Saturday, September 20, 2008

Vertical Bed 

"Vertical Bed is a sort of static prostheses that allows a person to fall asleep in a standing position. By bolting into cracks between the sidewalks, subway grates, or other rigid contact points, the suit will support it’s wearer with a minimum of visible hardware or occupied space, holding the sleeper’s weight with concealed harnesses. One-sided privacy will be achieved through noise canceling headphones and double-mirrored sunglasses. Additionally, an umbrella will clip in the rigid infrastructure for shelter. The project is designed for the visual performance of an alternate way of occupying urban space, born partly out of fantasies of minimal need and elegant futurism, and partly out of fears of the dehumanization of space. Occupants will absorb the vertical structure of urban architecture into their bodies. The vertical sleeper is in a constant state of readiness, never succumbing to collapse. Homelessness is most often marked by the forbidden act of lying down on the sidewalk, an act that the vertical bed circumvents. The vertical bed will imply a streamlined, rather than failed, infrastructure." (Conflux Festival)

Labels: Homelessness

9/20/2008 11:46:00 PM   •  

Economics Lesson 

"What was the greatest wealth-creating film of all time? Titanic might be a popular guess, but the answer, according to Columbia University’s Nobel laureate economist Robert Mundell, is Taxi Driver.

The 1976 classic, directed by Martin Scorsese with Robert De Niro as the bitterly alienated protagonist, gave the world De Niro’s catchphrase “You talking to me?,” and also introduced a young Jodie Foster. But what does it have to do with the world economy?

John Hinckley, the deranged would-be assassin who attempted to kill Ronald Reagan in 1981, claimed that he was inspired by it. He said that his action was an attempt to impress Foster. (The movie features a scene in which a mohawked De Niro attempts to assassinate a politician.)

According to Mundell, the wave of sympathy for President Reagan that was engendered by the assassination attempt deterred Democrats in Congress from voting against his proposed tax cuts. Due to this accident of history, the US administered a big fiscal stimulus at the same time that Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve was administering tight money. This, for Professor Mundell, was vital in creating the era of prosperity that followed.

“Taxi Driver is the most important movie ever made from the standpoint of creating GDP,” Mundell told delegates. “It’s the movie that made the Reagan revolution possible. That movie was indirectly responsible for adding between $5 trillion and $15 trillion of output to the US economy.”

So says a May 15, 2008 report in the Financial Times. (Improbable Research via julia)

Labels: Martin Scorsese, Robert DeNiro, Taxi Driver

9/20/2008 03:56:00 PM   •  

Neal Stephenson's Anathem 

The trailer (yes, trailer) for the new novel.

Related

• Neal Stephenson 's Internet-free bliss [Book Review] (ValleyWag)
• Ask Neal Stephenson questions about Anathem (Boing Boing)
• Stephenson's Anathem was inspired by Clock of the Long Now (Boing Boing)

Labels: Anathem, NealStephenson

9/20/2008 12:50:00 AM   •  

Cheney Unchained 

All the best details from Barton Gellman's new book on Vice President Dick Cheney: "It's often said on late-night TV that given Dick Cheney's cardiovascular problems, George W. Bush is just a heartbeat away from the presidency. In his new book, Angler, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barton Gellman suggests that this joke contains more than just a grain of truth. By immersing himself in details about national security and numerous other hot-button issues that the president was too lazy or too incurious to study, Cheney often managed to position himself as the real 'decider.'

For those of you who are too lazy or too incurious to read Gellman's lengthy exposé, Slate has put together a breezy executive summary."

9/20/2008 12:46:00 AM   •  

Random Silliness and Senseless Beauty 

The New Pranksters (Wall Street Journal) You know it has jumped the shark when the WSJ notices a social phenomenon, albeit only to call it silly. Still, the article does point to the social anomie at the root.

