Relevant History

More on the Facebook as time machine

John Boudreau reports that "the Internet is reconnecting long-lost sweethearts," while Scott Harris writes about Facebook as a time machine (gee, that sounds familiar).

Boudreau:

Not long ago, such rekindlings were largely relegated to once-a-decade school reunions, those awkward gatherings that tend to be more about sizing up past rivals than reconnecting with former sweethearts. But the Internet is now profoundly altering some people's links to the past and sometimes upending their lives in unexpected ways. For some, the outcome is a blissful recoupling; for others, the reignited embers burn down the house....

[T]he Internet, and now social-networking sites such as MyLife.com. and Facebook, make relinking easier and more common. And people are doing it at a much younger age — instead of an uncomfortable phone call to her parents, all he has to do is do a Google search for her name.

Harris:

Many people tell of reuniting with cherished, long-lost friends, or reviving meaningful social circles that had frayed over the years. I've met a couple who were high school sweethearts but had been out of touch for 23 years. Now they credit Facebook for reconnecting them — and the romance is fully rekindled. ...

It's interesting how Facebook has connected a little social network of my high school friends — some close, some not so close. When I couldn't find an address for a friend whose father had died, I contacted one of her classmates through Facebook. She had the e-mail address.

Why is that?

Unlike predecessors Friendster and MySpace, Facebook succeeded by creating a culture of authenticity — not a dodgy realm of alter egos, but a place where people feel comfortable showing off photos of their children to their friends.

I would say that it didn't create that culture of authenticity: it set some initial conditions that allowed users to create it.

[To the tune of Django Reinhardt, "It Don't Mean a Thing (If it Ain't Got That Swing)," from the album The Best of DJango Reinhardt (I give it 1 stars).]

On "Growing Up on Facebook"

Catching up with some reading, I came across Peggy Orenstein's New York Times essay "Growing Up on Facebook," published earlier this year. One of its themes, about the conflict between leaving behind old social circles and reinventing yourself on one hand, and remaining in ambient contact with your old social life on the other, resonated especially strongly:

As a survivor of the postage-stamp era, college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self? The cultural icons of my girlhood were Mary Richards of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and Ann Marie of “That Girl,” both redoubtably trying to make it on their own. Following their lead, I swaggered off to college (where I knew no one) without looking back; then to New York City (where I knew no one) and San Francisco (ditto), refining my adult self with each jump. Certainly, I kept in touch with a few true old friends, but no one else — thank goodness! — witnessed the many and spectacular metaphoric pratfalls I took on the way to figuring out what and whom I wanted to be. Even now, time bends when I open Facebook: it’s as if I’m simultaneously a journalist/wife/mother in Berkeley and the goofy girl I left behind in Minneapolis. Could I have become the former if I had remained perpetually tethered to the latter?

This also connects with an excellent William Deresiewicz essay about social media's erosion of solitude-- which in our pop psychology moments we tend to equate with loneliness and want to banish, but which serves a tremendous psychic need. Humans are social creatures who seem to grow in equal parts through being with others and learning to be on their own-- my children are currently both going through a phase in which they spend a non-trivial amount of time in their rooms-- and Deresciewicz argues that solitude offers a chance (as Orenstein puts it) "to establish distance from their former selves, to clear space for introspection and transformation."

[To the tune of Django Reinhardt, "Swing From Paris," from the album The Best of DJango Reinhardt (I give it 2 stars).]

Coffeeshop workers in New York City

A pretty good New York Times article on people who spend a lot of time working in coffeeshops. My favorite: a matchmaker who works out of a "Nora Ephron-ish coffee shop in the West Village" rather than an office because it's "easier to get people talking in a cafe."

Essentially, cafes really have become cheap coworking space filled with cafe zombies.

[To the tune of Blur, "Coffee & TV," from the album 13 (I give it 2 stars).]

"a skill no child should ever have to learn"

Patrick Stewart-- yes, that Patrick Stewart-- has a harrowing but brilliantly-written piece in the Guardian about growing up with an abusive father:

One of the very last men to be evacuated from Dunkirk, his third stripe was chalked on to his uniform by an officer when no more senior NCOs were left alive. Parachuted into Crete and Italy, both times under fire, he fought at Monte Casino and was twice mentioned in dispatches. A fellow soldier once told me, "When your father marches on to the parade ground, the birds in the trees stop singing."

