I’m ready for people in positions of power at magazines and newspapers and movie studios to recalibrate their understanding of what it means to talk about race in the first place. If America would like to express that it truly values and appreciates the voices of its minorities, it will listen to all their stories, not just the ones reacting to its shortcomings and brutality.

Because these combat robots are coming, and many are already here, if we do not prevent their global deployment by the time you and I are old we will see robots on street corners with guns that run software we do not control, implementing policies beamed to them over the airwaves in encrypted communications, accessing databases of faces and retinas, ever watchful for enemies not of the State as we currently understand it, but of the people who own the right to program the machines which watch over us. The State will have become technocratic – fascism by remote control – and the dream of control, coveted by evil men for generations, will have come to fruition. We have a scant few years to arrest the development of these technologies or to rearchitect the social foundations of liberty to survive a situation where combat robots leave the population largely powerless to resist tyranny, whether they have their rifles or not.

Taking human life should always be a very serious thing. There’s something very close up about the Middle Ages. You’re taking a sharp piece of steel and hacking at someone’s head, and you’re getting spattered with his blood, and you’re hearing his screams. In some ways maybe it’s more brutal that we’ve insulated ourselves from that. We’re setting up mechanisms where we can kill human beings with drones and missiles where you’re sitting at a console and pressing the button. We never have to hear their whimpering, or hear them begging for their mother, or dying in horrible realities around us.

It amazes me how the seemingly most paranoid people are all “Software created by anonymous entities? Sign me up! I can’t wait to use it to store my most sensitive files/conduct illegal transactions!”

Where do these systems of obedience come from? Why do we recognize power instead of individual autonomy? These questions are fascinating to me. It’s all this strange illusion, isn’t it?

The thing to understand is why we’re fighting - understand, the purpose of segregation is to preserve the second-class status of blacks. And the main thing for you to understand is we must continue to fight.

I am mostly a pretty worried person. In conversations, I am always worried about what to say. The first time I took ecstasy, all of that lifted away. All the anxiety, which is the baseline of my life in some way, and I had this moment of like, wait a second! Are there people who feel this way all the time? This is like a whole way to be, where you don’t feel anxious? Oh my god! It was so amazing. In the months after that, it was a really helpful thing to have experienced. It remains to this day a feeling that is helpful to know about.

Just as clean tech is being thwarted by the trillions of dollars previously sunk into fossil-fuel infrastructure, our collective investment in capitalism itself is forestalling superior post-capitalist alternatives.

I was told by another officer while in the car that recording a police officer was illegal because people are using iPhones as guns and shooting cops through the camera lens…I told him that I have the right to be recording a cop and he said that there were incidents, specifically in uptown Manhattan where a kid shot a cop with his iPhone. Straight face. Very serious.

Mother of Hydrogen: a novel about war, magick, and America

I’ve had countless requests to buy text links, do link exchanges, and create hidden links on mefi to lame spammy companies. I’ve also had content companies ask if I wanted to institute a NYTimes type of system where archive pages cost a buck to view after 30 days, and I’ve gotten offers from ad firms to do keyword smart tag type advertising on all old archive pages. I’ve refused them all, and developed a mix of self-service ads and donation/payments for new users that supports the site and my time well.

It is generally understood that women get paid less than men; that white women get paid more than black men and women and hispanic men and women. However, recognizing this macrocosm functioning intimately, in the immediate, personal, local context — in our friend groups, in our teams, in our companies, and in our communities — remains massively taboo.

I realized that if you swapped out the word housework for Facebook that 80 percent of this text was still totally crystal clear, and it really freaked me out.

Somewhere, some junior ad exec with the Fleischmann’s Yeast account has just gotten their first google news ping in a decade.

That these people, at this point of reasoning, seem to both want and not want something, to no ends, is vaguely an example of the base desire of conscious beings to want to stop being conscious, as a means of fulfillment, while knowing that if they stop being conscious they won’t require fulfillment, a paradox present in all consciousness-related phenomenon after 2-4 steps of cognition.

You will have to search long and hard in Philadelphia to find anyone who will say anything bad about Comcast.

It is becoming clearer to more and more people that none of the institutions which claim to represent us are ever going to act in the interest of communities.

No doubt, some will find the idea of engineering platforms to promote diversity or adapting existing laws to curb online harassment unsettling and paternalistic, but such criticism ignores the ways online spaces are already contrived with specific outcomes in mind—they are designed to serve Silicon Valley venture capitalists, who want a return on investment, and advertisers, who want to sell us things. The term ‘platform,’ which implies a smooth surface, misleads us, obscuring the ways technology companies shape our online lives, prioritizing and upraising certain purposes over others.

Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups…So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

We’ve spent the last 30 years losing every battle with kleptocracy and government support of corporations so enthusiastic it has become a merging. Political protest is a Potemkin village, and everyone knows it. It is pure spectacle, free of real world consequence. It can be safely ignored or marginalized on the edges of real American politics, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the kleptocracy. If it does, or even threatens to talk about the kleptocracy, it will be violently put down.

Turns out, as with all things political, there’s money involved in here. In order to entice Huy Fong from Rosemead - where they’ve been operating for years without complaint - Irwindale offered the company a low cost loan and expected to collect the interest. Huy Fong built the plant, moved and immediately refi’d and paid off the loan, screwing the city out of the interest. Irwindale, like a lot of these little LA satellite cities is a crooked cesspool. The Mayor and the Deputy Mayor are both under indictment for fishy practices with money. Also, the vast majority of the complaints have been filed by one household - who’s the nephew of one of the city councilmen. It’s a shake down pure and simple.

It has a neck. No fish has a neck. And you know what? When you look inside the fin, and you take off those fin rays, you find an upper arm bone, a forearm, and a wrist.

This is the age of the obvious.  You must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, what any educated individual already should know because there is a lot of money in obfuscating the obvious.

When I first got this role I just cried like a baby because I was like, “Wow, next Halloween, I’m gonna open the door and there’s gonna be a little kid dressed as the Falcon.” That’s the thing that always gets me. I feel like everybody deserves that. I feel like there should be a Latino superhero. Scarlett does great representation for all the other girls, but there should be a Wonder Woman movie. I don’t care if they make 20 bucks, if there’s a movie you’re gonna lose money on, make it Wonder Woman. You know what I mean, ’cause little girls deserve that.

While the physical space of the urban school is often understood to serve as preparation for factory work, with the rise of a deindustrialized economy it can be argued that students are being prepared instead for the enclosed space of the prison.

If you are 35 or younger - and quite often, older - the advice of the old economy does not apply to you. You live in the post-employment economy, where corporations have decided not to pay people. Profits are still high. The money is still there. But not for you. You will work without a pay rise, benefits, or job security. Survival is now a laudable aspiration.

Passover to me is informed by the Seder ritual, but it’s more than just that. It’s a Jewish holiday par excellence because every day should be a day where we remember the drive towards freedom. It’s something we should strive to preserve and protect. The month of April marks Passover, and it is the same month that the Civil War ended in 1865. During this time my great-great-grandfather and his brother were at the courthouse the day we signed the terms of surrender with Grant. They had been enslaved Africans at a tobacco plantation in Virginia. And on this day, their former slaveholder comes up to them and says, “You’re free.” I like to think of them as the first black people to realize that the nightmare was over.

Facebook wants my data to sell me stuff. I like to think of this as a feudal model. At a most fundamental model, we are tenant farming for companies like Google. We are on their land producing data.

If a person makes an unreasonable complaint at one of the stores, security camera footage of the person is processed into facial data with the recognition system and classified as “complainer”.

You speak English, a futured language, and what that means is that every time you discuss the future or any kind of a future event, grammatically, you’re forced to cleave that from the present and treat it as if it’s something viscerally different. Now suppose that that visceral difference makes you suddenly disassociate the future from the present every time you speak. If that’s true, and it makes the future feel like something more distant and more different from the present, that’s going to make it harder to save.

If, on the other hand, you speak a futureless language, the present and the future, you speak about them identically. If that suddenly nudges you to feel about them identically, that’s going to make it easier to save.

[…]

Futureless language speakers, even after this level of control, are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year. Does this have cumulative effects? Yes. By the time they retire, futureless language speakers, holding constant their income, are going to retire with 25 percent more in savings.

Can we push this data even further? Yes. Think about smoking, for example. Smoking is, in some deep sense, negative savings, right. If savings is current pain in exchange for future pleasure, smoking is just the opposite. It’s current pleasure in exchange for future pain. What we should expect then is the opposite effect. And that’s exactly what we find. Futureless-language speakers are 20 to 24 percent less likely to be smoking at any given in time compared to identical families. And they’re going to be 13 to 70 percent less likely to be obese by the time they retire.

As the white father of an African-American son, I am keenly aware that I never face the suspicion and indignities that my son continuously confronts. In fact, all of the men among my African-American in-laws—and I literally mean every single one of them—can tell multiple stories of unjustified investigatory police stops of the sort that not a single one of my white male relatives has ever experienced.

Once we made it to the lobby, Ross and Lebenthal reassured me that what I’d just seen wasn’t really a group of wealthy and powerful financiers making homophobic jokes, making light of the financial crisis, and bragging about their business conquests at Main Street’s expense. No, it was just a group of friends who came together to roast each other in a benign and self-deprecating manner. Nothing to see here. … The first and most obvious conclusion was that the upper ranks of finance are composed of people who have completely divorced themselves from reality.

Go ahead, say it out loud. The internet is a utility. There, you’ve just skipped past a quarter century of regulatory corruption and lawsuits that still rage to this day and arrived directly at the obvious conclusion. Internet access isn’t a luxury or a choice if you live and participate in the modern economy, it’s a requirement.

He told the story as-is, but instead of the whole notion of the intergalactic thing which was too hard and too silly, he maintained that the existence of Doctor Manhattan had changed the whole balance of the world economy, the world political structure. He felt that THAT character really altered the way reality had been. He had the Ozymandias character convince, essentially, the Doctor Manhattan character to go back and stop himself from being created.

In 1955, a crowd gathered in a hotel ballroom to watch as feed salesmen climbed onto a scale; the men were competing to see who could gain the most weight in four months, in imitation of the cattle and hogs that ate their antibiotic-laced food. Pfizer sponsored the competition.

For many white people the only kind of anti-black racism that exists is one of slurs, overt discrimination, and stand your ground style violence. This mode of “opt-in white racism” is almost useless as an analytic tool for discussing issues in which race plays a role, but is very useful in distancing oneself from the necessity to engage those conversations. What is more interesting to me is why white people find comfort in white spaces, seemingly without the ability to see those spaces as white.

Erecting more balcony guardrails won’t persuade frat brothers to stop hosting offensive Asian-themed ragers and sending mass emails referencing “rapebait.” It won’t stop them from from throwing beer bottles at black students, calling them “Trayvon Martin,” or more or less getting away with sexual assault.

If you look at the way that the world works now, you can point to very specific things, like Twitter and blogging and the changes that are happening in the music and publishing industries, and you can actually point to this set of people, this set of thinking, and the stuff that came out of it and say, “Holy shit. That worked.”

The first hundred or so times Expereal asked me how I was feeling, my assessments were the kinds of superficial ones you might respond with if a stranger asked you on the street: “I’m fine.”, “All good.”, “Frustrated by a supermarket line.” Reviewing my answers after the first few weeks, it dawned on me: I had been politely lying to my smartphone.

My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I can do something about it. So even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2 percent I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.

Plus I find the Bay Area con­gested, racist, in­ces­tu­ous, and over­priced. So I was never re­ally tempted.

They never did anything to me personally, or even threatened me, but they didn’t need to. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. They were über-right-wing. Now, I’m not talking about Rush Limbaugh; I’m talking about the people who make life-and-death decisions. And it’s not necessarily evil; it’s more realistic. Charles was ex-CIA. It’s weirder than you can possibly imagine. I certainly never got the truth. Since then, everything that’s happened—from Nirvana going crazy and on and on and on—none of that holds a candle to how weird that situation was. That’s David Lynch weird.

George Orwell would be flummoxed. ‘Let me get this straight: You pay every month for your tracking device?’

“Why is black pride OK but white pride is racist?” If students are taught that whiteness is based on a history of exclusion, they might easily see that there is nothing in the designation as “white” to be proud of. Being proud of being white doesn’t mean finding your pale skin pretty or your Swedish history fascinating. It means being proud of the violent disenfranchisement of those barred from this category. Being proud of being black means being proud of surviving this ostracism. Be proud to be Scottish, Norwegian or French, but not white.

I think a person should be able to dial a number, make a purchase, send an SMS, write an email, or visit a website without having to think about what it’s going to look like on their permanent record.

When I run, I’m an invisible observer of my city, a ghost forgotten by the people I pass almost as quickly as I disappear from view. I’ve gotten a broad, hard look at this city and its people. Some of it is challenging to see, but at times I think I can see the things that connect every citizen of the city. … We run across the invisible divides that segregate us from neighbors and, in that way, we come to understand where we live.

Whiteness was never about skin color or a natural inclination to stand with one’s own; it was designed to racialize power and conveniently dehumanize outsiders and the enslaved.

We have surveillance video from the hotels that shows people turn on the shower, direct the nozzle at the wall and then leave the room for the whole day.

As Americans have grown increasingly comfortable with traditional surveillance cameras, a new, far more powerful generation is being quietly deployed that can track every vehicle and person across an area the size of a small city, for several hours at a time. … A single camera mounted atop the Washington Monument, McNutt boasts, could deter crime all around the Mall.

It looks more and more as if high levels of extra antioxidants can actually give people cancer, or at the very least, help along any cancerous cells that might arise on their own. Evidence for this has been piling up for years now from multiple sources, but if you wander through a grocery or drug store, you’d never have the faintest idea that there could be anything wrong with scarfing up all the antioxidants you possibly can.

The key is to remember that the surveillance and the abuse doesn’t occur when people look at the data, it occurs when people gather the data in the first place.

Much as we marvel at Babylonian clay tablets listing measures of grain, future generations will find just as much meaning in our log files as they will in the media we consume.

Talk a little to your delivery guys. Get to know them. Ask them if the credit card tips are getting to them, and if not, complain at the restaurant and at Seamless, because that shit ain’t right. But mostly, just tip in cash.

You want to make metro areas of 6 million people prepared for things like this? Stop subsidizing the automobile. Stop making it so damned easy for us to build a society that’s so fragile, that’s so close to the breaking point, that the world ends and we have to sleep in our offices when we’re seven whole miles from home (as one tale had it). This isn’t solved by various Atlanta area regional governments providing more services, more salt and plow trucks, or even more transit facilities. This is solved by not subsidizing a lifestyle that makes it completely impossible to have any sort of resilience.

The people who say that are idiots. Blogging was never alive. It’s the people that matter. There will always be a small number who are what I call “natural born bloggers.” They were blogging before there were blogs, they just didn’t know what it was called. Julia Child was a blogger as was Benjamin Franklin and Patti Smith.

I’ll break you in half. Like a boy.

So I was asked to be on Roger Ailes’ television program and the moment we sat down I said, “Mr. Ailes, I’m the most conservative person you’ve ever interviewed.” (laughs) And he was surprised, said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, most conservatives just want to turn the back the clock 100 years, but I’d like to turn back the clock thousands of years, to when we lived in small communities and took care of each other.” He said, “Well, isn’t that just romantic?” And I said, “No, I don’t think the human race will survive unless we do something like that.”

If I had revealed what I knew about these unconstitutional but classified programs to Congress, they could have charged me with a felony.

The choice is not whether to allow the NSA to spy. The choice is between a communications infrastructure that is vulnerable to attack at its core and one that, by default, is intrinsically secure for its users.

Roger said that he didn’t know if he could believe in God. He had his doubts. But toward the end, something really interesting happened. That week before Roger passed away, I would see him and he would talk about having visited this other place. I thought he was hallucinating. I thought they were giving him too much medication. But the day before he passed away, he wrote me a note: “This is all an elaborate hoax.”

Our quote “Defense of the free world” is an aggressive hypocrisy that has damaged the very planet’s chance of survival. Now we have spent thousands of billions on offensive War in decades, and half the world is starving for food. The reckoning has come now for America. 100 Billion goes to the War Department this year out of 300 Billion Budget. Our militarization has become so top heavy that there is no turning back from Military Tyranny. Police agencies have become so vast – National Security Agency alone the largest police bureaucracy in America yet its activities are almost unknown to all of us – that there is no turning back from computerized police state control of America.

We can assume that people like to notice when their phone is ringing, and that most people hate missing a call. This means their perceptual systems have adjusted their bias to a level that makes misses unlikely. The unavoidable cost is a raised likelihood of false alarms – of phantom phone vibrations.

I think I’m looking at something Orwellian. It’s a government, many-tentacled operation to gather daily information on what everybody in the country is doing. Your daily transactions on the Internet can be monitored with this kind of system, not just your Web surfing. All kinds of business that people do on the Internet these days — your bank transactions, your e-mail, everything — it sort of opens a window into your entire private life, and that’s why I thought of the term “Orwellian.” As you know, in [George] Orwell’s story [1984], they have cameras in your house, watching you. Well, this is the next best thing. …

In the early 90s I desperately wanted to blow the whistle on racism in the market research industry, but with no Internet, not as easy to do that as it is today. Basically the company that did most of the market research for consumer product advertising (pop tarts, for example) refused to allow us to turn in surveys with more than ten percent black people in the sample. They had no other restrictions, on anything like age or gender. They were 100% clear that 0% would be fine with them, and in fact, preferred. I was doing surveys in a mall with a customer base that was probably 30% black at the time. We often had to tell people that we recruited that we couldn’t use them when the manager told us that we were over quota. The office manager would ask them what their zip code was, and whatever they said, she would say, oh, sorry we’re over quota for that zip code. Then they’d tell us that we couldn’t survey any more ‘zips’. Sometimes black people would directly even stop and ask us why we didn’t survey them, if I ignored them and asked a white person that walked by after them. I never had a good answer.

Teens aren’t addicted to social media. They’re addicted to each other. They’re not allowed to hang out the way you and I did, so they’ve moved it online.

"The feed is so pixelated, what if it’s a shovel, and not a weapon?" I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we endangered the wrong people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian’s life all because of a bad image or angle.

You may wonder what discrimination and social justice have to do with the technical and economic nature of the web; the short answer is, everything.

When we accuse people of being too lazy to take care of themselves and cook a proper meal, we assume they all have pots, pans, knives, sinks. There are people on social media who get on their high horses and call people who don’t make their own pasta “idiots”. Are you kidding me? My children were used to eating mangoes and avocados for snacks and having unlimited access to the cupboards and refrigerator. Now there is rationing. Woe to the person who eats the last egg I was saving to add protein to the salad. I turn into Mommie Dearest within seconds now, on edge all the time, trying to be the food police.

I almost cried and thought I might, but then didn’t, since I had a way to go before I got home and didn’t want anyone to have to see a 6’3”, 230 pound bearded man running down the street in tears in bright workout gear on their way to work or school.

“It’s cool!” I would have assured them, “I’m just thinking about men and boys kissing each other in the context of fatherhood! Not a big deal.”

I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.

The black people who Phil Robertson knew were warred upon. If they valued their lives, and the lives of their families, the last thing they would have done was voiced a complaint about “white people” to a man like Robertson.

Just add “if you’re white” or “because I’m white” to each generalization or anecdote in the article. For instance: “I find when you act confused but polite then people want to help if you’re white. There was a line behind me. I wasn’t fighting or angry. So there was no reason for anyone to get angry at me, because I’m white.”

Standards and practices still insisted on the removal of specific shots, like Mix doing push-ups on the butt, or other really tight butt shots.

Pop culture says that if a black girl is to be taken seriously, she has to assimilate and be as white as possible, to the point of bleaching her hair blonde. But the entire point of the song was the opposite.

There’s a world of possibility in telling me more about my own listening habits. If I could choose only one feature to add to Spotify, it would be play histories. When was the the first time I played a song? When was the last? When did I first add an album to my collection? How many times have I played it? Given my listening history, how likely am I to like a new album? How often do people with similar histories play a given album? How long did it take me to play one album twenty-five times in comparison to the last album I played that often?

In a sense, the most amazing thing about Mr. Mandela is that he is not a fiction. He actually lived in our lifetime.

Some of the questions asked by the incisive audience were polite versions of “What are the dangers of having this much data about so many people?” and “What does Facebook as a company do to help society?” These Zuckerberg dodged so expertly that by the time he was done “answering” (with a hefty & convincing confidence), I had forgotten exactly what the question was.

