we make them inside us

These lists are journalistic catnip. Fun to read and look at the pictures but I find the liveable cities lists intellectually on a par with People magazine's 'sexiest people' lists.

Academic Joel Garreau in Liveable v. Loveable: The world's most 'liveable' cities are beautiful, clean and efficient. So why does no one want to live in them? in today's Financial Times.

The title of this post is taken from the last couple lines of Edwin Heathcote's article: "Our cities are our own -- we make them inside us. No city means the same to two people so how on earth can we measure them?"

Amen.

the safety of the world

The safety of the world depends on your saying 'no' to inhumane ideas. Standing up for one's own integrity makes you no friends. It is costly. Yet defiance of the mob, in the service of that which is right, is one of the highest expressions of courage I know.

Representative Gabrielle Giffords' commencement address to Claremont's Scripps College in May 2009, as reported by the LA Times after Giffords was shot in the head this morning by a gunman at a "Congress on your Corner" event in Tucson. Six others were killed.

as soft-spoken executrix

The Summer had died peacefully in its sleep, and Autumn, as soft-spoken executrix, was locking life up safely until Spring came to claim it.

Kurt Vonnegut in Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction reviewed this morning by Dave Eggers in the New York Times Book Review.

A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.
—Dorothea Lange

anatomy lesson

I don’t wish to touch hearts. I don’t even want to affect minds very much. What I really want to produce is that little sob in the spine of the artist-reader.

Vladimir Nabokov as quoted by Arthur Krystal in yesterday's New York Times Book Review.

the chaco meridian

This book is not for the faint of heart, or for neophytes. If you are a practicing Southwestern archaeologist with hypertension problems, stop. Read something safe.

The warning that accompanies the The Chaco Meridian: Centers of Political Power in the Ancient Southwest by Steve Lekson, an archaeologist from the University of Colorado, in which Dr. Lekson argues that "for centuries the Anasazi leaders, reckoning by the stars, aligned their principal settlements along this north-south axis — the 108th meridian of longitude," according to today's New York Times.

The New York Times also cites David Phillips, curator of archaeology at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, on the controversial Chaco Meridian theory:

Steve is possibly the best writer in Southwest archaeology. Our academic writing has this inherent gift of taking something interesting and making it dull and boring. And Steve doesn’t have that problem. He thinks outside the box, and the rest of us comb through his ideas.

Having said all that, I personally think that the Chaco meridian is a crock.

Archaeology published Amending the Meridian by Lekson in the January/February 2009 issue »

this little light of mine

He who receives an idea from me receives it without lessening me, as he who lights his candle at mine receives light without darkening me.

Thomas Jefferson, American president and inventor, cited in an opinion piece about patent law reform in today's Wall Street Journal.

earthshaking

[Twitter's new VP of Operations, Santosh Jayaram] told of being in the Twitter offices in San Francisco on March 30, when the Twitter engineers noticed that the word "earthquake" had suddenly started trending up. They didn't know where the earthquake was. Several seconds later, their building started to shake.

The earthquake had been in Morgan Hill, 60 miles south of San Francisco, and the tweets about the shaker reached the office faster than the seismic waves themselves.

Rafe Needleman writing in Cool changes coming to Twitter Search.

Those cool changes include indexing the content behind links that are tweeted and ranking search results according to a reputation ranking.

Stating the obvious: Once Twitter has nailed search they're halfway to monetizing their business model -- and seriously competing with engines like Google. Twitter has an advantage that Google doesn't have[1]: homophilious network neighbors, which research has shown to be a powerful conduit for influencing others and for identifying affinities that don't materialize via traditional demographic profiling.

With the introduction of more powerful and reliable search capabilities Twitter could become a serious contender to Google in the search space.


[1] Worth noting that Google has attempted to accomplish something along the same lines by introducing the ability to tether an individual profile with search history (even more so now that they've introduced profile pages) and by letting folks score and record the importance of their search results.

my little red book

Generals, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite menstruation ("men-struation") as proof that only men could serve God and country in combat ("You have to give blood to take blood"), occupy high political office ("Can women be properly fierce without a monthly cycle governed by the planet Mars?"), be priests, ministers, God Himself ("He gave this blood for our sins"), or rabbis ("Without a monthly purge of impurities, women are unclean").

Male liberals and radicals, however, would insist that women are equal, just different; and that any woman could join their ranks if only she were willing to recognize the primacy of menstrual rights ("Everything else is a single issue") or self-inflict a major wound every month ("You must give blood for the revolution").

From Gloria Steinem's 1978 essay If Men Could Menstruate, which makes an appearance in My Little Red Book, a collection of stories about women's first periods compiled by Rachel Kauder Nalebuff.

desperate housewives

To our sincere regret ... it has now emerged that the text contains deeper levels of meaning, which are not immediately accessible to a non-native speaker.

The Max Planck Institute's apology for the cover of their latest journal, which the Institute believed was a Chinese classical text. However, upon circulation, the Independent reports, it was discovered that the text was an advertisement for a brothel specializing in "Hot Housewives in Action!"

According to the Independent: "The use of traditional Chinese characters and references to 'the northern mainland' seem to indicate the text comes from Hong Kong or Macau, and it promises burlesque acts by pretty-as-jade housewives with hot bodies for the daytime visitor."

cheddar menace

Seven officers arrived and found as many as 40 people knocking over chairs and yelling in front of the restaurant's music stage, where a robotic singing chicken and the chain's namesake mouse performed.