In civilian life it was a different story. He was an angry, unhappy and frustrated man who was not able to control his emotions or his hands. As a child I witnessed his repeated violence against my mother, and the terror and misery he caused was such that, if I felt I could have succeeded, I would have killed him. If my mother had attempted it, I would have held him down.

Read the whole thing.

[To the tune of Cocteau Twins, "Pur," from the album Four-Calendar Café (I give it 2 stars).]

The decline of the once-proud American webcam sex industry?

This just arrived in my in-box:

DotIn, as in, an Indian domain name.

Excuse me, this is not right. Not that I have anything against India. But when I was in Denmark, I was struck by the fact that American porn dominated the late-night airwaves, and I considered it a little mark in my country's favor. It's America's manifest destiny to dominate the market in pornography: we've long been a leader in consumption of it, and damn if we're not producers, too. It's our last genuine globe- um, straddling, American industry. Now is it all going the way of automobiles and steel? Are we going to turn into Britain, but with a better tan? And what'll be left for us? Manufacturing financial panics?

[To the tune of David Bowie, "Heroes," from the album Live at Olympic Stadium, Montreal (August 30 1987) (I give it 3 stars).]

I suppose it's possible that I'm still sick, and this would make sense if I felt better

Wonkette once referred to Michael Steele as "Michael Steele parodist Michael Steele." Maybe if I felt better, this recent statement would make more sense:

In response to press reports saying that the health care reform train is leaving the station with President Obama at the wheel (or whatever you use to run a train), Michael Steele just told Fox to look out because he is [the] "cow on the tracks." In other words, in addition to his other shortcomings, Steele is apparently unschooled on the history of train/cow confrontations, though I'm not sure it's a metaphor Democrats will necessarily want to dispute. Later, in a new strike in his on-going war with his dignity, Steele pleaded for a "Rodney King moment" on health care.

To elaborate:

The Fox anchor had noted that Democrats are saying the health care reform train has "already left the station" and "Republicans better jump on board."

"Well, I'm the cow on the tracks. You're gonna have to stop that train to get this cow off the track to move forward," Steele said.

It's like the man can't not be entertaining. That's worth something in today's world.

Though "I'm the cow on the tracks" would make an awesome meme.

[To the tune of Yoshinori Sunahara, "Cross Wind Take Off," from the album Take Off and Landing (I give it 5 stars).]

Green rooftops

One of my my favorite features of the California Academy of Sciences-- and there's a lot to like-- is the roof. (Though I even liked the temporary building.)

california academy of sciences, via flickr

Yes, it has a kind of Teletubbies thing going on, but it's still cool.

california academy of sciences, via flickr

So I was intrigued by this article on green roofs, in part because while it's generally positive about the growing popularity of green roofs, it ends on a worried note: that these will end up reduced to an architectural gimmick.

At some point a few of these are going to get built, and people are going to realise that green roofs are being used as the new equivalent of mirrored glass; Architects used to show renderings of towers reflecting birds and clouds to somehow make it disappear and be more palatable to residents and planning officials. In the end, people got a big box covered in mirrors. We should be careful that we don’t get sold a whole lot of big boxes with green boxtops, always shown from above. When you are at street level it will be a very different picture.

[via Inhabitat]

[To the tune of Future Sound of London, "Cascade," from the album Lifeforms (I give it 2 stars).]

I may need to sell off my Fassbinder and Hertzog DVDs now

From the New York Times, in an article about reactions to the Roman Polanski arrest:

The president of the German Film Academy... spoke about the need for "solidarity among prominent people "and bemoaned how Mr. Polanski had been arrested on his way to a film festival, as if film festivals were embassies or churches.

What a brilliant line-- solidarity among prominent people. Damned Regular People applying their standards to us!

Having followed the story back and forth, read about the documentary, about how one of the prosecutors has recanted his story about trying to influence the judge, etc., I come down on the opinion that Polanski ought to be returned to Los Angeles. The argument that he's suffered enough strikes me as dumb, for several reasons. First, he knew the risks when he fled, and he managed to give himself another 30 years. (And are you more deserving of release if you've been on the lam for 5 years or 50? Have you suffered more if you've spent decades looking over your shoulder, or if your caper only worked for a short period?)