This leads him to a controversial conclusion: that the saturated fat in butter, cheese and meats does not contribute to the clogging of arteries — and in fact is beneficial in moderate amounts in the context of a healthy diet (lots of fruits, vegetables, whole grains and other fresh, unprocessed foods). His own diet attests to that. Along with fruits, vegetables and whole grains, he eats red meat several times a week and drinks whole milk daily. He cannot remember the last time he ate anything deep-fried. He has never used margarine, and instead scrambles eggs in butter every morning. He calls eggs one of nature’s most perfect foods, something he has been preaching since the 1970s, when the consumption of cholesterol-laden eggs was thought to be a one-way ticket to heart disease. “Eggs have all of the nine amino acids you need to build cells, plus important vitamins and minerals,” he said. “It’s crazy to just eat egg whites. Not a good practice at all.”

It is on record. Rapes in the dozen. So stop hedging your words and when you tell me what a brilliant ode to pussy Black Panties is, then realize that the next sentence should say: “This, from a man who has committed numerous rapes.” The guy was a monster! Just say it! We do have a justice system and he was acquitted. Ok, fine. And these other women took the civil lawsuit route. He was tried on very narrow grounds. He was tried on a 29 minute, 36 second video tape. He was tried on trading child pornography. He was not tried for rape. He was acquitted of making child pornography. He’s never been tried in court for rape, but look at the statistics. The numbers of rapes that happened, the numbers of rapes that were reported, the numbers of rapes that make it to court and then the conviction rate. I mean, it comes down to something miniscule. He’s never had his day in court as a rapist. It’s fifteen years in the past now, but this record exists. You have to make a choice, as a listener if music matters to you as more than mere entertainment and you and I have spent our entire lives with that conviction. This is not just entertainment, this is our life blood. This matters.

The day will come — sooner than you think — when you’ll want to be able to conduct a security audit on your own sex toys.

Such a strange existential dilemma. I spend hours looking at this hole and poking at it with my fingers. I know that I cannot “have” a hole, as a hole is not a thing that can be had. A hole is an absence. And yet this is supposed to be a list of the things I want, and I want this hole in the hardwood floor the way Gandhi wanted peace. The way the dog wants to lick my face. The way my mother wants me to stop pulling off her eyeglasses.

I cut my teeth on the open web of the early 2000s. It was APIs, and mashups. Mac OS X turned my laptop into a web server and coding machine, just the same as where I hosted the toys and tools that I wrote. This is what the future was going to be like.

And then it didn’t happen. Code is fragile because APIs keep changing and nobody cares about scripting anymore. There are no text and image file formats anymore, practically speaking, because there’s no file interchange. Once photos are on Instagram, that’s it.

We’ve lost the ambition of the early web and early internet to create an inclusive, level playing field. It’s clear what the technical challenges are - HTTP needs micro-payments at the protocol level to support businesses outside advertising, we need portable high level standards for photos, streams and identity - but we’re kinda not thinking like that anymore.

So in reaction I stick with plain text as much as possible, and continue my computing life vaguely resenting the software world we’ve built.

I can guarantee you that in the seconds between the first blow to the right shoulder and the second blow to the left, you’re not thinking about anything else or anywhere else, and your full attention is on the here and the now.

It turned out a city was exactly what I needed at that moment. Only cities can shoot you down in this way, without any regard. I was not special, I realized, standing in the dark at the 40th street transit center.

And yet, somehow, a great many people who are privileged seem to forget this – indeed, they seem to think exactly the opposite. They convince themselves that they have made successes of their lives from raw talent and intelligence and that everyone else who hasn’t succeeded must have failed either because they’re too stupid - as the recent speech of Boris Johnson seems to suggest – or too lazy (as the whole ‘strivers vs scroungers’ agenda supposes) or because they’ve made terrible decisions, can’t budget and so forth.

To reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.

I’ve read outraged responses to his column, from Ta-Nehisi Coates, to Hunter here at Daily Kos, to Salon and more, but still haven’t been able to shake off my own anger at Cohen (and his WaPo bosses)…

'How the hell kids gonna stay straight and help they neighborhoods if these schools getting shut down,' the man says with passion in his voice.

To be sure, the Tea Party types about whom Cohen writes are not racist in the same vein as the cross-burning Klansmen or the angry lynch mobs of decades past. Rather, like Jefferson and millions of whites before them, segments of the Tea Party have been simmering in the soup of white privilege for so long that they don’t even recognize that an earlier form of racial dominance helped make the base of that soup. Thus, one need not be a flaming racist to defend cultural norms that were forged in a far more racist past. The Tea Party genuinely fears the consequences of losing their white privilege. Slavery is obviously no longer the issue, but slavery’s legacy has, as Linda Faye Williams writes, long resulted in the “unequal allocation of educational resources, substantial insider networks that funnel good jobs largely to whites, and social policies that deliver more generous benefits to whites.” These are the modern fruits of white privilege.

The issue isn’t that Cohen is a racist. It’s that he holds his position of vast influence while living in some older white man’s cocoon, liberalish in a way but not much, in which he’s either indifferent or unconcerned with the actual America around him and routinely jumps at the chance to normalize and legitimize retrograde views about race. The problem with the article isn’t racism but inaccuracy, both descriptive and moral. And the complacent inaccuracy makes it worthy of criticism and contempt. People who have physical revulsion at interracial couples aren’t “cultural conservatives”; they’re racists.

I erred in not editing that one sentence more carefully to make sure it could not be misinterpreted.

We are being told that Cohen finds it “hurtful” to be called racist. I am sorry that people on the Internet have hurt Richard Cohen’s feelings. I find it “hurtful” that Cohen endorses the police profiling my son. I find it eternally “hurtful” that the police, following that same logic, killed one of my friends.

Here’s the thing. There are people who have visceral reactions to inter-racial marriage and relationships. And those people are racist.

I just think that this paragraph is a gratuitously base aside that actually makes you look like a knuckle-dragging, bigoted garbage person, instead of just a conventionally lame political editorialist.

This Richard Cohen column — and perhaps all Richard Cohen columns — should be read as a memo to Jeff Bezos, the new owner of the Post. Cohen is saying, perhaps subconsciously, that he has nothing to offer the Washington Post. He adds no value. “Buy me out,” Richard Cohen begs, between the lines. “Pay me to go away and stop embarrassing this once respected newspaper.” How much will it take? I am not sure, but Jeff Bezos is a very rich man, and I think he can afford it. Indeed, if his mission is to invest in quality journalism, paying Richard Cohen to go away would be one of the quickest and simplest ways to advance that mission.

Almost every teacher in that school came to understand the history they were teaching on—the destruction of the Black Bottom neighborhood, the scattered draft cards of many African-American men drafted into the Vietnam War, and the issues that doomed the school from the very start. … These weren’t the closings of buildings. These were the closings of families and communities.

It seems the only language we have for expressing success is numeric. It may be a universal language, but it’s an impoverished one. Maybe we need a word for “never having to sit in a meeting where someone reads long power point slides out loud.” Maybe we should have an expression that captures the level of success you’ve achieved when you do exactly what you love every day.

Certainly it helps that all these smart people grew up in America, where they never had to worry about clean water or good public schools or political instability. The privileges we enjoy in the United States allow us to succeed on this level, and it’s why I challenge Twitter to extend these kinds of opportunities more broadly by expanding the diversity of its board, and in the process better reflecting its increasingly international and diverse user base.

A feeling I got from working at Google was that technology could solve any problem. Yes it’s fantastic, but what I realized later was there’s technology and there’s people. Google had its list ordered: Technology. People. And I think the right order is: People. Technology. You have to think about people first and technology second. Hopefully technology gets out of the way.

It’s telling a new acquaintance you’re biracial, then furnishing a photo of your family when she insists that you’re lying. You have to do this, though, show her a picture — because you might be the one person who can change her mind about what blackness looks like.

If in some way, you could contribute significantly to the way humans could handle complexity and urgency, that would be universally helpful.

I just got a report from someone who did this for six weeks, and his question to me was, ‘Is there any reason to stop?’

I’ve made it a goal to complete a photographic random walk at every subway station in New York City.

And I thought, how crude, how cruel, how ignorant, how disrespectful of these children. What a set-up. Who would do that to kids?

This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.

I told him he should ask his friend to come over for pizza and play video games but his new friend always had an excuse.

Obamacare, as the Affordable Care Act is popularly known, could fundamentally change the relationship between working Americans and their government. This could pose an existential threat to the small-government credo that has defined the G.O.P. for four decades.

Rather than think of ourselves as isolated islands of microbes, the Hadza teach us that we are better thought of as an archipelago of islands, once seamlessly connected to one another and to a larger metacommunity of microbes via a microbial super highway that runs through the gut and skin/feathers of every animal and water source on the landscape (for those of you keeping up with your homework, this is Macroecology 101). The same can be said for plants and their extraordinary diversity of microbes above (phyllosphere) and below ground (rhizosphere) that the Hadza, and once all humans, interact with on a nearly continues basis.

The boys played endlessly at tracking and hunting, and both boys and girls played at finding and digging up edible roots. They played at tree climbing, cooking, building huts, and building other artefacts crucial to their culture, such as dugout canoes. They played at arguing and debating, sometimes mimicking their elders or trying to see if they could reason things out better than the adults had the night before around the fire. They playfully danced the traditional dances of their culture and sang the traditional songs, but they also made up new ones. They made and played musical instruments similar to those that adults in their group made. Even little children played with dangerous things, such as knives and fire, and the adults let them do it, because ‘How else will they learn to use these things?’ They did all this, and more, not because any adult required or even encouraged them to, but because they wanted to. They did it because it was fun and because something deep inside them, the result of aeons of natural selection, urged them to play at culturally appropriate activities so they would become skilled and knowledgeable adults.

Libraries aren’t free. And the work that goes into keeping them running (which is a lot more than keeping a bookshelf stocked) is complicated, sometimes thankless and under attack from people who think somehow that libraries are not fashionable enough, not hip or current enough, that our day has passed.

There is no post-Civil War precedent for what the House GOP is doing now. It is radical, and dangerous for the economy and our process of government, and its departure from past political disagreements can’t be buffed away or ignored.

Larry Page is not going to go to jail. Marissa Mayer is not going to jail - she’s already said she thinks it’s tantamount to treason! The large corporations - whose own business model, after all, is surveillance - have folded their hands and said “we’ve done everything we can within the law to fight this”.

Smashing our smartphones is not a solution. If only it were that simple. That promise of simplicity, in fact, might be why it is so tempting to causally link personal and social problems to certain technologies. It offers a certain comfort to us because we don’t have to look to our own crooked hearts for the source of our problems, and it holds out the promise of a relatively painless and straightforward solution.

The assumption the media makes is that something is not important unless a familiar, male white face does it. So, when Dave Eggers decided to rewrite my book as his own novel about a young woman working her way up through Facebook, the Wall Street Journal called it a treatment of “the essential issues of the day.”

My most positive association with Whole Foods is that it was the place I used to steal tea-tree oil toothpicks from when I was quitting smoking. It worked! So thank you, Whole Foods, for having lousy security guards! What goes on in there otherwise has always been pretty offensive to me. A kind of lifestyle-porn orgy, carefully calibrated to make the affluent feel better about themselves and their place in the world.

blah blah blah, garbage.

Whether our teens will eventually regret the things they post online is the wrong debate to have—or at least, it’s a debate we should have later on. Instead, we should be asking ourselves why we, as a society, discourage the real teachers, counselors, and principals from seeing a full picture of what their students are up to and what can be done to help.

While gentrification is inevitable, its character is not. Small, personal decisions, like buying your coffee at the local place instead of at Starbucks, can give gentrification in your neighborhood a more organic, human character. So will voting for liberal candidates, who support subsidies for the poor and the elderly, and also donating to and volunteering with charities that support these groups. Don’t be a destructive transient: the future of your neighborhood, and your city, is in your hands.

It’s gotten so that when I ride a Citi Bike I invariably end up thinking of all the buildings with their windows shattered, gray snow falling on people trudging in rags on their way to the rat market to buy a nice rat for Thanksgiving.

I did not observe you, but my daughter was with me packing the groceries and saw it all: “EBT: Yeah, right,” you muttered, with that look of disgust that would have shattered someone feeling just a little bit of shame over needing food stamps. As we walked to the car, my daughter told me what had happened, and I sensed her resolve about having made the right decision to work for social justice as she starts her senior year in a social-work program.

Am I still going to get bookings? Is the promoter still going to book me if I say, ‘Yeah, occasionally I have fellatio with a transsexual?’

There is no way that I could have experienced what Trayvon Martin did (and other black people do) because I’m white and through white privilege I am immune to systemic racial profiling.

All you hear are your own crazy thoughts, like a river of SHIT, ON AND ON! See your thoughts for what they are! Stop your helping! Stop your planning! There’s NO WAY OUT! Not for others! Not for you!

Humans are involved, as they regretfully always are, but this is also a story about merging ideologies, about one great tentacle-laden corporate-human entity, the Hedgefox, tumefying a tentacle and spraying great blasts of life-sustaining cash all over a smaller, quivering entity, the Foxhog. Then eating it.

To talk to your private self is the way to talk to all self. Personal is universal simultaneously.

If we do not seize this unique moment in our constitutional history to reform our surveillance laws and practices, we will all live to regret it.

What has struck me about the anti-war movement in America in these last few years –perhaps it is different elsewhere and perhaps it was different before– is generally how polite it has been. How ironic to chant, “Whose streets! Our streets!” while politely walking into pens and free speech zones. How strange to demand an end to the war while politely conceding to the demands of the NYPD that protesters not use Central Park, that they only march on these streets and not those streets so that order can be maintained, so that things can carry on as if there were no protest at all.

I want to make one thing clear: These were not low-level employees. They were what I would describe as upper mid-level managers. They told us that they had a combined fifty-five years of experience at the NSA. Without the support and consent of people like this, the surveillance machine could not exist. I don’t think that they are stupid people or evil people. I do think that they are people who have abdicated their moral agency and thus allowed for something very scary and very evil to come into existence.

There are some surprising cultural impacts of us not having minorities: people here are often condescending (you can probably read parts of that in my post as well) — though there are exceptions — but people get really condescending to: a). people they perceive as dumb and b). types of people they perceive to be dumb. The amount of jokes made about base school kids (i.e. kids who go to the schools that we would be going to if it weren’t for TJ) and judgments made about blacks or Hispanics is staggering. There are kids here who feel validated that kids at the base school are going to “working for them someday” as if someone’s high school in life was any valid indication of their work ethic, perseverance, intellect, and luck. You also hear comments about “ghetto” kids, generally meaning blacks and Hispanics, which is ironic considering we live in Northern Virginia where half the kids have pool tables in their basement and have lawyer/doctor/government-employed parents. Some people I don’t even know are comfortable regarding me as a “nigger” (but in a good way, y’know?) or telling me how I’m black, but not really because I watch avant-garde films and study philosophy. Our BSU (black student union, which no, I’m not a part of) was led by a white guy, which was partially deserved (iirc he had participated in the club all four years) and was partially indicative of how few blacks are involved in the club and how little notoriety the club has at our school versus Namaste (an Indian culture club) or the various Asian culture clubs (including the Asian Awareness club, whose irony does not escape a school whose biggest demographic is Asian). This isn’t to suggest that BSU should be a thriving community when it appeals to so little of the demographic, but I think it does show that when certain cultures are underrepresented at a school, some kids, even if they don’t don a white hat and burning crosses, let racially-inspired tendencies and beliefs get to them.

You would have thought that by now evryone with a browser and a modem would be following the online exploits of webloggers, but this is not in fact the case. Bloggers! We still have a lot of outreach work to do! There are still some people, perhaps even here tonight, maybe in the seat right next to you, who have never seen a weblog or who have never even heard of weblogs. Yes! It’s true! So I make this challenge: To all webloggers, and to our brother and sisters in the e/n, journal and webzine communities, let us join together in links of love and take back what is rightfully ours! Let us join together; for together we can take back the web!

Put yourself in Martin’s shoes, based on the scenario exactly as Zimmerman described it in that interview. An adult male has been behaving strangely and following him, first in his car and then on foot. It’s dark and a heavy rain is falling, making these actions even more suspicious. He has traveled on foot away from the street to a place behind condos near his residence, and there’s Zimmerman again. Martin confronts the man to find out why he’s being followed and the man doesn’t explain. Instead, he quickly reaches for something in a waist pocket. At that point, does Martin have any way of knowing the man isn’t reaching for a gun?

America has no functioning democracy at this moment.

This brings us to the second feature: the Zimmerman trial judge’s decision to sharply limit the explicit reference to race—including denying the prosecution the ability to argue that Zimmerman engaged in racial profiling. Studies of the legal system and aversive racism show that the less explicitly race is engaged in the discourse in the courtroom, the more likely aversive racism is to influence the decisionmaking process of the jurors. Thus, the judge’s decision also makes it more likely that race played a role in the outcome of the case.

When our children are gunned down in cold blood, I want it to be enough that they were simply ordinary as opposed to ‘innocent.’ In America, Black people will never be considered “innocent” and frankly it’s a label that we shouldn’t want to claim for ourselves. None of us is ‘innocent;’ most of us are just ordinary and flawed people. That should be enough to have the right to live.

It’s been hammered in my DNA to not “rock the boat”—which since I wanna keep it real means not make “certain people” feel uncomfortable. I mean, that is a crazy way to live. Seriously, imagine a life in which you think of other people’s safety and comfort first before your own. You’re kinda programmed and taught that from the gate. It’s like the opposite of entitlement.

It’s an appealing argument, and widespread, but simplistic and obtuse. It’s a belief most easily held when you’ve not witnessed peace rallies and makeshift memorials, when you’ve turned a blind eye to grassroots organizations like the Interrupters in Chicago working valiantly to stem the tide of violence in the city. It is the thinking of people who’ve never wondered why African Americans disproportionately support strict gun control legislation. The added quotient of outrage in cases like this one stems not from the belief that a white murderer is somehow worse than a black one, but from the knowledge that race determines whether fear, history, and public sentiment offer that killer a usable alibi.

It’s a vivid reminder that we must always be deferential to white people, or face the very real chance of getting killed.

Even senators. Even senators must fear to describe America’s laws to America’s citizens. This is, yes, democracy-suppression, but it is a vitally necessary arrangement. It keeps you and your adorable kids and even your cute pet dog alive.

I also want to know what are the qualifications that one needs to become a whistleblower because that sounds like a much more interesting job.

I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.

Storing and analyzing all global cellphone calls is neither necessary nor sufficient to fight the conflict method of terrorism. Greenwald is right in saying: “It is a globalized system designed to destroy all privacy.” But destroying privacy is not the primary or ultimate purpose of the system. The only plausible purpose of this striving for total information is its use for total control. It is the foundation of a totalitarian state.

Libraries have had a long history of dealing with authoritarian organizations demanding reader records—who’s read what—and this has led to people being rounded up and killed. As a librarian, you take this very, very seriously. So, when you get demands for information about a patron’s activities, there are things that sort of flash before your mind. Where am I? What century is this? What country am I in?

Chicha made with saliva remains an important part of the diet of many South American tribes, and a woman’s ability to make it is important for her husband’s social status. It is rude to refuse it, as this account written up in Salon describes. Given the amount of calories and nutrients such beverages can provide, it amazes me that many ethnographical and anthropological surveys seem to ignore or downplay their presence, as if they were just mere recreation.

To me, each song on “Exile in Guyville” reverberates powerfully, making it patently one of the strongest rock albums ever made.

Few fully understand that the tension between young black men and the police (and by extension, security guards, traffic cops and just about any sort of watchman) is the main thing keeping America from getting past race. If ten years went by without a story like the Martin case we’d be in a very different country.

One evening, I was having trouble with my computer, and I went to Luke’s room to ask him for help. I found him in the midst of shooting imaginary people. After he fixed my computer, he asked me if I wanted to watch him play for a little bit. I said I did not and tried to explain: “You know, I’ve seen the real thing. So I’m not really interested. I’m sorry.”

Don’t forget that the Southern food you have been crowned the queen of was made into an art largely in the hands of enslaved cooks, some like the ones who prepared food on your ancestor’s Georgia plantation.

