NPR’s On the Media is on balance my favorite radio program these days. Last week’s episode had a nice remembrance of Tony Schwartz.
In his 84 years Tony Schwartz produced over 30,000 recordings, thousands of groundbreaking political ads, media theory books and Broadway sound design, invented the portable recorder, delivered hundreds of lectures and had [...]
Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke.
Helmuth von Moltke was at a meeting at the Foreign Minstry in Berlin with twenty-four men. They discussed a legal decree that would expropriate the property of deported Jews. Twenty-four of the twenty-five wanted to approve the decree; Moltke opposed it.
The men were chameleons, Moltke wrote his wife: “In a healthy [...]
My regular commute to work ends with a walk from the Mountain View Caltrain station to my office, and the walk includes a freeway overpass (Shoreline Blvd over US 101 for the locals). Lots of lanes, lots of cars.
God, but we drive drab cars in this neck of the woods. The palette runs from white [...]
Just before sunset, on my way home this evening. The view is from Highway 1, just north of Lobitos Creek. Mustard and wild radish, I think.
philosophy bites is “podcasts of top philosophers interviewed on bite-sized topics.” Each podcast is c. 15 minutes long, and new ones show up about twice a week. The topics are wide-ranging, and the discussions are of interest to interested non-professionals as well as professional philosophers in other fields.
A sampling of recent bites:
Simon Blackburn on Plato’s [...]
Last month, PBS’s Frontline showed a fascinating documentary on the state of health care delivery in five developed countries around the world.
The program is available online. Watch it.
From the introduction,
In Sick Around the World, FRONTLINE teams up with veteran Washington Post foreign correspondent T.R. Reid to find out how five other capitalist democracies — [...]
Wired notes the Honda Super Cub’s 50th anniversary and 60-millionth unit sold. That places the first sales in 1958, which also happens to be the year I moved (with my family) to Tokyo.
The Cub must have been an immediate hit, because I remember them as ubiquitous. Years later, attending New College in Sarasota Florida in [...]
Cognitive enhancement | All on the mind | Economist.com
Provigil and Ritalin really do enhance cognition in healthy people. Provigil, for example, adds the ability to remember an extra digit or so to an individual’s working memory (most people can hold seven random digits in their memory, but have difficulty with eight). It also improves people’s [...]
I’ve been reading Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke.
Winston Churchill was readying his book Great Contemporaries for the press. It was August 1937. In it was his article on Hitler, written a few years earlier. “Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms,” he said, “have found a highly [...]
David Kaiser: Facts are stubborn things
A couple of days ago President Bush ignited a firestorm before the Knesset by attacking those who support talking with hostile foreign leaders as practitioners of appeasement. “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939,” he said, “an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, [...]
Glenn Greenwald: Tom Friedman’s latest declaration of war
So congratulations to us. After years of desperately searching, we’ve finally found our New Soviet Union. Nay-saying opponents of the New War … may try to point out that it’s a country whose defense spending is less than 1% of our own, has never invaded another country, and [...]
I have a longish commute, and I like to pass the time listening to audiobooks. I get them mostly on CD from my local library system, but because my commute is evenly split between car, train and walking, I rip the CDs to my iPod.
Unfortunately, library CDs are often not in the best shape, and [...]
Dean Baker on one of his favorite subjects, the attribution of ideological motivations to political actors, quoted here mainly for its fine last line.
Frank-Dodd Bailouts: Arithmetic, Not Ideology
It is remarkable how often reporters/columnists feel the need to assert that political disputes are about ideological issues. Why do they feel the need to make assertions for [...]
James Hamilton speculates on the consequences of a US move to a gold standard in 2006.
What if we’d been on the gold standard?:
If the U.S. had decided to go back on the gold standard in 2006, where would we be today? That’s a question my friend Randy Parker recently asked me. Here’s how we both [...]
George Monbiot, in a nice piece on airships, points out a neat solution to the problem of hydrogen fuel storage:
Traveling Light
Even when burning fossil fuels, the total climate-changing impact of an airship, according to researchers at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, is 80-90% smaller than that of ordinary aircraft. But the airship [...]
Deep Antarctic waters freshening
April 18, 2008
Sydney Daily Telegraph
Scientists studying the icy depths of the sea around Antarctica have detected changes in salinity that could have profound effects on the world’s climate and ocean currents. . . Voyage leader Steve Rintoul said his team found that salty, dense water that sinks near the edge of Antarctica [...]
Mailx is a simple NetNewsWire style based on Chris Clark’s Mail style, with readability enhancements. Thanks to Oliver Boermans for some of the ideas.
My aim was to display all the relevant meta-information cleanly, and specify enough leading to improve readability, but no so much as to waste too much screen real estate.
Download Mailx here, put [...]
For those who were, like me, scratching their head over the number of teams in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, this from Wikipedia explains the number, if not the apparently arbitrary reasoning behind it.
Two low-seeded teams (typically teams with poor records that qualified by winning their conference tournament championships) play the “opening round” game to [...]
Wikipedia:
Petrichor (from Greek petros, “stone” + ichor) is the name of the familiar scent of rain on dry earth.
The term was coined in 1964 by two Australian researchers, Bear and Thomas, for an article in the journal Nature. In the article, the authors describe how the smell derives from an oil exuded by certain plants [...]