9/20/2008 12:25:00 AM   •  

Why it’s dangerous to be a witch in a recession 

"Why did people murder suspected witches in renaissance Europe? And why do they still do so today in sub-Saharan Africa? As someone whose main source of information about witch trials is Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I was fascinated to learn that witch-burning has its own grim economics." — Tim Harford (Financial Times)

Labels: Tim Harford, Witch-hunt

9/20/2008 12:08:00 AM   •  

Friday, September 19, 2008

If There Ever Was: 

A Book of Extinct and Impossible Smells: "Robert Blackson is a trailblazer in the nascent field of conceptual scent art. He recently curated an exhibition at the Reg Vardy Gallery in Sunderland, England, that took viewers through fourteen significant points in time and space using only the olfactory sense.

...Blackson tasked perfumers, chemists, botanists and even a NASA scientist to engineer smells that most humans might never experience. Scents created include everything from long extinct plants to the fragrance immediately following an atomic bomb explosion. They even recreated the smell of the surface of the Sun, which scientists approximated by using the scents of seven earth metals heated to their melting point.

If There Ever Was is the companion book to the art exhibit. It features paper inserts that correspond to the exhibit smells, all manifested through scratch-and-sniff technology. That way, you can smell the putrid odor of Russian gym socks on the Mir space station without having to leave the comfort of your home (Cool Hunting)

Labels: Odor, Olfaction

9/19/2008 06:29:00 PM   •  

Eve Ensler on Sarah Palin 

Drill, Drill, Drill: "I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it's their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.

I don't like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.

But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story -- connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.

I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God's plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, "It was a task from God."

Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist's baby or not.

She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.

Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an e nvironment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and might very well be the next president of the United States. She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.

Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in God's name, when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.

I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

If the Polar Bears don't move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, "Drill Drill Drill." I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain.

Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?

Eve Ensler
September 5, 2008 (HuffPo)

Labels: Sarah Palin

9/19/2008 01:04:00 AM   •  

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Open Thread: Caveats 

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9/17/2008 04:48:00 AM   •  

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Hubble Finds Unidentified Object in Space, Scientists Puzzled 

"This is exactly why we send astronauts to risk their life to service Hubble: in a paper published last week in the Astrophysical Journal, scientists detail the discovery of a new unidentified object in the middle of nowhere. I don't know about you, but when a research paper conclusion says 'We suggest that the transient may be one of a new class' I get a chill of oooh-aaahness down my spine. Especially when after a hundred days of observation, it disappeared from the sky with no explanation. Get your tinfoil hats out, because it gets even weirder." (Gizmodo)

Labels: Astronomy, Hubble, Hubble Space Telescope

9/16/2008 09:32:00 PM   •  

The Ugly New McCain 

Richard Cohen: "Following his loss to George W. Bush in the 2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain did something extraordinary: He confessed to lying about how he felt about the Confederate battle flag, which he actually abhorred. 'I broke my promise to always tell the truth,' McCain said. Now he has broken that promise so completely that the John McCain of old is unrecognizable. He has become the sort of politician he once despised." (Washington Post op-ed)

Labels: John McCain, Richard Cohen

9/16/2008 09:30:00 PM   •  

Amazon Does the Obvious, Finally: 

Adds Video on IMDb: "Amazon has finally done what many have been asking it since the time the company bought IMDB: it has enabled video on the film and TV database/info site. The company says users can now watch 6,000 full-length feature films and TV episodes for free on IMDb.com’s video section." (paidcontent.org)

Labels: IMDb.com, Internet Movie Database, Movies

9/16/2008 09:23:00 PM   •  

That Was Quick 

Palin's Favorability Ratings Begin to Falter: "To know her, it seems, is not necessarily to love her... Over the course of a single weekend... Palin went from being the most popular White House hopeful to the least." (Newsweek)

Labels: Sarah Palin

9/16/2008 09:19:00 PM   •  

Dark matter 'bridge to nowhere' found in cosmic void 

"More than a dozen galaxies seem to be lined up along a bridge of dark matter inside a region of nearly empty space. This 'bridge to nowhere' could shed light on how small galaxies formed in the early universe.

Galaxies in the universe are arranged in a lacy structure that contains many holes, or voids, that are largely bereft of galaxies. But the voids are not completely empty; astronomers expect they are criss-crossed by filaments of dark matter.

