I always thought so

Via: Tywkiwdbi

The Future of Kool-Aid

Yeah, I read the New York Times. More precisely, I cherry pick the web site for articles with interesting tags and read the paper edition when a neighbor in the building leaves it out in a common library by the lobby desk. (thanks Mme.) David Brooks, a twice weekly political columnist, has written an article, The Crossroads Nation, that distills my unease with showbiz media while ostensibly addressing something completely different. Brooks bashing has become something of a de rigueur amusement, but the look on his face when someone disagrees with his “eminently reasonable” chattering class shtick is priceless. In order to have my fun, I’m going to quote short bits, but you can read the whole at the link above.

...They are vague because nobody is clear about what sort of country America is going to be in 2030 or 2050. Nobody has quite defined America’s coming economic identity.

• Vague; this from a journalist that can sum up three thousand years of human history as stuff leading to David's world. (along with some not-too-subtle name dropping) We're in the midst of a logarithmic increase of technical knowledge, coupled with the rise of a very old fashioned oligarchy, officials on both sides of the aisle raiding the cookie jar while prattling about exceptionalism, and the Times' columnist is selling a fluff piece about the future while shaking his well manicured finger at the people doing the work. Jeez, the view from his leather couch must be swell.

Years ago, it was industrial production. Now, of course, we’re living in an information age.

• Information age; this is the roi des rats of the current sales pitch. To touch on one aspect, our current monetary crisis has a great deal to do with the misapplication of information age conceits. At its root, money is a game marker for trade. I tend and grow a bushel of carrots. You build toys for kids. We trade said carrots for a stuffed doll. Got it. Money works because now I can trade more carrots to someone else, take the marker and buy a dress to go with the doll. (assuming everyone agrees to regard the marker as legit) Got it. Now, in our brave new age, we have theorized the game markers into information about game markers. All sorts of interesting possibilities open up. American industry has metamorphosed into financial sporting houses where you get to purchase the chance to roll virtual house dice on the destination of an information flow, no carrots or stuffed dolls required. E-mail a bit of information to the friendly banker, and they’ll commoditize your debt, tranche it and ship you a chance to roll on your virtual dinner in the bargain. Works fine as long as everyone agrees that information about the markers is as good as a bushel of carrots. If not, no dinner for you. Mr. Brooks and his class expend a great deal of energy on this particular house of cards because, well, it doesn’t appear he‘d make a very good farmer.

...The main point in this composite story is that creativity is not a solitary process. It happens within networks.

• Networks seem like such a comfortable thing. We can get the gang together and put on a show. In fact, creativity is a solitary process. It happens individually in a concrete place and time. What happens in networks, is the original ideation has its common denominator polished, its uniqueness hidden, a percentage pulled by the network’s owner, the proper advertisements attached, and anything that might upset the powers that be is dealt with tout de suite. Pace: David’s writing

...this new situation: “In a networked world, the issue is no longer relative power, but centrality in an increasingly dense global web.”

• Dave, buddy, let’s do this together. Network - no center. That’s what the word means. Your imported leather couch, winning smile, and latest software constitute a node. Try thinking a bit before hitting the cliché key.

..If you are passionate about fashion, maybe you will go to Paris. If it’s engineering, maybe it’ll be Germany.

• Here lies the crux of my dissatisfaction with Mr. Brooks style of moonbeam sales. I’m talking about people, he’s talking about interchangeable consumption units. He can fly his bubble from interchangeable place to another same place, avoiding any flavors or smells or those nasty rough edges. In Mr. Brooks world, camera operators appear, record his ruminations, and like good hookers, go away. Food appears on his plate without the mediation of fields, manure, or some guy in a truck. Big picture writing without those bothersome details, that’s why he’s on the opinion page. Class, position, and influence are his currency, not being centered in a place and time is what he used to buy in.

A Tough Little Stinker

Actually, there were pressures to switch from carrots. “The Utah Celery Company of Salt Lake City offered to keep all the studio’s staffers well supplied with their product if Bugs would only switch from carrots to celery,” Adamson reports. “[And] later, the Broccoli Institute of America strongly urged Bugs Bunny to sample their product once in a while… Mel Blanc would have been happy to switch… but carrots were Bugs’s trademark.”

A Brief History of Bugs Bunny

The Pulps

A site I stumbled across. Caleb is posting covers and content from older science fiction pulps. Pulp Archive.com It appears that he's just begining the project, so parameters haven't been set in stone. (some legal entity, somewhere, is probably hunting for billable hours) Wish him well and enjoy what's up so far.

Proto-Leatherman

The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, UK, holds a Roman multitool that dates back to the 3rd Century C.E. When unfolded, it has a fork, spatula, pick, spike, and knife blade.

