Brian Hayes, from 2001:

When base 2 is too small and base 10 is too big, base 3 is just right.

Third Base

John Lanchester, on Liaquat Ahamed’s new book, "Lords of Finance":

The crucial questions in history often turn out to involve things that people at the time simply did not understand. Sometimes these things were too complicated to be resolved, and sometimes they were so glaringly obvious that they were hidden in plain sight. Sometimes they were both at the same time: horribly complex, horribly obvious. In the buildup to the 1929 crash and the subsequent depression, the linked issues of reparations and the gold standard were at once unfixably complicated and so much at the heart of the system that they were hard to see plainly. The equivalent issue at the heart of the current financial meltdown is that of risk. For reasons to do with a lack of historical awareness, overconfidence, and faulty mathematical modelling, the entire global financial system was built on mistaken calculations about probability.

Heroes and Zeroes

Packer seeks sunshine, finds cloud. Behind paywall.

Writer visits a number of inland real-estate developments near Tampa, Florida. Developers there dreamed up instant communities, parceled out lots, and built look-alike two-story beige and yellow houses. The houses sold to some of the thousand or so people who moved to Florida every day. Now many are ghost subdivisions.

Have you seen "Revolutionary Road"?

Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

The Ponzi State

Bruce Sterling, in Seed:

After 1989 we enjoyed a strange interregnum where "history ended." Everyone ran up a credit-card bill at the global supermarket. The adventure ended badly, in crisis. Still, let us be of good heart. In cold fact, a financial crisis is one of the kindest and mildest sorts of crisis a civilization can have. Compared to typical Italian catastrophes like wars, epidemics, earthquakes, volcanoes, endemic political collapse — a financial crisis is a problem for schoolchildren.

From the archive:

He was overwhelmed by what he saw at a Houston supermarket, by the kaleidoscopic variety of meats and vegetables available to ordinary Americans.

From 2008:

Those that died of kuru were highly regarded as sources of food, because they had layers of fat which resembled pork. It was primarily the Fore women who took part in this ritual. Often they would feed morsels of brain to young children and elderly relatives.

From 2004:

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?

What is to become of those of us past schooling, who are aware of these planes? Are we to dredge on with pink shades over our blue eyes?

The True 21st Century Begins

Virginia Heffernan:

I’m not sure he’s developing an appreciation for books. But he is learning how to enrich his solitude, and that is one of the most intensely pleasurable aspects of literacy.

From last year's best-of:

One of the greatest compliments I have ever given anyone I dated is that being with him was like being alone.

Recently, Robert Darnton:

How can we navigate through the information landscape that is only beginning to come into view? Would we not prefer a world in which an immense corpus of digitized books is accessible, even at a high price, to one in which it did not exist?

Last year, Alberto Manguel:

For the last seven years, I’ve lived in an old stone presbytery in France, south of the Loire Valley, in a village of fewer than 10 houses. I chose the place because next to the 15th-century house itself was a barn, partly torn down centuries ago, large enough to accommodate my library of some 30,000 books, assembled over six itinerant decades. I knew that once the books found their place, I would find mine.

Click and Jane

Josh Dugan, in the January 2009 issue of the Georgetown Law Journal:

The Third Amendment is not merely an esoteric prohibition on an obscure and outdated inconvenience. Instead, the Amendment prescribes practical rules for limiting the enforcement power of the most coercive and dangerous organ of government power: the military. The Amendment's proscription against military enforcement of civilian law is evident in the founding debates and documents and is the best explanation for the Amendment in the larger constitutional scheme. This explanation also frees the Third Amendment from offering a redundant protection already contained in the Fourth Amendment.

Far from being irrelevant to contemporary constitutional law, the Third Amendment could have an enormous role to play in today's constitutional schema. As the military establishment grows and its role confronting terrorism expands within the United States, the Third Amendment provides the proper backdrop against which to analyze those military actions which intrude on an individual's life and constitute traditional law enforcement functions, such as wiretapping. This test would categorically bar the military from enforcing the law against civilians during peacetime but would allow the military to do so without any further conditions, so long as the activities were approved by Congress, during time of war.

