I've never been able to explain Halloween to the kids, with its odd thematic confluence of pumpkins, candy and death.

Mmmm, candy ...

But Halloween is a piece of pumpkin cake compared to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, which commences today.

It's Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week!

Islamic militants have spread beyond their tribal bases, and have the run of an unstable, nuclear-armed nation.

Mmmm, candy ...

Pakistan: The Most Dangerous?

Latin America is deepening its democratic institutions, integrating into the global economy, and finally addressing endemic social inequalities -- in short, turning into something of a success story even as most outsiders look the other way.

A Quiet Revolution, by Francis Fukuyama

They send a reporter to literally Middle America, and surprise, discover that they don't much care for them Hollywood movies. Suuuurrr-prise!

But one chunk of this report, to me, is symptomatic of a larger issue that grinds my molars.

ANDERSON: We stopped by the Lebanon [Kansas -- ed.] hotspot, Ladow's Market, where one local told us Hollywood just can't relate to a farming way of life.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They've never been back in here to know what it's like to actually have to make a living doing this.

You know what, Unidentified Male? You're right. I don't know what it's like to have to make a living farming. NOBODY DOES.

...

Four million people in the US play World of Warcraft. And yet, do I ever hear:

ANDERSON: We stopped by the gates of Ogrimmar in Durotar, on the east coast of Kalimdor, where one local told us Hollywood just can't relate to the level-grinding life.

UNIDENTIFIED ORC: They've never been back here, questing Razormane or Drygulch Ravine, y'know ... or farming for Peacebloom and Silverleaf. They're out of touch.

No. No I do not.

Farm Fetish

'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle' has become an almost unquestioned mantra of our time. It is claimed that recycling will save the planet. Less energy and fewer resources would be used in manufacture and disposal, and recycled or composted food waste would reduce methane emissions from landfills. More pressing from the government's point of view is the need to meet landfill reduction targets. ... Finally, it is claimed that recycling saves money, therefore increasing economic competitiveness.

It can be questioned, however, whether municipal (household) recycling is worth it.

Recycling: Reducing waste or waste of time?

“We think what’s happening during sleep is that you open the aperture of memory and are able to see this bigger picture,” said the study’s senior author, Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist who is now at the University of California, Berkeley. He added that many such insights occurred “only when you enter this wonder-world of sleep.”

Keep a copy of this study on your desk, so you can point to it the next time your boss catches you napping in your cube.

An Active, Purposeful Machine That Comes Out at Night to Play

Jill Lepore, in the latest issue of The New Yorker, reviews What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848.

How America came of age.

Her review is worth reading.

Here's Thoreau:

“Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts ‘All aboard!’ when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over.”

I'd file this book alongside such (Richard) Hofstadter classics as Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and The Age of Reform, as well more recent Pulitzer Prize winners like Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America.

"What Hath God Wrought" earns a Starred Review from Publishers Weekly:

In the latest installment in the Oxford History of the United States series, historian Daniel Walker Howe, professor emeritus at Oxford University and UCLA (The Political Culture of the American Whigs), stylishly narrates a crucial period in US history -- a time of territorial growth, religious revival, booming industrialization, a recalibrating of American democracy and the rise of nationalist sentiment. Smaller but no less important stories run through the account: New York's gradual emancipation of slaves; the growth of higher education; the rise of the temperance movement (all classes, even ministers, imbibed heavily, Howe says). Howe also charts developments in literature, focusing not just on Thoreau and Poe but on such forgotten writers as William Gilmore Simms of South Carolina, who helped create the romantic image of the Old South, but whose proslavery views eventually brought his work into disrepute. Howe dodges some of the shibboleths of historical literature, for example, refusing to describe these decades as representing a market revolution because a market economy already existed in 18th-century America. Supported by engaging prose, Howe's achievement will surely be seen as one of the most outstanding syntheses of US history published this decade.

See also the Farm Fetish story.

Vast Designs | The New Yorker

The concept of ceremony is introduced as an extension of the concept of network protocol, with human nodes alongside computer nodes and with communication links that include UI, human-to-human communication and transfers of physical objects that carry data. What is out-of-band to a protocol is in-band to a ceremony, and therefore subject to design and analysis using variants of the same mature techniques used for the design and analysis of protocols. Ceremonies include all protocols, as well as all applications with a user interface, all workflow and all provisioning scenarios. A secure ceremony is secure against both normal attacks and social engineering. However, some secure protocols imply ceremonies that cannot be made secure.

Ceremony Design and Analysis

THE revival in Welsh identity and the rise in the number of Welsh- speakers may be down to a reaction against globalisation, a leading academic will claim today.

Manuel Castells, a professor of Sociology at the University of California and a former UN adviser, says trends in Wales are similar to those in his native Catalonia, which has also seen a resurgence in a separate national identity.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Analysis, to be broadcast tonight, “All identities are culturally constructed, people decide to assign themselves these identities, but it doesn’t mean these are arbitrary identities. People work with the material of history.

“You use these attempts to build on your language as a sign of creating autonomy, of reacting against globalisation. That is actually very similar to some of the things happening in Catalonia or the Basque country.”

The programme delves into some controversial areas, and carries interviews with – anonymous – senior civil servants who complain of a pro-Welsh speaking bias in the public sector. One talks of a “fear of debate” around language politics, and a “fear of what the consequences of airing views would be, particularly at senior level”.

Welsh revival may be a reaction to globalisation

I mentioned this recently; now, the paper is available.

In this paper we propose an over-arching namespace that serves to abstract away the Internet's current and obscure naming schemes from users. We argue for users to have personal namespaces that are not concerned with unique naming of resources, but rather focused on aiding user’s interactions with the system. This additional namespace does not replace any of our current (or future) naming systems. Rather, our vision calls for adding a naming layer that provides the ability for users to meaningfully alias network resources (especially their own). These aliases become context-sensitive, provider independent names for objects that can be easily shared among people. In addition, we sketch a strawman system -- called pnames -- in high level terms as a starting point in the discussion of how such a system might be built.

Personal Namespaces