Second, lots of people lose parents or spouses under horrible circumstances yet don't go on to commit crimes against 13 year-old girls.

Finally, Polish artists and intellectuals have been moving to France for at least the last 150 years: it's where you go when you make the big time. It's hard to say that Polanski "suffered long enough" if he's imitating Chopin.

[To the tune of Green Day, "Holiday (Faded Ending)," from the album Holiday - Single (I give it 2 stars).]

Sobering

I've been on a Raymond Chandler kick recently, plowing through my two-volume Library of America collection of his work. Chandler was the quintessential hard-drinking writer-- it took him a long time, but he basically drank himself to death-- and of course alcohol figures pretty prominently in his work: Philip Marlowe drinks a lot, people meet at cocktail parties and bars, characters have shady pasts because of alcoholism.

So I was interested to see an article in More Intelligent Life about authors who sober up. The sad conclusion is that with a few exceptions-- Cheever, Carver, Steven King-- going sober is a professional error: "It may seem a little impertinent to gauge the literary merits of sobriety—you cannot write books of any discernible quality if you are dead—but clearly, sobering up is one of the more devastating acts of literary criticism an author can face."

[To the tune of Frank Sinatra with Count Basie & the Orchestra, "It Was A Very Good Year," from the album Sinatra At The Sands (I give it 4 stars).]

Sharon Lerner on "The Real Reason American Women Are So Unhappy"

Slate's Sharon Lerner writes about "The Real Reason American Women Are So Unhappy" (go read the whole piece):

While women in rich countries around the world may be becoming generally sadder... American women are still probably the gloomiest. Only 3 percent of people in Japan experience major depression in their lifetime, for instance, compared with about 17 percent of Americans, according to the most recent cross-national comparison of depression rates.... [According to the] online World Database of Happiness... the family-friendly (or at least family-friendlier) nations of Sweden (in eighth place), Denmark (second), Finland (seventh), and Holland (13th) as happier than we are. For what it’s worth, the United States, birthplace of both “happy hour” and “the Happy Meal,” ranked only 31st in overall happiness....

So why are American women so particularly blue? For women, two of the most potentially life- (and mood-) altering factors are family size and work hours. American women have notable distinctions on both fronts. First, we have more babies than women in most any other developed country. While an American woman still typically has around 2.1 children over her lifetime, in other rich countries, family size has dropped significantly as women have gained access to jobs and education. More than 90 nations throughout Europe and Asia now have fertility rates well below ours. Second, even while we’ve continued to raise sizable families, American women have achieved the very highest rate of full-time employment in the world, with 75 percent of employed women working full-time....

[A] bizarre, punishing disregard for the impact of work stress on mothers of very young children permeates our culture. How else can one explain the U.S. Army’s policy of sending female soldiers back to work full-time just six weeks after giving birth and back into war zones just two-and-a-half months after that? Welfare policy reflects a similar disconnect from the reality of motherhood, with some welfare recipients now guaranteed no leave at all from their work assignments after having babies, which can mean being separated from newborns just days after giving birth. Together, these factors may help explain why, at least in the United States, parenthood now tends to be a downer, with both male and female parents more depressed than their childless peers.

In many ways, the pressures mount as women age and continue to feel the unalleviated pulls of working and parenting. Even though they may start out in the same schools and land in the same jobs, as their careers typically don’t offer the flexibility necessary to care for children, women often have to watch the income gap between themselves and their male counterparts grow—a gap that, given the lack of re-entry points onto career tracks, seems to widen even after children are grown. So, while many women, particularly those who can’t afford to “opt-out,” wind up overwhelmed and exhausted by the combination of full-time careers and motherhood, others wind up nudged out of their professions. Some leave the workforce altogether, but many just wind up in lower-paying, lower-status work that accommodates their schedules. Often neither option is what they wanted, which helps explain the gradual dwindling of women’s happiness.

[To the tune of Zero, "These Blues," from the album 1993-02-06 - Great American Music Hall (I give it 4 stars).]

Why I love Raymond Chandler

From The Long Goodbye:

There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, expert perhaps the metallic ones who are as blonde as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very very tired when you take her home....

