October 2010
16 posts
Peter Lawler on D.B. Hart's Politics
Still, Hart never forgets that the effects of Christianity on political life are always incomplete and compromised. That was true of both the Roman Empire and imperial Christendom, as well as the British and American empires. The polis or nation or empire can be influenced or limited by the presence of the Christian community, but always against politics’ own grain. Hart’s view...
Of course, there are artists of hipster-related sensibility who remain artists. In the neighborhoods, though, there was a feeling throughout the last decade that the traditional arts were of little interest to hipsters because their consumer culture substituted a range of narcissistic handicrafts similar enough to sterilize the originals. One could say, exaggerating only slightly, that the...
2 tags
Report of action 24-25 November 1943 off Cape...
By my great uncle, third from right, after the Battle of Cape St. George. I put this up on Posterous a while ago, but I’m consolidating here.
U.S.S. CONVERSE
S-E-C-R-E-T November 27, 1943.
From: The Commanding Officer.
To : The Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet.
Via : The Commander South Pacific.
The Commander Task...
The API Revolution
One of Arment’s goals in developing the API in the future is to allow Instapaper to move beyond iOS: “I don’t personally have the time or motivation to make good clients for those platforms, but I do intend to make a fully featured API available soon that would enable third-party developers to make Instapaper clients if they wish.”
Instapaper Inventor Links Inattentive Reading to Information...
“The line between Google and government is destined to blur. You can say that...”
– FT.com / Columnists / Christopher Caldwell - Government by search engine
Tim Maly on the 50 Cyborgs Project
How does the project strike you as a template, then? What other topics seem especially well-suited to the cliquesourced, refractory, penumbral anthologizing?
If anything, I think that you want to think less about topic and more about contributors. If you want interesting refractions, you focus on more choosing cool prisms, than on controlling the light that’ll pass through.
As to...
“I see a great deal of need for expertise devoted to institutional design, but...”
– Will Wilkinson makes a good distinction here.
pegobry:
“I’m not sure I’d describe him as a socialist. I might even say he has a naive and touching faith in capitalism. He believes you can impose all sorts of burdens on the system and it will still work.” — Peter Thiel on President Obama.
My favorite line:
University administrators are the equivalent of subprime mortgage
brokers,” he says, “selling you a story that you should...
1 tag
Matthew Battles on "Dumborgs"
It’s interesting, by the way, how the development of “robots” like the Panasonic hairwasher necessitates a proliferation of para-robotic accoutrements like the built-in splashguard visor. (It’s unclear what kind of mishap the recliner’s sickly green body shield is meant to prevent.) Room-cleaning robots need open floors and targeted base stations; lawnmowing bots must be fenced in with...
At Google, Sergey and Larry hired Eric Schmidt to do their empathizing for them. On speaking platforms around the world, Schmidt delivers handsomely on his remit, fluently discussing the trade-offs required by the web, society and democracy. He makes Google sound like a company that won’t nudge you more than is strictly necessary.
No. Really. Someone actually typed those words and hit...
