December 2011
30 posts
IMs for Christmas
Message:
[11:14:58 AM] Roland: I wonder if I might crave your momentary indulgence in order to discharge a by no means disagreeable obligation which has, over the years, become more or less established practice as we approach the terminal period of the year — calendar, of course, not financial — in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, Week Fifty-One — and submit to you, with all appropriate...
High Line Section 2: Before and After
nycedc:
We can’t wait to walk High Line Section 2, which officially opens to the public tomorrow. The new stretch runs between West 20th and 30th Streets in Manhattan and essentially doubles the length of the existing park. NYCEDC is involved with the construction of the High Line. Mouse over the photos to view Section 2’s transformation. Read more info about Section 2. Photo credit: SiteWorks
The Power of Jane Jacobs' "Web Way of Thinking" →
humanscalecities:
Michael Mehaffy refutes the contrarians and clarifies Jacobs’ lasting “Top 10” observations found in the incredibly influential book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Technology & Money
This story starts in the 1850s with the founding of Western Union Telegraph and the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution.
When Morse was approaching his eightieth birthday it was felt among the telegraph fraternity at Western Union that a formal testimonial in the U.S. should be given to honor him - Saturday, June 10th, 1871 Morses final message was:
” Greeting and thanks...
Solar Photovoltaic Catches a Major Breakthrough →
“‘Never Leave the Store’”
– Sol Goldman, a Brooklyn grocer’s son who built one of New York City’s great fortunes buying and selling real estate for more than half a century. In 1976, Mr. Goldman remained the city’s largest private landlord - and at the time among the most unpopular in the city - in command...
Need for a New Economics
Current Economics Theory has three blind spots
Growth is Necessary
Distribution of Wealth/Product is an afterthought
Larger is Better, Scale
From OccupyHarvard
From: occupyharvard2011 Dec 9, 2011
Occupy Harvard Teach-In #1 12/7/2011 “Economics for the 99%” Juliet Schor, Professor of Sociology, Boston College
Navy Island & The Caroline Affair
Navy Island’s first inhabitants were Natives who used it for fishing and building canoes. In the 1700s, the French used it as a a naval base and for ship building. When the area was taken over by the British, they also built ships there, constructing in 1763 two sloops and three schooners on the island. Canada was awarded ownership of the island in 1822. Fifteen years later it...
“Can you crack it?” →
In the Internet age, the spy catchers have been forced to go digital, democratic and, old-timers might say, outright pop. Their latest wheeze, causing a buzz on the Internet — and stirring a torrent of Web chat among people identifying themselves as hackers — is an online cryptographic puzzle that promises a fast track to recruitment as spies for those who solve it before the challenge...
The Mentat
A Mentat is a profession or discipline in Frank Herbert’s fictional Dune universe. Mentats are humans trained to mimic computers: human minds developed to staggering heights of cognitive and analytical ability.
In Herbert’s fiction, following the defeat of the thinking machines by humanity in the Butlerian Jihad, it is forbidden to create sentient machines. The Mentat discipline is ...
Bill Gates Going Nuclear With China →
Bill Gates is in discussions with China to jointly develop a new and more efficient type of nuclear reactor. “The idea is to be very low cost, very safe and generate very little waste,” Gates told CBC and other news outlets while giving a talk at China’s Ministry of Science and Technology on …
23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, by...
Ha-Joon Chang, Reader in the Political Economy of Development at Cambridge University, has written a fascinating book on capitalism’s failings. He also wrote the brilliant Bad Samaritans. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times says he is `probably the world’s most effective critic of globalisation’. Chang takes on the free-marketers’ dogmas and proposes ideas like - ...
“Philosophy is to science what masturbation is to sex”
– via: Squashed Philosophers abridged
Blog: Alexandra Lange Thinking in Tumblr →
On a Tumblr, every kind of memory could be collected and streamed, linked, as so many of the “f*** yeah” genre are, by a single word. Vintage ads and color samples, quotes from literature and scenes from movies, new product, old furniture, cleaning tips and housewives’ economiums. All these things would sit easily next to each other (and, I believe, attract a larger...
