A team led by a Libyan-American telecom executive has helped rebels hijack Col. Moammar Gadhafi's cellphone network and re-establish their own communications.

The new network, first plotted on an airplane napkin and assembled with the help of oil-rich Arab nations, is giving more than two million Libyans their first connections to each other and the outside world after Col. Gadhafi cut off their telephone and Internet service about a month ago.

Rebels Hijack Gadhafi's Phone Network - WSJ.com

Jonathan Franzen in The New Yorker:

REFLECTIONS about "Robinson Crusoe," the remote island of Masafuera, and the death of David Foster Wallace. In the South Pacific, five hundred miles off the coast of central Chile, is a forbiddingly vertical volcanic island, seven miles long and four miles wide, that is populated by millions of seabirds and thousands of fur seals but is devoid of people, except in the warmer months, when a handful of fishermen come out to catch lobsters.

David Foster Wallace and 'Robinson Crusoe' : The New Yorker

Noteworthy:

Like-minded people must form groups and work together to find the most effective way to express their sentiments.

Votizen:

Our approach is simple: we authenticate your existing Facebook, Twitter and email accounts as belonging to a registered voter, and we help match you with other voters who share your views. We then automatically connect you with your specific elected officials, who pay particular attention since they know the opinions are from actual voting constituents.

Stanley Fish:

To be political is to believe something, and to believe something is to believe that those who believe something else are wrong, and after all you don't want people who believe (and would do) the wrong things running your government. So you organize with other like-minded folks and smite the enemy (verbally) hip and thigh. You join a party.

Economist:

Americans are increasingly choosing to live among like-minded neighbours. This makes the culture war more bitter and politics harder.

John C. Dvorak:

The public continues to read about what they already know. And they hang out only with like-minded people. There are huge cadres of people who are practically duplicates of each other. They all think alike, dress alike, and go to the same group-approved places.

Conan O'Brien:

[In the future,] Super-TiVos will arrange marriages between like-minded viewers and will persuade mismatched couples to throw in the towel and start seeing other people.

Nova Spivack:

Twine is a new [now defunct] service that helps you organize, share and discover information about your interests, with networks of like-minded people.

Scott Sassa:

The notion of having like-minded people provide you with a trusted referral is a really powerful marketing concept.

Vint Cerf:

The Internet is for everyone ... I hope Internauts everywhere will join with the Internet Society and like-minded organizations to achieve this, easily stated but hard to attain goal.

Homer:

Can't someone else do it?

Decius:

I said I'd do something about this, and I am.

Votizen

Colleen A. Reilly:

Digital spaces on the World Wide Web can be consumed as windowed technologies, providing apparently transparent access to information, or as mirrors, multi-layered and complex, requiring critical reflexivity for productive participation. Approaching Wikipedia as a mirrored technology exploits its potential as a pedagogical tool with which students can improve their research practices and writing proficiency in digital environments. Students can learn to grapple with Wikipedia as a complex, living discourse community, whose rhetorical practices and technical conventions they must learn in order to make contributions to it that are accepted by fellow editors of the site and withstand its unique editorial processes. By writing for Wikipedia, students become critical users of this digital resource, develop rhetorical and technological proficiency, and generate texts that prompt real-world response and provide potentially useful information for fellow users of this massive digital resource.

Can Wiki Voter Guide help teachers to build lesson plans around the development and curation of relevant content on local elections?

Decius:

I said I'd do something about this, and I am.

Teaching Wikipedia as a mirrored technology | First Monday

Steve Duncan:

As an urban historian & photographer, I try to peel back the layers of a city to see what's underneath. From the tops of bridges to the depths of sewer tunnels, these explorations of the urban environment help me puzzle together the interconnected, multi-dimensional history and complexity of the great metropolises of the world.

Jacki Lyden:

Steve Duncan lives dangerously. The urban explorer goes underground, examining the hidden infrastructure of major cities all over the world -- their tunnels, subways, sewers.

In New York City, his favorite underground adventure, he could drown when the tide comes in or succumb to toxic gases in the sewers. He could be hit by a train or step on the third rail. And if he gets caught, he would be so under arrest.

So why does he do it? If you could have followed Alice down that rabbit hole, or Jules Verne to the center of the Earth, or gone to see the mandrake god in Pan's Labyrinth, wouldn't you do it? It's seductive. It's mysterious. It's what lies beneath.

Edward L. Glaeser:

During economic downturns, we begin to fear that we are entering a permanent period of decline. But we can avoid that depressing prospect if we recognize that a revival will not come from federal spending or another building boom. Reinvention requires a new wave of innovation and entrepreneurship, which can emerge from our dense metropolitan areas and their skilled residents. America must stop treating its cities as ugly stepchildren, and should instead cherish them as the engines that power our economy.

Urban Exploration - Undercity.org

National Geographic:

There's a jungle inside Vietnam's mammoth cavern. A skyscraper could fit too. And the end is out of sight.

Sean O'Neal:

The same Kansas salt mines that protected over 3,300 hours of The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson from the ravages of time and Injuns has now given us another worthy pop-culture artifact: 17 "lost" minutes from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey that have been unearthed by Warner Bros. Douglas Trumbull, the film's special photographic effects supervisor, made the revelation while discussing Beyond The Infinite: The Making Of A Masterpiece, a behind-the-scenes documentary he'd been working on with David Larson.

See also, Modern Times, by BC2010.