The Third Amendment may have fallen into obsolescence, but its history suggests it should not remain there. Despite what many are content to believe, the American experience with quartering may not be over. It might have just begun.

You might ask, "What's this all about?"

It's not about Google. It's about you.

What are the locals saying?

Give me money. No consequences, no whammies, money. Money for me ... Money for me, databases for you.

Surrounded by piles and piles of it, you might reasonably ask:

Is more what we really need?

Ira Glass:

"Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap."

When is a Search not a Search? When It's a Quarter: The Third Amendment, Originalism, and NSA Wiretapping

Matthew Kirschenbaum, on why humanities students should learn to program:

The first program most people learn to write in any computer language is called Hello World. Its sole function is to display those two words on the screen. But the act of writing and then running Hello World can raise some intriguing questions: Who, or what, exactly, is saying hello to the world? The original author of the program? The neophyte who just transcribed it on a computer? The computer itself? All of these somehow together? Whose "world" is being greeted? The world around us, or the virtual world inside the machine? Is anyone (or anything) expected to return the salutation? Hello World, whose syntax varies from one computer language to another, is a postmodern cultural artifact, and to me such questions are irresistible.

From the archive, 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?

From last year, David Lynch:

Ideas are like fish. Originality is just the ideas you caught.

Hello Worlds

William Deresiewicz, returning to his sad theme:

The great contemporary terror is anonymity. So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone.

Solitude isn't easy, and isn't for everyone. It has undoubtedly never been the province of more than a few. "I believe," Thoreau said, "that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark." Teresa and Tiresias will always be the exceptions, or to speak in more relevant terms, the young people — and they still exist — who prefer to loaf and invite their soul, who step to the beat of a different drummer. But if solitude disappears as a social value and social idea, will even the exceptions remain possible? Still, one is powerless to reverse the drift of the culture. One can only save oneself — and whatever else happens, one can still always do that. But it takes a willingness to be unpopular.

In the archive, more from Deresiewicz:

There’s been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude.

From last year, Jonathan Franzen:

Privacy, to me, is not about keeping my personal life hidden from other people. It's about sparing me from the intrusion of other people's personal lives.

From last year's best-of:

One of the greatest compliments I have ever given anyone I dated is that being with him was like being alone.

The End of Solitude

As recommended by Roy Blount, Jr.

This off-the-wall feature about legendary Nashville record producer/performer/artist Cowboy Jack Clement tells the story of his amazing career via home movies featuring longtime friends Bono, Johnny Cash, Jack Clement, Jerry Lee Lewis, Dolly Parton, John Prine, Porter Wagoner, Robert Gordon, Morgan Neville, Dylan Robertson, and Brenna Sanchez.

Shakespeare Was A Big George Jones Fan: Cowboy Jack Clement's Home Movies

Roy Blount, Jr. writes:

Whenever I hear a new hit song these days I wonder, is anybody getting any simple pleasure, or pain, out of life? Everything’s jacked up to a level of ecstasy or outrage people couldn’t live with if they knew what they were feeling. In country music, it used to be that the performers’ hair was unreal but their songs were down to earth. Now their hair looks more or less natural but their songs are bouffant wigs.

From last year, a thread about Blount's latest book:

After forty years of making a living using words in every medium, print or electronic, except greeting cards, Roy Blount Jr. still can’t get over his ABCs. In Alphabet Juice, he celebrates the juju, the sonic and kinetic energies of letters and their combinations. Blount does not prescribe proper English. The franchise he claims is “over the counter” and concentrates more on questions such as these: Did you know that both mammal and matter derive from baby talk? Have you noticed how wince makes you wince?

Back to Blount on Cowboy Jack Clement:

Maybe the Recession will bring us back to basics. “Whatever may be wrong with the world,” Clement has said, “at least it has some good things to eat.”

Recently, Tim wrote:

In my attempt to find some meaning in life I've taken to reading lots of food blogs.

Calvin Trillin:

It has become possible to eat in Singapore for days at a time without ever entering a conventional restaurant.

Tim again:

Calvin Trillin is a food writing god.

Jack, Johnny, and something only pigs can do