May 2011
45 posts
“The church was now a quarter full and it went on filling: a constant stream of...”
– From The Turn-around by Vladimir Volkoff.
April 2011
39 posts
“Now the wearing of solid black neckties remains a practice that has not dated at...”
– Put This On: In praise of the black necktie.
Like I complained the other day on twitter, now that I’ve worn a black necktie a few times, all my other (perfectly nice, sometimes really nice) patterned ties feel as flamboyant as feather boas. Once you go black…
“Our technologies are almost exclusively implemented as services: bits of logic...”
– 2010 Letter to Shareholders
This is so true. Amazon nailed SOA early, so flexibility and resilience were built into the entire company’s technology infrastructure. To the extent that such a thing is possible, I want to see this design pattern translated into other social, cultural, and...
“From 1970 to 1990, crime rose while we locked up a million more people. Since...”
– In Defense of Flogging - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Non-Science That Explains What’s Wrong with... →
If you lived through the last fifty years, you can remember a great many things which public officials and influential scientists told the public to do or believe which were not just wrong but primarily served the self-interest of government, private industry or research institutions. It is completely rational to recall this evidence every single time that science and policy intersect.
“If you are looking for a career where your services will be in high demand, you...”
– Hal Varian, chief economist at Google (via consillyence)
I appear to have been doing this by accident. Not necessarily well, but showing up early masks a lot of incompetence.
Public Institutions of Mercy
popsins:
Ballerinas dance, and alcoholics drink
Mike’s link is to a story about a “wet house,” where alcoholics beyond hope of successful treatment can, by their own account, drink themselves to death without dying under a bridge.
It costs $18,000 a year to house and feed each St. Anthony’s resident, a tab that’s shared by Catholic Charities and the state of Minnesota. Each...
“This is not a “speed bump” or a “cloud failure” or “growing pains”, this is a...”
– On Cascading Failures and Amazon’s Elastic Block Store « Joyeur
Joyent’s (admittedly self-interested) take on the EC2 unpleasantness.
“The latest budget reduces financing for Planned Parenthood, for public education...”
– Poor Jane’s Almanac - NYTimes.com
AND EVEN FOR THE STUDY OF HISTORY!
Of course. Because unless the federal government uses its funds to train K-12 history teachers, “we” will completely abandon the study of history.
“Dr Drake, who founded the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence)...”
– Satellite TV ‘making humans invisible to aliens on other planets’ - Telegraph
Basically, aliens will have a picture of life on Earth that starts with Hitler and ends around 9/11. Nice branding, humans!
The University Bookman: Wilhelm Roepke and the... →
In 1946, as a student in Roepke’s seminar, I was invited to his home in Champel in Geneva, a great privilege. We got to discussing the war, just over, and the immense tragedy of it, and Roepke recounted an episode in which, during the war, he has met, quite by accident, his old friend and colleague, Ludwig von Mises. He remembered von Mises saying that if only the principles of...
Doonesbury →
During Watergate, one [Doonesbury] sequence about Nixon’s aide John Ehrlichman was sent out to newspapers a few days before Ehrlichman resigned. “We had to scramble to replace the strips with substitutes,” Trudeau says. “Ehrlichman actually wrote me to apologize for his timing.”
I am improbably fond of Doonesbury. Even though I rarely read it, I’m grateful that Gary Trudeau has had the...
iPhoneTracker's Fuzzing of Data →
To make it less useful for snoops, the spatial and temporal accuracy of the data has been artificially reduced. You can only animate week-by-week even though the data is timed to the second, and if you zoom in you’ll see the points are constrained to a grid, so your exact location is not revealed. The underlying database has no such constraints, unfortunately.
An odd decision.
Apart from being dead, Art and Science are strong... →
There is neither art nor science in web cartography.
This is the first of two rude things I will say: web cartography is unartistic and unscientific. The common “cartographer” on the web is either a machine or simply the final human element of everything that goes into a map—the mapmaker. The word itself doesn’t seem as common as it used to be, but the mash-up is still the heart of web...
“Like their traveler, Brodsky and Utkin perhaps wanted to believe that they too...”
– Brodsky & Utkin: Etchings from the Projects Portfolio | Article: Art and the Imaginative Promise
This is so cool. I went looking for this article not by googling myself, but by looking for something about Brodsky & Utkin’s bridge design. Of all the brief flashes of “internet...
“People at Granada House listened to me for hours, and did so with neither the...”
– Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library | The Awl
If Tocqueville were to travel through the country today, I hope he’d stop in and visit a few 12-step programs and reflect on what they mean in a democratic age.
“Why are we asking young women to give up their dignity for this kind of...”
– Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Bitchslap: A Column About Women and Fighting.
“When it comes to the operational side of the CIA’s work—mostly the...”
– The CIA Is Déclassé - By Edward N. Luttwak - Slate Magazine
In addition to the “Salt Lake City” reference in the quote above, Luttwak explicitly calls out the preponderance of Mormons among CIA field operatives in two other places in this article, saying that the clandestine service is...
“Amazon.com: Why World War Two in particular?
Baker: Politicians constantly...”
– Amazon.com: Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (9781616850920): Nicholson Baker: Books
“Whether an entire new ecosystem of code based upon the IT Dashboard platform...”
– White House releases IT Dashboard as open source code - O’Reilly Radar
I agree that the release process shown here is good news. Every dollar of our economy that avoids being sucked into a government procurement system is a step toward a better world. I wish, though, that Data.gov had been...