There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn't care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up.... There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can't lay a finger on her because in the first place you don't want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original....

And lastly there is the gorgeous show piece who will outlast three kinpin racketeers and marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa Romeo town car complete with pilot and copilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats....

The dream across the way was none of these, not even of that kind of world. She was unclassifiable, as remote and clear as mountain water, as elusive as its color.

Something tells me she's going to cause Philip Marlowe some trouble.

Actually, this list would make a brilliant Facebook quiz: What Kind of Raymond Chandler Blonde Are You?

[To the tune of Concrete Blonde, "Little Wing," from the album The Essential Concrete Blonde (I give it 2 stars).]

Spencer Ackerman on Michael Gerson

I always like Spencer Ackerman, but his response to Michael Gerson's latest "these liberal Jews don't take antisemitism as seriously as the evangelicals" screed jumped out at me:

[S]eriously: Michael Gerson needs to shut his fucking mouth before he ever even thinks accusing a Jew of insufficient vigilance against antisemitism. I don't know what lack of self-awareness convinces right-wing evangelicals that they're the true guardians of the Jews, but that condescending and parochial nonsense is its own form of antisemitism. We Tribesmen do not need some wire-rimmed enabler of one of the most destructive and inept presidents in American history to protect us from the perfidies of the world. It's us and not him who will pay the price for antisemitism, so if Gerson wants to actually act like a righteous gentile, he can start by not accusing Jews of apathy to their own people's wellbeing for the sin of not sharing his politics.

[To the tune of Ric Ocasek, "Coming For You," from the album This Side Of Paradise (I give it 3 stars).]

Quote of the day: On managerial cosmopolitanism

From bookforum.com, via Crooked Timber:

It is unlikely that anyone has ever confused a page of Thomas Friedman’s with one of Immanuel Kant’s, but between them it is possible to triangulate a prevailing sensibility of the past two decades. Call it managerial cosmopolitanism. It celebrates the idea of a global civil society, with the states cooperating to play their proper (limited) role as guardians of public order and good business practices. The hospitality that each nation extends to visiting foreign traders grows ever wider and deeper; generalized, it becomes the most irenic of principles. And so there emerges on the horizon of the imaginable future something like a world republic, with liberty and frequent-flier miles for all.

I suspect I'm being insulted in this paragraph, but I'm still too jet-lagged to figure out exactly how. No, wait...

Eeeewwww. Just... eeeewwww. (Or maybe not?)

From an essay in the Times Higher Education on the seven deadly sins in academia, when I first read it this piece on lust made my eyeballs hurt, and not in a good way:

When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he is famously said to have replied, "because that's where the money is". Equally, the universities are where the male scholars and the female acolytes are. Separate the acolytes from the scholars by prohibiting intimacy between staff and students (thus confirming that sex between them is indeed transgressive - the best sex being transgressive, as any married person will soulfully confirm) and the consequences are inevitable.

The fault lies with the females. The myth is that an affair between a student and her academic lover represents an abuse of his power. What power? Thanks to the accountability imposed by the Quality Assurance Agency and other intrusive bodies, the days are gone when a scholar could trade sex for upgrades....

Normal girls - more interested in abs than in labs, more interested in pecs than specs, more interested in triceps than tripos - will abjure their lecturers for the company of their peers, but nonetheless, most male lecturers know that, most years, there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration and who asks for advice on her essays. What to do?

Enjoy her! She's a perk. She doesn't yet know that you are only Casaubon to her Dorothea, Howard Kirk to her Felicity Phee, and she will flaunt you her curves. Which you should admire daily to spice up your sex, nightly, with the wife.... And in any case, you should have learnt by now that all cats are grey in the dark.

So, sow your oats while you are young but enjoy the views - and only the views - when you are older.

Crooked Timber comments, this is a "classic example of the sort of thing where having shown a draft to a single close female friend might have saved the day, and in the process offered a useful insight into the distinction between the concept 'refreshingly un-PC' and the concept 'creepy'."

