’ve discovered is now my enemy.

Being Crazy Is Noisy

Roger Ebert:

Bill O'Reilly insists he is dealing only with the truth. When his guests disagree with him, he shouts at them, calls them liars, talks over them, and behaves like a schoolyard bully.

He has been an influence on the most worrying trend in the field of news: The polarization of opinion, the elevation of emotional temperature, the predictability of two of the leading cable news channels.

O'Reilly represents a worrisome attention shift in the minds of Americans. More and more of us are not interested in substance.

People aren't in the habit of searching the dial.

P.J. O'Rourke:

I wonder, when was the last time a talk show changed a mind?

Have you read Infinite Jest?

The O'Reilly Procedure

Paul Graham:

It sucks to run a start-up. Running a start-up is like being punched in the face repeatedly.

We're mass-producing the start-up.

Everything around us is turning into computers. Everything is becoming software.

Justin Kan:

You could be working on the most boring piece of software, and you talk to Paul and you think, Man, I'm excited to go back to work.

Fred Wilson:

I don't mean this in a negative way, but Y Combinator is more like a cult than a venture capital fund. And Paul is the cult leader.

Max Chafkin:

Graham tends to have an air of impatience, as if even a momentary distraction is too much to bear.

Winifred Gallagher:

You can’t be happy all the time, but you can pretty much focus all the time. That’s about as good as it gets.

From the archive:

Marge: I'd really like to give it a try!
Homer: I don't know, Marge, trying is the first step towards failure.

Jeff Bezos:

People over-focus on errors of commission. Companies over-emphasize how expensive failure's going to be. Failure's not that expensive ...

The big costs that most companies incur are much harder to notice, and those are errors of Omission.

Johan de Kleer:

One passionate person is worth a thousand people who are just plodding along ...

Atul Gawande:

Let us look for the positive deviants.

The Start-up Guru

From a year ago:

American authorities may be deluding themselves into believing they can forestall the endgame of post-bubble adjustments.

Decius, in a prescient post from 2004:

Ever wanted to know what life was like in the 30s? You will.

Recently:

I thought I was unlucky graduating into the tech bust. I had no idea.

From a few years back:

The United States government does not want billboards in space.

The Federal Aviation Administration proposed Thursday to amend its regulations to ensure that it can enforce a law that prohibits "obtrusive" advertising in zero gravity.

Keep your space-based advertising tasteful, folks. Think quaint New England hamlet ...

Zero Gravity Water Bubble

Lisa Selin Davis:

There's something deeply wrong with Tysons Corner.

Nate Silver:

Perhaps the only good thing about losing your job is that you no longer have to endure the drive to work.

Verlyn Klinkenborg:

Driving is the cultural anomaly of our moment.

Louis Menand:

The interstates changed the phenomenology of driving.

Louis Kahn:

In his plan for midtown Philadelphia he attempted to press the forms of Piranesi's Rome of 1762 into the service of the modern city. In this, expressways were thought as "rivers" and the traffic-light controlled streets as "canals." Kahn was conscious of the profound antipathy between the automobile and the city and of the fatal link between consumerism, the suburban shopping center and the decline of the urban core. He proposed a "dock" solution (1956) comprising a 6-story cylindrical silo housing 1,500 cars and surrounded on its perimeter by 18-story blocks that was deprived of elements at a human scale.

Amy Gardner:

A construction crew putting up an office building in the heart of Tysons Corner a few years ago hit a fiber optic cable no one knew was there.

Within moments, three black sport-utility vehicles drove up, a half-dozen men in suits jumped out and one said, "You just hit our line."

Walk Score:

Walk Score shows you a map of what's nearby and calculates a Walk Score for any property. Buying a house in a walkable neighborhood is good for your health and good for the environment.

Christopher Leinberger:

It’s not a matter of waiting for two or three years to absorb the overproduction. It’s a matter of drastically reducing real estate prices to well below replacement cost. And when you sell something for below replacement cost – that might sound like, well, “Somebody takes a hit but life goes on as usual.” No, life doesn’t go on. For the owners of that retail or housing space, every dollar that they invest will be money they don’t get back. That is another definition of a slum. There’s no incentive to invest in a slum. So here you are.