As the world eagerly watches Snowden’s movements today, the public should put aside the mainstream media frenzy buzzing around Snowden’s personal life, and ask the more important question: in a country with the freedom of speech enshrined in the First Amendment, why does a whistleblower have to seek political asylum elsewhere after exposing government wrongdoing?

My wife Ana Hurtado and I have been eating a paleodiet (by accident because of fieldwork) for more than 30 years, because we grew accustomed to that diet (long before the fad). Meats, and unprocessed plant foods are a simple generalized ancestral diet and appear to produce better health than the current standard modern diet. As anyone who knows us can affirm, Hurtado and I are a lot leaner and fitter than most Americans in our age cohort (near 60). Why?

I believe a world in which everything is recorded and persists forever carries the seeds of something monstrous. It is in the nature of computer systems to remember things indefinitely, but there’s nothing difficult about programming machines to forget. It just requires laws to do it. We can’t treat it as a technical problem. And to get the laws passed, we need to politicize the issue.

You have to assume everything is being collected.

The first time I ever played in a long term D&D campaign I made a half-elf—bi-racial, like me. I’m putting this out there because it’s hilarious and says basically everything you need to know about 18 year old Austin Walker: his name was Xanatos Woodshymn, he was a bard who was raised by orcs and who saw himself as the ‘by any means necessary’ advocate for the kobolds who were being used as slave labor in the nearby mines. He was the reincarnation of the Elven god Corellon—it was one of those D&D games—and at the final moment of the first “season” of our campaign, he sided with the orcs, resurrecting their ancient ‘evil’ god and becoming public enemy number one for all of elf-kind. It was a weird year. I had dreadlocks.

We are not just ourselves anymore. Each one of us has a new, statistical self living in databases around the world. It’s those selves, uniquely identified bundles of behavior, that marketers target and companies try to reach. These are remarkable, distributed portraits of what we read, what we eat, and where we sleep. When it comes to our statistical selves, the difference between the NSA and private companies such as Facebook or Google or Amazon.com lies in what the government can do with the data it collects. It’s building that giant index so that, if it needs to, it can actively cross the line between your statistical self and your real, physical self. It’s the difference between “would you like to receive local coupons for businesses you love?” and “why is there a van in front of our house?”

I began to wonder if abstaining from animal products actually contributed to improvements in animal welfare or just gave me a false sense of moral purity while flesh from abused animals that could otherwise have been eaten just wound up rotting in the trash. I decided I could do more to improve animal welfare by supporting farmers who do treat animals well than by keeping my money from “farmers” that would be better termed “meat production engineers.”

What’s at stake has to do with how power is employed, by whom, and in what circumstances. It’s about questioning whether or not we still believe in checks and balances to power. And it’s about questioning whether or not we’re OK with continue to move towards a system that presumes entire classes and networks of people as suspect. Regardless of whether or not you’re in one of those classes or networks, are you OK with that being standard fare? Because what is implied in that question is a much uglier one: Is your perception of your safety worth the marginalization of other people who don’t have your privilege?

Somewhere around its final passage, which begins when a slacker picks up the Pixelvision camera through which we ourselves see the next few minutes, you realize you’ve been watching something on a higher plane.

Ed Snowden is a hero because he realized that our very humanity was being compromised by the blind implementation of machines in the name of making us safe. Unlike those around him, who were too absorbed in their task to reflect on their actions and pause in their pursuit of digital omniscience, Snowden allowed himself to be “disturbed” by what he was doing. More in the midst of technology than most of us will ever be, Snowden disengaged for long enough to be human, and to consider the impact of what he was helping to build. He pressed pause.

Omniscient, automatic, mass surveillance. . . . That seems to me a greater threat to the institutions of free society than missed intelligence reports, and unworthy of the costs.

Discuss: Are there ways in which government or the private sector intrudes upon the privacy of U.S. citizens? What are some of these ways?

You are not even aware of what is possible. The extent of their capabilities is horrifying. We can plant bugs in machines. Once you go on the network, I can identify your machine. You will never be safe whatever protections you put in place.

I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.

You want to know why revolutions happen? Because little by little by little things get worse and worse. But this thing that is happening now is big. This is the key ingredient. This allows them to know everything they need to know to accomplish the above. The fact that they are doing it is proof that they are the sort of people who might use it in the way I described. In the country I live in, they also claimed it was for the safety of the people. Same in Soviet Russia. Same in East Germany. In fact, that is always the excuse that is used to surveil everyone. But it has never ONCE proven to be the reality.

Maybe Obama won’t do it. Maybe the next guy won’t, or the one after him. Maybe this story isn’t about you. Maybe it happens 10 or 20 years from now, when a big war is happening, or after another big attack. Maybe it’s about your daughter or your son. We just don’t know yet. But what we do know is that right now, in this moment we have a choice. Are we okay with this, or not? Do we want this power to exist, or not?

To those who understand state surveillance as an abstraction, I will try to describe a little about how it has affected me. The United States apparently placed me on a “watch-list” in 2006 after I completed a film about the Iraq war. I have been detained at the border more than 40 times. Once, in 2011, when I was stopped at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and asserted my First Amendment right not to answer questions about my work, the border agent replied, “If you don’t answer our questions, we’ll find our answers on your electronics.”’ As a filmmaker and journalist entrusted to protect the people who share information with me, it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to work in the United States. Although I take every effort to secure my material, I know the N.S.A. has technical abilities that are nearly impossible to defend against if you are targeted.

The 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which oversees the N.S.A. activities, are up for renewal in December. Two members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, both Democrats, are trying to revise the amendments to insure greater privacy protections. They have been warning about “secret interpretations” of laws and backdoor “loopholes” that allow the government to collect our private communications. Thirteen senators have signed a letter expressing concern about a “loophole” in the law that permits the collection of United States data. The A.C.L.U. and other groups have also challenged the constitutionality of the law, and the Supreme Court will hear arguments in that case on Oct. 29.

The retweet allows any user to recontextualize such quips however they please. Anyone, from their computer or Smartphone, can participate in an act of re-framing, of cultural critique or celebrity gossip or found poetry, all dealing with the same 140 characters. The retweet can serve as an implicit comment on the state of our Internet-formulated language, forcing us to consider a barely coherent Martha Stewart rant as a work within itself, rich with Steinian echoes.

In many ways, 1993 did give us our world: globalized and multicultural, libertarian and technocratic at once, target-marketed, relentlessly digital and relentlessly individual, without distinctions between the pursuit of culture and the pursuit of wealth. To put it another way, 1993 might have been the last year of the sellout, when the principle of resistance to the smooth and efficient running of the market began to collapse into our culture of collaboration. It was the year of the first web browser and the forging of both the European Union and NAFTA. Bill Kristol was writing, in Commentary, of how to rebrand conservatism as rebellion in the face of Clinton’s win. MTV’s cultural metabolism was probably at its most rapacious, Tony Kushner brought Angels in America to Broadway, and Toni Morrison won her Nobel. Atlantic Records invested in indie label Matador and Walt Disney bought Miramax. Pulp Fiction, Clerks, and Reality Bites were all in production. Marc Jacobs’s grunge collection was for spring ’93. Harmony Korine was writing Kids, and the former insult-comic editor of Spy had taken over Vanity Fair.

When you used a Commodore 64 or one of the first Macintoshes, you were keenly aware of its limits: the paucity of colors, the tiny memory, the long time it took to load files off a disk. You had to learn to work within the machine’s constraints. The history of computing is the history of human creativity and ingenuity—which is why we should hold on to it forever.

I have interviewed many white people who have fond memories of their lives in the 1950s and early 1960s. The ones who never cross-examined those memories to get at the complexities were the ones most hostile to the civil rights and the women’s movements, which they saw as destroying the harmonious world they remembered.

But others could see that their own good experiences were in some ways dependent on unjust social arrangements, or on bad experiences for others. Some white people recognized that their happy memories of childhood included a black housekeeper who was always available to them because she couldn’t be available to her children.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto vacant human faces — forever.

As an entirely predictable consequence of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.

To hear “Dark Eyes” for the first time — one of the greatest listening experiences one is ever likely to have in life anyway — with Dylan sitting there, averting his glance, shifting his weight nervously, made me aware of just how rare, how painful it is for him to lay his heart bare this way. The tape ended and there was a long silence as we all stared at our feet.

It may have been the entire function of communes to go big, fail and then go home. At the time we thought we were reinventing civilisation but all we discovered is that free love isn’t free at all, that [when] one guy puts up all the money for your commune he is going to feel robbed after a period of six to 12 months, that gardening is actually hard, and that if you treat your women as people who are supposed to wash the dishes, they will leave after six months.

Rewilding, in my view, should involve reintroducing missing animals and plants, taking down the fences, blocking the drainage ditches, culling a few particularly invasive exotic species but otherwise standing back. It’s about abandoning the Biblical doctrine of dominion which has governed our relationship with the natural world.

How can we design the space and signage to be flexible enough to switch between the two modes of service and to make it clear upon a glance what to do when you enter the space at any given time? I constantly have to examine the interface and imagine the experience from the other side. Honing my sense of empathy is an essential part of being a designer and part of why I was attracted to the discipline in the first place.

I’ve heard people say that if someone is brought up in a sexist society and thus becomes sexist, it’s not their fault. That’s a bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand. On the surface, it’s true – but it sidesteps the question of continuing responsibility. If the same sexist (or racist, or whatever) person is capable of re-evaluating their own position but does not do so, then they’re responsible. Perhaps not for becoming prejudiced, but for remaining so.

And I would NEVER try to obtain information illegally! I’m shocked at the suggestion!! (And will contact you in a more private forum…)

My late father, Junius Edwards, was among the first African-Americans to own and operate his own advertising agency in New York City in the 1960s after working for years as a copywriter for Ogilvy & Mather and other Ad agencies Madison Avenue. Some of his clients under Junius Edwards Inc. Advertising were Carver Federal Saving Bank of Harlem, Faberge, Ligget&Myers, Greater New York Savings Bank and more. Junius Edwards Inc. is featured in the book: “Madison Avenue and the Color Line African Americans in the Advertising Industry” by Jason Chambers.

If you start thinking really hard about what “random” really means, first you get a little nauseated, and a little after that you find you’re doing analytic philosophy. So let’s not go down that road.

Burglar Mammy was horrendous, a confirmation of every harsh judgment levied against Mad Men for being too much of a white upper-middle-class historical fantasy, a show that’s not willing or able to really go where it labors to convince us it’s going. If Burglar Mammy were a dream figure attached to a particular character, and if Mad Men had shown any inclination to go anywhere substantive with its allusions to civil rights and racial anxiety, and if it hadn’t given us a black Playboy bunny, a black prostitute, a black mugger, and other disreputable minor characters over the years, but no people of color with personal or even narrative substance, I might feel differently about her.

We need to look at the very heart of the web, the directory that connects the names of our services to the servers they run on, and we need to apply the concept of the Wayback Machine to it. We need temporal DNS, maintainable by librarians to keep the domains of the past connected to their archived futures.

Why tease us with skin color, as if this great simmering issue will finally be addressed, only to retreat again? Why is this great and lingering theme in American culture not addressed as fully as the show addresses, say, capitalism, or gender?

Why did Yahoo! make this acquisition? We know very little about Marissa Mayer’s big goals for Yahoo!, but we know one. She wants Yahoo! to own users’ daily habits. At an analysts conferece recently, she classified these as “searches on the Internet, checking finance, doing your email.” Yahoo! is skating to where the puck is going to be when it comes to “daily habits.” The Tumblr daily dashboard is a daily habit, and by some accounts, moreso than even Facebook or Twitter among teens.

Twenty years ago, at the 1993 Whitney Biennial, fault lines opened up and the ground shifted. About 30 of the 43 artists were in the museum for the first time. More than 40 percent of the participants were women, quite a few were nonwhite, and a generous amount of the work was about being openly gay. One of the exhibition’s admission buttons, designed by artist Daniel J. Martinez, read I CAN’T IMAGINE EVER WANTING TO BE WHITE. People went batshit.

It is not my job to convince you to distinguish me from the violent sociopaths that claim to be Muslims, whose terrorism I neither support, nor condone. It is your job.

Letting children have their own way? Doing just what they like? Wouldn’t that be a total disaster? Yes, if parents perform only the first half of the trick. In the cultural lexicon of modernity, self-will is often banally understood as brattish, selfish behaviour. Will does not mean selfishness, however, and autonomy over oneself is not a synonym for nastiness towards others – quite the reverse. Ngarinyin children in Australia traditionally grew up uncommanded and uncoerced, but from a young age they learned socialisation. That is the second half of the trick. Children are socialised into awareness and respect for the will and autonomy of others, so that, when necessary as they grow, they will learn to hold their own will in check in order to maintain good relations. For a community to function well, an individual may on occasion need to rein in his or her own will but, crucially, not be compelled to do so by someone else.

Although by conventional test-taking rules, the students were cheating, they actually weren’t in this case. Instead, they were changing their goal in the Education Game from “Get a higher grade than my classmates” to “Get to the best answer.”

After a thorough review of the facts, available to our office at this time, it is our opinion that this case can only be seen as a tragic accident.

The problem isn’t that it’s impossible to pick yourself. The problem is that it’s frightening to pick yourself.

Clinton is an amazing person. At one point he hadn’t slept in like 30 hours and I heard him very articulately discussing the fine details of the history of ATMs in Malawi.

The very qualities that improve palatability and lengthen shelf life—high sugar content, fats that resist turning rancid, and a lack of organic complexity—make refined foods toxic to your key microbes. Biologically simple, processed foods may cultivate a toxic microbial community, not unlike the algal blooms that result in oceanic “dead zones.”

The act of running a marathon is supposed to be simple, individual—a victory of the will over the body, celebrated by all and untouched by the complicated questions of who in the world can choose to suffer and who only bears suffering.

dont be afraid to do anything. infact if youre afraid of something, do it. then do it again. and again.

I have watched Dazed and Confused many, many times since that first afternoon, and it has improved with almost every viewing. It now seems like a completely different film. And as I have grown older, I’ve deduced why. Dazed and Confused is not a movie about how things were; Dazed and Confused is a movie about how things are remembered.

One of my central points is that the arrogance and insularity of the old-guard, conventional wisdom creators of social media, including myself, was one of the primary reasons we lost some important values of the early social web. Seeing this resonate with those of us responsible gives me hope that perhaps we can work to remedy our errors.

This threatens many dearly held beliefs of technology workers: It suggests those at the top aren’t there because they’re the best, but because of hard work and privilege. It suggests that the enormous wealth generated by tech startups and founders isn’t justified by their superior intelligence.

In short, it requires geeks to re-examine their own revenge fantasies of being outsiders who now rule the world and admit that they might, themselves, be actively excluding others.

It’s just good, old-fashioned hard work, and there’s not a lot of that now. You know, hard work? Like not on the computer.

Life expectancy at age 5 was as good or better than exists today, and the incidence of degenerative disease was 10% of ours. Their levels of physical activity and hence calorific intakes were approximately twice ours. They had relatively little access to alcohol and tobacco; and due to their correspondingly high intake of fruits, whole grains, oily fish and vegetables, they consumed levels of micro- and phytonutrients at approximately ten times the levels considered normal today.

Out of frustration, I tweeted ‘Here are the 10 biggest markets for Letter to Jane…’ and the next tweet was ‘If anyone in those markets gave me a job that can pay for an apartment and wifi, I’m yours’ and five minutes later, David Jacobs tweeted me and said ‘DONE!’

The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we’re being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period.

This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it’s efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell.

Bob Roth, one of my bosses when I edited Washington City Paper, told me to watch people as they picked it up from a street box and walk away with it: Almost to a one, they would hold it in their hands or fold it under their arms as if to display the paper’s flag so onlookers would know they were City Paper people, whatever that meant.

The first thing I ate as part of my new diet was ox liver, so I really threw myself in at the deep end. I was a bit squeamish because you can’t pretend a liver is anything other than part of an animal. It freaked me out a bit but I got through it. The second thing I ate that day was a rare steak. That was when I had a transformative experience.

Like most freelancers of my generation, I prefer to be paid in whiskey and sadness.

"Traffic," they spit. And I get it. The word has been used to bludgeon you into dumb shit. To put great stories on the shelf to build slideshows. To give up on quality and focus on quantity. I do get all that. But that’s precisely why we journalists must understand the numbers! The business side of any publication knows them inside and out. If we don’t understand how to tell good stories with our own data, who do you think wins any argument that involves data, which they all do?

Justice Scalia, when you spew that entitlement discourse from the bench you undermine the very core of our democracy. But you know what? I want to thank you for what you said. Because on Wednesday, you showed us all exactly who you are. And in the words of the late, great poet Notorious B.I.G.: “if we didn’t know, now we know.”

Huber is not a brave man, and his premise is totally false. People will only think you “simply discussing race” is racist if you, like Huber, treat black people like inscrutable extraterrestrials whose moral shortcomings might be responsible for their own poverty.

If this looks good, I’m making one for myself later.

The cover stands out for its cast of black and Hispanic caricatures with exaggerated features reminiscent of early 20th century race cartoons. Also, because there are only people of color in it, grabbing greedily for cash. It’s hard to imagine how this one made it through the editorial process.

It’s OK, I’m just recording video.

They were never included in the Parker Brothers version, but, in all the early boxes, you were given an address to send to [Monopoly creator Lizzie] Magie for her advanced rules. If you did, under the heading of “For Advanced and Scientific Players”, Magie suggested a way to play where, rather than one person owning everything, all the players could share in the wealth.

When the USPS announced that it was planning to stop Saturday delivery, how many of your white friends made snarky comments about being pleased to get junk mail less frequently and how many expressed concern about job cutbacks at an institution that has for decades provided a path to middle class life particularly for black Americans?

My wife roasts a whole chicken in a 90 year old Lisk roasting pan in our 1927 Chambers stove. She then takes it apart and stores the meat in the fridge while making stock from the bones. Want chicken for a sandwich, or a nibble?, or maybe some bites sized pieces in Frank’s hot sauce? It’s all in the fridge, no breading, (unless you want mom to make that, and she will), and very healthy. Come on folks, this is easy stuff to do.

Most of you who are reading this assume that Harvard provides some end-of-the-line safety net for poor students in such calamitous circumstances and that Harvard would never let a student fail, drop out, or not receive medical care for lack of money. I write to assure you that there is no end in sight to the falling.

Coke was Dunn’s concern, and on one trip, as he walked through one of the favelas, he had an epiphany. “A voice in my head says, ‘These people need a lot of things, but they don’t need a Coke.’ I almost threw up.”

It is the largest reported meteor since the one that hit Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “When you have a fireball of this size we would expect a large number of meteorites to reach the surface and in this case there were probably some large ones.”

Now your inbox is empty. You’re welcome. You still have a to-do list, and it is not empty.

As I settled into a state of calm, the thin man in the white robes told me his story. Vijaya was a former leader of the American Hare Krishna cult. He had left the group because they had started to behave — as do pretty much all cults — like gangsters, with all the corruption and violence that implies. He still believed in Hare Krishna’s brand of Hinduism, but he was part of a renegade group of psychedelic Hare Krishnas. And the Hare Krishna cultists had tried to kill him… and he was hiding out.

As a document in literary-critical and literary-theoretical taste in the late twentieth century, Random Walks will prove central.

A recent study of Google searches by Professor Latanya Sweeney has found “significant discrimination” in ad results depending on whether the name you’re Googling is, statistically speaking, more likely to belong to a white person or a black person. So while Googling an Emma will probably trigger nothing more sinister than an invitation to look up Emma’s phone number and address, searching for a Jermaine could generate an ad for a criminal record search. In fact, Sweeney’s research suggests that it’s 25% more likely you’ll get ads for criminal record searches from “black-identifying” names than white-sounding ones.

In the 100 years since we really got serious about education as a universally good idea, we’ve managed to take the 15 years of children’s lives that should be the most carefree, inquisitive, and memorable and fill them with a motley collection of stress and a neurotic fear of failure.

I find it all too easy to forget my corporeality, to forget that my life is contingent upon the health of my body. My body is millions of years older than I am; it is skilled and experienced in ways beyond mine or anyone’s comprehension, yet day after day I use it to sit in front of a computer. I look at a screen; I punch keys. I sit down to read; I hold a book. This isn’t using my body - I’m just a mind. As Marwood says in Bruce Robinson’s Withnail & I, ‘We are indeed drifting into the arena of the unwell, making an enemy of our own future. What we need is harmony, fresh air, stuff like that.’ For me, that is the pull of running.