However, the author answers his critics this way:

This is a moral piece that says that middle aged male academics and young female undergraduates should not sleep together. Rather, people should exercise self-restraint. Because transgressional sex is inappropriate, the piece uses inappropriate and transgressional language to underscore the point - a conventional literary device. At a couple of places, the piece confounds expectations, another conventional literary device, designed to maintain the reader's interest. Sex between academics and students is not funny, and should not be a source of humour. But employing humour to highlight the ways by which people try to resolve the dissonance between what is publicly expected of them and how they actually feel - not just in this context - reaches back to origins of humour itself. In his introduction, [editor] Matthew [Reisz] wondered how many of his contributors would enter into the spirit of levity that inspired the idea of the seven deadly academic sins (submitting a piece on prevarication late, etc) and I suspected that one could get to heart of all that is wrong with sex between scholars and students by employing the good ol' boy language of middle aged male collusion. I'm not sure I'm wrong.

If it's intended to be a piece whose style and tone exemplify its subject, I have to admit it does a decent job. Naturally the piece has generated a huge number of comments, though this one takes the prize:

Professor Kealey assumes that every male academic’s wife mustn’t be that attractive. How wrong! I, for example, I am far hotter than any of my husband’s young and inexperienced students could ever (unfortunately for them) hope to be.

Hear hear. When I was in Oxford, walking around in the evening and trying to navigate around the crowds of students in high heels and skirts, I'd sometimes think, "They might be interesting in twenty years." I can't be the only man who reacts like that.

[To the tune of Radiohead, "Scatterbrain (As Dead As Leaves)," from the album Hail To The Thief (I give it 1 stars).]

Nudge in Britain

The New York Times' Idea of the Day blog reports on the appeal of Thaler and Sunstein's ideas in Britain, especially among conservatives:

“Behavioral economics has been embraced by the British right in particular,” writes Matthew Taylor in Prospect. David Cameron, shown here, the Conservative considered the country’s likely next leader, seeks to “refashion the Tories’ whole approach to regulation” based on the insights of “Nudge,” the book Sunstein co-wrote with Richard Thaler.

Ideas like “save tomorrow” — getting people to sign up now to make bigger pension contributions next year — appeal to the “conservative brain,” writes Taylor, because they preserve individual choice while leveraging human nature toward responsible action: “The fact that the financial sacrifice is in the future means people will sign up; inertia prevents them changing it later.”  

[To the tune of The Band, "The Weight," from the album Music From Big Pink (I give it 5 stars).]

The problem with forecasting

Lewis Grossberger on the whole 2012 thing, and a variation on the question that futurists often get: if you're so smart, why don't you still exist?

Nothing special is going to happen in 2012. The world isn’t going to end.... The [only] real catastrophe that lies ahead is we’re going to be inundated by a tsunami of Mayan apocalypse crap for the next three years.

I hate to sound anti-Mayan, because some of my best friends are extinct Mesoamerican rain-forest denizens, but I have a question: How come these ahead-of-their-time mathematical geniuses couldn’t foresee their own apocalypse? The Mayan civilization is kaput! And yet we’re supposed to believe they were able to look hundreds of years into the future and foresee ours?

[To the tune of Thom Yorke, "Analyse," from the album The Eraser (I give it 3 stars).]

Brilliant parenting advice

From the recent Values Voters Summit: "Coburn Aide: If Boys Knew Porn Will Turn Them Gay, They Won't Want Playboy."

This does not link to the Onion, I'm sorry to say.

[To the tune of Duran Duran, "Bedroom Toys," from the album Astronaut (I give it 2 stars).]

Strange signs

A couple curious things I saw walking around Vienna today.

via flickr

Is it just me, or do "Alter Schmuck" and "pullovaria" this sound like his and hers medical centers?

And I dislike sexism in that special way that fathers of daughters do, but...

via flickr

Space Invaders? Huh?

[To the tune of Amy Winehouse, "Back To Black," from the album Back to Black (I give it 2 stars).]

"Blogging constituted a kind of gateway drug"

Adam Greenfield on craft, localism and infrastructure:

[O]ver the last several years, San Francisco in particular has become a field of premium and super-premium, small-run craft production: Ice cream. Bicycles. Coffee. Spirits. Clothing. An audience primed to expect, desire and demand the provenance of the “lovingly handcrafted,” and pitch-perfect retail tuned to that demand. Especially for someone like me, whose senses have become inured to the increasingly homogenized material landscape of Manhattan, it’s hard to escape the sense that the last decade’s activity amounts to nothing less than a local renaissance of craft and technique and pride.