In Vietnam, World's Largest Cave Passage

The Paris Metro and the service it provides are deeply intertwined into the fabric of the city. As the 4.5 million passengers who ride it every day will probably attest it's the quickest way around whether it's for work, for play or both. The metro's distinctive art-nouveau style is unmistakable and the plant like green wrought iron entrances topped with the orange orbs and Metropolitan signage designed by Hector Guimard which sprout up all over the city lead one down to the gleaming white tiled platforms to be whisked away all over the city. On my first trip to Paris I arrived into Gare du Nord and entered the dense maze that is the metro. Despite the crowds, the noise and the distinct odour of piss, I was in love. The kind of love which inspires one to risk life, limb and deportation to get up close and personal.

sleepycity | photography urban exploration | Demolition of the Paris Metro

It must have been the third or fourth day -- time, by that point, had started to dissolve -- when I stood in camping gear on Fifth Avenue, waiting as my companions went to purchase waterproof waders at the Orvis store. We had already hiked through sewers in the Bronx, slept in a basement boiler room, passed a dusty evening in a train tunnel; we were soiled and sleep-deprived, and we smelled of rotting socks. Yet no one on that sidewalk seemed to notice. As I stood among the businessmen and fashionable women, it dawned on me that New Yorkers -- an ostensibly perceptive lot -- sometimes see only what's directly in front of their eyes.

I suppose that's not a bad way to think about the urban expedition we were on: a taxing, baffling, five-day journey into New York's underground, the purpose of which, its planners said, was to expose the city's skeleton, to render visible its invisible marvels. The trip's conceiver, Erling Kagge, a 47-year-old Norwegian adventurer, had ascended Mount Everest and trekked on foot to both the North and South poles. His partner, Steve Duncan, a 32-year-old student of public history, had logged more than a decade exploring subways, sewers and storm drains. Last month, the two of them forged a new frontier: an extended exploration of the subterranean city, during which they lived inside the subsurface infrastructure, sleeping on the trail, as it were.

The Wilderness Below Your Feet

Andrew Rice:

"Because it was a place that always drew visionaries and big thinkers, it has always showed the way that the nation is going," said Strand. If economic stagnation and distrust of government are the defining features of this American moment, Niagara Falls charted the way to the bottom.

You wouldn't call it [the Canadian side of Niagara Falls] classy; you wouldn't call it impoverished, either.

Mark Greif:

It's a superficial topic, yet it seemed that so much was at stake. Why? Because struggles over taste (and "taste" is the hipster's primary currency) are never only about taste.

The things you prefer -- tastes that you like to think of as personal, unique, justified only by sensibility -- correspond tightly to defining measures of social class: your profession, your highest degree and your father's profession.

Satoshi Kanazawa:

There is a clear monotonic association between childhood intelligence (measured before the age of 16) and the frequency of alcohol consumption in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. "Very bright" British children grow up to consume alcohol nearly one full standard deviation more frequently than their "very dull" classmates.

The more intelligent Americans are in their childhood, the more alcohol they consume as young adults.

Robert Lane Greene:

Steve Jobs says that the most important class he took in college (before dropping out) was calligraphy.

Ben Smith:

Writing a blog has become this very old-fashioned thing. It is like calligraphy or something.

Decius:

As Obama has been repeating, the American middle class has been thrown under the bus.

Jonathan V. Last:

Politicians as a class are particularly susceptible to mirror-gazing. But Obama's vanity is overwhelming. It defines him, his politics, and his presidency.

Peter Baker:

What you hear Obama aides talking about is that the system is "not on the level." That's a phrase commonly used around the West Wing -- "it's not on the level." By that, they mean the Republicans, the news media, the lobbyists, the whole Washington culture is not serious about solving problems. The challenge, as they see it, is how to rise above a town that can obsess for a week on whether an obscure Agriculture Department official in Georgia should have been fired.

As Brands, the historian, put it, "It'll be really interesting to see if a president who is thinking long term can have an impact on a political system that is almost irredeemably short term in its perspective."

Bruce Sterling:

They're just living, mortal human beings, the kind of geeky, quirky, cyberculture loons that I run into every day. And man, are they ever going to pay.

The politics of personal destruction hasn't made the Americans into a frank and erotically cheerful people. On the contrary, the US today is like some creepy house of incest divided against itself in a civil cold war.

It is a godawful mess. This is gonna get worse before it gets better, and it's gonna get worse for a long time.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri

What happens when an industry concerned with the production of culture is beholden to a company with the sole goal of underselling competitors?

Most customers aren't aware that the personalized book recommendations they receive are a result of paid promotions, not just purchase-derived data.

Edward Said:

Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that - to borrow a phrase from music - is contrapuntal. For an exile, habits of life, expression or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment.

Clay Shirky:

That giant sucking sound you hear is a billion putatively shared documents being slurped back into their silos, and even now, somewhere in the bowels of the Pentagon, there is doubtless a Powerpoint deck being crafted whose title is "Need to Know 2.0".

Marco Arment:

Attention to detail, like most facets of truly good design, can't be (and never is) added later. It's an entire development philosophy, methodology, and culture.

Great products, far more often than not, are great since day one.

Fouad Ajami:

In this astonishing -- and in contemporary Arab literature, perhaps unprecedented -- mingling of old and new totalitarianisms, this skillfully drawn analogy between Islamic fascism and Nazi fascism, The German Mujahid is a genuinely brave book. It goes against the grain of the writer's own culture, and tears down its taboos.