The goal of the North Dakota Man Camp Project was to document the social and material conditions present in the growing number of “man camps” in the Bakken Oil Patch. … The project brings archaeological and historical methods to the study the ephemeral phenomenon of contemporary labor housing.

Meritocracy has been criticized as a myth which only serves to justify the status quo; merit can always be defined as whatever results in success. Thus whoever is successful can be portrayed as deserving success, rather than success being in fact predicted by criteria for merit.

Every modern life is lived in the teeth of massive evolutionary mismatch. … Nearly all of us receive unconscious biochemical rewards from our pain and emotional distress, and nearly all of us consequently develop literal biochemical addictions to at least some of our painful, distressing, out-of-balance, survival-mode states.

We citizens of a modern democracy claim to believe in equality, but our sense of equality is not even close to that of hunter-gatherers. The hunter-gatherer version of equality meant that each person was equally entitled to food, regardless of his or her ability to find or capture it; so food was shared. It meant that nobody had more wealth than anyone else; so all material goods were shared. It meant that nobody had the right to tell others what to do; so each person made his or her own decisions.

Every American wants MORE MORE of the world and why not, you only live once. But the mistake made in America is persons accumulate more more dead matter, machinery, possessions & rugs & fact information at the expense of what really counts as more: feeling, good feeling, sex feeling, tenderness feeling, mutual feeling. You own twice as much rug if you’re twice as aware of the rug.

People who like to share what they’re reading are looking at this material in a very different way from the publisher. They’re looking to cut it and paste it.

At first when the fire trucks showed up, I wondered if they were an intended part of the ‘performance,’ but I was quickly informed that it was DEFINITELY not part of the piece.

I didn’t want to come off as trying to do some D’Angelo stuff, but I can’t think of any other album that’s been so influential. D’Angelo left such a wealth of unexplored territory musically.

We live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis dine at the White House regularly. The idea that the government felt it so essential to insist that this behavior be marked as a felony is just unfathomable.

The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories,” Andreessen says. “People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.

We would collect a bundle of sticks in the local wood, sell them to a neighbour for a penny, then walk two miles to to the local picture house to see Charlie [Chaplin], it was silent films in those days, talkies weren’t invented then.

With that said, Kwanzaa-hating has always struck me as the most bougie and snobbish of holiday traditions. It’s that cool that Jonathan Safran Foer thinks that “no one is quite sure what Kwanzaa is,” but I’m not sure “what Hanukkah is.” And for most of my life, no one I knew was quite sure either. I’m only barely sure “what Christmas is.” (Celebrating the birth of your savior with an orgy of consumption?) It’s just seems bizarre in America, of all places, to stand on vintage. Has there ever been a more mongrel, more made-up, country that this one? Have there ever been two more “made up people” then the “white race” and the “black race?” This country is a mongrel mess — and its traditions are, too. That’s the whole charm of the thing. No one who takes the Easter Bunny seriously should mock Kwanzaa. This is about equality. Black people have right to make shit up, just as white people have the right to make shit up.

So often when I’m out and about I find myself in desperate need of some random numbers!

An increasing number of Americans have found that when legal strictures and open discrimination are stripped away they are left not with the reprehensible, but with neighbors, friends, and family members whom they love, and see loving each other. Little wonder, then, that two-thirds of those under thirty support same-sex marriage.

The only people in the world who get to act like race and gender don’t matter are white men. I’m a white man myself. And let me tell you: It is amazing. No joke. And if I shave and put on a suit? You would not believe it.

In response to the specific example of Nicolala liking Walmart, Facebook insists it really did happen: “We show that the Like happened on 10/01 at 6:46 p.m.,” the spokesman says.

It’s really the first time online-native writers have been given a tool they understand how to use with a hook into the App Store’s ecosystem.

When people look us up in the App Store, we’re confident that the first 12-15 apps are going to represent us very well. Our platform is only as good as the people using it. Compared to what publishing has been going through, programming is pretty easy.

They understand that healthy publishing businesses are built from the ground up, not from ‘vast amounts of cash’ on down. There is no ‘moving into profit mode later’ for healthy publications. So 29th Street is making top-notch tools that allow publishers of ANY size to find their fit — and publishers don’t have to burn money that isn’t theirs making delivery vehicles like these.

For the last seven years, at the Metropolitan Police forensic lab in south London, audio specialists have been continuously recording the sound of mains electricity. Comparing the unique pattern of the frequencies on an audio recording with a database that has been logging these changes for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year provides a digital watermark: a date and time stamp on the recording.

To be on the Newsstand you have to program an iOS app. The tech hurdle is high, and hiring isn’t cheap. iOS programmers are in extremely high demand. Now is a great time for another Movable Type. Writers would love a way to push serialized content straight to tablets, and the experience would be a boon to readers. Tablets are the best way to read, and Newsstand is the equivalent of RSS for non-geeks.

Few people know this, but Community Chest is real; there are real cards, drawn in secret by the powerful and the occult — in darkened living rooms in penthouse apartments — in small clearings near running water — behind certain colonial buildings in the coastal northeast — cards whose instructions and gifts are printed in blood and considered mystical bonds.

Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors—home, car, gym, office, shops—disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.

How about I build something that buys me things completely at random? Something that just… fills my life with crap? How would these purchases make me feel? Would they actually be any less meaningful than the crap I buy myself on a regular basis anyway?

I thought it would really be exciting and sort of progressive for a big game company like ours to [create] a minority, someone who’s an outsider, who’s pretty underrepresented in most media.

Maybe a hundred years down the line, nobody will look back at climate change as the most important issue of the early 21st century, because the damage will have been done, and the idea that it might have been prevented will seem absurd. Maybe the idea that Mali and Burkina Faso were once inhabited countries rather than empty deserts will seem queer, and the immiseration of huge numbers of stateless refugees thronging against the borders of the rich northern countries will be taken for granted. The absence of the polar ice cap and the submersion of Venice will have been normalised; nobody will think of these as live issues, no one will spend their time reproaching their forefathers, there’ll be no moral dimension at all. We will have wrecked the planet, but our great-grandchildren won’t care much, because they’ll have been born into a planet already wrecked.

You’re only able to get to a certain depth of creativity if you’re being constantly distracted. And I think you can cross further if you’re alone for, say, eight hours with no distraction. You can cross even deeper if you’re alone for a week. I found that it really wasn’t until about two days into any given stretch that I was able to get to a place of inspiration — that I had anything valid to say.

ALF was the minstrel it was politically correct to love even as you shrank from him. He was the camp Semite redeemed by his ability to be more clever than the goyim. His appetite for the most helpless icon of the home, the kitten, updated the blood libel to slapstick.

Enough. This is just sex. This is nothing more than the odd, notable penis or the odd, notable vagina staggering off the marked path and rubbing against the wrong tree. This is just people.

Republican strategist: “This is the last time anyone will try to do this” — “this” being a near total reliance on white votes to win a presidential election.

Before election night 60 years ago, the race between Stevenson and Eisenhower looked close. But early in the night, with just over 3 million votes counted, UNIVAC predicted the odds were 100 to 1 in favor of Eisenhower.

A single mysterious computer program that placed orders — and then subsequently canceled them — made up 4 percent of all quote traffic in the U.S. stock market last week, according to the top tracker of high-frequency trading activity. The motive of the algorithm is still unclear.

For such a critical app, there’s really very little that’s being done to innovate on the experience. It doesn’t wake me up to my favorite song. It doesn’t let me decide how long I want to snooze between alarms. It doesn’t check my calendar automatically and set an alarm based on what my day looks like. It doesn’t give me the weather forecast for the day when I wake up.

For instance, my mother is 89-and-a-half years old. She lives in Northeast Philadelphia and reads the Inquirer every day. She doesn’t own a computer. Her knowledge of computers, I would say, is minuscule. If there were no Inquirer in print, she would have to buy a computer, and at the age of almost 90, master new technology, or go to the Daily News, or stop reading.

The long-awaited results of a study in which patients were given complete access to their doctors’ notes do more than shed light on what patients want. They make our current ideas about transparency in the patient-doctor relationship a quaint artifact of the past. … All three hospitals in the study are working to allow those patients who participated to continue to have access to their doctors’ notes.

To which Big Bird interjects: “That’s not fair!” I am absolutely not fucking kidding. This is the part of the program where Big Bird defies a god and argues justice for the tormented soul of his little buddy.

If it actually were my friend, a large, online book retailer might say, ‘Look, you’ve been spending too much money on books recently. Don’t you think you should get out a bit more, and not sit there buying stuff?’

Not content with being merely evil, criminal, and spammy, they now seek to be outright creepy and repulsive.

When the company that bought the brand itself went out of business in 2001, Peterman bought the name back with the help of John O’Hurley, the actor who played J. Peterman on “Seinfeld.”

Facebook can now tell if you’ve purchased a product that was advertised to you on Facebook.

Those killed by US drone attacks in Pakistan are more or less automatically deemed “militants” by unnamed “officials”, and then uncritically called such by most of the western press – a practice that inexcusably continues despite revelations that the Obama administration has redefined “militants” to mean “all military-age males in a strike zone”.

Given a chance to be free of modern life, the body would naturally settle into a split sleep schedule.

Semi-autonomous flying things are already available to the public and will continue to become more available. Yet our intuitive privacy settings, our security forces, and our sense of property all assume humans on the ground. Let me posit this: Drones will make traditional fences as obsolete as gunpowder and cannons made city walls.

You must understand that haters have constructed an alternate reality around themselves, one where shitting on a perfect jewel is the equivalent of enlightenment. If you feel frustrated dealing with them, just imagine what it’s like inside their own heads!

Some few, some very few, there are, who try the key of love in all life’s doors. Radiant, they turn to the men and women about and cry, “Try love! It unlocks all other doors as surely as it does the first in life. Try love!”

One irony of Mitt Romney’s leaked criticism of the 47% of Americans who don’t pay income tax is that Romney may be a member of the club himself since he pays almost no income tax relative to his vast wealth.

As long as the veg*n narrative is taken seriously, and we double-down on agriculture as a solution to the problem of overpopulation that it is the very cause of, we simply increase the human suffering that the failure of agriculture is inevitably hurtling toward.

Walking upright has a price in back problems. The capacity for tissue repair has a price of cancer. The immune response has a price of immune disorders. The price of anxiety is panic disorder. In each case, natural selection has done the best it can, weighing benefits against costs. Wherever the balance point, however, there will be disease.

"Generous" is the first word that comes to mind. Generous with his time, contacts, stuff and money. Maybe a little too generous sometimes with money—some people took advantage. Extraordinarily energetic; he wouldn’t stop working even when doctors told him to slow down. Meticulous in his research on causes. Sometimes he acted like a spoiled child, and I did see him stamp his feet and jump up and down on occasion.

Turn right onto E Main St and then walk toward the heart of the city. If the city has no heart, give it one.

Most people’s first mistake when walking is to know where they already are. Street names and recognisable sites should be avoided like the weekly chart countdown. If you know where you are, you cannot get lost. If you cannot get lost then you will constantly be distracted by things you have have already seen.

We don’t yet have the history of who was the Afrika Bambaataa of blogging. If there was a Sugar Hill Gang, if there was a “Planet Rock” of blogs, that was the stuff that I was around, and got to see. You were aware of it, you were like, this is going to win. This is going to take over the world.

Darwin’s revolutionary theory of evolution has been confirmed beyond any doubt, and is the foundation for a new and rapidly expanding field of precise science with profound potential benefits to human health.

Public Telephone
Write down the number. Stand nearby and call it. Gesture excitedly and encourage a passerby to answer. When they do, ask them where they are, and ask them what the weather is like.

Getting lost means that between us and space there is not only a relationship of dominion, of control on the part of the subject, but also the possibility that space can dominate us. There are moments in life in which we learn how to learn from the space around us. […] We are no longer capable of giving a value, a meaning to the possibility of getting lost. To change places, to come to terms with different worlds, to be forced to continuously recreate our points of reference, is regenerating at a psychic level, but today no one would recommend such an experience. In primitive cultures, on the other hand, if someone never gets lost he never grows up. And this is done in the desert, the forest, places that are a sort of machine through which to attain other states of consciousness.

We felt as if we were moving in a strange new zone exactly halfway between randomness and order. No one could predict where the left-and-right pattern would take us, yet we weren’t wandering. The firm logic of the algorithm was constantly taking us away from the directions and destinations our whims might have chosen.

Keep in mind people use social tools very differently. What has worked for the very early innovators through early adopters is extremely different from the different personality types that will follow. This gap in understanding that the world is not like us has not become real to many building social tools.

The city is a behavioral device. Its shapes and systems alter how we feel, how we see each other, and how we act. This would be a terrible thought if it were not for a second truth, which is that the city is malleable. We can change it whenever we wish.

I wanted to be able to have it as a very collaborative play space, and still the web hasn’t fully provided what I wanted then in terms of being a really powerful collaborative medium.

This is straight-up blogging, amateur prose written quickly and with neither guiding stricture nor sober editing. I am going to tell it like it is, right from the heart, and I am going to tell it about telephone dials, because a man has to live by a code, and my code is unary loop disconnect dialing.

Peel your potatoes. All the antinutrients (defenses plants evolved to keep critters from destroying the tubers) are contained in the skin. This is exactly the opposite of what our parents told us! Like it or not, all the good stuff is NOT in the skin.

I think the next 10 years are going to be a really interesting time where Twitter and a couple other services connect people all over the world in new ways and surprising things happen that we can’t even imagine right now. I am long on Twitter.

Homo sapiens have walked the Earth for at least 130,000 years and, in this time, they learned to be human from their elders, not from their peers. Mandatory education in the U.S. is less than 150 years old. Learning to be a productive adult human by spending a third of every day with other kids might be a good idea, but it’s too soon to tell. I’m still unsure that the people best equipped to teach a 14-year-old boy how to be a man are other 14-year-old boys.

You try and treat it as a journey or a pilgrimage of self-discovery where you try to improve yourself as a person and overcome your doubts and negativity.

While eating, defecating, or resting in our beds, we are rubbing on our glowing rectangles, seemingly lost within the infostream.

I think it’s better for journalists to be much more transparent about where we stand. … Here’s my question to journalists everywhere—in a country that’s going to get gayer, browner, more Asian, more women in power, how are we going to accurately reflect the different realities that are out there?

Suppose a major party candidate for president believed we were in a “post-truth” era and actually campaigned that way: Would political reporters in the mainstream press figure it out and tell us?

To the engineers at Delany, the regulation ergonomic stance of the pisser is to look ahead, not look down and wonder what “Turn To Silence” means.

Wait, you guys practice tracking enemies by using civilian cars?

When I write about ‘Drones over Brooklyn,’ it’s not like I’m making something up. Drones are policing American cities. I’m not a ‘dystopian, futuristic master,’ I’m a schnook walking the street. It’s an insane reality we’re living in, and I’m just trying to translate it for myself.

A decade of growth and exciting ideas inspired by democratization of content has metastasized in websites that put out self-conscious, largely contrived, meta content—what writers think they are supposed to produce. This plateau is extended and populated by a wave of writers who, frankly, don’t have much to offer: not original voices, not fresh ideas, not diversity of experience.

Our idols have aged and proven human. They have turned into yuppies like us who smoke weed only occasionally and in comfortable living rooms with Persian rugs and who have kids who play soccer, and that’s okay.

You fulfill hip-hop’s early promise to not give a fuck about what others think of you.

Today is a big day for hip-hop. It is a day that will define who we really are. How compassionate will we be? How loving can we be? How inclusive are we?

Millions of middle-class Americans are now receiving unemployment benefits, and many find themselves compelled by the meagerness of the assistance to shun opportunity and forgo productivity in favor of a ceaseless focus on daily survival. The system’s incoherence and contempt for its dependents fluoresce brilliantly in the wake of a historic event like the Great Recession. When floodwaters cover our homes, we expect that FEMA workers with emergency checks and blankets will find us. There is no moral or substantive difference between a hundred-year flood and the near-destruction of the global financial system by speculators immune from consequence. But if you and your spouse both lose your jobs and assets because of an unprecedented economic cataclysm having nothing to do with you, you quickly discover that your society expects you and your children to live malnourished on the streets indefinitely.

Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie.

It doesn’t change who I am, I’m still the same person. I’m honest, I’ve always worked hard and I’ll work hard for you.

I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion.

America’s biggest banks ripped off the entire country, virtually every day, for more than a decade!… Get busted for welfare fraud even once in America, and good luck getting so much as a food stamp ever again. Get caught rigging interest rates in 50 states, and the government goes right on handing you billions of dollars in public contracts.

Design & user experience are not the only vectors on which those decisions are made.

Lots of people talk about their standing desks with some degree of bravado. That is entirely unjustified; outside of office workers, a large portion of the workforce spends most of every day standing and working. It’s the traditional sitting office worker who is doing something unusual.

These shots are great. Your skin tones on Caucasians are perfect. Question: How’s the skin tone color on people of color ranging from Asian to African Americans, etc.?

Have your friends direct your movies and they’ll turn out better.

Lisa Herlihy, 45, said she was uncomfortable with the individual mandate upheld in the Supreme Court ruling. “I don’t think it’s right,” Ms. Herlihy said as she took a smoking break from her job in the Cobra department at a third-party insurance administrator here.

It may sound crazy and anti-capitalist to consider healthcare for all, but if we flipped a switch tomorrow and everyone had health coverage I swear a million small businesses would launch overnight.

A show that’s 100 percent reruns doesn’t fit with our mission as public broadcasters. I don’t think it’s justifiable.

This is the hidden truth: black people dominate Twitter.  The trending topics, the amount of mobile penetration of devices…study after study continues to prove that Twitter is disproportionately black. 

The daily repetition of chores once associated with survival has now been fully recast as a series of almost spiritual rituals intended to reconnect the camper with what has been largely lost; for by now most of the old necessities — hiking to and clearing the site, hunting for game, collecting water and firewood — have given way to such less arduous activities as parking the car, pitching cable-free pop tents, buying cold cuts at the campground store, hooking up electrical and sewerage conduits, setting up patio chairs, etc.

I was wolfbackriding while shooting white doves with fire when I got the email from Visitsweden.

I have been using the internet for TWENTY years! Like some hipster who has been following a band for years I spent 10 of those years not shutting up about the internet, and then the second 10 years wishing everyone would get off my internet.

I had never been able to find a clear way to say “it’s over” until now. Last week, I broke up from my long term girlfriend simply by using the “unpair” button. Alas, it saved a lot of pain and “talking,” since we conducted our entire relationship on pair since we had moved. It’s like we never even met — easy and painless.

But let’s face it — most of us know in our hearts that eschewing a breakfast of whole grains and fruit crowned with a dab of yogurt for a greasy pile of sausage, bacon, and eggs is not the road to health.

I try not to make it be about me, but as with all evangelizers, something transforms you and changes your life—you see people saying things that are dangerous, and it’s hard not to speak up.

It took me 10 years to figure out that I have a large karmic debt to pay for the number of Cokes I sold across this country. … It’s shocking to me now. But it was not shocking to me then in any way, shape or form. … We were really uninformed relative to the health issues.

There is a large portion of the population that relies on the carbohydrates and energy in our regular beverages. When my son gets home from school, he needs a pick-up with calories and great taste.

Increasingly I find myself purchasing from the food underground, tiny businesses that could never find their way through the monolith of regulations. They are foods, god forbid, cooked in people’s kitchens. You know, kind of like the food mom made, but for some reason it’s OK if mom does it, but not OK to sell it to other people.

This is by far my favorite book of the series, which makes no sense because it is the most boring and nothing happens in it. But there’s a scene at the beginning, when the Ingalls family moves into their fiftieth new house, and comes across all of the cool odds and ends left over by the last tenants that reminds me so much of my favorite dream ever, in which I am roaming around a house filled with all of these endless rooms of marvelous and amazing stuff, that I couldn’t help loving it despite its boringness.

I’m not going to put anything in my body that was not here before the Europeans arrived, because there is something wrong here. Ever since colonization, my people went from being a fit, athletic race of people to the most sickly and lame.

The absence of human placentophagy, the maternal consumption of the afterbirth, is puzzling given its ubiquity and probable adaptive value in other mammals. We propose that human fire use may have led to placentophagy avoidance in our species. In our environment of evolutionary adaptedness, gravid women would likely have been regularly exposed to smoke and ash, which is known to contain harmful substances. Because the placenta filters some toxicants which then accumulate there across pregnancy, maternal placentophagy may have had deleterious consequences for the overall fitness of mother, offspring, or both, leading to its elimination from our species’ behavioral repertoire.

