January 2010
Sunday, 31 January 2010
Translating David Brooks
Matt Taibbi: “Next time there’s an earthquake in Russia or Georgia, I’m probably going to wait at least until they’re finished pulling the bodies of dead children out of the rubble before I start writing articles blasting a foreign people for being corrupt, lazy drunks with an unsatisfactorily pervasive achievement culture whose child-rearing responsibilities might have to be yanked from them by with-it Whitey for their own good.”
“SuperFreakonomics” and climate change
Elizabeth Kolbert: “To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction.”
“We are here to represent.”
Last year, a friend sang with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, performing Mahler’s 8th Symphony,. Tonight, the recording of that performance won three grammy awards. Go, team.
Rahm Emanuel makes me very pessimistic about health-care reform
Ezra Klein: “It is very, very, very important to be clear on what the death of health-care reform looks like. It is not a vote that goes against the Democrats. It is not an admission that the White House has moved on from the subject. It is continued statements of commitment from the key players paired with a continued stretching of the timetable.”
Saturday, 30 January 2010
The Internationalization of US Policy Paralysis and the Collapse of American Diplomacy
Matthew Yglesias: “The dysfunctional nature of the United States Congress means that essentially all diplomatic intercourse with the American government is worthless.”
David Axelrod: ‘Reconciliation is a tool that is there to be used’
Ezra Klein: “A Pew poll released today found that only 26 percent of Americans could correctly identify 60 votes as the numbers needed to break a filibuster. Twenty-five percent thought 51 votes was sufficient, and 37 percent had no idea.”
Lady Gaga’s Lessons for the Music Business
WSJ.com: “The business needs more Gagas. The upheaval of the last decade has forced the major record companies to cut their work force by 60%, according to a recent report by the Recording Industry Association of America.”
Friday, 29 January 2010
Future Shock
Fraser Speirs: “I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn’t a price worth paying to have a computer that isn’t frightening anymore.”
Thursday, 28 January 2010
Bunch Of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger
The Onion - America’s Finest News Source: “‘He had a real impact on the literary world and on millions of readers,’ said hot-shot English professor David Clarke, who is just like the rest of them, and even works at one of those crumby schools that rich people send their kids to so they don’t have to look at them for four years.”
Tuesday, 26 January 2010
Oh Noes, Hard Works!
Oliver Willis: “We should have year-round school, not the constant coddling.”
Sunday, 24 January 2010
fMRI Gets Slap in the Face with a Dead Fish
Neuroskeptic: “They put the salmon in an MRI scanner and ‘the salmon was shown a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations. The salmon was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.’”
Tablet Prediction
Neil Mix: “And speech dictation is out because no one wants a world filled with Macheads talking to their computers on public transportation, least of all Apple.”
Thursday, 21 January 2010
Do the Right Thing
Krugman: “A message to House Democrats: This is your moment of truth. You can do the right thing and pass the Senate health care bill. Or you can look for an easy way out, make excuses and fail the test of history.”
‘Hamas accepts Israel’s right to exist’
Jerusalem Post: in Arabic, though?
Wednesday, 20 January 2010
He Wasn’t The One We’ve Been Waiting For
Paul Krugman Blog: “I’m pretty close to giving up on Mr. Obama, who seems determined to confirm every doubt I and others ever had about whether he was ready to fight for what his supporters believed in.”
Tuesday, 19 January 2010
The Conservative Case For Gay Marriage
Ted Olson: “Another argument, vaguer and even less persuasive, is that gay marriage somehow does harm to heterosexual marriage. I have yet to meet anyone who can explain to me what this means.”
Monday, 18 January 2010
Congress takes a bold stand against surveillance abuses
Glenn Greenwald: “Surely, the U.S. Congress that is now putting its foot down on private companies cooperating with such abusive spying elsewhere would react very angrily in the face of revelations that it was being done here. Actually, in the face of such revelations less than two years ago, they ended up on a very bipartisan basis legalizing the illegal spying program and immunizing the telecoms that enabled it all.”
New Evidence For Seas of Liquid Diamond On Neptune
io9: “Vast seas of diamond could also explain how the giant planets’ magnetic fields got warped too, with the magnetic pole as much as 60 degrees off from the geologic one.”
The Bank Tax
Greg Mankiw: “We could promise never to bail out financial institutions again. Yet nobody would ever believe us. And when the next financial crisis hits, our past promises would not deter us from doing what seemed expedient at the time.”
Sunday, 17 January 2010
Googlephone No Match for Kafkaesque Carriers
Steven Levy: “‘What if I buy the phone full-price?’ I ask. ‘Do I pay the same rates, even though I’m not getting a discount for the phone?’ Yes. Same rates, even though I’m no longer amortizing a phone. By the way, she adds, the terms of the contract have changed, and my data charges have gone up.”
New York Times Ready to Charge Online Readers
New York: “What makes the decision so agonizing for Sulzberger is that it involves not just business considerations, but ultimately a self-assessment of just what Times journalism is worth to the world.”
The New Cavemen Lifestyle Has Found a Home in the City
NYTimes.com: “More to the point, the city has gone so far as to outlaw both hunting and gathering, at least when committed in a city park.”
Saturday, 16 January 2010
Bankers Without a Clue
Krugman: “stop listening to financiers about financial reform”
Thursday, 14 January 2010
It’s Time to Drop the ‘Expectation of Privacy’ Test
Bruce Schneier: “No one knows how this will shake out legally.”
Why is the news media comfortable with lying about science?
ars technica: “In essence, the message it sent was ‘we will intentionally undercut the best available science using a celebrity.’”
Stop the panic on air security
Bruce Schneier: “We’re doing these things even though this particular plot was chosen precisely because we weren’t screening for it; future al Qaeda attacks rarely look like past attacks; and the terrorist threat is far broader than attacks against airplanes.”
Tuesday, 12 January 2010
Two Gentlemen of Lebowski
The most excellent comedie and tragical romance of Two Gentlemen of Lebowski: “Let me not to the marriage of false impressions deny impediments. I am not Master Lebowski; thou art Master Lebowski. I am the Knave, called the Knave. Or His Knaveness, or mayhap Knaver, or mayhap El Knaverino, in the manner of the Spaniard, if brevity be not in thy soul nor wit. A Knave by any other name would abide just as well.” - translations all the way down
Monday, 11 January 2010
VR Hurts
Mark Pesce: “can cause ‘binocular dysphoria,’ a defect in depth perception, for several hours after removing” – now let’s put 3d into a screen Americans spend 8 hours a day watching