Via: Neatorama

Those Darn Coercion Engineers

Halloween came and went this year without too much fuss. Normally it's a sort of national holiday around here (S.F.), but this year was pretty subdued. I still get a kick out of watching the Chinese kids in the neighborhood. The recent arrivals try to copy the old vets and when they get a handful of candy for their efforts... From the hour before sunset until an hour after, even Broadway gets turned over to the kids. The ladies from the strip joints set up on the sidewalk with a witches' hat and a big bag of candy and even a chair or two for Mom to rest a second.

The first three links are about science in its various forms. Number one is a humorous montage fron the NYT. Number two is the chemistry of coffee, something we all know about. Number three is about China's new supercomputer. I'm sure the powers that be will afix blame on the janitors' union or some such. On the other hand, we might be on better ground with less deal makers, lawyers, and media pundits,and a few more working engineers. I don't know how it is in your neighborhood, but here, the Bay Bridge still hasn't been fully repaired from the damage done in the '89 earthquake. We have plenty of studies, court cases, artistic visions, political action committees with their attendant back room deals, and of course the taxes to support each one, but the city always seems to be a few dollars short when it comes time to send a welder out to do some actual work. While politicians' refusal to break the flow of easy money in order to fix something may seem unrelated to China's computer, the systemic rewards for blowing smoke instead of accomplishing something aren't.

• Unpopular Science. Whether we like it or not, human life is subject to the universal laws of physics.
• What's inside a cup of coffee: ...3,5 Dicaffeoylquinic acid
  When scientists pretreat neurons with this acid in the lab, the cells are significantly (though not completely) protected from free-radical damage. Yup: Coffee is a good source of antioxidants.
• Supercomputer unveiled in China: The record-breaking performance was measured by the LINPACK benchmark, a system designed in the early 70s to test how fast a computer can solve a dense system of equations. And the score? 2.5 petaflops -- "flops", being a measure of floating point operations per second, and "peta" meaning a thousand trillion.

Next are some links to economic matters. Again we have references to the two tiered nature of the law. Bank error: sorry, here's the bill. Your error .. can you spell tuchis, cuz we own yours.

• Inertia You Can Believe In: The U.S. is facing another predictable financial crisis -- two actually, one having to do with a trillion dollars in underfunded public pension liabilities, and the other having to do with the current or looming insolvency of a large number of cities, counties and states -- with the same inaction as before.
• The Paperless Society: And now it turns out that banks' aggressive entry into the paperless world is merely just another example of their abandonment of due diligence generally. Sufficient capital? - bah, just some quaint concept from the 30's. Borrower's credit worthiness? - out-dated, narrow-minded notion from our racial dark-ages.
• Banks Put Economy Underwater: Banks are claiming that these are just accidents. But suppose that while absent-mindedly paying a bill, you wrote a check from a bank account that you had already closed. No one would have much sympathy with excuses that you were in a hurry and didn’t mean to do it, and it really was just a technicality.

Now we have a bit about why the current administration seems to be in for such a drubbing tomorrow. I realize it's not directly related, but in a way it is. If you ignore your base because you know better, if your policies benefit the very institutions you were elected to trim back, and if you have majorities in both houses and still can't do better than wimper, you're toast. This isn't to give any kudos to Bush, quite the opposite. We seem to have Bush redux on most of the matters that count, along with the same arrogance.

• And only where it's due: Further, it's the height of arrogance to suggest that parents are not positioned to question, let alone have a say in, how their schools are run. We're supposed to simultaneously praise parents for being concerned about their children, wanting better schools, involving themselves with their children's schools, etc., but they are to be dismissed as know-nothings the second they question the goals of the system's top bureaucrat?

After linking the above, I thought about the Tea Party. Are they really bottom-up orgs? Some of their members might think so, and more power to them. Are they just another instance of the coercion engineers selling a Trojan horse to the rubes? Stay tuned, we'll know soon enough. Since we're on the subject of coercion engineers, the last three links are on the media.

• The Internet Diet: The same anxieties that we have about the Internet, the ancient Greeks had about the new technology of writing. In The Republic, Plato has Socrates famously declare that poetry has no place in the perfect state. As Carr explains, this attack may seem a little out-of-nowhere unless you understand that poetry was Plato's stand-in for the oral tradition of Greek thought.
• A Little Horse Would be my Paradise: It is fitting that Bruno should encompass also the shifty question of what constitutes exploitation. A reality television celebrity chooses to be exploited, often to extremes; society hasn't yet an answer for these--people whose individual actions become our collective embarrassments.
• Politicians Are Fighting Mad, at the News Media From New York to Alaska, the 2010 campaign season has been rife with hostile and downright bizarre encounters between candidates and the news media.

In A Rut