Liberal democracy—based on commitment to individual liberty and dignity—does not exist if the government legislates against particular bodies in public spaces, as it did during Jim Crow, or when it is complicit in the violent policing of those bodies by other citizens, as in the Trayvon Martin slaying. For more than two years, vocal pockets of conservative activists and politicians demanded proof of President Obama’s citizenship—as if a black man was trespassing simply by being elected to the Oval Office. As the president was being asked to show his papers to the nation, state governments in Arizona, Alabama and South Carolina empowered police officers, school officials and merchants to demand proof of citizenship from anyone they deemed suspicious of immigration violations—suspicions that are triggered primarily by racial, ethnic and linguistic profiling. Despite the dramatic legal changes brought about by the ending of Jim Crow, it is once again socially, politically and legally acceptable to presume the guilt of nonwhite bodies.

Unfortunately, “inadequate citizen rule” or “doubts about corporate governance” are not among the choices. From the available list, I went with “I don’t feel safe on Facebook.”

They’re fucking gross, man. Look, I love beautiful girls too. I think everyone should be free to have their knee socks and their sweaty shorts, but I’m over it. I’m over this weird, exhausted girl. I’m over the girl that’s tired and freezing and hungry. I like bossy girls, I always have. I like people filled with life. I’m over this weird media thing with all this, like, hollow-eyed, empty, party crap.

I would predict the first guy who uses a Second Amendment weapon to bring a drone down that’s hovering over his house is gonna be a folk hero in this country.

We have a game that you play once, on a randomly assigned difficulty setting, where you initially spawn in some random location (and may legally be prevented from leaving that location), where your long-term stats depend heavily on both the stats given to you by your parent gamers and by their treatment of you early in life. Every one of these factors is out of your control, and heavily influences how successful you’ll be in the game. What can be done, both as an individual player and as a collective of players, to give as many people as possible a satisfying gaming experience?

We need to work toward flooding the market—even if for the moment merely the intellectual market—with a mass of desires whose realization is not beyond the capacity of man’s present means of action on the material world, but only beyond the capacity of the old social organization.

My son will be three-years-old next month and is still breastfeeding. In other words, he is a typical primate.

My cavorting is part of my work.

It’s true that you have a higher chance of getting sick from drinking raw milk than pasteurized milk. You have a 0.00011 percent chance of getting sick from drinking pasteurized milk, and a 9.4 times greater risk of getting sick from drinking raw milk. We’re still talking about a miniscule risk of 0.00106% (one one-thousandth of a percent) .

If you feel the photograph is vaguely sexual — and I think many do, whether they’re willing to admit it or not — you’re dead wrong. If you extract the misguided sense that the kid is old enough to enjoy a breast as if it were a boob, suddenly all those unexplainable feelings about it being wrong or gross float out into the ether where they belong.

I am at Dell’s big summit with Michael Dell in Copenhagen. Here we learn how to say “shut up bitch” and that women don’t belong in tech.

A fast-spreading plague of “super weeds” taking over U.S. farmland will not be stopped easily, and farmers and government officials need to change existing practices if food production is to be protected, industry experts said on Thursday.

Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, ‘Dear Jim: I loved your card’. Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, ‘Jim loved your card so much he ate it’… That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it

Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth!

What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other’s shoulders and kicking each other’s teeth in. It’s not a pleasant situation. And yet, you can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us — the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary — we are led by the least among us — and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.

is this all what it lead up to? come out the gate rowdy and fightin’….and then gain spiritual enlightenment down the line? the same guy who had “twin sisters in the bed” was now offering women (wives, mothers, & sisters) love and respect to the end.

I drove a lot of famous musicians and speakers to & from the Cleveland airport over my college career, but I literally lost my head driving Adam Yauch down 480 back to Oberlin.

Damn, man. It’s well after 2am in somebody’s living room on a warm spring evening in 1995, and there’s a beer in my hand and a joint’s just coming around again, and that swirling sound in the mix at 2:45 of “Something’s Got To Give” (right after Yauch gleefully takes a sledgehammer to a handgun in the video) sounds like a helicopter taking off, bound for some funkier and more peaceful universe. And for a blissful half a minute, I’m on it. Feel like I just switched from one chapter in life to another here. This isn’t Cobain’s suicide, this is the grim hammer of inevitable mortality or something. Damn.

Next time you get a Lionel Richie record instead of ours, keep it. He’s the shit.

What is being proposed, in effect, is ‘charterizing’ the whole district, when there is a lot of evidence that at best [charters] have no positive effect on student achievement, and there is a lot of evidence they cost more. Charters in many instances, in Philadelphia and elsewhere, have served private interests — sometimes of public officials.

There is in fact no distinction between the fate of the land and the fate of the people. When one is abused, the other suffers. The penalties may come quickly to a farmer who destroys perennial cover on a sloping field. They will come sooner or later to a land-destroying civilization such as ours.

I can’t imagine I have to explain this to anyone in 2012, but if you find yourself putting brown makeup on a white person in 2012 so they can do a bad “funny” accent in order to sell potato chips, you are on the wrong course. Make some different decisions.

What really strikes me about this whole NYtimes exercise is how shitty it is. It effectively ignores decades and decades of academic debate on the subject. The fact that they included an essay on lab-grown meat, which doesn’t even address the philosophy or ethics of it at all, and is scientifically dishonest, really reveals that the Nytimes doesn’t know how to curate quality anymore.

A small, attentive child, in a stroller on some Brooklyn playground or Minneapolis street, is already recording the stray images and sounds of this era: Michelle’s upper arms, the baritone crooning sound of NPR, people sipping lattes (which a later decade will know as poison) at 10 A.M.—manners as strange and beautiful as smoking in restaurants and drinking Scotch at 3 P.M. seem to us.

Animals in nature move nutrients uphill, against the natural gravitational flow from high ground to low ground. This is why low lands and valleys are fertile and the uplands are less so. Animals are the only mechanism nature has to defy this natural downward flow. Fortunately, predators make the prey animals want to lounge on high ground (where they can see their enemies), which ensures that manure will concentrate on high look-out spots rather than in the valleys.

Researchers found that most feather-meal samples contained caffeine. It turns out that chickens are sometimes fed coffee pulp and green tea powder to keep them awake so that they can spend more time eating.

The disastrous thing about advertising on the internet is that you know which ads work and how well, and you know what content gets the most hits. This creates a race to the bottom which is inimical to creativity and cool.

Often times, a writer uses tricks and exaggerations to convey to a reader the spirit — if not the precise truth — of what occurred. I just want to make clear that when I say that one of my friends was actually on the verge of tears, you understand that this is not such a trick. She was horrified to the point of crying.

I ate the vomlet!" he yelled. "I made other pledges eat it! That’s brotherhood!

Now you’re talking. I think a lot about Serena. I do. I collect photos of Serena. She’s just a total, super-Amazon. What more can you say? Of course, she’s also a Jehovah’s Witness. Yeah, people have said to me, ‘Hey, I can arrange for you to meet Serena.’ But I have nothing to say to her. I’m not interested in tennis, and I can’t really abide that Jehovah’s Witness nonsense. You know, there’d be no grounds for anything to talk about. So I just have to admire her from a distance. But God, what a butt, as you well know.

These people are MAD that the girl that they cried over while reading the book was “some black girl” all along.

He didn’t just retweet content without comment but vetted it, asking for confirmation, sourcing, more details, playing his followers against each other as if he were an assigning editor of an incorporeal newsroom. He became a dogged beat reporter, far removed from the scene but covering it at all hours, exposing his messy and complicated process for all to see.

All this emphasis on clothing as a motive for murder is just a smokescreen for sidestepping the real issue, which is that bigots shouldn’t be allowed to have hand guns. In fact, since you can’t hunt deer with a hand gun and most owners of a hand gun are not reservists in the National Guard of their state, it is unclear why the US tolerates so many hand guns. In countries like Britain, which do not, the murder rate by gun is vanishingly small compared to the annual carnage in the US.

Publishing for mobile demands new tools and processes. As with zines and blogs, lowering the barrier to entry will encourage new authors and forms to flourish without losing the open ethos that is central to the spirit of the Web.

It really is true that the American government and its media jointly terrorize the American people far more than the actual so-called “Terrorists” could even dream of achieving.

I wonder if doctors are losing their legitimacy now in a way similar to the other authority figures in our culture: the political leaders, the bankers economists, the business executives.

Most of the conversation that once took place daily on blogs now takes place on your Facebook and Twitter accounts. To try and fight that trend is a losing proposition. Almost all prominent blogs are now corporatized with actual budgets, so continuing to play in that shrinking sandbox doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, ‘social isn’t a product,’ she told me after I gave her a demo, ‘social is people and the people are on Facebook.’

Much of the history of Black people, particularly our intimate history as shown in The Black Vernacular, is still unseen and unexplored.

Most of our competitors are interesting in doing something different, or want to appear new — I think those are completely the wrong goals. A product has to be genuinely better.

The results speak for themselves. My students not only understand Hamlet, they love it. They talk about it in the hall, and other teachers ask me about what’s happening on Twitter. My quiz grades have been higher than any in the past twelve years of teaching this piece.

Seeds that might not even be marketable now, 100 years from now might be the ace in the hole we need to figure out some kind of climatic conditions we can’t even perceive right now.

In case you missed it, the Attorney General of the United States spent a little time yesterday discussing the circumstances under which the President could order your death without having a trial or even having charged you with any crime.

What we’ve seen documented through more than fifty years of experimentation in New York City is that we cannot effectively create public spaces in places that are owned by a company. Yet, we’re increasingly ceding our public discourse to platforms and services which exactly mimic the traits of our sterile captive atria in the physical world.

There is a counterpart to you in China who is looking at the iPhone and approving of the fact that its hardware is made in China, but disapproving of the fact that its software is made in California, where there is a racist government, hundreds of thousands of innocent people in jail, and where people die routinely because they don’t have basic medical care. Too bad for that guy also. He has no control over California, its laws, or its problems, in the exact same way that you have no control over China, its laws, or its problems. Same for Tim Cook. He has a lot of corporate power, but it is still illegal for him to get married in California in spite of all that. He can’t wave a magic wand and fix California, let alone fix China. It is a fact of life that a modern computing device will have software from Silicon Valley and hardware from Shenzhen because those are the places where software and hardware are made.

…It was the first time I ever felt like a non-outsider in my own country and where my race was never a consideration to who I was as a person. It dawned on me that this is what white people must get to feel like all the time. It’s not a bad feeling. I highly recommend it!!! A+++

Safari users with the browser set to block third-party cookies thought they were not being tracked. Nonetheless, DoubleClick was able to set tracking cookies in an obvious violation of the set preference.

I was not dressed like a parking valet; I was wearing a suit coat and a nice shirt and carrying my own laptop bag. And I wasn’t standing behind the valet stand. But that white lady was not getting served fast enough. She just looked for the first available brown person.

I don’t really think anything Microsoft does puts pressure on Apple.

Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own.

Usually, a breakthrough that can radically improve national health and has strong biomechanical science behind it is welcomed as “promising” and “exciting.” So why is running form different? Because if you strip Lieberman’s work down to raw essentials, you come up with a single hard truth: cushioned running shoes are a fraud. They don’t help, they probably hurt, and the billions of dollars that are made every year by selling and promoting them are cashing in on your pain. With that mountain of money at stake, a tremendous amount of effort has been made to create the false impression that cushioned shoes are a safety item, like bike helmets and seat belts. It’s not easy to reverse a misconception like that, especially when it’s such a cash machine for everyone who makes, sells, and “reviews” running shoes.

“I work in an I.T recycle center. We have stacks of abandoned Apple G5 Macs” - Ian Lee

Nobody wants to think about the poet at the water cooler, or, even worse, pouring over actuarial tables.

I do not agree that I, the consumer am responsible for creating the working conditions in Chinese factories simply because I decide to purchase a product that happens to be made in China.

These articles get the neighborhood’s evolution precisely backwards. Park Slope was initially gentrified in the 1970s and ’80s by families like mine that moved there for more space than they could afford in Manhattan or Brooklyn Heights, often to raise children. There were stores selling toys and books for children and babies long before there were trendy bars, clubs or restaurants.

I’d like to raise both of my middle fingers to him and anyone who thinks profanity is somehow more harmful to our children than images of violence and misogyny.

I was living in South Slope four years ago, and it was already known as the stroller district.

I cannot figure this out, though: WHAT ARE THOSE OTHER YELLOW CREATURES IN THE FIELD WITH THE COW????

What’s the right way to protest TODAY?

1. Don’t delete your Facebook account. Deleting your account just makes you look like a weirdo in today’s world. Dave Winer has that luxury, but most of us don’t.
2. Make ALL data on your Facebook account PUBLIC. Most technologists have done the opposite. To the point where if you aren’t friends with most geeks you can’t even see ANYTHING on their account. That isn’t helping the commons.
3. Work to figure out how to get our data OUT of Facebook, Google , and Amazon and back into the commons.

People who argue that it’s a realistic movie are incorrect: the men of Jackson, Miss., would have killed several of these maids. The happy ending we get — Viola Davis’ Aibileen walking home unharmed as the screen fades to black — is fraudulent and so surreally absurd as to be Dalí-esque.

I think that all social apps really strive to put people (and their work) at the center of the product, but very few succeed.

Now we were supposed to come up with a groundbreaking literary anthology representing a cornucopia of online talent, a new scene bursting with originality and genius. Genius? The literary web was two years old. Who exactly were the hot online writers of 1996?

When everything flows through a few company’s servers, Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Amazon, and a few others — it’s much easier to shut things down. And it’s also possible to shut things down without anyone knowing. And it’s possible to shut things down with no possible recourse. This is an unacceptably dangerous situation.

Clicking the like button 1 billion times will never give you an orgasm or a hug or a high five.

Grab a coffee, sit back and really enjoy one of the most fascinating patent applications to have surfaced in some time.

Under this new deal, pirated movies remain free of charge, free of non-skippable ads, free of five-minute load times, and are now nearly three months ahead of the competition.

At this point I can no longer postpone the actual copy. So I go home and sit down at my desk. I find myself entirely without ideas.

Several studies have shown that optimal muscle-tendon efficiency occurs when the muscle stays approximately the same length while the tendon lengthens. When the tendon lengthens, it stores elastic energy and later returns it when the foot pushes off the ground. Tendons are more effective springs than muscles.

Therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller– writer, musician, filmmaker. Being black is like serving as Hoke, the driver in “Driving Miss Daisy,” except it’s a kind of TV series lasts the rest of your life: You get to drive the well-meaning boss to and fro, you love that boss, your lives are stitched together, but only when the boss decides your story intersects with his or her life is your story valid.

Shocking acts of cultural preservation and repair

Good luck holding out for that Organic Sustainable Craft Underwear for Puppies Shop.

Critics often describe Legend of Zelda games as classic Hero Journeys in the tradition of Gilgamesh and The Odyssey. While it’s easy to find connections here — the call to adventure, supernatural aid, descent to underworld, etc. — I see more resonance in Zelda’s connections to Japanese folklore and, especially, the series’ deep roots in Shintoism.

Long-term there’s no future in printed books. They’ll be like vinyl: pricey and for collectors only. 95% of people will read digitally. Everybody in publishing knows this but most are in denial about it because moving to becoming a digital company means laying off like 40% of our staffs. And the barriers to entry fall, too. We simply don’t want to think about it.

The constant celebration of excess — must we all aspire to twelve kinds of twine? — is more than I can stand.

Are you getting the picture here? If you decide to NOT play on Google+, you will, in essence, be devalued in Google search, at least for the percentage of people who are logged in whilst using Google. This strikes me as wrong.

Why don’t infants signal hunger quietly with spirit fingers or jazz hands?

Three years ago, a TFA recruiter plastered the Fordham campus with flyers that said “Learn how joining TFA can help you gain admission to Stanford Business School.” The message of that flyer was “use teaching in high-poverty areas a stepping stone to a career in business.” It was not only profoundly disrespectful to every person who chooses to commit their life to the teaching profession, it advocated using students in high-poverty areas as guinea pigs for an experiment in “resume-padding” for ambitious young people.

It was all Steve’s stuff, but he was just a year and a half too early.

The things we own are more than ever like props, the clothes we wear like costumes, the places where we live, dine, shop, and vacation like stage sets.

Holy crap this thread is positively SOAKED in White Woman’s Tears.

Piracy is a special form of stealing committed on the high seas. It involves rolling up to a boat, and taking stuff away from the occupants of the boat. Nobody has ever been killed downloading an authorized copy of a Katy Perry song.

It was awesome to see flying cars, blimps, weird stoplights, people eating noodles outside, and a woman in a fur coat in the rain all within the span of a minute.

I’ve been enamored with body modifications that have utilitarian value.

Weetzie’s heart felt so full of love, so full, as if it could hardly fit in her chest.

What you’ve actually made, when you have an internet-connected device that can both send and receive 3D-printed objects, is a teleporter.

I just ate 272% of my recommended daily amount of saturated fat — and it’s only breakfast!

Let me tell you, this guy has a fridge full of butter — he probably had eight different kinds of grass-fed butter. Naturally, we got them all out and just ate butter for awhile…RIGHT FROM THE STICK. It was glorious.

At the time I craved sugar so much that if I went to a friend’s house to spend the night, and she didn’t have anything sugary when I got there, I would have to go back out and go to the convenience store and get something, since it was like torture to go through a night without it. I had these bizarre alcoholism-esque behaviors around it.

Someone once asked Allen Ginsberg how one becomes a prophet, and he simply replied, “Tell your secrets.”

Rather than urging people to consume only plants, doesn’t it make more sense to encourage them to eat an omnivorous diet that is healthy, ethical, and ecologically sound?

But, if no one’s gonna write on their Tumblr, well:

FYI – i know a forbes.com (salaried) journalist, and he has informed me that their bloggers do not get edited, and that they are paid based upon clicks to their posts. stop paying this guy. do not click the link, if you can help it.

I would not say this thread is “great” since no one is responding—besides you and my son! But you bring up a good point.

FIND IDEA THAT BURN, GRAB WITH BOTH HANDS, NEVER LET GO. THAT HOW MAKE FIRE.

Am I really that close with you? Should we actually be connected here?

The price that fair-minded readers WANT to buy digital comics at is starkly different from what they are currently set at.

But, does it really matter, the City is stalled, growth is negative and the only thing moving at Canary Wharf will be tumble weeds past banks of empty desks and MD’s PAs in a hooped ear ring frenzy at Accessorize.

I’d like to see the bootstrappers, the tiny service businesses doing great stuff for their clients, the parents combining business with a successful and happy family life, the small companies treating their employees with kindness and compassion held up as great examples – not those who think sleeping under their desk makes them better than the rest of us.

I guess if I’m honest about it, I often feel like Slashdot never got the fair credit it deserved. As “Blogging” became a mainstream buzzword that you’d hear about on CNN, Slashdot simply got lost in the history.

Blacks are not seeing anything new for themselves in the movement. Why should they ally with whites who are just now experiencing the hardships that blacks have known for generations? Perhaps white Americans are now paying the psychic price for not answering the basic questions that blacks have long raised about income inequality.

It is extremely easy for systems to become biased, even if none of the individual people in those systems intends to be biased. This is partly a cognitive problem, that people harbor unconscious bias, and partly an organizational problem, that even a collection of unbiased actors can work together to accidentally create a biased system. And when those systems are examined scientifically, they can be reformed to reduce their bias.

By breeding the fat out of turkeys and pigs, we have bred our own ignorance into other species.

It not about rich people having more money. It about how they got money. It about how they take opportunity away from rest of us, for sake of having more money. It how they willing to take risks that destroy economy — knowing full well what could and would happen — putting millions out of work, while creating nothing of value, and all the while crowing that they John Galt, creating wealth for everyone.

Authorities have long claimed that they were merely battling the “black bloc” of violent anarchists. But when you look at all these videos, the bogeyman isn’t there. Instead, it’s a dozen scared kids and a police officer named John Pike spraying them in the face from three feet away. And while it’s his finger pulling the trigger, the police system is what put him in the position to be standing in front of those students. I am sure that he is a man like me, and he didn’t become a cop to shoot history majors with pepper spray. But the current policing paradigm requires that students get shot in the eyes with a chemical weapon if they resist, however peaceably. Someone has to do it.