It’s not difficult to infer that this all happened when it did, where it did, because of the post-dotcom-crash emergence of a healthy cohort of talented (and relatively well-capitalized) folks hungry to make something with their lives just a little more tangible than some evanescent Web portal. I’m also willing to bet that the relatively low barriers to entry involved in successful push-button publishing of the early blog era convinced a whole lot of people in the Bay Area that it was safe to try their hand at other, more ambitious endeavors – that is, that blogging constituted a kind of gateway drug....

The San Francisco resurgence would not – could not – have happened if there were not at this point literally several hundred years of insight into craft technique just lying on the ground, for just about any domain of productive activity you can imagine.

[To the tune of Alban Berg Quartet, "String Quartet No. 3 in D major, Op. 18 No. 3: III. Allegro," from the album Beethoven: The Complete String Quartets [Disc 3] (I give it 4 stars).]

What to do with those old CD cases

Use them in a building, like the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion by Atelier Feichang Jianzhu.

The exterior structure is composed of hundreds of polycarbonate transparent recycled plastic tubes formed into a grid-like matrix. Recycled from used CD cases, the polycarbonate tubes will be able to be recycled again at the end of the building’s life. Multi-colored LED lights will be built into the exterior structure and be computer controlled to change the appearance of the exterior on a whim or based on a computer program.

[To the tune of Giorgio Moroder & David Bowie, "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)," from the album Cat People (I give it 3 stars).]

Explaining why the Ikea switch to Verdana is a mistake

It's easy to dismiss the IKEA switch from Futura (a font I used in my e-mail when I worked at the Institute for the Future, for obvious reasons) to Verdana as much ado about nothing. But this Guardian piece does a better job than many of explaining why it matters:

Futura has a quirkiness to it that Verdana does not, as well as a much longer history linked to a political art movement. Futura, dating from the 1920s, is loosely Constructivist (only loosely, because the proprietary version that Ikea made its own – Ikea Sans – is slightly tweaked to distinguish it from, say, something Joseph Stalin might have used). Verdana... is one of the most widely used fonts in the world, and people who care about these things dislike the way our words are becoming homogenised: the way a sign over a bank looks the same as one over a cinema; the way magazines that once looked original now look like something designed for reading online. This is what has happened with Ikea: the new look has been defined not by a company proudly parading its 66-year heritage, but by something driven by the clarity of the digital age....

Verdana seems to have been chosen by Ikea by default, or at least by economics. An Ikea spokeswoman, Monika Gocic, has said that Verdana is for them because "it is more efficient and cost-effective". This is another way of saying: "We use it because everyone else does."

It's amazing to think that serious modernism is now a century old-- a hundred years ago, more or less, Peter Behrens was revolutionizing industrial design at AEG and training a generation of architects and designers who would shape the look of the 20th century (Gropius, Mies and Le Corbusier all studied under him), Charles Rennie Mackintosh was finishing the Glasgow School or Art, Frank Lloyd Wright completed the Robie House-- and so IKEA can reasonably see itself as a company with a serious history that it should take seriously.

Further, IKEA matters in the world of design, not just because it's a company that has shown that (at its best anyway) good design sells, but because it has a disproportionate effect on the design market:

According to Swedish folklore, there are more copies of the Ikea catalogue printed each year than the Bible. It certainly has more Billy bookcases than either the Old or New Testatment, but its designers would do well to remember their history. The first movable type appeared with Gutenberg's Bible in the 1450s, and everything followed from there. In this strange way, the multi-million print-run of the Ikea catalogue has now adopted a cloak of heavy responsibility. But things could be worse. It could be in Helvetica.

[To the tune of Alban Berg Quartet, "String Quartet No. 4 in C minor, Op. 18 No. 4: II. Scherzo (Andante scherzoso quasi Allegretto)," from the album Beethoven: The Complete String Quartets (Disc 4) (I give it 4 stars).]

Citizen scientists and citizen journalists

My friend (and, if the editors smile upon our efforts, soon-to-be coauthor) Darlene Cavalier pointed me to an article by Dan Schultz on Media Shift Idea Lab about what journalists can learn from the citizen scientist movement. Essentially, the piece argues that citizen and professional scientists have developed a division of labor and authority that journalists could emulate.