Now, astronomers have found a total of 14 galaxies that appear to be part of a dark matter bridge at least 1.5 million light years long.

The string of galaxies spans just 0.5% of a 'mini-void' – a region of space containing mostly dim, dwarf galaxies kept small by their relative isolation from other matter. But the underlying dark matter bridge may be far longer than that." (New Scientist)

Related

• Dwarf galaxies need dark matter too (scienceblog)

Labels: Dark matter, Universe

9/16/2008 09:16:00 PM   •  

Will the Internet Evolve into a Lifeform? 

"Some think that sentience could emerge from any sufficiently complicated system. By the way, you're reading this on a massively-crosslinked network built from millions of routers, allowing any of a billion individual units to access, modify and reply to the others. Interested?" (Daily Galaxy)

Labels: Router, Sentience

9/16/2008 09:08:00 PM   •  

On Stupidity 

"The anti-intellectual legacy [Richard Hofstadter first] described has often been used by the political right — since at least the McCarthy era — to label any complication of the usual pieties of patriotism, religion, and capitalism as subversive, dangerous, and un-American. And, one might add, the left has its own mirror-image dogmas.

Now, in the post-9/11 era, American anti-intellectualism has grown more powerful, pervasive, and dangerous than at any time in our history, and we have a duty — particularly as educators — to foster intelligence as a moral obligation.

Or at least that is the urgent selling point of a cartload of books published in the past several months." — William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English at Hope College, in Holland, Mich. (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Related

• It Ain't Called the Stupid Party for Nothin'

Labels: Anti-intellectualism

9/16/2008 03:28:00 AM   •  

What Makes People Vote Republican? 

Jonathan Haidt: "What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world."

[Jonathan Haidt is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, where he does research on morality and emotion and how they vary across cultures. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.] (The Edge)

Labels: Jonathan Haidt, Republican

9/16/2008 03:23:00 AM   •  

Are Too Many People Going to College? 

"America’s university system is creating a class-riven nation. There has to be a better way...

College is seen as the open sesame to a good job and a desirable way for adolescents to transition to adulthood. Neither reason is as persuasive as it first appears." (The American)

9/16/2008 03:14:00 AM   •  

Strip of Iraq 'on the Verge of Exploding' 

"Kurdish leaders have expanded their authority over a roughly 300-mile-long swath of territory beyond the borders of their autonomous region in northern Iraq, stationing thousands of soldiers in ethnically mixed areas in what Iraqi Arabs see as an encroachment on their homelands." (Washington Post)

Labels: Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan, Kurdistan, Kurds

9/16/2008 03:07:00 AM   •  

Science as an Ethical Community 

Cosmologist Lee Smolin: "...[S]cience works because scientists form communities defined by a set of ethical principles which, even if imperfectly applied, tend to lead to progress in our understanding of nature. While these communities have long been international, the combination of the internet with cheap airfare and easy migration of educated people makes scientists into 'global souls', in Pico Iyer's phrase. This opens up new opportunities and also new challenges for the thriving of scientific communities."
(Perimeter Institute)

Labels: Lee Smolin, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Theoretical physics

9/16/2008 03:05:00 AM   •  

In Search of The 'Real 3D Mandelbrot Set' 

The Holy Grail of fractals (Skytopia)

Labels: fractals mathematics

9/16/2008 02:50:00 AM   •  

This is Your Nation on White Privilege 

Tim Wise's damning indictment of the Palinocracy: "For those who still can’t grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help." (Red Room)

Related

• White Privilege & Palin (ohnezu.net)

Labels: Tim Wise, White privilege

9/16/2008 02:28:00 AM   •  

Sunday, September 14, 2008

John McCain's health records must be released 

Signed by 13,742 people, 473 doctors: "John McCain has not yet released his medical records to the public. McCain is 72 years old, and has been diagnosed with invasive melanoma. In May of this year, a small group of selected reporters were allowed to review 1,173 pages of McCain's medical records that covered only the last eight years, and were allowed only three hours to do so. John McCain's health is an issue of profound importance. We call on John McCain to issue a full, public disclosure of all of his medical records, available for the media and members of the general public to review."

