Day 1063: The More We Modernize
July 25, 2008 - Filed Under books, culture-society-history, energy
The more we inherently stay the same.
Re-reading Daniel Yergin’s The Prize, with some added experience and urgency, I’ve come across several gems like this description of energy consumers in the 1850s, before the advent of kerosene and petroleum. Sound reminiscent of people today?
… For those who had money, oil from the sperm whale had for hundreds of years set the standard for high-quality illumination; but even as demand was growing, the whale schools of the Atlantic had been decimated … For the whalers, it was the golden age, as prices were rising, but it was not the golden age for their consumers, who did not want to pay $2.50 a gallon - a price that seemed sure to go even higher. Cheaper lighting fluids had been developed. Alas, all of them were inferior.
Did Yergin mean $2.50 in 1850s money or the money of 1993, when the book was published? In any case, what cost $2.50 in 1850 would have cost $43.44 in 1993 and around $65 today.
Day 1033: GONZO
June 25, 2008 - Filed Under books, funny, government, movies/tv
Drops on the 4th of July like my daddy done did.
“Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for objective journalism which is true but they miss the point.”
“I am tired of old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.”
Day 1019: Fight The CDMCA!
June 11, 2008 - Filed Under books, digital rights, global, government, public domain
Sweet ghost of Johannes Gutenberg, this is awesome! Gordon Duggan of Appropriation Art has put out a comic book about the ongoing, mostly covert efforts on the part of the Canadian government to lengthen that nation’s copyright terms (currently a moderate life-plus-fifty) and to stifle user rights.
As Cory Doctorow says at BoingBoing, “this is just staggeringly great, the perfect primer on the shameful attempt by Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice to smuggle the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act into Canadian law without debate or public input.”
“De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium” by Copernicus is on the auction block at Christie’s for about $1 million. Buy it before the crazies burn it and assert that the sun revolves around the earth. Snide commentary aside, sales like this make me cringe because, to my renaissance-driven mind, this book belongs to everyone and not snug inside a hermetically-sealed case in some gazillionaire’s study. Good thing then that the Lehigh University Digital Library scanned the book and Harvard makes it available online. (Check out pages 16 and 18 on which some astrophysicist punk underlined sentences and made notes in the columns.) Viva la internet! 0 comments #
Day 1013: From “America: A Prophecy”
June 5, 2008 - Filed Under books
The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations;
The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up;
The bones of death, the cov’ring clay, the sinews shrunk & dry’d,
Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing! awakening!
Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds & bars are burst.
Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field:
Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;
Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years,
Rise and look out; his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open.
And let his wife and children return from the opressor’s scourge.
They look behind at every step & believe it is a dream,
Singing, ‘The Sun has left his blackness, & has found a fresher morning
And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night;
For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.’
Day 1009: Surfing The ‘Tubes
June 2, 2008 - Filed Under books, computing & internet, desi / india, gizmos & hacks, louisiana, movies/tv, new orleans, photographs, science & technology
Not at work, hacking like a tuberculosis-ridden dog, dutifully not passing germs along to co-workers, and bored out of my skull despite five books that are waiting to be read, I present you with the results of today’s internet scouring:
* Desi Fix: Proving that there are desis a lot less lame than me, Sameer Mishra won the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee on Friday, May 30th. In true spelling bee fashion, Sameer beat out another bhaiya, Sidharth Chand, to claim his first prize. As Jon Stewart said in 2006 after Anurag Kashyap’s 2005 spelling bee win, “Your names already have like 20 letters in them. That’s a huge advantage. That’s always going to win against the Bob Smiths.”
* New Orleans: Wonderful visual aid for those on the don’t-know-where-this-is-going-but-can’t-get-off New Orleans Recovery School District Express Train: Andrew Turner and Francine Stock have created a mashup of schools facility data. Much thanks to Cliff, G, Liprap, Sarah Elise and E for keeping us informed on the state of education in post-K New Orleans via their lengthy, personal posts.
