Jon Bruner:

More than 10 million Americans moved from one county to another during 2008. This map visualizes those moves. Click on any county to see comings and goings: black lines indicate net inward movement, red lines net outward movement.

Discover:

There are 260 million people in America, and you are one of them.

Decius:

Paul Graham asks what living in your city tells you. Living in the north Perimeter area for 6 odd years now has told me that everybody makes way, way more money than I do. It's not inspiring so much as it makes you sympathize with class warfare.

Bird and Fortune:

They thought that if they had a bigger mortgage they could get a bigger house. They thought if they had a bigger house, they would be happy. It's pathetic. I've got four houses and I'm not happy.

Louis CK:

Maybe we need some time ... because, everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy ...

Where Americans Are Moving

John Koenig:

The Upper Midwest's third-largest compendium of the outer spatters of the emotional palette. Our mission is to harpoon, bag and tag wild sorrows then release them back into the subconscious.

A sampler:

dry pocket, n. the phantom vibration of a hip whose corresponding pocket is phoneless ...

contact high-five, n. an innocuous touch by someone just doing their job--a barber, yoga instructor or friendly waitress--that you enjoy more than you'd like to admit, a feeling of connection so stupefyingly simple that it cheapens the power of the written word, so that by the year 2025, aspiring novelists would be better off just giving people a hug.

maison d'etre, n. satisfaction with the decisive sounds of arriving home, from surfing the gearshift into park to clacking open the deadbolt, a morse code reminder that your greatest power is to renounce what you most want to hold onto.

Cory Doctorow:

The real reason to wear the mask is to spare others the discomfort of seeing your facial expression ...

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Justin E.H. Smith:

Turning to empirical methods is valuable, but not at the cost of neglecting what we already know.

John Allen Paulos:

Unless we know how things are counted, we don't know if it's wise to count on the numbers.

Jeffrey Moore:

Do you know, or are you guessing? Do you know, or are you guessing? You're guessing, aren't you? No points! 0! You don't get any points for guessing!

Tom Friedman:

We're entering an era where being in politics is going to be more than anything else about taking things away from people. It's going to be very, very interesting.

Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris:

We can rely on accumulated data, but too often we don't. Why not? Because our intuitions respond to vivid stories, not abstract statistics.

Kyle Lundstedt:

From the lenders' standpoint, people who stay in their homes without paying the mortgage or actively trying to work out some other solution, like selling it, are "milking the process."

An exchange:

Charlie Rose: Don't you think we've milked this for about as much as we can, Richard?

Richard Florida: I hope not, Charlie. I hope not.

Richard Florida:

We have come to an economic juncture where we must re-examine even our most cherished beliefs.

Mark Foulon:

We have tried incremental steps and they have proven insufficient.

Paul Volcker:

The nature and depth of the financial crisis is forcing us to reconsider some of the basic tenets of financial theory.

Any thoughts -- any longings -- that participants in the financial community might have had that conditions were returning to normal (implicitly promising the return of high compensation) should by now be shattered.

Today's concerns may soon become tomorrow's existential crises.

Edward Chancellor:

There is a danger the proposed fiscal tightening in the eurozone will lead to further deflation and economic collapse. The Spanish government faces "the paradox of public thrift": the less it borrows, the more it will end up owing.

Decius:

Our job is to apply our well-earned cynicism and fail to follow the baby boomers off a cliff in their pursuit of some idealistic agenda.

Ridley Scott:

Cynicism will lead you to the truth. Or vice versa.

John Givings:

Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

Angus McCullough:

To compare Tetris to any other game is somehow wrong -- it is a masterful test of how our brains function while trying to balance instinctual and intellectual challenges in real time.

The major difference between Tetris and other games is the simplicity of its construction and complexity of play.

Most importantly, it is a game that does not have a goal or end.

There is no castle to storm or high score to achieve -- the only way to end your game is to lose.

Instead of building up, every time a line is completed it disappears.