This morning's Wall Street Journal, on the tide of violence that has sprung up chain wide at Chuck E. Cheese.

I received the blurb in an email message from a friend[1] who described it as "the best sentence ever written in a newspaper", and who pointed out that: "another comment later in the article made by a cop in a different city said 'we have a biker bar down the street that gets fewer calls than Chuck E. Cheese'."



[1] who should be tweeting. just sayin'.

letter to santa

And I would like to go into your sleigh. How will I do that? Do I have to climb up the trees?

Kisses,
Capucine.

can't. stand. the cuteness. »

(from the little girl who brought you the hippo who was allergic to magic)

skills

Lichens, fungi, and algae are referred to as cryptogams, which literally means “hidden marriage” -- a reference to their means of reproduction, which long remained a mystery to botanists. During World War II, a misunderstanding about the meaning of this term led to a breakthrough of the greatest military importance.

Geoffrey Tandy was the [London Natural History] museum’s “seaweed man.” he only ever published two scientific papers, a lack of productivity that seems to have been owing to a hidden marriage of his own, for Tandy shouldered the burden of running two families in tandem.

His great moment came when a functionary in the Ministry of War became confused between crypotgamists and cryptographers, and recruited Tandy to the British center for signals intelligence at Bletchley Park, where some of the world’s brightest minds were working on cracking the German Enigma Code.

During Tandy’s stay at Bletchley Park several sodden notebooks holding vital clues to the German code were recovered from sunken U-boats, but they seemed damaged beyond recovery. Tandy, however, knew exactly what to do, for the problem was not so different from preserving marine algae. Obtaining special absorbent papers from the museum, Tandy dried the sodden pages and made them readable, an important contribution to deciphering the Enigma Code.

From Tim Flannery’s review of Richard Fortey’s Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum in the 4 December issue of the New York Review of Books.

speaking of brotherly love (& guns)

We’re not really sure who is promoting the concept that a change in federal administrations might affect firearms possession rights, but we do know that it’s increased business considerably.

Lance Clem in today's New York Times. Clem is a spokesman from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, commenting on the 24-hour record for number of background checks required to purchase a firearm, which was set this last Saturday in Colorado.

Gun sales in Colorado have increased 30% since Obama declared his candidacy.


p.s. See the story on the album cover art »

ahistorical

I think they should keep it. Turn it into an aquarium. Fill it with fish. Do something special — not just another building.

Al the Mechanic commenting at Ground Zero on the glacial pothole characterized by "plummeting holes, steep cliffsides and soft billows of steel-gray bedrock, punctuated by thousands of beach-smooth cobblestones in a muted rainbow of reds and purples and greens" that underlies the construction site where the former Twin Towers stood. As reported in At Ground Zero, Scenes from the Ice Age in this morning's New York Times.

The "Grand Canyon of Lower Manhattan" will be obliterated by the construction of Tower 4 of the new World Trade Tower.

the measure of man

We want to give movie and video game makers the tools necessary to animate actors and have their hair look and behave as it would in the real world.

UC San Diego computer science professor Matthias Zwicker in Hollywood Hair is Captured at Last: Details in SIGGRAPH 2008 Paper

Well. Thank god for that.

no safety

Feeling safe kills.

From Mary Roach's review of Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) in last Sunday's New York Review of Books.

In which I learned that 80 percent of auto accidents happen because a driver was distracted for only three seconds.

Re feeling safe: Vanderbilt indicates that S.U.V.s are more dangerous than cars because they confer "a sense of safety — they invite careless behavior."

No indication in Roache's review of whether Vanderbilt tackles one of my pet wildass theories: That the increase of S.U.V.s on the road has contributed markedly to the slowing of traffic in recent years, because they reduce visibility for smaller cars. (Can't tell you how many times I had to wait for a big ass vehicle to move through their left turn so I could make my right turn.)

curious correlate

When you have one correlation, you raise an eyebrow. But when you have more than 20 correlations pointing in the same direction, you start building a strong case for causality.

David Stuckler, a research associate at Cambridge University, speaking of a recent study that draws a strong correlation between "the rapid rise in tuberculosis cases in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union ... with the receipt of loans from the International Monetary Fund" in Rise in TB Is Linked to Loans From I.M.F. in this morning's New York Times.

The piece continues: "Critics of the fund have suggested that its financial requirements lead governments to reduce spending on health care to qualify for loans. This, the authors say, helps explain the connection."

the art of war

Photo: Reuters

"Remember, I came out of Silicon Valley, where if you had a six-month lead on your competition, you win. You deprive them of cash, you have more cash . . . you get an installed base that's bigger, you take their installed base away," he says, using the financial term for operating system users.

"That's thematically what I'm thinking about, you know," he says, now jabbing his fingers at Pakistanis screaming on the cover of a news magazine. "How do I get this installed base to turn?"

Former Silicon Valley business man Major General Douglas Stone speaking to his responsibilities at the U.S. detention Camp Bucca in Iraq, in today's Financial Times.

ticket to ride

You need to push hard into the wind, [using] a big gear, for at least six minutes and no longer than 45 minutes [once or twice a week] to get the aerobic benefits of climbing big hills.

Cyclist and flatlander Christian Vande Velde, who trains outside Chicago, speaking to how it's possible to simulate altitude in this godforsaken terrain in today's New York Times.

Okay. I'll give it a try. (Doesn't mean I won't still long for my daily ride up Sunshine Canyon, just outside Boulder.)

And I'm guessing the descent won't be as much fun.