9/14/2008 09:22:00 PM   •  

Memewatch: NOMF 

"NOMF McCain" - Google Search

9/14/2008 09:14:00 PM   •  

Making America stupid 

Thomas L. Friedman: "Imagine for a minute that attending the Republican convention in St. Paul, sitting in a skybox overlooking the convention floor, were observers from Russia, Iran and Venezuela. And imagine what these observers would have been doing when Rudy Giuliani led the delegates in a chant of 'drill, baby, drill!'" (International Herald Tribune)

Labels: Republican National Convention, Rudy Giuliani, Thomas Friedman

9/14/2008 03:48:00 PM   •  

McCain-Palin Crowd-Size Estimates Not Backed by Officials 

"Senator John McCain has drawn some of the biggest crowds of his presidential campaign since adding Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to his ticket on Aug. 29. Now officials say they can't substantiate the figures McCain's aides are claiming....

In recent days, journalists attending the rallies have been raising questions about the crowd estimates with the campaign. In a story on Sept. 11 about Palin's attraction for some Virginia women voters, Washington Post reporter Marc Fisher estimated the crowd to be 8,000, not the 23,000 cited by the campaign." (Bloomberg)

Labels: Republican Party

9/14/2008 12:34:00 PM   •  

The secret benefits of fandom 

"...[A] few scholars have started to suggest that there may ...be another kind of benefit from big-time sports. There's a catch, though: the team has to be good. In a forthcoming paper, economist Michael Davis and the psychologist Christian End say that having a winning NFL football team increases the incomes of the people who live and work in its hometown by as much as $120 a year. And while the study doesn't identify exactly what causes the boost, the authors point to psychological literature suggesting that winning fans are at once harder workers and bigger spenders. In short, buoyed by the team's success, we work longer hours, take bigger risks, and shop more avidly, all of which helps the local economy." (Boston Globe)

In other words, just another way of making you a better cog in the machine. Didn't Marx say that spectator sports is the opiate of the masses, or something like that?

Labels: Sports

9/14/2008 12:21:00 PM   •  

9/14/2008 12:08:00 PM   •  

9/14/2008 12:06:00 PM   •  

Tea 'healthier' drink than water 

"Public health nutritionist Dr Carrie Ruxton, and colleagues at Kings College London, looked at published studies on the health effects of tea consumption.They found clear evidence that drinking three to four cups of tea a day can cut the chances of having a heart attack.Some studies suggested tea consumption protected against cancer, although this effect was less clear-cut.Other health benefits seen included protection against tooth plaque and potentially tooth decay, plus bone strengthening.Dr Ruxton said: 'Drinking tea is actually better for you than drinking water. Water is essentially replacing fluid. Tea replaces fluids and contains antioxidants so it's got two things going for it.'" (BBC)

Related?

• Pharmaceutical residues in drinking water may be worse than suspected (Yahoo News)

Labels: Beverages, Drinking water, Health

9/14/2008 11:58:00 AM   •  

Tying Knots with Light 

Researchers find a new theoretical way to tie light into complex knots and links. "Imagine twisting a beam of light into a knot, as if it were a piece of a string. Now grab another light beam and tie it around the first, forming its own loop. Tie on another and another, until all of space is filled up with loops of light.

Sounds preposterous, but a pair of physicists has shown that light can do just this — at least in theory. Visible light, along with all other forms of electromagnetic radiation, is governed by Maxwell’s equations, and the researchers have found a new solution to these equations in which light forms linked knots. The team is now working to create light in this form experimentally." (Science News)

9/14/2008 11:39:00 AM   •  

To defeat Palin, ignore her 

Errol Louis: "The Democrats' Palin problem won't be going away any time soon. And it could derail Barack Obama's fight against Republican John McCain - unless Dems summon the discipline to ignore the GOP vice-presidential candidate's celebrity and instead focus like a laser on campaign basics." (NY Daily News op-ed)

9/14/2008 11:17:00 AM   •