The amphetamine-assisted, physician-abetted social adjustment of yore is back as a mass phenomenon.

How did a dangerous drug, all but banned for very good reasons, become a pharmaceutical best seller once again? To get a handle on America's enduring attraction to speed, we must step back and explore how amphetamines became part of the fabric of American life.

...

When Allen Ginsberg helped open the counterculture's own anti-amphetamine campaign in 1965 under the slogan "speed kills," he wasn't referring just to the drug that so many Americans relied on to keep up. He was also thinking of the demand that amphetamine satisfies. It might be time to think again about heeding his call.

From the archive:

"People have less time. So their garden projects have changed over time. Convenience, time-saving factors, less mess," he said.

To be sure, time marches on.

Yet for many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

Life in the Fast Lane

For those of you who might not recall, the paradox of thrift posits that if we all individually cut our spending in an attempt to increase individual savings, then our collective savings will paradoxically fall because one person’s spending is another’s income – the fountain from which savings flow.

This principle is part of a whole range of macroeconomic concepts under the label of the paradox of aggregation: what holds for the individual doesn’t necessarily hold for the community of individuals. Understanding this paradox is absolutely vital to understanding macroeconomics and even more so to understanding what is presently unfolding in global financial markets.

Once the double bubbles in housing valuation and housing debt burst a little over a year ago, everybody, and in particular, every levered financial institution – banks and shadow banks alike – decided individually that it was time to delever their balance sheets. At the individual level, that made perfect sense.

At the collective level, however, it has given us the paradox of deleveraging: when we all try to do it at the same time, we actually do less of it, because we collectively create deflation in the assets from which leverage is being removed. Put differently, not all levered lenders can shed assets and the associated debt at the same time without driving down asset prices, which has the paradoxical impact of increasing leverage by driving down lenders’ net worth.

The Paradox of Deleveraging

The volume of freight transported in the United States is expected to double in the next 30 years. An increased use of rail freight could allow the supply chain to accommodate these increased volumes while minimizing highway congestion and improving energy efficiency in the transportation sector. Shippers and policymakers are concerned that the existing infrastructure — much diminished after decades of track abandonment — lacks sufficient capacity to accommodate the increased demand for rail freight. This report draws from publicly available data on the U.S. railroad industry to provide observations about rail infrastructure capacity and performance in freight transportation. Railroads have improved their productivity in the past three decades, mitigating immediate concerns about capacity, but concerns about future capacity constraints appear to be justified. Insufficient data exist to determine whether rail performance is now stable, significantly declining, or improving. The railroad system is privately owned and operated, but there is a public role for easing rail capacity constraints because private decisions about transportation investment and freight shipping have public consequences for safety and the environment. A better understanding of the public and private cost trade-offs between shipping freight by truck and by rail is needed. Improvements to data quality and freight-modeling tools will improve the ability for policymakers to better target public investment in the rail freight transportation system.

The State of US Railroads

While nature tends to trump humans when it comes to color inspiration, at least in my opinion, when humans put their hands into engineering nature, like in the case of salt evaporation ponds, together, unimaginable colors can be created.

The beautiful colors in these images from Google Earth are created during the process of harvesting salt. The vivid colors, which can range from green to bright red, come from different concentrations of algae.

From the archive:

Acidus wrote:

Google just added satellite view for most of the world. This link is something I found in the north east part of Austrailia. Its an insanely huge structure, and Google doesn't have any more zoomed in data.

- Giant solar panel field?
- Irrigation?
- Echelon listening post?

I answered:

These are Evaporative salt pans at Port Alma.

Acidus replied:

Damn! Thanks!

The Colors Of Salt Evaporation Ponds

It happens all the time: you're registering a free e-mail account or making a purchase online, when up pops a wavy, multicolored word. The system asks you to retype the word - and you roll your eyes, squint a little, and transcribe. This little test is one of the most successful techniques for making sure the person trying to log on is really a human, and not a digital "bot" prying into the site.

But now, when you type that word, something else may be happening as well: You may be deciphering a word from a decaying old book, helping to transform a historic text into a new digital file.

Jessamyn West, a library technologist, points out that these tools and games - which people can sign up for voluntarily - give people a rare chance to do small nice things without leaving their desks. "I think people like feeling like they're helping," she said. "They recycle, they pick up litter, they'll pick a penny or leave a penny."

In a time when the Net seems overrun with spammers and trolls preying on our ignorance, desires, and fears, she finds it cheering to know that people are looking for ways to reward cleverness and generosity - a micro-ethics of clicks, games, and tag clouds.

Click to translate

BoingBoing linked to Cute Overload, saying that viewing the site “is like taking a happy pill.”

And in that warm feeling lies the reason for its popularity. Given all the nastiness on the Internet — blog trolls, flame wars, vicious gossip, pornography, snark and spam — what better antidote is there than looking at pictures of tiny ducklings waddling in a line or kittens splayed on their backs, paw pads in the air?

Click through for the kitten.

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.

A Small Empire Built on Cuddly and Fuzzy Branches Out From the Web

Sunflow is an open source rendering system for photo-realistic image synthesis. It is written in Java and built around a flexible ray tracing core and an extensible object-oriented design.

Sunflow - Global Illumination Rendering System

Neither candidate speaks with much candor about solving the energy crisis.

See also:

What will happen when America can't afford to fly?

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.

More recently:

McCain is no longer telling the sorts of hard truths that people would prefer not to confront, or even half-truths that they might find vaguely discomfiting. Instead, he’s opted out of truth altogether

Recent history suggests that Presidential campaigns don’t reward integrity; the candidate who refuses to compromise his principles is unlikely to have a chance to act on them. Still, McCain’s slide is saddening. That he has sunk to the level of “Pump” a full month before Labor Day really doesn’t leave him—or the race—far to go.

Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs.

The sacrifice-free election strategy

1. Do one thing at a time.
2. Know the problem.
3. Learn to listen.
4. Learn to ask questions.
5. Distinguish sense from nonsense.
6. Accept change as inevitable.
7. Admit mistakes.
8. Say it simple.
9. Be calm.
10. Smile.

From the archive:

Benjamin Franklin's 13 Virtues:

It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.

For this purpose I therefore contrived the following method.

Powell's Rules:

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.

Rumsfeld's Rules, including this one, from H.L. Mencken:

For every human problem there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong.

How to Work Better

What will happen when America can't afford to fly?

From the archive:

Every now and then I meet someone in Manhattan who has never driven a car. Some confess it sheepishly, and some announce it proudly. For some it is just a practical matter of fact, the equivalent of not keeping a horse on West 87th Street or Avenue A. Still, I used to wonder at such people, but more and more I wonder at myself.

Driving is the cultural anomaly of our moment. Someone from the past, I think, would marvel at how much time we spend in cars and how our geographic consciousness is defined by how far we can get in a few hours’ drive and still feel as if we’re close to home. Someone from the future, I’m sure, will marvel at our blindness and at the hole we have driven ourselves into, for we are completely committed to an unsustainable technology.

From the archive:

Fundamental changes in American life may turn today’s McMansions into tomorrow’s tenements.

The End Of Aviation