John Bird and John Fortune:

They thought that if they had a bigger mortgage they could get a bigger house. They thought if they had a bigger house, they would be happy. It's pathetic. I've got four houses and I'm not happy.

Sarah Silverman:

You're very free if you don't love money.

McCullough:

The way to become a Confucian gentleman is through mastery of ritual, training your instinct to work with your mind.

Ben Bernanke:

When you are working, studying, or pursuing a hobby, do you sometimes become so engrossed in what you are doing that you totally lose track of time?

That feeling is called flow.

If you never have that feeling, you should find some new activities.

Xunzi:

When one has grasped Virtue, then one can achieve fixity.

When one can achieve fixity, then one can respond to things.

To be capable both of fixity and of responding to things -- such a one is called the perfected person.

McCullough:

With practice, you can simply put the pieces where you desire, and be sure that they are filling in the right spaces.

In many ways, the ideal of Tetris is to continually return to this first frame, where the simplicity of the game is truly represented.

The fact that emptiness is the goal connects with Xunzi's saying about clearing away murkiness to be able to see.

Tetris, in its highest and purest form, is about learning how to fail. Even if you spend your whole life working at the game and playing at a high level, you will inevitably reach a moment of failure in every single game. This is, I think, the greatest lesson that the game can impart.

Return to Nothingness

Molly Young:

The difference between successful and unsuccessful people is that the first kind gain momentum from boredom and the second kind don't.

Paul Buchheit:

Many people with jobs have a fantasy about all the amazing things they would do if they didn't need to work. In reality, if they had the drive and commitment to do actually do those things, they wouldn't let a job get in the way.

Sarah Silverman:

You're very free if you don't love money.

Martin Wolf:

If you want to accumulate enduring wealth, do not lend to grasshoppers.

Bruce Nussbaum:

It is not impossible to monetize that which is free. Apple did that with 99 cent songs on iTunes. But it is difficult.

Ian Bogost:

Mark Zuckerberg has taken up the reigns of involuntary public life's dark chariot from Josh Harris, but the fascism and exhibitionism remain the same. The scale has changed too: instead of a hundred residents, Zuckerberg rules over 400 million. Harris's tiny tragedy has become everyone's. The only difference is, most of us don't even notice.

Like the manure catcher on a draft horse, online services collect and disseminate the exhaust of our lives without us even noticing. Any idiot can live in public.

Steven Johnson:

There used to be a large crevasse separating the intimate space of private life and what's exposed by the klieg lights of fame. But in the Facebook age, that crevasse has broadened out into a valley between the realms of privacy and celebrity, and we are starting to camp out there and get the lay of the land. The fascinating and troublesome thing about the valley is that the rules of engagement there are not clearly defined, and it's likely that they will stay undefined.

It is going to take some time to learn how to live there.

Robert Scoble:

We want to present ourselves to other people the way we would like to have other people perceive us as.

Translation: I'd rather be seen as someone who eats salad at Pasta Moon than someone who eats a Big Mac at McDonalds.

This is the problem with likes and other explicit sharing systems. We lie and we lie our asses off.

danah boyd:

When you think about Facebook, the market has very specific incentives: Encourage people to be public, increase ad revenue. All sorts of other things will happen from there.

Bill Gurley:

Customers seem to really like free as a price point. I suspect they will love "less than free."

Josh Harris:

Everything is free, except the video that we capture of you. That we own.

boyd:

Big Data is made of people.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Michael Osinski:

Oyster farmers eat lots of oysters, don't they?

Denton Gentry:

We might recoil from this, but I suspect it is not something which can be stopped. The technology has reached the point where these things are feasible, and there is a huge economic incentive to do so. A concerted effort to stop it results in the technology being less visible, not absent.

Ellis:

All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.

Libby Purves:

There is a thrill in switching off the mobile, taking the bus to somewhere without CCTV and paying cash for your tea. You and your innocence can spend an afternoon alone together, unseen by officialdom.

