The Eco side of the Street

Designer Yeongwoo Kim created this Eco Urinal where men can pee and wash in the same stand. What Kim has done is incorporated the wash basin just above the spot you take aim to pee.

The reason cited is that you'll save a water flush cycle, coz when you rinse your hand after the job, the same gray water can be used to cleanse the urinal basin.

A number of SRO hotels around town have a much older, but similar feature. The room's sink is installed much lower than usual, 28" off the floor, to facilitate male customers who can't pull it together to walk down the hall. Just a bit of random urban lore that may explain something someday.

Trainwrecks, Trappist Monks, and Mossad

Aw jeez, it's Tuesday already. Somebody managed to sleep through the entire weekend. Link-dump follows. First a eulogy for George Weiss.

• R.I.P. George David Weiss: “the lion sleeps tonight” (1961), based on a south African Zulu song first recorded in the 1930s, was given a reworked melody and new lyrics (“in the jungle, the mighty jungle/the lion sleeps tonight”) by Mr. Weiss, Mr. Peretti and Mr. Creatore.

Next a rather unusual look at the administration of the Catholic Church. As a side note, it seems that the Belgium government's raid netted a Bishop,but he's been sent to a Trappist monastary, so it's OK - nothing to see here.

• The Pope is not Gay: So far, tragically, fear has won. But Toibin also sees the potential for a reborn Christianity in the papacy of John Paul II - wrecked by the white-knuckled reactionary politics that grew under him and now defines the Vatican. Here is what I too found so mesmerizing about Wojtila - as Toibin describes an event in John Paul II's native Poland in the spring of his papacy.

And as long as we're on a computer, a bit of meta about them.

• The Web is Dead: Long Live the Web: ...which argues that the web is an antienlightenment phenomenon, a destroyer of wisdom and culture and an infantile, Rousseau-esque fantasy. “It’s the cult of the child,” he says. “The more you know, the less you know. It’s all about digital narcissism, shameless self-promotion. I find it offensive.”
• Virtual Horizon: Computers today barely connect with people. The human body evolved as a whole to sense and interact with the world, but computers sense us only at our fingertips. Even the fingertips aren’t allowed to do all they can; a computer that was designed to interact with us holistically would feel different from moment to moment in order to convey information. For more than two decades, I’ve been working on the grand project of virtual reality (VR) to bring the whole body into computing.

A bit of business. I mean really, if we didn't have a banker veto in congress, the hoi polloi might vote for jobs or worse.

• The Business of Business: As with the banks and other financial institutions that played clever, manipulative games, producing little of real value other than moving vast amounts of capital from A to B in a giant shell game and racking up massive salaries and bonuses as their games plunged the country into recession and drove "the little people" out of jobs and homes. These "giants" provide ample proof that not all products that can be produced should be produced and that not all services that can be provided should be provided.

And last, the trainwreck section. (politics)

• Since when is it rational to bet on history being made by rational men? But then, a few days back, with the sanctions regime fresh out of the Suzy Homemaker oven that produced the oddly small confection, the Chinese let it be known that sanctions or no they would be working to deepen their trade ties with Iran. Which more than trumps the even more recent announcement that the Brazilians will, reluctantly, go along with the sanctions program.
• Mossad in America: It also dominates two commercial sectors that enable it to extend its reach inside America’s domestic infrastructure: airline and telecommunications security. Israel is believed to have the ability to monitor nearly all phone records originating in the United States, while numerous Israeli air-travel security companies are known to act as the local Mossad stations.
• Anti-Fascist Superheros: The comfort of the child’s vision of right and wrong is that he or she lives in a mental world where only monsters perpetrate crimes. Here on planet Earth, people who are certain they are doing right murder and terrorize. It’s a cruel world.
• America Is Exporting Terrorism: Think about what the U.S. reaction would be if, say, France claimed jurisdiction over a terrorist crime that a U.S. citizen committed on American soil, in which a visiting Frenchman happened to be one of the casualties.
• The Undemocracy: Let us consider how it is that Benjamin Quayle, son of the former vice president, opposed by a majority of Arizona's Republican voters, will soon be a member of Congress, their opposition notwithstanding.

That week in March

When Pope John Paul died, Rogers Cadenhead quickly registered www.BenedictXVI.com thinking this might be the name chosen by the new pope. When Cardinal Ratzinger was elected Pope he did choose the name Pope Benedict XVI, causing many to question what the Vatican would do to get the rights to that domain name.

Cadenhead didn't ask the Vatican for money. Instead, in a humorous manner on his blog he suggested a few things he would trade for:

1. Three days, two nights at the Vatican hotel.

2. One of those hats (referring to the bishop's hat).

3. Complete absolution, no questions asked, for the third week of March 1987.

Wonder what Rogers did the third week of March in 1987? Me too. Most of us have at least a week we'd like total forgiveness for.

Via: Grow-a-Brain

A naif does apophenia

Guardian U.K.

Fidel Castro has more reason than most to believe conspiracy theories involving dark forces in Washington. After all, the CIA tried to blow his head off with an exploding cigar.
But the ageing Cuban revolutionary may have gone too far for all but the most ardent believer in the reach and competence of America's intelligence agency. He has claimed that Osama bin Laden is in the pay of the CIA and that President George Bush summoned up the al-Qaida leader whenever he needed to increase the fear quotient. The former Cuban president said he knows it because he has read WikiLeaks.