A (Radical) Way to Fix Suburban Sprawl

Ed Felten et al:

If the next Presidential administration really wants to embrace the potential of Internet-enabled government transparency, it should follow a counter-intuitive but ultimately compelling strategy: reduce the federal role in presenting important government information to citizens. Today, government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use. We argue that this understanding is a mistake. It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility.

Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, we argue that the executive branch should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data. The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large.

Aaron Swartz:

I've spent the past year and change working on a site that publishes government information online. In doing that, I've learned a lot. But I've also become increasingly skeptical of the transparency project in general.

In short, the generous impulses behind transparency sites end up doing more harm than good.

Government Data and the Invisible Hand

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN will look deeper into the nature of the universe than anything that has gone before, and its’ vast experiments are certain to change our understanding of the world around us. The scale of the engineering involved can sometimes obscure the fact that the project is designed and run by people - hundreds of teams of researchers and collaborators, all driven by the simple desire to increase our understanding of the universe we live in.

‘Colliding Particles’ is a series of films following just one of the teams of physicists involved in the research at the LHC. The project documents their work at the frontiers of particle physics, exploring the human stories behind the research and investigating the workings of the scientific process itself.

From a September 2008 letter to Harper's:

The Reading presents what appears to be a factual affidavit [from one Luis Sancho, about the chances that the earth will be destroyed should the Large Hadron Collider be activated]. Is this a misapprehension on my part? Is this an inside joke that is funny to the editors because you don't believe a word about the danger described? Is your magazine so sophisticated that you would simply report, without comment, the possibility of the careless destruction of the world by a group of scientific researchers?

According to the crack reportage of the Times:

Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.

Have you heard The Large Hadron Collider Rap?

From last year at The Big Picture:

Here is a collection of photographs from CERN, showing various stages of completion of the LHC and several of its larger experiments (some over seven stories tall), over the past several years.

Just in case:

Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet?

Colliding Particles

Sasha Frere-Jones:

According to Mad Decent, the record label, Major Lazer is a Jamaican commando who fought in the “secret Zombie War of 1984” and lost both arms in combat.

Then the U.S. military equipped him (*) with experimental lasers that double as prosthetic limbs.

You can stream the album and watch a video.

(*) See also, from the Post's Dana Milbank:

Shelby also coaxed Mullen to praise Alabama's very own littoral combat ships. "Could you tell us here the advantages that the Navy will gain once the service begins to utilize the LCS?" he asked.

"Okay," Mullen obliged. "I need the LCS at sea, deployed today. ... It offers unique characteristics in terms of speed and mobility and ..."

"Also firepower," Shelby added.

"And firepower," Mullen agreed.

Major Mixup

Matt Zoller Seitz:

"Following" is a montage of clips illustrating one of my favorite types of shots: one where the camera physically follows a character through his or her environment. I love this shot because it's neither first-person nor third; it makes you aware of a character's presence within the movie's physical world while also forcing identification with the character. I also love the sensation of momentum that following shots invariably summon. Because the camera is so close to the character(s) being followed, we feel that we're physically attached to those characters, as if by an invisible guide wire, being towed through their world, sometimes keeping pace, other times losing them as they weave through hallways, down staircases or through smoke or fog.

Have you seen The Wrestler?

Have you seen Following?

On the Creepy/Alluring Art of the Follow Shot

Tom Vanderbilt:

Who and where was this invisible metropolis? What infrastructure was needed to create this city of ether?

Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network.

The tilting CD tower gives way to the MP3-laden hard drive which itself yields to a service like Pandora, music that is always “there,” waiting to be heard.

But where is “there,” and what does it look like?

Have you read Vanderbilt's "Traffic"?

Ultimately, Traffic is about more than driving: it’s about human nature.

Data Center Overload