Two points.

First, this isn't the first time that such a division of labor and authority has emerged in science. In the early nineteenth century, the scientific world in Britain (and in somewhat similar measure the U.S.) consisted of a small elite that ran the Royal Society, was considered (or considered itself) competent to deal with big theoretical issues, and set the agenda for science; and a mass of local observers, ranging from country parson and skilled artisans to teachers and soldiers. Members of this second group could become notable for masterful knowledge of a narrow slice of the universe-- the natural history of their parish, the habits of large mammals in eastern Kenya, Jupiter's moons, etc.-- and could make meaningful contributions to science within their area of expertise.

These boundaries weren't entirely hard and fast-- there was always the possibility of either moving up from the category of local expert to scientific eminence (Charles Darwin might never have made the jump to the second category if he hadn't gone on the Beagle), or reaching beyond one's place-- but people generally (to use an outmoded phrase) knew their place.

The existence of these well-understood boundaries, and the resulting symbiotic relationship that is emerging between professional and citizen scientists, gives Schultz hope that journalists could create something similar:

If you buy my claim that scientists and journalists all care about informational integrity and the quest for truth, then several things can be extrapolated:

1. If professional journalists take the lead by clearly defining expectations, explaining best practices, and implementing an accessible infrastructure, then amateurs can contribute without disrupting the industry.
2. If amateur journalists do a good job of covering a smaller scope of topics or areas (e.g. the hyperlocal), then professionals can focus on the deeper, otherwise inaccessible issues.
3. Professional journalists are responsible for creating and maintaining the citizen network if they want it to meet their standards.
4. Citizen networks need more than a host. In order to reach full potential, they need to be explicitly empowered through tools and guidance.
5. A symbiotic relationship between the professional, the amateur, and the crowd is not just possible, it's socially optimal.

And there we have it: If the journalism industry can create an infrastructure that allows amateurs to contribute reliable information, then professionals will be able to dedicate more resources to epic reporting. If local papers can find the capacity to set up and empower meaningful citizen networks, they will establish a major foothold in the evolving domains of community and information.

But this leads to my second point, which is that this division of labor and authority is exactly what some bloggers argue is unnecessary today-- and which is more at issue in contentious scientific fields like climate change (or alas, evolution) than it should be. Proponents of intelligent design, for example, have quite brilliantly appropriated the language of democracy to suggest that people should be allowed to make up their own minds about evolution, and could easily make a similar appeal using the citizen science movement. Journalists, it seems to me, are likely to have a tougher time differentiating what they do from "citizen journalists," particularly in an age in which the boundary between reporting and opinion has been eroded, and the professional status of journalists is under assault.

Still, it's a good model to follow.

[To the tune of Miles Davis, "So What," from the album Columbia Years 1955-85 (Disc 2): Originals/Moods (I give it 4 stars).]

Sure you're saved. But what about Fido and Fluffy?

Marginal Revolution is remarkably restrained in its description of this new service: Rapture insurance for your pets.

You've committed your life to Jesus. You know you're saved. But when the Rapture comes what's to become of your loving pets who are left behind? Eternal Earth-Bound Pets takes that burden off your mind.

We are a group of dedicated animal lovers, and atheists. Each Eternal Earth-Bound Pet representative is a confirmed atheist, and as such will still be here on Earth after you've received your reward. Our network of animal activists are committed to step in when you step up to Jesus....

Our service is plain and simple; our fee structure is reasonable. For $110.00 we will guarantee that should the Rapture occur within ten (10) years of receipt of payment, one pet per residence will be saved. Each additional pet at your residence will be saved for an additional $15.00 fee. A small price to pay for your peace of mind and the health and safety of your four legged friends.

I think I also really like the way it brings together evangelicals and atheists. Who says people can't put aside their differences?

[To the tune of Willie Nelson, "Gravedigger," from the album Moment of Forever (I give it 5 stars).]

Quote of the day

Report from a health care town hall:

A lot of the folks in attendance were confused. President Obama was portrayed on signs and pamphlets as some sort of Nazi, socialist, foreign born, communist, Muslim, euthanasia enthusiast... [by protesters who] don't want to see Medicare go away, but are opposed to government healthcare coverage options.

Blink.

