Milt Bearden:

Perhaps the failure of empires in Afghanistan is merely destiny.

As with all of the other problems the new administration faces, Afghanistan and Pakistan need new, even radical, rethinking if the United States is ever to reverse a failing enterprise. The only certainty about Afghanistan is that it will be Obama’s War, as surely as Iraq is Bush’s War and Vietnam was Lyndon Johnson’s War. The president’s new team for Afghanistan and Pakistan has been dealt a losing hand, but if anyone can turn the tables, they just might be able to do it.

Curse of the Khyber Pass

At what point does excerpting from an article become illegal copying?

The prevailing wisdom is that content should roam widely online, but lackluster digital advertising of late has called that into question.

Copyright Holders Challenge Sites That Scrape Content

Joel Spolsky:

A new business is like a shortwave radio. You have to fiddle patiently with all the dials until you get the reception you want.

How Hard Could It Be?

This chart shows the US Savings Ratio as percentage of total household disposabale income over Time.

Move the slider along the bottom all the way to the left to look at the full time span from 1959 to the present.

US Savings Ratio over Time

Dean Keith Simonton, via John Cloud:

Deliberate practice is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creating genius. For one thing, you need to be smart enough for practice to teach you something.

W.A. Pannapacker:

Academe is full of potential geniuses who have never done a single thing they wanted to do because there were too many things that needed to be done first: the research projects, conference papers, books and articles — not one of them freely chosen: merely means to some practical end, a career rather than a calling.

Alan Kay:

If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

Douglas Coupland:

People would go into the pi room, and their brains would become quiet, and they would emerge relaxed.

Is Genius Born or Can It Be Learned?

Martin Schwartz:

Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it.

Louis Menand:

Getting a Ph.D. today means spending your 20’s in graduate school, plunging into debt, writing a dissertation no one will read – and becoming more narrow and more bitter each step of the way.

The importance of stupidity in scientific research

Noam Cohen's friend:

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

From the archive:

If you give me money, everything's going to be cool, okay? It's gonna be cool. Give me money. No consequences, no whammies, money. Money for me ... Money for me, databases for you.

More recently:

The ship has already sailed on the question of whether or not its reasonable for the government to collect evidence about everyone all the time so that it can be used against them in court if someone accuses them of a crime or civil tort. This is just another brick in the wall.

As Data Collecting Grows, Privacy Erodes

On February 10 at approximately 1656 GMT, the Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 communications satellites collided over northern Siberia. The impact between the Iridium Satellite LLC-owned satellite and the 16-year-old satellite launched by the Russian government occurred at a closing speed of well over 15,000 mph at approximately 490 miles above the face of the Earth. The low-earth orbit (LEO) location of the collision contains many other active satellites that could be at risk from the resulting orbital debris.

The following videos, interactive 3D Viewer files, 3D models, and high-resolution images are available to better understand this event.

See also:

... POSSIBLE SATELLITE DEBRIS FALLING ACROSS THE REGION...

Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 Satellite Collision

Witold Rybczynski on Louis Kahn.

In a small room, one does not say what one would in a large room.

Louis Kahn:

A good idea that doesn't happen is no idea at all.

I.M. Pei:

Quality, not quantity.

V.S. Naipaul:

Ideas are abstract. They become books only when they are clothed with people and narrative.

Garry Winogrand:

I think part of the aim was to unsettle people's ideas, whether his own or other people's. To move people out of an unquestioning space and to some less settled space in which the authority of rules and structures was broken up a bit.

Louis Kahn, again:

I like English history. I have volumes of it, but I never read anything but the first volume. Even at that, I only read the first three or four chapters. My purpose is to read Volume Zero, which has not been written.

Have you seen My Architect?

Louis Kahn and the lost art of sketching

Ever notice how people texting at night have that eerie blue glow?

Or wake up ready to write down the Next Great Idea, and get blinded by your computer screen?

During the day, computer screens look good—they're designed to look like the sun. But, at 9PM, 10PM, or 3AM, you probably shouldn't be looking at the sun.

F.lux fixes this: it makes the color of your computer's display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.

It's even possible that you're staying up too late because of your computer. You could use f.lux because it makes you sleep better, or you could just use it just because it makes your computer look better.

From the archive:

What's happening during sleep is that you open the aperture of memory and are able to see this bigger picture.

Jenny Diski:

Inexpert though I am in all other fields, I am a connoisseur of sleep.

Later, you can remember or feel, but the only actual experience of sleep is not-knowing. And not knowing thrills me – retrospectively or in anticipation, of course. That one has the capacity to be not here while being nowhere else. To be in the grip of unconsciousness, and consciously to lose consciousness to that grip.

F.lux: software to make your life better