The linked article drops all the right words: conspiracy theory, fringe, paranoia, and the more academic support articles debunk away with the ever popular apophenia, catharsis and anti-social personality disorder. All well and good, buuuuut we're also aware of how having a handy-dandy boogie man cut a number of pointed questions off at the pass. It was so sweet of ole boogie to drop his jeremiads in lockstep with the political newscycle.

The sad part, in my opinion, is that we've become so inured to being lied to, that nobody really gives a darn either way. Expecting politicians to lie, assuming a coercion engineer behind every spin cycle, and substituting a boogie simulacra for a messy reality has been re-christened political sophistication. Asking for better from the powers that be qualifies you as a naif. Pity, but you paid your nickle, enjoy the show.

---

A brief reflection, after I pushed the publish button, made me realize I had left a mispercision in the text. The word I used was re-christen. Even a superficial familiarity with the classics, Thucydides - Machiavelli - Sun Tsu - Bilhana - Gibbons, show that reality based politics is a tried and true tool for gaining and wielding power. Putting a digital gloss on old-dog shenanigans doesn't warrant a new term. A plain vanilla caveat emptor would suffice.

Chipper-Away

Fountain of Bedlam

The first two URLs of this week's link-dump are about blogging itself and a take on the difference between pundits, the pundocracy, and expertise.

• Slow Blogging: In between the slow bloggers and the rapid-fire ones, there is a vast middle, hundreds of thousands of writers who are not trying to attract advertising or buzz but do want to reach like-minded colleagues and friends. These people have been the bedrock of the genre since its start, yet recently there has been a sea change in their output: They are increasingly turning to slow blogging, in practice if not in name.
• Slow Blog Manifesto
• So You Want to be an Expert
  

  9) Recognize your limits. True experts don't just know a lot -- they are also aware of the vast oceans of knowledge that they don't know. 
  10) Quit reading blogs. They rot your brain and give you cooties.

Next is a bit of computer lore, the first prognostication is making all the rounds, i.e. talking head-o-rama, while the 2_nt is drowning in that fountain of openness; Homeland.

• The web is dead: It seemed just a matter of time before the Web replaced PC application software and reduced operating systems to a “poorly debugged set of device drivers,” as Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen famously said. First Java, then Flash, then Ajax, then HTML5 —
• Pentagon wants to secure domains of contractors: Under the proposal, which is being informally circulated throughout the department and the Department of Homeland Security, the NSA could set up equipment to look for patterns of suspicious traffic at the internet service providers that the companies' networks run through. The agency would immediately notify the Pentagon and the companies if pernicious behavior were detected.

I'm not to sure how I feel about steampunk lately. I'm told that there are writers and salespeople clamoring for a new marketing slot - dieselpunk. Sorry, I'm more of a rocket and ray-gun reader. For those of you that do enjoy that sort of thing, here is a bit of exotica.

• More Brazilian Steampunk: It was with great surprise I saw this cover, published in the City Phantastica of Romeo Martin. I was mesmerized with the quality of it and sure it take to see a cover of this genre better than this, so soon. I do not know the stories that rechearão editing this show, but they are so amazing, we have a work to remember for a long time.

The next two are about different business models.

• How to Run a Maritime Militia: The UNSC-mandated Monitoring Group on Somalia presented its report to the Security Council Tuesday. The part of the report detailing corruption in the distribution of humanitarian aid is getting all the press, but for my money the most interesting part of the report is the discussion of piracy, which has morphed into a multi-million dollar business replete with investors and an informal business model.
• Soft Rock Power: For decades, the world has considered business giants like IKEA and Saab the bright lights of Swedish industry. Yet the real symbol of Sweden's economic power is not the Poäng chair or the Gripen fighter jet, but the catchy choruses of the 1970s pop supergroup ABBA.

And last, politics. Let's see, what's a good word: bedlam? loonie bin? Inane? Inmates running the .. uh .. courtesan residence?

• Just how broken is the Senate?: Between speeches, there are quorum calls, time killers in which a Senate clerk calls the roll at the rate of one name every few minutes. The press gallery, above the dais, is typically deserted, as journalists prefer to hunker down in the press lounge, surfing the Web for analysis of current Senate negotiations; television screens alert them if something of interest actually happens in the chamber.
• Getting Digital Statecraft Right: In January, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for the United States to pursue a policy of "twenty-first-century statecraft," which would use modern information and communication technologies to promote development. She foresaw "a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas."
• Rebuilding the Democratic Brand with Jobs: That leaves the Democrats not as the party of government so much as the party of paralyzed government. That the Republicans are largely responsible for the paralysis isn't a big problem for a minority-status GOP so long as the public has concluded that activism per se is a bad idea.

Stripping on Holey Ground

Strippers at Ground Zero

The Constitution ... but. We believe ... but. Private property .. in this case. The sanctity of our .. the babies ... Holey Ground.. the lash on our backs .. HITLER!! And if we get elected bla-bla ba bla-bla