Old articles by Howard Rheingold, Cheshire Catalyst, Steve Wozniak, Ted Nelson, the Jolly Roger, Dan Bricklin, Mr. Wizard, Art Kleiner, Ray Bradbury, John Markoff, Mitch Kapor, Timothy Leary, William F. Buckley, Jr., and many more.

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Would McCain be the oldest US President? Would Obama be the youngest? Who was the youngest president? Were presidents younger in the past or older? What is the highest number of years a former president lived after leaving office? Who served the longest? Whose term was the shortest? The interactive visualization below lets you answer these and a few other questions.

Presidential Demographics

Tyler Cohen:

A bursting real estate bubble set off the Japanese recession of the 1990s, which deepened as ailing banks languished. It took Japan’s economy more than a decade to resume steady, noticeable growth.

Will this happen to the United States? Probably not, but we may face a protracted process of recovery, stretching longer than the two or so years usually required to climb out of recession.

The fundamental problem in the American economy is that, for years, people treated rising asset prices as a substitute for personal savings.

From the archive:

Are Americans suffering from an undue sense of entitlement?

Somebody said to me the other day that the entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement.

From last month:

Given a Shovel, Americans Dig Deeper Into Debt

And further back, we have "Memorable Quotes from Mystery Men":

The Shoveller: We're not your classic heroes. We're the other guys.
The Shoveller: God's given me a gift. I shovel well. I shovel very well.
The Shoveller: We struck down evil with the mighty sword of teamwork and the hammer of not bickering.

David Brooks, from June:

The United States has been an affluent nation since its founding. But the country was, by and large, not corrupted by wealth. For centuries, it remained industrious, ambitious and frugal.

Over the past 30 years, much of that has been shredded.

Finding the Mess Behind the Mess

The changes started coming slowly ...

First was the lettering on the pavement -- "Canada" on one side, "U.S.A." on the other. Then came the white pylons. After that, signboards were erected on some streets, ordering drivers to turn back and use an officially designated entry point.

For longtime residents accustomed to a simpler life that flowed freely across a largely invisible border, the final shock -- and what made most people really take notice -- was a proposal by the border agents last year to erect fences on the small streets to officially barricade the United States from Canada, and neighbor from neighbor.

A large part of the job, border agents said, is community outreach and educating border residents that the way of life they have known for generations has profoundly changed.

Beltran said he instructs his agents to use discretion and "common sense." It goes like this: "If a kid [on the Canada side] throws a Frisbee over here, he can come and get it. But if he got the Frisbee and kept walking down to the Arby's to get a soda, we're going to stop you."

"We can't be wrong once."

From the archive:

"You can't talk sense to them," Bush said, referring to terrorists.

"Nooooo!" the audience roared.

Decius:

Overestimating the threat, when you're lining people up against the wall without due process, does have a cost, and frankly it's your soul.

Final thoughts:

According to one who was present, Churchill suddenly blurted out: "Are we animals? Are we taking this too far?"

People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything. And still I see a woman in row four, cutting an apple. With a four-inch knife.

Homeland Security Comes to Vermont

This paper describes a study of undergraduate women's retention in the first-year of the computer science major at the University of Pennsylvania for the purpose of identifying the underlying issues responsible for attrition. The subsequent steps taken by the faculty to improve women's retention is also discussed.

From the archive:

Dive into the sea, or stay away.

Consider starting out with Danica McKellar's Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle-School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail.

In all his speeches, John McCain urges Americans to make sacrifices for a country that is both “an idea and a cause”.

He is not asking them to suffer anything he would not suffer himself.

But many voters would rather not suffer at all.

Also:

"Being in the water alone, surfing, sharpens a particular kind of concentration, an ability to agree with the ocean, to react with a force that is larger than you are."

If Schnabel is a surfer in the sense of knowing how to skim existence for its wonders, he is also a surfer in the more challenging sense of wanting to see where something bigger than himself, or the unknown, will take him, even with the knowledge that he might not come back from the trip.

Have you seen Man on Wire?

Improving the Persistence of First-Year Undergraduate Women in Computer Science

A Greensburg man was convicted Tuesday of using a 2-pound concrete garden gnome as a deadly weapon in a February attack against his 16-year-old stepdaughter.

Greensburg man guilty of using gnome as weapon

The world does not look today the way most anticipated it would after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Great-power competition was supposed to give way to an era of geoeconomics. Ideological competition between democracy and autocracy was supposed to end with the "end of history." Few expected that the United States' unprecedented power would face so many challenges, not only from rising powers but also from old and close allies. How much of this fate was in the stars, and how much in Americans themselves? And what, if anything, can the United States do about it now?

