Whether they use the term white trash or not, most Americans are unaware of its long and ugly history. If you had to guess, you’d probably say that the term arose in the Deep South, sometime in the middle of last century, as a term that whites coined to demean other whites less fortunate than themselves. Yet most of what we presuppose about the term is wrong.

The term white trash dates back not to the 1950s but to the 1820s. It arises not in Mississippi or Alabama, but in and around Baltimore, Maryland. And best guess is that it was invented not by whites, but by African Americans.

That Ain't White: The long and ugly history of 'trash' talk

Opinion — thumbs up, thumbs down — is the least important aspect of reviewing.

... you are appalled by the sheer uselessness of their spray-painted opinions ...

Not everybody's a critic

Out of curiosity I looked up Newt’s last major speech, delivered to the Heritage Foundation, and found that it really wasn’t a speech at all. It was a collection of 238 GOPAC buzzwords, lightly connected by a few ordinary nontoxic words.

Did you read Janet Maslin's review of his new book?

Back to the story:

Our minds are clogged with the clichés, idioms, and rhythms of other people, and we have to work to avoid them. Paul Johnson says, “Most people when they write, including most professional writers, tend to slip into seeing events through the eyes of others because they inherit stale expressions and combinations of words, threadbare metaphors, clichés and literary conceits. This is particularly true of journalists.”

Ah, the simple pleasure of the inherited stale expression ...

The Office of Assertion

And to think I was just miles from this museum yesterday!

You come upon a pastoral scene undreamt of by any natural history museum. Two prehistoric children play near a burbling waterfall, thoroughly at home in the natural world. Dinosaurs cavort nearby, their animatronic mechanisms turning them into alluring companions, their gaping mouths seeming not threatening, but almost welcoming, as an Apatosaurus munches on leaves a few yards away.

What is this, then? A reproduction of a childhood fantasy in which dinosaurs are friends of inquisitive youngsters? The kind of fantasy that doesn’t care that human beings and these prefossilized thunder-lizards are usually thought to have been separated by millions of years? No, this really is meant to be more like one of those literal dioramas of the traditional natural history museum, an imagining of a real habitat, with plant life and landscape reproduced in meticulous detail.

Adam and Eve in the Land of the Dinosaurs

Like the “Ghost in the Shell” animes, “Paprika” explores that intersection between the human and the machine, including the lands of enchantment you can travel to when you plug in, boot up and drop out.

See also the New Yorker review by David Denby.

Paprika

A question I keep mulling over is...when all is said and done...what legacy do I want to leave behind?

When all is said and done, I'm certain I'll go back to blonde.

When all is said and done we must continue with the fight in our country to get freedom. We can't outsource our liberation to foreigners. We must be masters of our own destiny and the price of freedom is death! Give me freedom or give me death.

And probably, when all is said and done, the roots of this infatuation go back far beyond the birth of America.

Still, when all is said and done, macho people simply live more exciting lives. Just ask Jack Bauer.

“When all is said and done, though, I think we milbloggers will do just fine despite the changes,” he said. “After all, unless DoD comes out and says, ‘Thou Shalt Not Blog,’ we’re much more nimble than any office code in the Pentagon.”

As expensive as JWST might seem, Weiler said, when all is said and done it will cost roughly half of what NASA has spent on Hubble -- about $7 billion to $8 billion adjusted for inflation and measured according to the same accounting methods that govern Webb.

When all is said and done, the summer of 2007 will be known as the summer of the trilogy.

"But when all is said and done, the system that we're putting here in this region is going to be the best in the country."

And when all is said and done, enough candidates are likely to get enough slices of the huge delegate pie that several will be able to claim victory in one state or another on Feb. 5.

One of our greatest failures in my lifetime has been the failed policies of Iraq. I personally believe when all is said and done, it will haunt us more than Vietnam because of failures across the entire spectrum of American life.

WJLA was kind enough to remind us that Digestive Disease Week will have brought in $32 million to the District when all is said and done, in addition of course to the ... [ Read More (0.8k in body) ]

The central thesis of The Web's Awake is that the phenomenal growth and complexity of the web is beginning to outstrip our capability to control it directly. Many have worked on the concept of emergent properties within highly complex systems, concentrating heavily on the underlying mechanics concerned. Few, however, have studied the fundamentals involved from a sociotechnical perspective. In short, the virtual anatomy of the Web remains relatively uninvestigated. The Web's Awake attempts to seriously explore this gap, citing a number of provocative, yet objective, similarities from studies relating to both real world and digital systems. It presents a collage of interlinked facts, assertions, and coincidences, which boldly point to a Web with powerful potential for life.

The author, Philip Tetlow, is a researcher at IBM.

Read his paper, SOA, Glial and the Autonomic Semantic Web Machine, on developerWorks:

Our industry is drowning in a sea of complexity, with software complexity in particular causing significant complications. The natural sciences have been studying complexity for far longer that we could ever pretend. In many of these chaotic patterns, feedback is an essential component for the supporting mechanisms to be sustained. Such self-organising, or autonomic, systems are relatively commonplace in nature and many of their axiomatic workings have now been captured and formalised using abstract models. This paper therefore presents the proposition that such models may be used to address complexity issues within IT problem spaces. In particular it investigates the use of Semantic Web technologies as a means of reducing ambiguity in the design and implementation of automatic solutions for addressing complexity at a number of points in the Software Life Cycle. Additionally, Glial, an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) based prototype language, is introduced for the implementation of such autonomic solutions, including SOA systems.

Last year, the Web Science collaboration was launched by MIT and U. Southampton.

The Web's Awake: An Introduction to the Field of Web Science and the Concept of Web Life

Perhaps the bizdev folks at IMI ought to talk to Hollywood.

The case file illustrates the economics of information in the place that values it most — a community devoted to the manufacture, control and perpetuation of image. And it explains why Mr. Pellicano, who trafficked in all manner of potentially damaging data, was so eagerly hired and his unmasking so direly feared.

The marketplace was filled with potential buyers, from the top of the town to the bottom of the D-list, in the movies, television, music, even the art and sports worlds. Stars might have had the most to lose if secrets were exposed. But entertainment executives — for whom job security is notoriously fleeting, and reputations as evanescent as last weekend’s box office — had ample reason to think others were plotting against them, or at least rooting for them to fail.

In Court Files, Hollywood’s Mr. Fix-It at Work

At The New York Times, our idea of living on the edge is a second trip to the afternoon coffee cart.

Page Six Covers Itself, a Bit Painfully

This op-ed could also be titled, Yet Another Display of Public Indifference.

This scandal is too important for the public or Congress to move on. This story should not end until Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is gone.

The degree of partisanship in the department is shocking.

It is hard not to see the fingerprints of Karl Rove.

In his upcoming HBO special, Bill Maher explains (I'm paraphrasing), "What angers me the most is how few people are angry."

Why This Scandal Matters