IT circa 1880: the newspaper.
News journalists and software developers are two branches of the same tree: information technology.
Category: ideas
epistemology, philosophy, theology, religion
The lightbulb above your head might be a strobe.
How much creative thinking is simply misremembering? I was groping for Rudyard Kipling and came up with Rumpelstiltskin. In this case, the substitution wasnR...
When it comes to snare rushes, today’s banda might be yesterday’s IDM.
Is Ando Bien Pedo by Banda Los Recoditos (2009) faster than Beep Street by Squarepusher (1997)?
$29,062,272.22
That’s how much the Six Million Dollar Man would cost today. (Thank you Ana for asking, Wikipedia for defining, and the Measuring Worth aggregator for ans...
Domestic news from an international perspective: Spain comes to Austin.
The Spanish newspaper El País is taking it pretty seriously: Un activista anti gobierno se estrella contra un edificio federal en Tejas Un ingeniero de sistemas...
Over time, who will we blame? Whoever got away with it.
A colleague asked me if our company was still throwing a conference I will refer to as “The Fun Meeting,” to which employees from around the country...
Long overdue: my favorite new music.
Them Crooked Vultures. So often, musical groups try to steal and end up copying. Them Crooked Vultures have pulled off at least a half-dozen perfect heists on t...
Why write?
Amusing and insightful take down of conservative think tank propaganda celebrates the pleasures of writing and of living the life examined.
How we’ll get there: the future of cars and cities.
Wonderful, exciting review of future cars and cities.
The drug war: another health care externality.
America has a horrendous mental health problem and instead of addressing it we imprison the hundreds of thousands if not millions who try to cure themselves wit...
Amazing things, of late.
Brilliant idea: Balance the U.S Budget by Auctioning off 10 Million U.S Passports. A monologue that could make a great dialogue: you’re angry because you&...
Obama blinked.
Stephen Walt lays bare the failures of the Obama administration’s policy towards Palestine and Israel and makes some unsettling predictions about its impl...
Learning from nature.
Slime Mold Beats Humans at Perfecting Traffic Networks
Art by substraction.
Masse Critique by Kilian Rüthemann & Niklaus Wenger Out of the White by Michel de Broin
Realizing what is more than pay and prestige, “wildly and unpredictably.”
A great quote from Charles Taylor in an so-so piece: The individual pursuit of happiness as defined by consumer culture still absorbs much of our time and energ...
Robert Reich on bumper stickers and Obama-Biden in 2012.
Robert Reich on bumper stickers and Obama-Biden in 2012: The most painful political truth for Democrats is the nation won’t possibly be out of this jobs hole by...
What makes great teachers?
Teach for America and its lessons for public school reform: Things that you might think would help a new teacher achieve success in a poor school—like prior exp...
Revising history and science books made easier by Prop 13.
Another casualty of the broken budgeting process in California: the quality of textbooks in other states. Battles over textbooks are nothing new, especially in ...
Canaries (and more) in the coalmine that is Earth.
Margaret Atwood on why we should not assume any bird species will survive without our help: One more statistic: according to Al Gore, 97% of charitable giving g...
Is the web making journalism more effective and thus more pleasurable? Maybe.
Context transforms content. It’s not that people like reading at a computer, though many have more opportunities to do so in the modern workplace. It̵...