Erasing David:

David Bond lives in one of the most intrusive surveillance states in the world. He decides to find out how much private companies and the government know about him by putting himself under surveillance and attempting to disappear, a decision that changes his life forever. Leaving his pregnant wife and young child behind, he is tracked across the database state on a chilling journey that forces him to contemplate the meaning of privacy and the loss of it.

Cordelia Dean:

There are those who suggest humanity should collectively decide to turn away from some new technologies as inherently dangerous.

Marc Lacey:

In other words, there has to be a line people will not cross, even for a suitcase full of cash.

Lisbet Rausing:

It is clear that if a new Alexandria is to be built, it needs to be built for the long term, with an unwavering commitment to archival preservation and the public good.

In today's era of electronic abundance, how can libraries archive the dreams and experiences of humankind? What do we discard?

David Lynch:

So many things these days are made to look at later. Why not just have the experience and remember it?

Rivka Galchen:

I prefer the taciturn company of my things. I love my things. I have a great capacity for love, I think.

Ira Glass:

Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.

Rausing:

We have belatedly realized that humankind understands only poorly what will last through the ages.

You see the problem. What is the library, when the totality of experience approaches that which can be remembered?

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Jules Dupuit:

Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

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.

Brad Lemley:

It is a clock, but it is designed to do something no clock has ever been conceived to do -- run with perfect accuracy for 10,000 years.

Stewart Brand:

We're building a 10,000-year clock, designed by Danny Hillis, and we're figuring out what a 10,000-year library might be good for. If the clock or the library could be useful to things you want to happen in the world, how would you advise them to proceed?

Toward a New Alexandria

Jenna Russell:

It is economic inequality, not overall wealth or cultural differences, that fosters societal breakdown, by boosting insecurity and anxiety, which leads to divisive prejudice between the classes, rampant consumerism, and all manner of mental and physical suffering.

Jules Dupuit:

Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

Decius:

Paul Graham asks what living in your city tells you. Living in the north Perimeter area for 6 odd years now has told me that everybody makes way, way more money than I do. It's not inspiring so much as it makes you sympathize with class warfare.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira:

Follow the data.

Bird and Fortune:

They thought that if they had a bigger mortgage they could get a bigger house. They thought if they had a bigger house, they would be happy. It's pathetic. I've got four houses and I'm not happy.

It's Money That Matters

Economist:

In the past information consumption was largely passive, leaving aside the telephone. Today half of all bytes are received interactively.

Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes.

Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, predicts that the job of statistician will become the "sexiest" around. Data, he explains, are widely available; what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them.

Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira:

Follow the data.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Bruce Schneier:

Data is the pollution of the information age.

This is wholesale surveillance; not "follow that car," but "follow every car."

More is coming.

Will not wearing a life recorder be used as evidence that someone is up to no good?

Sense Networks:

We asked ourselves: with all this real-time data, what else could we do for a city?

Nightlife enhancement was the obvious answer.

Camille Roth, Soong Moon Kang, Michael Batty, and Marc Barthelemy:

The spatial arrangement of urban hubs and centers and how individuals interact with these centers is a crucial problem with many applications ranging from urban planning to epidemiology. We utilize here in an unprecedented manner the large scale, real-time 'Oyster' card database of individual person movements in the London subway to reveal the structure and organization of the city. We show that patterns of intraurban movement are strongly heterogeneous in terms of volume, but not in distance, and that there is a polycentric structure composed of simple flow patterns organized around a limited number of activity centers arranged in a hierarchical way. This new understanding can shed light on the impact of new urban projects on the evolution of the polycentric configuration of a city and provides an initial approach to modeling flows in an urban system.

An exchange, circa 2008:

Charlie Rose: Don't you think we've milked this for about as much as we can, Richard?

Richard Florida: I hope not, Charlie. I hope not.

DeLaval:

The Voluntary Milking System (VMS) allows cows to decide when to be milked, and gives dairy farmers a more independent lifestyle, free from regular milkings.

Sterling Hayden:

Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?

Nate Silver:

Perhaps the only good thing about losing your job is that you no longer have to endure the drive to work.

Commuting in a polycentric city