* New Orleans: In Lies, Damned Lies & Statistics, Mominem points out that Mayor Nagin’s assertion in the last State Of The City address that “Downtown office occupancies are the highest they’ve been since the 70s oil and gas boom” is a damned lie. Incidentally, I hear that Chevron’s new Northshore offices already have a mouse problem.
* Louisiana: Louisiana drivers aren’t the worst in the nation, they’re only the eighth-worst. (Did they count Wet Clay PIleup Jerk?) According to the 2008 GMAC Insurance National Drivers Test, Top Lousy Driver award goes to New Jersey and the best drivers are from the Midwest. To paraphrase D, does this include the FIBs, I mean, Chicagoans?
After many rounds of Lost In New Jersey, we made it into the Lincoln Tunnel. Even on a weeknight, it was packed and scary, yet very cool.
* Movies: Best indirect review of Sex And The City: The Movie, which I refuse to watch, from Jezebel:
If you don’t get married, or if you botch your prenuptial agreement, or if he leaves you at the altar (a.k.a. Big) or sleeps with a random stranger (a.k.a. Miranda), you lose all dignity; all of it, gone. And without that dignity, what is left? Shoes. The end.
* Books/Science: To bring our collective IQ back up again after that last topic, Michael Shermer’s beautifully-penned review of Alan Sokal’s Beyond The Hoax.
“Beyond the Hoax” is an essential text for anyone interested in the history and philosophy of science, or for that matter science itself … Why did academics fall for [Sokal's 1996 hoax]? The hindsight bias and the confirmation bias. Once you believe that science holds no privileged position in the search for truth, and that it is just another way of knowing, it is easy to pull out of an article like Mr. Sokal’s additional evidence that supports your belief. It is a very human process, and since science is conducted by very real humans, shouldn’t it be subject to these same cognitive biases? Yes, except for one thing: the built-in defense known as the scientific method.
* Fashion/Photography: First Bo Diddley, now Yves Saint Laurent. Interesting retrospective from The Luxist on a Dior and Saint Laurent photo shoot in Paris, 1962.
* I Can Haz Internet?: Explosion at Texas data center may explain why our ‘tubes are often tied these days.
* Srsly, I Can Haz?: In other outage-related news, the Center Networks posts on Twitter are funny!
* Technology: Lastly, another reason I need an iPhone
Day 1004: Rest In Peace, Robert Asprin
May 28, 2008 - Filed Under books, family & friends, new orleans
D and I just found out that Robert Asprin passed away six days ago, and we’re crushed. The last time we saw him was the last time we were at Fahy’s, during Jazzfest, when he asked how my re-read of the M.Y.T.H. series was coming (had just finished Hit Or Myth). And I didn’t get to razz him about the awful puns.
Obituaries from the Times-Picayune and Hip Hop Elements (the latter of whom swiped the following picture of Asprin from my Flickr and didn’t bother with the whole attribution thing).
If one has to go earlier than expected, it had might as well be while reading Terry Pratchett. Catch you in another dimension, sir.
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Goodbye, Frak: My silly feedreader only now picked up on the fact that R’s cat, Frak, passed away earlier this month, while living at John’s. Frak, the rest of the farm and I were housemates for six months after Katrina and the Flood. Crap. WTF. Crap.
Day 948: Books, Madison And Friends
April 2, 2008 - Filed Under books, family & friends, wisconsin
Three of my favorite things all rolled into one news item.
UW-Madison News: New book explores Daily Cardinal’s legacy
Older Posts »It is the stories of the students, the fights and the successes of the Cardinal that lent [Allison Hantschel] subject material for her new book “It Doesn’t End With Us,” about the legacy of the Daily Cardinal at UW-Madison.
“The Cardinal legacy is really two-fold. It lies in the journalism, like the ground-breaking stories,” Hantschel says. “It also lies in the journalists. The Cardinal is an educational system. The work never really stops; it ripples out from the Cardinal and affects ordinary people.”
“It Doesn’t End With Us” gives readers not just a glimpse into the inner workings of one of the nation’s oldest daily student papers, but a detailed description of the past 115 years of struggle by students to keep UW-Madison’s Daily Cardinal afloat as an independent entity.