In a selfish world, enlightened wisdom may be beyond the capacities of all states. But if there is any hope, it lies in a renewed understanding of the importance of values. The United States and other democratic nations share a common aspiration for a liberal international order, built on democratic principles and held together, however imperfectly, by laws and conventions among nations. This order is gradually coming under pressure as the great-power autocracies grow in strength and influence and as the antidemocratic struggle of radical Islamic terrorism persists. If the democracies' need for one another is less obvious than before, the need for these nations, including the United States, to "see further into the future" is all the greater.

The September 12 Paradigm

The information technology industry is about to face its toughest period since the dotcom bust.

Corporate IT budgets remain the big, boring engine that powers Silicon Valley and the rest of the technology industry. Now, with a pronounced economic slowdown in the US and the UK, the engine has started to sputter.

The industry's seemingly endless hype cycle feeds optimism: there's always a new computing architecture about to go mainstream, a new must-have gadget, and a Next Big Thing.

But there is no escaping the fact that, after five years of steady growth, tougher times lie ahead.

"We're just putting our heads down, and hoping that in two or three years things will have re-emerged." For many Web 2.0 hopefuls, that time will never come.

Back to bust?

Publishers Weekly Starred Review:

Peter Trachtenberg wryly observes: Everybody suffers, but Americans have the peculiar delusion that they're exempt from suffering. He shared in this denial until a friend died of cancer, and then he began to ask questions. Most of these are unanswerable, he admits. Why me? How do I endure? What is just? What does my suffering say about me? about God? And what do I owe those who suffer? This book is a layman's response to unimaginable anguish, a collection of powerful stories rather than a philosophical treatise. Writing movingly about victims and survivors of natural disasters, war, genocide, domestic violence, addiction, illness, suicide and injustice, he deftly intermingles their stories with observations from religion, philosophy and literature. Not everyone will want to face this much misery, and Trachtenberg offers no easy solutions. His book, however, succeeds because it asks the right questions, calls on the experience of articulate witnesses and—through skillful narrative and trenchant observation—beguiles the reader into facing heartbreaking reality.

From the archive:

In all his speeches, John McCain urges Americans to make sacrifices for a country that is both “an idea and a cause”.

He is not asking them to suffer anything he would not suffer himself.

But many voters would rather not suffer at all.

From 2005, Tom Friedman:

Are Americans suffering from an undue sense of entitlement?

Somebody said to me the other day that the entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement.

From 2004, a letter in the NYT Sunday Magazine:

It is sad but common evidence of our sense of entitlement that we in the West consider whatever we get our hands on to be ours.

From 2006, Decius:

I think many Americans feel a sense of entitlement to the greatness of America. They wrap up our country's accomplishments, sprinkle on a bunch of stuff we didn't accomplish, pin it on their chest, and claim personal responsibility for it. They believe that they are personally great because they are Americans and America is great.

From 2004, David Brooks:

Most students today are overprotected, uninterested and filled with a sense of entitlement.

The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning

Why are many storefronts in Moscow empty while street kiosks in front are full of goods? This article develops a theory of anticommons property to help explain the puzzle of empty storefronts and full kiosks. Anticommons property can be understood as the mirror image of commons property. By definition, in a commons, multiple owners are each endowed with the privilege to use a given resource, and no one has the right to exclude another. When too many owners have such privileges of use, the resource is prone to overuse -- a tragedy of the commons. In an anticommons, by my definition, multiple owners are each endowed with the fight to exclude others from a scarce resource, and no one has an effective privilege of use. When there are too many owners holding rights of exclusion, the resource is prone to underuse -- a tragedy of the anticommons. Anticommons property may appear whenever new property rights are being defined. For example in Moscow, multiple owners have been endowed initially with competing rights in each storefront, so no owner holds a useable bundle of rights and the store remains empty. Once an anticommons has emerged, collecting rights into private property bundles can be brutal and slow. This article explores the dynamics of anticommons property in transition economies, formalizes the empirical material in a property theory framework, and then shows how the idea of anticommons property can be a useful new tool for understanding a range of property puzzles. The difficulties of overcoming a tragedy of the anticommons suggest that property theofists n-fight pay more attention to the content of property bundles, rather than focusing just on the clarity of rights.

The Tragedy of the Anticommons