I had been writing very short summaries (usually 3 or 4 sentences) and then tweeting the links to the sources of the stories (New York Times, AdAge.com, etc.) rather than back to Poynter. Julie wanted our thousands of Twitter followers to stop by Poynter’s site, then decide whether to check out the original story.

Here is your library, more or less intact. We will give it back if you hand over your collective future without argument. Just leave it in the trashcan on the corner of Wall Street.

It’s true that iTunes Match is offering matched tracks for artists it doesn’t officially sell in its catalog—AC/DC among them.

Unmasking an anti-Mac blogger may not be life-changing, but if you’re an anonymous blogger writing about Chinese censorship or Mexican drug cartels, the consequences could be dire.

Once the foot soldiers who are ordered to carry out acts of repression, such as the clearing of parks or arresting or even shooting demonstrators, no longer obey orders, the old regime swiftly crumbles.

Who shovels Bank of America’s snow? We do. Who hauled away the tree that fell in Bank of America’s yard? We did. But there are only so many hours and dollars we can invest in maintaing the Bank of America’s house.

It would be so easy to say, ‘Well I’m going to retire, I’m going to sit around, watch television or eat bonbons,’ but somebody’s got to keep ’em awake and let ’em know what is really going on in this world.

If “young, white, geeky, and Stanford/Harvard/MIT dropout”, then “invest”, is a kind of mental shortcut that is anything but objective. This is mirror-tocracy not meritocracy.

I just noticed last week that Google Maps knew the location of my laptop computer, even though I had never told it where I was. After a bit of sleuthing, it turns out that Google probably got this information when a someone with an Android phone visited. The phone sniffed my WiFi ports, read the GPS location, and reported this back to Google location services. They did this without my knowledge, and without my permission.

It has to be the most disingenuous opt-out functionality ever. Google might as well make people solve calculus problems to opt-out.

Parents are being asked to teach their children that it’s not just acceptable, but often necessary, to lie on the Internet.

The most fundamental thing about the experience of sound, that it is a vibration of air or other medium, that animals developed to sense goings-on in their environment, is now optional.

Our version of a perfect customer experience is one in which our customer doesn’t want to talk to us.

Collective action is huge; people agreeing across time and space to do things that matter to them is a phenomenon that we’ve only glimpsed and imagined up to now. Peer-to-peer initiative is the next step past conversation and agreement. It’s true change, and it’s successful the first moment it occurs. Whether or not the banks care about it in this particular example is irrelevant. If people can unite to do one thing, they can and will organize to do something else. Again and again.

Protest is transformative precisely because people emerge, encounter one another face-to-face, and, in re-learning the habits of freedom, build new institutions, relationships and organisations.

When the rain has wet the kite and twine, so that it can conduct the electric fire freely, you will find it stream out plentifully from the key on the approach of your knuckle.

The great accomplishment of Jobs’s life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies—his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness—in the service of perfection.

If only we’d had the courage to respond to ter­ror­ism with a stead­fast unwill­ing­ness to be ter­ror­ized. If only we’d rec­og­nized the trap we were being led into. But we didn’t. Now Amer­ica is a par­ody of what it was that day 10 years ago.

My weblog is an old school blog, a public diary of things that personally interest me.

Your behavior is affecting the normal operations of the IKEA cafeteria. Frequent fights and arguments do serious harm to the image both of Shanghai residents and IKEA.

Actual human beings are not going to use this new Google Reader any more than they used the old version.

Imagine how great it would have been if they had a real cameraman. But instead you get all the bonehead mistakes of the amateur. There are no establishing shots, the camera is always jiggling, and none of them had a particularly good eye.

Plots from the unaired 8th season of Star Trek: The Next Generation

It’s as if whoever made the update did so without ever actually using the product to, you know, read something.

Leary and Alpert fancy themselves prophets of a psychic revolution designed to free Western man from the limitations of consciousness as we know it. They are contemptuous of all organized systems of action—of what they call the “roles” and “games” of society. They prefer mystical ecstasy to the fulfillment available through work, politics, religion, and creative art. Yet like true revolutionaries they will play these games to further their own ends.

A better way to put it is that we’re trying to eat foods that are whole and unprocessed, and avoid those that are inflammatory or metabolically damaging.

I’m going to call the paleo diet portrayed in the media the PaleoStrawman diet. It contains only lean meat and non-starchy vegetables. The meat comes from factory farms. The latest place it has showed up on is NPR, where anthropologist Barbara King contends that it is not the way to a healthy future for the world. She says she has interacted with paleo dieters online and has read Paleo magazine, but it doesn’t show at all.

We need to de-normalize the fact that a clown is telling our children how to eat.

Hey all you guys here is a cheap way to build a computer.

You can download CSV files with all the data you’ve generated in the Shoe Tracker.

If drinking domestic beer was ironic, then drinking it unironically was bad and funny, and I’d only ever drunk it unironically, only ever knew people who did, which meant we were bad and funny; if I drank the PBR it wouldn’t be a joke somehow, they would know.

I paid good money for this and it’s full of ads?

So I said, “Wow, that’s a really good-looking 12-gauge.” And he said, “Would you like to fire it?” And I said, “Yeah, sure, I’ll fire it.” And he said, “Shit, man, we must build a bomb!”

Just to be clear: They aren’t holding up signs that say “I want Bill O’Reilly’s stuff.” They aren’t holding up signs that say “I am animated by toxic levels of envy and entitlement.” They are holding up signs that are perfectly and intrinsically clear: They want accountability for the banks that took their money, they want to end corporate control of government. They want their jobs back. They would like to feed their children.

Think about it: there have always been rich and poor people in America, so if this is about jealousy, why the protests now? The idea that masses of people suddenly discovered a deep-seated animus/envy toward the rich – after keeping it strategically hidden for decades – is crazy. Where was all that class hatred in the Reagan years, when openly dumping on the poor became fashionable? Where was it in the last two decades, when unions disappeared and CEO pay relative to median incomes started to triple and quadruple? The answer is, it was never there. If anything, just the opposite has been true. Americans for the most part love the rich, even the obnoxious rich.

This is a never-forget moment. The show’s provocative name holds a mirror up to an ugliness that seems to have become yesterday’s news without having barely even made news.

This is just one reason why occupiers seem incompatible with current ideas about policy demands or right vs. left. They are not interested in debate (or what Enlightenment philosophers called “dialectic”) but consensus. They are working to upgrade that binary, winner-takes-all, 13th century political operating system. And like any software developer, they are learning to “release early and release often.”

The iPad calendar is something that you can show to people who have never seen an iPad before, and they don’t see a computer interface. They see a calendar.

And I realize, my God, I had forgotten, I had completely forgotten how unbelievably, inexplicably wonderful it is that any of us exist at all.

I’ve been trying to figure out why I hold a bit of disdain for the Occupy movement that is sweeping the nation and world.

When is drinking beer and eating fried chicken a chemistry-building exercise, and when is it a sign of flagging morale and defiance of managerial authority?

The total body of evidence suggests that attention should be shifted from the harmful effects of dietary saturated fats per se, to the prevention of the accumulation of saturated fats in body lipids. This shift would emphasise the importance of reducing dietary carbohydrates rather than reducing dietary saturated fats.

I don’t care if Google wants Plus to get bigger, I care about me and my friends who seek to read and discuss the entire internet every day. Is there really no space for different kinds of people to form different kinds of social spaces in Google products?

A crew of four Hispanics can earn about $150 each by picking 250-300 boxes of tomatoes in a day, said Jerry Spencer, of Grow Alabama, which purchases and sells locally owned produce. A crew of 25 Americans recently picked 200 boxes — giving them each $24 for the day.

When I decided to take up hunting, my secret fear was that I would become callous toward animals. Surprise, surprise - the opposite happened. My respect for animals has grown exponentially, as has my love for them.

Everything you put in your body has behind it a ‘chain of trust’. This chain consists of everyone who touches it before it goes down your throat. Being a bit on the paranoid side myself, I believe the best way to be sure I am getting what I think I’m getting is to make that chain of trust as short as possible.

I’m often surprised that people aren’t talking about these issues all the time. But the reason seems clear enough. Our brains have evolved to deal with issues at our own scales: mates, rivers, apples, rabbits, and so on. Our brains simply weren’t built to understand the fabric of reality at the very small scales (quantum mechnics) or the very large (the cosmos). As Blaise Pascal put it, “Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.”

It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one’s environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way.

Anyway, last night, the conversation turned to replicator-generated human meat, as it will do.

For those who are not aware, these “feather extensions” are actually fly fishing lures that women have been buying up from fishing stores all across the country, causing a shortage. And fly fishermen are pissed.

With a rising number of Hispanic and black voters pushing into the electorate — putting Republicans at a bigger disadvantage every day — the GOP has unleashed a brazen, ugly effort to discourage these new voters from ever getting near the voting booth. They are turning back the clock on voting rights in America.

Ronan has given us a terrible freedom from expectations, a magical world where there are no goals, no prizes to win, no outcomes to monitor, discuss, compare.

I guess he thought that was funny. I don’t. I think the vote is sacred.

It’s easy: you just imagine you have a few friends sitting around your living room and you’re telling them what’s new.

He saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that.

Evidence is mounting that points to a “lost decade” between what we now remember as the 1970s and 1980s, a time whose full cultural trauma and resulting suppression from memory was so complete as to effect itself even on the living.

The scale of U.S. food aid isn’t strongly tied to how much recipient countries actually require it — but it does rise after a bumper crop in the American heartland, suggesting that food aid is far more about dumping American leftovers than about sending help where help’s needed.

The movement does not stand against capitalism, and it certainly doesn’t stand for communism. It’s a movement for honest capitalism. Honest capitalism in America — funding good emerging businesses so that they succeed — what a concept! Our bankers should try it sometime.

whoa whoa whoa. whoa. I have never wanted to cook up some cabbage more than I want to after reading this recipe

I feel strongly that users are the owners and stewards of their own health and fitness data.

I said, ‘I don’t feel like digital is quite here yet.’ And he said, ‘I agree,’ then he turned and looked at me and said, ‘But we’ll get there.’

The night Jobs died, my ex and I talked about our differing approaches to the worn-out Mac keyboards. She would meticulously get replacement keys, but over the years they came in different varieties of off-white, so her keyboard ended up looking like a weird off-white on off-white checkerboard. And when they stopped making keys the right size she figured out something I still can’t quite follow about putting paper on top of the blurred-out old keys and using a Sharpie to write the letters on them.

I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.

It was early 1991, Steve had announced to us that he would soon wed Laurene. At some point soon after that I realized he would need a fitting bachelor party and it would fall to me to put it together.

The Macintosh on his desk at NeXT had the striped Apple logo stabbed out, a memento of anguish scratched deep into plastic.

It’s 10,000 times better than anything I’ve ever done.

To me, Steve Jobs stands out most for his clarity of thought. Over and over again he took complex situations, understood their essence, and used that understanding to make a bold definitive move, often in a completely unexpected direction.

I can’t pick up your standard, but you didn’t expect me to. You gave me the tools and the inspiration to pick up my own. How dare I give back anything less than my very best effort?

I was reminded of AllMusic’s biography of Miles Davis: ‘… he was in the thick of almost every important innovation and stylistic development in the music during that period, and he often led the way in those changes… It can even be argued that jazz stopped evolving when Davis wasn’t there to push it forward.’

After a couple of bizarre weeks where I attended meetings all day filled with amazing people and amazing technology, knowing that at any minute I would have to leave, HR informed me that they’d talked the insurance company into providing special coverage. Just for me. It was that important to NeXT and to Steve that they keep a nobody first-line manager they had just hired. A couple of months later they turned that into coverage for all gay employees at NeXT.

When I would criticize the decisions of record labels or phone carriers, he’d surprise me by forcefully disagreeing, explaining how the world looked from their point of view, how hard their jobs were in a time of digital disruption, and how they would come around.

Elegance, character, artistic integrity, and ruthless dedication to design can no longer be derided as luxuries of those who don’t have anything to lose.

My own deep-seated libertarianism is probably more a conceit of modern technology than a core human trait.

24 years ago, Apple predicted a complex natural-language voice assistant built into a touchscreen Apple device, and was less than a month off.

Plenty of things in your ordinary, “small life”, would be inconceivably extravagant to your ancestors. It seems like humanity as a whole is on some sort of hedonic treadmill. I don’t think any of us, for instance, take any pleasure in the fact that we can freely shave ourselves or kick safes or go out in the rain without dying of an incurable infection, which is insane. All of human history minus the last hundred or so years people lived with this reality, and it was probably a great comfort to people to escape it, for about five seconds. Now we’re back to taking it for granted.

(oh and I would say the majority of the daily use kind of smokers I know are all over 40 and quite tweedy, if you need a source, why not try the head of the history department?)

You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts.


That’s something that sticks in my memory. It was kind of a sloppy job. It wasn’t doing what it was intended to do.

I’m using about 10 extensions to prevent tracking (NoScript, AdBlock, Ghostery and others). The functionality provided by these extensions should be default in a modern browser.

When people at home see PEOPLE THAT LOOK LIKE THEM getting abused by police… That’s when shit changes.

While Amish dairymen are being raided by the F.D.A., Jack DeCoster, the notorious Iowa egg producer whose filthy, salmonella-infected eggs were linked to an outbreak that sickened more than 1,500 people last year, received a mild warning letter from the F.D.A. What is going on here?

The most successful civilizations in human history always had some way of readjusting debt so that you don’t end up in a situation where the big people end up effectively enslaving the little people.

In 2008, Dr. Jeffrey Guss, a Manhattan therapist and co-investigator on the NYU study, taught “Psychedelics and Psychiatry,” the first course on psychedelic therapy offered at a modern medical school. Guss also directs the university’s 12-week psychedelic psychotherapy training program, the only program of its kind in the country.

A 71-year-old Wisconsin woman broke the Guinness World Record for planking Wednesday. Betty Lou Sweeney held the abdominal plank for 36 minutes and 58 seconds.

In one email sent by a dummy account using the name “Connor Erickson” with the subject “Arrested: need lawyer” Gmail populated ads for criminal and fraud attorneys. But when a user named “DeShawn Washington” sent the same email, Gmail populated ads for attorneys specializing in DUI cases.

People who cringe at the privacy and data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here.

I just thought, This will freak everyone out. It’ll be so funny. I’ll announce that I am running. I told Leno I was running. And two months later I was governor. What the fuck is that?

I think the only thing that homeschooling left me at a disadvantage with is that I failed to learn to obey. Not that I think it’s really a bad thing, it just makes me unsuitable for certain jobs, religions, and other institutions.

It makes running a joyous celebration and makes me more mindful.

Some doctors resist. They call it ‘poor care for poor people.’ This is a misunderstanding. It’s the most effective use of our resources.

Right before I left New York, I had my manager tell me: ‘You need to get a girl on your arm or people will start talking.’ I remember telling him: ‘I’m gay.’ He had no idea. And he said: ‘All the more reason to get a girl on your arm.’ My agent was also like, ‘It’s best if you keep your options open. Maybe bisexual?’

Not a chance.

I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world. For me, there is no difference between Ripley from “Alien” and any Katherine Heigl character. They are equally implausible.

A great pencil can be a magical thing. It turns simple note-taking into a charcoal sketch, with darker or thicker lines depending on how firm your grip is and how fast you’re scanning the page. It’s not just a pencil; it’s a lead paintbrush.

It seems like putting Facebook in jail is the only way to keep it from tracking you everywhere you go on the Web.

Somehow, no-nonsense cooking and eating — roasting a chicken, making a grilled cheese sandwich, scrambling an egg, tossing a salad — must become popular again, and valued not just by hipsters in Brooklyn or locavores in Berkeley.

By listing, with certainty, the accomplishments of my future self, I hope to plaster over panic that I will achieve nothing close to them.

Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

On Wednesday night I ate a light dinner and went to bed early, in order to get extra sleep for Thursday morning. Nevertheless, 24 hours later, my hands are still shaking. I’m unable to focus. No matter where I am, I am thinking about Facebook and the new, deeper connection that I immediately feel to everyone I know.

By eschewing commodity crops and advocating the consumption of grass-fed meat, pastured eggs, and local produce, we are making several very, very powerful enemies.

How can Americans gain access to real, unadulterated milk? This would require a re-localization of dairy production, which would mean more dairy farmers. “Look,” Bunting says, “if you don’t want industrial processes, then we need more people producing food.”

miRNAs may be a new class of functional components in food, like vitamins or minerals—even in an animal that’s pretty far removed from their home organism, they can manipulate gene expression and have an effect on nutrition.

In the case of an execution of an innocent person, the necessary point had nonetheless been made: the state and the community had shown that they were prepared to kill.

I never felt like passing out in a warehouse and I never felt treated like a piece of crap in any other warehouse but this one.

Remarkably, there exist simple scaling laws relating animal metabolism to body mass. Larger animals live longer; but they also metabolize slower, as manifested in slower heart rates. These effects cancel out, so that animals from shrews to blue whales have lifespans with just about equal number of heartbeats — about one and a half billion.

Military robotics has reached an advanced state of development on land, in the air and at sea. The perceived military advantages has led to a proliferation of robotics programmes to more than 40 countires. Armed robots currently have a human in the loop to control the application of lethal force. But there is an inexorable drive to create autonomous robots that can choose their own targets and kill them. There have been no international discussions about how such systems could impact on how wars are fought or what the likely effect will be on civilian populations.

Contemplation of civilization can only reveal more about itself, about civilization, and perhaps a bit about the nature of humanity because we created civilization - our fingerprints are inherent in it’s design. In contrast contemplation of nature can reveal the nature of all of reality.

Jurors were required to consider whether a convicted murderer would pose a future danger if he were sentenced to life in prison rather than death. In a series of cases, Dr. Walter Quijano, a psychologist, testified that blacks posed a greater risk of “future dangerousness” than whites.

The corn eaten by the Tarahumaras is what we want to eat. The soy eaten by the Okinawans is what we want.

My issue is not with Kathryn Stockett. I am just tired of the same old shit. At age 74 I’ve been watching this black-people-don’t-exist-until-white-people-notice-us for a very long time. When a white person writes about black life, major media and the movie studios suddenly see us. It’s Black Like Me all over again. I wrote about actually being a maid in my memoir, The Time and Place That Gave Me Life; nobody cared.

I am not saying that you are not sufferring from apnea but my sister works in a sleep clinic and she says everybody that goes in for testing gets diagnosed with some form of apnea. All patients leave with a CPAP machine too. While many cases are diagnosed as mild cases it is still diagnosed as apnea. Its unfortunate but sleep apnea is a cash cow for Drs right now.

He said that I had a nervous breakdown because I was an overachiever. He said colored people weren’t supposed to do as well as I had done. I had been stressed out and there was nothing wrong with my knee. White guy thought I was imagining things. And that’s why I walk with a cane and I’ve had a dozen operations since I was fourteen. I hope that motherfucker’s burning in hell.

Everybody’s talking about the new design; no one’s talking about the fact that the content that yesterday was free will cost > $200/yr moving forward. It’s an interesting strategy. Rather than attempt, as the Times did (and the Times, remember, owns the Globe), to arbitrarily establish a paywall, you couple that decision with the release of a slick new interface. Then hope no one notices; see their FAQ for confirmation of that.

When you refuse to allow major characters in YA novels to be gay, you are telling gay teenagers that they are so utterly horrible that people like them can’t even be allowed to exist in fiction.

The emphasis on animal products remains. The emphasis on real whole foods - kill it or dig it up with a stick - remains and is enhanced. Macro ratios had already been de-emphasized in v 2.0, but that has now been made even more explicit in the steps, and not just in the coda. Things which in my mind were “givens” but had been pointed out to me were not clearly emphasized have been made more explicit, like sleep and eating some offal. I’ve deleted references to legumes other than avoiding soy and peanuts, as other legumes seem more and more benign to me.

The study of human nutrition remains an immature science because it lacks a universally acknowledged unifying paradigm. Without an overarching and guiding template, it is not surprising that there is such seeming chaos, disagreement and confusion in the discipline. The renowned Russian geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975) said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. Indeed, nothing in nutrition seems to make sense because most nutritionists have little or no formal training in evolutionary theory, much less human evolution.

What do you get when you put together afrobeat legend Fela Kuti and rap pioneers De La Soul?

For those of us who are thinking in the long run, towards an economy with greater scarcity of natural resources, being able to have food independence is truly important. True food independence involves both plants and animals.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Manufacturers like Procter & Gamble, the household-goods giant responsible for everything from Charmin and Old Spice to Tide, are concentrating their efforts on luxury and bargain items, putting less emphasis on products aimed at the middle class, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Towards the end of my normal life when I still could watch television I could actually cut my pain off and on with the remote control device. It was such an enormously clear association there was just no denying it.

No one would answer me. They put me in the back of the car. It’s a plastic seat, for all you out there who have never been tossed into the back of a police car. It’s hard, it’s hot, and it’s humiliating. The Indian man who had sat next to me on the plane was already in the backseat. I turned to him, shocked, and asked him if he knew what was going on. I asked him if he knew the other man that had been in our row, and he said he had just met him. I said, it’s because of what we look like. They’re doing this because of what we look like. And I couldn’t believe that I was being arrested and taken away.

It is spring time now in Tokyo and the cherry blossoms are in bloom. In my small terrace garden, the plants – tulips, roses and strawberries – are telling me that a new season has arrived. But somehow, they make me sad because I know that they are not the same as last year. They are all contaminated.

It takes a certain amount of time and faith to accept or to realize that there is no difference between Him and His name, to get to the point where you’re no longer mystified by where He is. You know, like, “Is He around here?” You realize after some time, “Here He is—right here!” It’s a matter of practice. So when I say that “l see God,” I don’t necessarily mean to say that when I chant I’m seeing Krishna in His original form when He came five thousand years ago, dancing across the water, playing His flute.

The reason why a lot of commodity farmers would want to transition isn’t for moral or ethical reasons, but because organic production actually creates more jobs because it’s more labor-intensive [than industrial agriculture]. That allows for the next generation to stay on the farm.

What we have to do to create liberty in the future is to monetize more and more instead of monetize less and less, and in particular we have to monetize more and more of what ordinary people do, unless we want to make them into wards of the state. That’s the stark choice we have in the long-term.

Once you can gather information in real time with a network, you can see so much more that the traditional idea of the insurer managing risk becomes absurd, because now you can say, “Well, I have enough information that it’s not so much of a mystery what will happen, and what I want to do is just insure the people who won’t need the insurance”. Then you start breaking the whole system.

You end up doing all this stuff to control your online presence, and your online reputation, and people become obsessed with that. But the real representation of you is the one you can’t access, which is the one that’s used to sell access to you to third parties.

I’m convinced the reason copying happened on the Internet was because Xerox PARC was so important as an early supporter of computers, that for Alan Kay to go to the Xerox people and say, “Oh, by the way, copying itself, even in the abstract will become obsolete because of computer networks”, would have just blown their minds. We ended up with copying on a network.

I’m astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw around online.

The Apple idea is that instead of the personal computer model where people own their own information, and everybody can be a creator as well as a consumer, we’re moving towards this iPad, iPhone model where it’s not as adequate for media creation as the real media creation tools.

Those markets are geared to shoppers who want to buy in bulk at the lowest possible price in order to pickle, can, dry and freeze, Mr. Woods said — unlike urban markets, where customers pay double rural prices and typically eat what they buy right away. “You won’t see certified organic products or any fancy marketing,” he said of rural markets. “It’s a very different world.” Ms. Hamilton began selling about 10 years ago when her garden produced more than she could handle. She knows she could charge more but doesn’t, because her customers “are struggling just like me.”

If you have Parkinson’s disease and you get an invitation from MJF foundation that has a statement like that on it you get real excited. If I’m taking time off work to go down there to see the unveiling of a pair of sunglasses I’m going to be highly pissed off.

We were unwilling participants in a bait-and-switch for Marie Callender’s new frozen three cheese lasagna and there were cameras watching our reactions.

This site is about to change forever and we’re in the total fucking dark.

Seek answers in only one particular set of semi-literate bronze age folk tales.

That list of preparedness resources on hardcorepreppers.com I blogged about this past week is now online and working again. There’s some great stuff there as well as some goofy items. As one Root Simple reader pointed out, the “herbalism” file is actually a list of imaginary herbs from World of Warcraft. Oh how I love when the virtual and real worlds collide.

Since people pay him money, he doesn’t need to run ads to “monetize” his customers’ attention. He doesn’t have to do all the things that typically ruin the experience for people—like clogging pages with distracting banners or breaking them into smaller chunks so users have to click around a lot. “It’s like a moral hazard,” he says. “Once you’re not just charging people straight up, you get into all these murky ethical things. You have to sell their eyeballs.”

If you’re white, you have to own it. None of this I’m-not- white, I’m-beyond-it-and-I’m-Norwegian stuff. White people have to see race according to the terms they actually benefit from. Not that whiteness is a monolith, any more than nonwhiteness is. As Mab Segrest writes: “Women are less white than men, gay people are less white than straight people, poor people less white than rich people, Jews than Christians, and so forth.” But what might matter, what should matter, is that whiteness is a real force that you’ve personally benefited from in one way or another if you’re white.

When I read a Bradbury story, I not only want to race to the computer and create literary wonders of my own—the greatest gift a fellow writer can give you—I want to race out the door and up the street with my arms wide, embracing the entire universe.

It’s perfectly suited for the pantry in this house and we needed one and it was free.” And the dump, she noted, “has the best return policy.

Your carbohydrate cravings will go away and energy will come back. You will feel full and not really need to eat three meals to exist. You will notice your taste and smell change. You will notice changes in personality. You will become more thoughtful and mindful. You wont be as explosive in an explosive environment. You feel like you are warmer and exude body heat but your body temp will actually be lower and it will trend lower over 18-24 months while you thyroid settles into it new biologic groove. Your sexual desires will change and your libido will awaken. Your sleep will dramatically improve. Your migraines will improve slowly over time. Your muscles will begin not to kill you when you exercise after the rest. Your hair and nails will improve in color and presentation. Your pedicurist will notice you have less dead skin on your heels and you face. Your skin will soften and your skin color will change. Your energy level will gradually improve over 6-12 months. Your spouse will begin to notice things and treat you differently.

You’re looking at a credit score the wrong way round. You’re imagining it says how good you are with money and trust-worthy. It’s not. It’s how much of a good idea it is for a company to lend you money. Ideally they want to be able to charge you a high rate, for you to only pay a little above the minimum but to never miss a payment. i.e. low-risk, high-profit.

Over the past year, I’ve watched my credit score start low and go lower, and I’ve come to the realization that it’s complete bullshit.

Yes, the 300 foot trees can be found as far north as Oregon. They need to be within 40 miles of the coast because they require around 500 quarts of water a day, but they can absorb the water through their bark and needles and get up to 40 percent of their water from fog.

Wayback: web.archive.org/web/20111…

Ah, the perversity of it all just gets to me.

In one of history’s ironic twists, a Gujarati man born in Bombay now owns the company that was set up at Leadenhall Street at the end of the 16th century by British traders and merchants who went around the globe looking for a good cuppa and some spices and ended up colonising half the world—including India, the jewel in the crown—before collapsing in 1873.

Apple competitors tried to rub the amulet for luck — and showed us what they really stood for: Cheap, imitative mediocrity.

It isn’t just that he made computers cool or put them in pretty boxes. It’s that he put those computers in new conceptual boxes. A machine originally designed for processing equations and building bombs turned out to have a wonderful hidden potential: for song, laughter, poetry, community, family.

Is it now against the law to be dark and read a book about historic aircraft?

I spend almost all of my waking hours looking at, listening to, touching, or carrying an Apple device, except when I am taking a shower or have been chided for neglecting the children.

“The Whole Earth Catalog,” a kind of hippie Wikipedia

On Saturday, a representative from the Federal Emergency Management Agency emailed Ms. Tien’s colleague, asking if @irene could help them with their outreach. (A suggested tweet from the FEMA rep: “People should protect themselves from me, I’m dangerous. Visit http://m.fema.gov for tips on your phone.”)

He treated them the way his grandparents had been treated by so many small minded Americans 100 years ago. He had risen from humble beginnings into a position of power, and then used that power to oppress people because they spoke a different language, came from a different culture, and were a slightly different shade than his ancestors.

At some point as a society we’re going to have to stop pretending that useful jobs will continue to be created at even close to the rate that they’re being made obsolete, and figure out what to do with all of these people with time on their hands. Anyway, derail.

“You’re missing it. This is not a one-man show. What’s reinvigorating this company is two things: One, there’s a lot of really talented people in this company who listened to the world tell them they were losers for a couple of years, and some of them were on the verge of starting to believe it themselves. But they’re not losers. What they didn’t have was a good set of coaches, a good plan. A good senior management team. But they have that now.” [BusinessWeek, May 25, 1998]

Everyone leapt to their feet and applauded again for several minutes more, this time with Steve egging them on, applauding each other as a team. That moment has since defined what I think about as leadership.

We believe that we’re on the face of the earth to make great products and that’s not changing. We’re constantly focusing on innovating. We believe in the simple, not the complex. … We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us.

Even if Mr. Jobs does not get personally involved in future negotiations, music executives still fear dealing with Apple. One chit the company holds is the power of the iTunes home page, where it promotes music. They also say that the entire Apple staff, including Eddie Cue, the vice president in charge of iTunes who handles the relationships with the record labels, do their best to follow Mr. Jobs’s style in their own negotiating.

What are you going to do in the longer term?” Rumelt asked. “What’s the strategy?” Jobs, he recalls, “just smiled and said, ‘I am going to wait for the next big thing.’

These headbangers are angry and vindictive. They’ve been looking for revenge since ‘92 and let’s face it— you weren’t far from the scene of the crime.

Used to be Apple would add features like this for power users to find.

I’m thrilled to be able to show Tito, my son, a Spider-Man whose last name is Morales. Call me selfish, but I think that’s wonderful.

The couple say they do not feel like pioneers in the gentrification of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the neighborhood in central Brooklyn that traces its African-American roots to the early 19th century and has been the borough’s black cultural capital for decades.¶ “We just feel so lucky to be in such a vibrant neighborhood,” Ms. Enck said.

My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.

When Earl Ray, a Pima Indian who lives near Phoenix, switched to a more traditional native diet of mesquite meal, tepary beans, cholla buds and chaparral tea, he dropped from 239 pounds to less than 150 and brought his severe diabetes under control without medication.

Am I seriously being asked to sign a petition in favor of more privileges for overprivileged youth?

The logo for the symposium was offensive, in my view, as it showed outlines of clearly northern European Caucasians. So far, in all of the photos I’ve seen from the symposium, I haven’t seen any dark-skinned people.

If you accept the notion that no one knows what to eat these days since they’re bombarded with conflicting nutritional advice at every turn, then the several hundred people who attended this past weekend’s Ancestral Health Symposium in Los Angeles must be an exception to that as they seem to have a handle on it.

"93. Develop a way to program that requires no scripting or coding." Bad advice. Unrealistic.

"44. Continue your research in voice recognition." Bad advice. Still irrelevant.

20. Tap the move toward push media by creating a network computer. Bad advice. Probably the most dated piece of advice on the list.

A generation bred on a diet of excessive consumerism and bombarded by advertising had been unleashed, he added. “Where we used to be defined by what we did, now we are defined by what we buy. These big stores are in the business of tempting [the consumer] and then suddenly these people find they can just walk into the shop and have it all.”

Psychedelic drug intoxication is a high-reward state, whereas meditation is generally a low-reward state. Drugs can cause a feeling of oneness that is similar to what a person can experience while meditating, but they lack the ability to increase reward sensitivity and restore a constructive relationship with everyday life.

If you aren’t willing or able to eat mostly home cooked food made from basic ingredients, as every healthy culture does, you will have to accept a higher likelihood of fat gain and disease.

When he wants to be, the president is a brilliant and moving speaker, but his stories virtually always lack one element: the villain who caused the problem, who is always left out, described in impersonal terms, or described in passive voice, as if the cause of others’ misery has no agency and hence no culpability.

Sell all you want, I’ll be buying this week.

Some of the congressional Republicans who are preventing action to help the economy are simply intellectual primitives who reject modern economics on the same basis that they reject Darwin and climate science. Others are obviously cynical, desiring the worst possible economy as an aid to recapturing the White House and Senate in 2012. Still others simply do not believe that government action can ever be a force for good at any time or in any way. Whatever their motivations, there is something terribly sad about desperate and unemployed Americans looking for rescue to a party that lacks any inclination to alleviate their misery.

Several blogs and gay and lesbian publications are now picking up the story, but the heavy hitters who usually kill for hero stories like this, have remained silent.

They hold your name hostage. It’s like identity theft. What the hell? I’m not gonna pay ‘em. They’re like, “It’ll cost you $50,000 for your name.” F you! I don’t have to pay for my name.

Will knowing how to make mead from sorrel and tea from honey locusts pods really come in handy if there is a food supply-chain meltdown?

if any of the fixes listed do not fix your washed out display please look into the following. Universal Access - Monitor Contrast Adjustments in OSX Be aware that OSX introduces a feature in the “Universal Access” utility that can severely limit the performance of your monitor. To review this feature proceed as follows: Click on the Apple icon (top-left) then on “System Preferences”
Next, click on the “Universal Access” icon (bottom-right). Ensure that the “Seeing” tab is selected. Under “Display”, ensure that the “Enhance Contrast” slider is as far left as possible - this is the normal position. If the slider is positioned even a small fraction of an inch from the left, there will be a loss of shadow contrast that can hide subtle shadow details in your images.

Did they run and hide? No, they’re lesbians, so they jumped in their boat and sped toward the slaughter. The women pulled terrified teens from the water and the rocky coast as the insane far-right gunman shot through their vessel. Unfortunately, there were too many youth to fit in the boat. Hege and Toril ferried the group to safety, then hurried back to the massacre, rescuing another boatload. Then they did it yet again. And still again. Altogether in their four trips they saved forty people from the scene where seventy-six died. The mainstream U.S. media, which loves a hero story almost as much as a tragedy, has been uniformly silent about the lesbian superstars.

We may iterate on the design later, but at the moment, the current experience is desired and what we will implement in Lion.

How else can some criminals make money if the drug game isn’t what it used to be? As far as the younger kids, the group/gang mentality seems to be the fad. The kids in their early teens seem to favor the shock and awe approach meaning they bum rush and attack then take whatever they can get their hands on. It should be noted that when separated from the group in the police station they tend to weep uncontrollably.

Actually, it takes place in the year before it was published. Literally in the year in which it was written. A speculative novel of the very recent past.

It’s really, really about the material.

Applications without processes. Processes without applications. Did Lion just blow your mind?

Fuck the business models, projections, and funding rounds and just “do the right thing”.

For someone who’s spent a lot of your career puncturing middle-class aspiration and self-delusion, your piece is painfully blind to the fact that all of China is just a few generations removed from dire, desperate want.

If I had continued at the public school, I’m quite sure I would have found my way into the group of bohemians (basically stoners playing hacky sack on the hill) and my subsequent life would have been very different.

A medical system that successfully guided patients toward healthier lifestyles would almost certainly see its cash flow diminish dramatically. “Last year, 75 percent of the $2.6 trillion the U.S. spent on health care was for treating chronic diseases that, to a large degree, can be prevented or reversed through lifestyle change,” says Dean Ornish of UCSF. Who (besides patients) has an incentive to make changes that would remove that money from the system?

I’ve worked in a lot of retail jobs. Zellers, Wal-Mart, Loblaws, Rogers Video. Not a single one even came close to making me feel the way Whole Foods did. Primarily because they don’t misrepresent themselves to the extent that Whole Foods does.

The HR lady has the audacity to tell me that I should have given myself enough time from leaving my place to be hit by a car and deal with the whatever happened afterwards to get to work.

It’s just crazy, and I’m tired of dealing with the crazies. It’s just unnecessary to be accusing this guy of things just because of his religious background. I’m happy that he’s willing to serve after all this baloney.

In Lion, screen sharing is easier than before — you can now log in and control a user account even if the computer is being used by someone with a different user account.

I pay the local gutter punks a trifling sum monthly to hurl a brick through the window and occasionally to spraypaint hostile graffiti on the marquee. Any minute now Channel 10 and the UC Review will be around all aghast to record the latest outrage against the yuppie community. It’s incredible how much sympathy we get from these vulgar anarchist attacks on our efforts to bring haute cuisine to this dreary neighborhood.

being in the country,” “feeling like I’m outside even if I’m inside,” “silence,” “music” and “lots of light.

These strains are a food-safety disaster waiting to happen. As far back as 2007, the government considered routine testing for the presence of these pathogens in certain raw beef products. But nothing has been done: inspectors don’t test for them, and the public isn’t aware of how they are different from earlier strains. Nor have they been declared adulterants in food, which would lead to stricter quality and reporting standards.

I’d love next/previous tab gestures. More useful than back/forward a page.

(Imagine laptops that look like two iPads hinged together, is what I’m thinking.)

We’re doing a very basic thing: bringing plain water into contact with dried plant materials to imbue the water with flavor, color and various active substances, like caffeine and antioxidant polyphenols.

The best thing is to let children encounter these challenges from an early age, and they will then progressively learn to master them through their play over the years.

The Hope Creek reactor is the same model as the plant that melted down in Japan following the catastrophic tsunami and earthquake in the spring.

They’ve added all of the ports you’ll normally use to their new generation of displays, and they use a Thunderbolt cable to handle the communication for all of those ports using a single cable. To connect, you just plug in the Thunderbolt cable and the power cable from the monitor. You can even daisy chain multiple monitors through a single Thunderbolt connection.

Interests: Getting my innocent brother freed from prison after 28 years and counting

There are good foods and bad foods, and the advice should be to eat the good foods more and the bad foods less.

I was recently at a very large consumer products company (stay tuned) where there was a wall of different phones and tablets from which managers could choose, then sit in a mockup hotel room to test how they’d work with it remotely. “Three to five years from now, everyone will be bringing their own device into work anyway,” the CIO told me. “I have to turn that issue into an opportunity.”

Like all past versions of Mac OS X, Lion has no serial number, no product activation, and no DRM of any kind.

Apple couldn’t get much bigger without selling oil, while the media industry has been reduced to dime-size buttons that show up on iPhone screens. Google regularly announces initiatives to “save” the newspaper and book industries — like a modern-day hunter who proclaims himself a conservationist. And Facebook, having already swallowed up enormous chunks of discretionary media consumption time, has its old-school media counterparts chasing after “Likes” as if they were cocaine being dispensed in a lab rat’s cage.

Peep exploits human instinct: our ability to notice a deviation from the norm with little effort, to determine what sounds right, and to discern singular important sounds from a collection of many sounds. We do these tasks with little or no conscious effort. Since computer interfaces mainly require the visual senses (and some motor skills), the audio senses are left available to perform this unconscious processing.

I made the same trip in 1958 in a ‘53 Hudson. The worst seating position of any car that had ever been invented. And if the film is authentic, the driver will be squirming with a sore back all the way. Good luck, everybody!

So then World War II comes and then everyone’s sad for a while—a simplification of history—and then everyone wants to be cheered up, so along came the Beatles, just in time.

Musicians come and go and they’re stewards of the music for a brief period of time. But once the music plays—it’s really between Beethoven and the listener at that point. The musicians are there to get their goddamn hands off of it. All that training! Thousands of hours! Sight-reading every day! All so they can get the hell out of the way because nobody gives a crap about them at all.

I got to play with these orchestras recently, at Carnegie Hall. One of the best musical experiences of my life. You go in and there are all the walls covered in photos of great conductors. A picture of Mark Twain standing on the stage. This is what you walk by before you go onstage, in case anyone ever wants to try and have an ego in that room.

When 1 out of 5 students in the class being involved in a cheating case, the lectures and class discussions became awkward. For the rest of the semester there was a palpable anxiousness in class. Instead of having friendly discussions, the discussions became contentious. Not a pleasant environment.

This, of course, had a direct effect to my teaching evaluations. Instead of the usual evaluations that were in the region of 6.0 to 6.5 out of seven, this time my ratings went down by almost a point: 5.3 out of 7.0. Instead of being a teacher in the upper percentiles, I was now below average.

The Dean’s office and my chair “expressed their appreciation” for me chasing such cases (in December), but six months later, when I received my annual evaluation, my yearly salary increase was the lowest ever, as my “teaching evaluations took a hit this year”.

As if vocabulary itself materializes, precipitating out as alternative spatial futures for the city.

I would like to see our NGO post the state’s rules in the community kitchen and then let people make their own decision; keep the market together and let the state come down and pluck out who’s following the rules and who is not. Are folks who create cottage industry going to be forced to sell the goods from their homes or from hidden baskets under tables at the market?

Now many people know that octopii can change color but they think it’s for camoflage, for blending in with the environment, this is not at all the case. The reason octopii change colors in a very large repatoire of stripes, dots, blushes, travelling shades and tonal shifts is because this is for them a channel of linguistic communication.

Imagine another room within that room whose doorway is also sealed behind drywall—and then other rooms within that room, and further corridors and stairs and entrances. Tap, tap, tap—you navigate by sound, knocking deeper and deeper into an architectural world you only reveal by means of careful deconstruction.

Neurochemicals are highly conserved in evolution - bacteria, plants, insects, and fish all produce forms of the neurochemicals called the catecholemines. Thus it makes sense that bacteria in our gut can communicate directly with using, to some extent, the same “language” as our mammalian brains. Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium species are known to produce GABA. Escherichia, Bacillus, and Saccharomyces produce norepinephrine. Candida, Streptococcus, Escherichia, and Enterococcus produce serotonin. Bacillus and Serratia produce dopamine, and Lactobacillus species produce acetylcholine. That’s pretty much the entire hit parade of major neurotransmitters

Also, the idea that the “hidden” sculpture could, in fact, remain hidden unless the wind were to blog a certain way, revealing itself to the listener.

It’s really about communicating with people that I work with that there are limits.

Omar Wasow looks at the rise in violence in the 1970s in black communities, and the forces responsible for the rise in disparities of black incarceration.

I’d like to see the full spectrum of psychedelics be integrated into hospice care.

I never would have thought that writing gender-neutral language in software would be a harder problem than, say, indexing the entirety of the Internet for perfect search results.

Some people squirt their cats when they’re misbehaving, so maybe it could have water in the phone, and you could squirt the dog.

To present email and text messages as they often feel would create an experimental novel, as if descending from Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs cut-ups.

The subtext of nearly every interaction with a health-care provider in the U.S. is: You’re lucky to have this coverage. Don’t push it. There are thousands of patients waiting behind you who are in even worse condition than you are. Let’s get through this as quickly as possible so the whole bloody machine doesn’t come grinding to a halt.

And when I was 13 years old, reading this, I didn’t understand the scouring of the Shire. They won—why are there all these other pages? But I reread these books every few years, and every time my appreciation for what Tolkien did there grows. It was this kind of sad elegy on the price of victory.

A few months ago, I said in Berlin, “Cognitive cities require the approval and collaboration of city authorities. The same people who make flyposting illegal.”

It’s sad, and somewhat annoying – especially for Tom – but a better example that these streets are not our streets won’t be found in Britain today.

The slipper to coffee snobbery was fairly close to my bed when I woke up.

I’m uncomfortable using a privately-owned social network as the medium to give voice to our sensors and objects.

A lot of the moms there are giving their kids Botox, I’m not the only one who does it.

And somehow I knew that the notional space behind all of the computer screens would be one single universe.

I’ve just gotten to a point where this is no longer working for me. Too many of my day-to-day concerns are not consonant with the way I want to experience the world.

“It’s Andy Hertzfeld, the original Mac guy,” he said.

Unlike most of the party games you’ve played before, Cards Against Humanity is as despicable and awkward as you and your friends.

I have a theory that all men in the universe can be classified into two groups depending on which of the following two questions they answer “yes” to: 1. Have you ever partied with cheerleaders? or, 2. Have you ever been bitten by a snake?

The world is full of aging baby boomers who are looking forward to psychedelic retirement and psychedelic hospice. They had psychedelic experiences in their youth that were useful to them. They gave up the drugs for family and career. Now they’re thinking back to those valuable experiences and they want to get re-engaged.

With all due respect, I’m certain I can’t understand how Maisel’s hurt feelings are worth $32K.

The poor kids wouldn’t know where to look – the reassuring fullness of their own mothers’ breasts, granny’s withered pancake boasting its long experience, or the strange mound of flesh granddad was squeezing up in breast envy.

Modern civilization has many things to admire, but the dark side of its so-called nutrition comes with it in a package. Often the fake foods that carry its malnutrition are manufactured to have drug-like addictive qualities. It peddles the illusion of ease with its elevators and office chairs. Its televisions and radios and educational systems constitute unparalleled systems of mass media that embed its ideologies within the minds of its students.

The one-story house in West Hollywood (835 North Kings Road; 323-651-1510; makcenter.org; $7) was built in 1921-22 and feels incredibly modern with its lack of decorative fuss. The unpainted concrete walls feature narrow strips of glass set at regular intervals. Other walls are made of redwood frames and stretched canvas; some open onto the gardens. Schindler described the house as fulfilling “the basic requirements for a campers’ shelter: a protected back, an open front, a fireplace and a roof.” Schindler’s house integrates the interior and exterior with several protected outdoor “rooms” — some with fireplaces on the exterior walls.

You actually have to watch the popcorn pop. Then you take the various accouterments to the Champagne room for the least erotic virtual striptease possible.
It made me long for the urinal.

…This is basically equivalent to a “smoke cigarettes to raise money for colon cancer” promotion.

Humans paid a heavy biological cost for agriculture, especially when it came to the variety of nutrients. Even now, about 60 percent of our calories come from corn, rice and wheat.

I AM JOHNNY CARSON’S ADULT MALE CHILD

Parkitecture occupies an interesting liminal space in the parks; it both informs and restricts your movement, trying to blend in with the natural surroundings while being obviously official. It also requires an investment in apparently outdated trades–we saw trail maintenance in Zion being performed by a team of masons with chisels and hammers, chipping the red sandstone into appropriately rustic blocks. The curation and preservation of these trade skills seem just as important to me as the park itself.

I want to target the pot market. There’s no good reason we haven’t.

Instead of white bread, corn, sugar, powdered milk and canned foods, they began to eat the traditional fresh foods of their ancestral past: kangaroos, birds, crocodiles, turtles, shellfish, yams, figs, yabbies (freshwater crayfish), freshwater bream and bush honey. At the experiment’s conclusion, the results were spectacular, but not altogether unexpected given what [was] known about Paleo diets, even then … their diabetes effectively disappeared.

As a person concerned about his health, and as someone who feels that there are reasonable ethical options available for meat consumption, I have consciously (and perhaps selfishly) chosen to avoid a sub-optimal diet. I have come to recognize the fact that the human body evolved to eat meat, and that in order for me to live and be at my best, I need to be an omnivore.

Is this what people aspire to? A stuffed peacock on a non-functioning fireplace? A 4-foot high photo of a cigarette smoker on the wall? Lily-white upholstered furniture on the beach?

Most small farms are not self-sustaining in a very basic sense: they can’t make ends meet financially without relying on income from jobs off the farm.

The Lisa hardware designers (Paul Baker, Bob Paratore and others) solved the problem by including a little Apple II, with its own memory and microprocessor (but clocked twice as fast), inside the Lisa to control the Twiggy drives.

You will know the future is here because it will not be a continuation and repetition of mids-80s and late-90s phantasms with ever shittier economic and political conditions.

if you described the War On Drugs, with its massive collateral damage to civil liberties and innocent lives to someone from a few decades ago, that would sound pretty crazy

He was a kind of action hero for very famous writers and poets, but he couldn’t create that notion himself. It must’ve been a weird existence for him, where he almost felt like a creation of other people.

I can at a moment’s notice access any email I’ve sent in the last 14 years, or any school paper I’ve written in the last 23. All this data takes up less than one gigabyte. By 8-bit standards, that’s staggering; by today’s, having the output of an entire era fit on 0.2% of my current computer’s capacity is humbling.

Tokyo Electric Power Co., the utility that operates the plant, has said radioactive water could start overflowing from temporary storage areas on June 20, or possibly sooner if there is heavy rainfall.

Earlier this month, Mike Maginnis outlined some of his Apple II goals. It was an excellent call to action for Apple II users to outline what they want to accomplish with or contribute to the Apple II.

So the original Apple II price point was $1195, and it still is.

The communes were the model for the modern idea of the self organising, non-hierarchical network which you now see in internet utopianism. What I show in the film is that what’s been wiped out of the memory of the communes is that most collapsed within three years. The more powerful system used the system and everybody else was defenceless because you were not allowed to make alliances with other people.

When I came back to California after the last commune I’d lived in had broken up, I was a single father with a young daughter, and I had to earn a living. I began acting professionally as a source of income. The good news is I was able to save toward my retirement and send both my kids to good schools and colleges, to graduate debt-free. The bad news is that once I took the money, I was a bought boy. I was dependent on other people for a living. I put my family’s needs before my own authentic desires. I don’t mind, and acting has been good to me, but it’s not where I live, and whenever you violate what’s most important to you, you pay a price.

I felt comforted by the fact that like everyone I’ve reconnected with on Facebook, he’d gotten fat, and by the banality of his listed interests like “Bob Marley” and “Scrubs.” He was a monster in my memory, but on Facebook, he was just a man.

I still agree with my 2005 opinion that rather than assuming “everybody reads” you should assume you’re somebody’s only filter.

To last for centuries, to provide a sheltered roadway, to serve all creatures and to present a living surface to the sky, a bridge must have a roof and a deep covering of earth.

In a Senate floor speech on Tuesday, Udall urged Congress to restrict the Patriot Act’s business-records seizures to “terrorism investigations” — something the ostensible counterterrorism measure has never required in its nearly 10-year existence.

We did public art installations. And, I don’t know if you consider it arts, exactly, but I consider growing organic vegetables in the shadow of a steel mill an art, and that has attracted homesteading.

We also want equitable education that’s shared - not people who know to text each other at 1 a.m. That’s not public education.

I know it might sound nuts, but it’s going pretty well. The allergies seem to have peaked and declined.

In particular, this is directed to locally storing one or more clips corresponding to a media item such that the clips can be immediately played back in response to a user request to play back the media item. While the clips are played back, the electronic device can retrieve the remaining segments of the media item from the user’s media library as a media stream over a communications network. Once the playback of the clip is complete, the electronic device can seamlessly switch playback to the media stream received from the user’s library.

If something is tied to a project’s success, you can’t hope for it, you need to find a way to make it happen.

I got really, really fast and to this day I still think of executing things in 30 minute increments. If something’s not right after 30 minutes, start over and try again.

I think it went way beyond constructive. It was an art form in itself. We were basically trying to see if we could get each other to drop out of school.

I am a Master of three martial arts including ninjitsu, which means I can wear the special boots to climb walls.

It just really made sense that the human body was surviving without grain. Our bodies really haven’t had time to adapt to pizza and rolls.

It’s hard to talk to strangers in parks,” said Scott. “Because invariably they need $50 for the train because they’ve lost their wallet. And you’re like, oh, I thought I was building community.

UNIVERSITY CITY IS AN EXPERIMENT IN THE ROTTING GENTRY. A MASTER PLAN OUTLINED BY A COALITION OF ORGANIZATIONS THAT ARE THE BASTIONS OF THE RICH WHITE LIBERALISM THAT HAS PERVADED THIS COUNTRY OF LATE. SPECIFICALLY, THAT MEANS A FLOOD OF PEOPLE BUYING HOMES IN WEST PHILLY THAT CAN AFFORD TO DO SO BASED ON THE UPENN WAR MACHINE’S GENEROSITY, ADDITIONALLY ENABLED BY OBAMA-VOTING, HYBRID-DRIVING LIBERALS WHO BELIEVE THEMSELVES TO BE OPEN-MINDED, NON-RACISTS WHO CAN SEEMINGLY SEAMLESSLY INTEGRATE INTO IMPOVERISHED NEIGHBORHOODS OF PEOPLE OF COLOR. DISPEL AND DESIST THESE IDEAS, AND DARE TO RESIST. YOUR CHOICES ARE TIED INTO THE ECONOMIC MACHINE WHICH GRINDS US ALL DOWN, BUT NEVER FORGET THAT IN AMERICA “SOME [PEOPLE] ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.”

I will lose. I will make mistakes. I will have shitty periods of time that are completely outside of my control. People I love will make mistakes, usually completely unrelated to me, or not.

What I found most amazing was the glimpses of Black service workers in those parts of the canopy where Whiteness asserts itself most viciously as the dominant cultural form: the hostess at Rouge, the doormen in Rittenhouse Square, and the security guards in the Center City office building. That’s where Anderson’s magic lies: in offering vivid glances into the often-obscure mechanics of social life.

Anderson calls these spaces “cosmopolitan canopies,” places where diverse people gather, and feel comfortable striking up sometimes surprisingly intimate conversations. “It’s really a point of cultural convergence,” Anderson tells NPR’s Neal Conan, “where all different kinds of people … call ‘time out’ on the segregated and sometimes quite contentious areas” outside of those melting pots.

It’s the outdoor cafes. All 213 of them.

Why has eating gotten so complicated?

When I start at a new office I like to take a small copy of a famous picture of a sad baby monkey desperately hugging a “mother” monkey made of chicken wire, and I pushpin that through the cloth of the cubicle-skin into the cushiony sponge-flesh below. That is how I tell the world.

No one writing code said, “Let’s totally mess with his perception of self and understanding of free will.”

You don’t get into what happened a week after his original vision of Blake’s voice, when Allen tried to re-invoke it and ended up having a horrific, nightmarish experience. He took that as a lesson if you tried to invoke visionary states consciously, you didn’t always know what you were getting. You might get merry Krishna or grim Shiva.

With a great leap, I threw myself through the air and landed with one foot on the poor armadillo’s tail. In a flash I drew a long knife from the sheath on my belt and stabbed it in hard and quick into the gap in the armor at the base of the armadillo’s neck, cutting the spine and killing it instantly.

I use default settings in almost all of my apps… I really like the idea of experiencing the software as it was designed (or unleashed) by its creators, and sort of getting in the mindset of the millions of other people who use the apps.

As upper-middle-class consumers increasingly seek out healthier foods, fast-food chains are targeting low-income minority communities — much like tobacco companies did when wealthy and well-educated people began to quit smoking.

Kern had previously gained national attention for her comments three years ago that homosexuality is the death knell of the country, and a bigger threat than terrorism or Islam, and for comparing homosexuality to toe cancer. She did not apologize and was not reprimanded for those remarks.

Natural selection has produced only minor alterations during the past 10,000 years, so we remain nearly identical to our late Paleolithic ancestors and, accordingly, their nutritional pattern has continuing relevance. The preagricultural diet might be considered a possible paradigm or standard for contemporary human nutrition.

Research shows that even when news reports have been retracted, and we are aware of the retraction, our beliefs are largely based on the initial erroneous version of the story. This is particularly true when we are motivated to approve of the initial account.

That Hudson just wants to go!

"There is no point for me to be here," as the Kan administration had failed to listen to him, said Kosako, an expert on radiation safety.

But if you can find only hard, green mangoes, bring them home anyway — they will ripen at room temperature in a few days time.

There is a huge irony, that a time when we discover so many planets to look at, we don’t have the operating funds to listen.

If, like me, you obsess over tiny details of your Macintosh browsing experience, you may find LinkThing useful. If not, you’ll probably wonder what’s wrong with me.

You start out as a young person bewildered by things, and then suddenly you’re the one bewildering the young people. I can see it in their faces.

Go as far down the list as you can in whatever time frame you can manage. The further along the list you stop, the healthier you are likely to be. There is no counting, measuring, or weighing.

Please stop trying to sell me something I don’t need.

One of the remarkable things about the way the *global* indigenous world has embraced the web, for example, is that it has hugely facilitated political alliances between indigenous groups in different parts of the world, who nonetheless have similar (“tribal”) understandings of social organization that are relatively readily inter-translatable.

not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things

We’re all practically living in the same place. There has been a great levelling. We have the same brand names reiterated in all of our shop fronts; the same chain stores in every town.

I’ve come to the conclusion that what superheroes might be — in their current incarnation, at least — is a symbol of American reluctance to involve themselves in any kind of conflict without massive tactical superiority.

But I can remember walking through town wearing an old Watchmen T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off and somebody shouting ‘Aciiieeeeeeed!’ at me from the other side of the street! Which was a pleasant and engaging experience!

We ought to become what surrounds us and let our surroundings reach so far into us that there is no us left. From this expanded/contracted view nothing is secret, unrevealed or unknown because we become more than our “self,” we become the vantage point of the landscape and the environment literally.

We grew up together in a small town in Western Colorado during the 50’s and 60’s; we traveled to the Amazon together in 1971, as brothers and friends, as fellow seekers. We called ourselves, self-mockingly, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (even on the cusp of uncovering the mysteries of existence we managed to keep a sense of humor; it helped to be Irish). We went in search of we knew not what; only that it was a profound insight, unspeakable, beyond comprehension, and that it would change us, and everything, forever.

People were more likely to choose bigger, delayed rewards over smaller, more immediate payoffs when making the decision on a full bladder.

They are the only generation who will have pensions, social security, and crazy real estate investments that guarantee the expansion of wealth. They were bribed, paid to let the current system take it’s hold, and they took the money. My generation and many that follow will pay the price for their choices. We will rebuild this world or die trying.

Nutritionally I can’t think of a bigger lie than the one claiming that fats in general and saturated fats in particular are bad for us. This lie is so deeply embedded in the minds of most that you couldn’t blow it out with a stick of dynamite.

It seems possible that the golden age for forensic recovery and analysis of deleted data and deleted metadata may now be ending.

…What you need to do is to start finding out what local plants can be used for antibiotics. What are local water purification systems you’ll be able to use. How are you going to build shelters. How will you pull up parking lots to make gardens. Learning self-defense and forming committees to deal with the additional violence that might (or might not) break out. Getting to know your neighbors, both human and nonhuman. How’s that for a start?

These flat omelets, which can be eaten hot or cold and pack well in a lunchbox, are a perfect destination for all sorts of vegetables.

When children age 3 to 5 see a ball rolling into a box, they say that the ball couldn’t have done anything else. But when they see an experimenter put her hand in the box, they insist that she could have done something else.

I am a huge geek; my wife, however, is not. She, like Luke, could never be turned, so the responsibility for making sure our two little kids end up liking stuff like Star Wars, Tolkien, Final Fantasy, Doc Brown and, of course, D&D is on me.

Owsley Stanley,” my dad wrote. “Didn’t know his first name was Owsley. Just knew that the first few hits of acid were called Owsley. Went with friends to the Fillmore West to see Janis Joplin and the Holding Company, or so I was told. They laughed when I told them that I didn’t know who she was. Had just started U.C. Berkeley and had taken an Alternative Course in creative writing and another course on Gandhi. Dropped the Acid and well what is time and space anyway.

As the drug was then unknown in the UK and they had no knowledge of dosage or potency, he and his partner Paula injected the whole shipment in one go. It was an experience that he never really recovered from…

I tried “To Kill a Mockingbird,” but listening to Alex recite Atticus Finch made me want to push an icepick in my ear.

My grandmother took me down to the mailbox in Brooklyn every morning, and she would say, ‘It’s a federal offense for anyone to look at your mail. That’s what makes this country great.’ In the old country they’d open your mail, and that’s how they knew about you.

Don’t forget the human and the first-person experience, he said, we have this job to wake up the world to itself.

I’d always been a writer but, boy, did I get an education. He’d say: ‘It’s easier than you think! Just look out your eye like you’re looking through a window!’ and, ‘Nobody wants to hear about your feelings, darling, tell me what you see!’

Hi, I hear you’re really nice, if you come down to the Howard Johnsons in Greenwich Village, I’ll be waiting at the counter in a red-and-black-checked shirt.

In the noise of everything you see and do in your life, those moments that garner the strongest reaction are the ones that are remembered. Fear, rejection, humiliation, glee, joy, devotion, tenderness, devastation, grief. So, to have a life filled with memories, you must always feel genuinely and passionately, and let everything make an impression on you. Avoid walls or defenses. You must always take chances. Accept it all, unshielded. That way, you’ll get the most value for your time.

The situation is not unfavorable; there is a prospect of ultimate success, but there are still obstacles in the way, and we can merely take preparatory measures. Only through the small means of friendly persuasion can we exert any influence. The time has not yet come for sweeping measures. However, we may be able, to a limited extent, to act as a restraining and subduing influence. To carry out our purpose we need firm determination within and gentleness and adaptability in external relations.