[h/t Pam's House Blend]

[To the tune of Led Zeppelin, "The Battle of Evermore," from the album Box Set (Disc 2) (I give it 4 stars).]

Jugglers on the Quad

Something I saw tonight at Stanford:

via flickr

Juggler practicing on the Quad.

via flickr

Since I'm attending a conference on collaborative visualization and distributed intelligence, I expected to see a lot of really cool things today. I just didn't expect the best one to come after the day was over.

[To the tune of Led Zeppelin, "The Rover," from the album Physical Graffiti (Remastered) (I give it 3 stars).]

Redwood Trading Post knows its market!

Sarah Palin, muse

William Shatner reads Sarah Palin's resignation speech as poetry (listen for the bongo drums).

Thanks to Balloon Juice for costing me several minutes of productivity this morning. Though the best commentary is from Gawker:

It's like Peggy Noonan, Jack London, and William Faulkner wandered into the woods with three buttons of peyote and one typewriter, and only this speech emerged.

And she wrote this speech! In advance, on paper! What does any of it mean? It is amazing. Twenty years ago she could competently descibe a dog race, three years ago she could articulate a position on the abortion issue, and this weekend she composed a resignation speech by throwing culture war stock phrases into a hat and dumping it upside down on a copy of The Paranoid Style in American Politics [ed: great book! really holds up!].

Okay, now I'm going to work.

Yes, shamelessness is the new virtue

A few days ago I wondered if shamelessness was the the new virtue. Yesterday I didn't quite find an answer, but I did find another great example of how information transparency doesn't necessarily lead to greater probity and economy, but greater recklessness or shamelessness. This is from Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, pp. 16-17:

[I]n 1993, federal securities regulators forced companies, for the first time, to reveal details about the pay and perks of their top executives. The idea was that once pay was in the open, boards would be reluctant to give executives outrageous salaries and benefits....

But guess what happened. Once salaries became public information, the media regularly ran special stories ranking CEOs by pay. Rather than suppressing the executive perks, the publicity had CEOs in America comparing their pay with that of everyone else. The result?... [I]n 1976 the average CEO was paid 36 times as much as the average worker. In 1993, the average CEO was paid 131 times as much.... Now the average CEO makes about 369 times as much as the average worker-- about three times the salary before executive compensation went public.

Really great.

Is shamelessness the new virtue?

There's a great catflight going on between Matt Taibbi (who has turned into a mad cross between Upton Sinclair, Michael Lewis, and Lenny Bruce) and Claudia Deutsch about Goldman Sachs' plan to pay big bonuses to its people again. Matt rips apart a post titled "Congratulations, Goldman-- And I Wish You Many, Many More."

The defense of Goldman seems to boil down to, yes they have all sorts of connections, and yes they got tons of money from the government, but but they're honest about it.

It makes me wonder: At one time, back in the day, we thought that the Internet and other information technologies would create transparency, make it harder to hide corruption, and thus force powerful people to behave better.

But we've essentially run an experiment for a decade testing this hypothesis, and it seems to me that it hasn't worked out that way.

Instead of forcing corruption underground, the Internet has forced shamelessness aboveground-- and indeed, has turned it into a virtue. So the Goldman execs may be dickheads, money-grubbing asses, and willing to sell their grandmothers if the price is right, but they don't pretend to be anything else. So they're welcome to their bonuses.

Hitler finds out his subtitles are wrong

The whole re-subtitled Downfall thing reaches its logical endpoint here:

Sometimes Amazon does too good a job of recommending things

This came up the other day. I'm pretty sure that aside from my actually owning all of them, these three items have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

In case you can't see, the items are Radiohead's Amnesiac; Alan Furst's novel Dark Star; and the classic children's book Goodnight Moon.

After I stopped being slightly alarmed (can I really be that predictable?), I was pretty impressed.

Demolishing the future

The New York Times has a piece (Future Vision Banished to the Past") about the likely destruction of Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower, a "rare built example of Japanese Metabolism, a movement whose fantastic urban visions became emblems of the country’s postwar cultural resurgence."

Nakagin Capsule Tower, from the New York Times

The building, built in 1972, is now in lousy shape (what a surprise for an architecturally distinctive building employing innovative construction technology), but the author argues that

the building’s demolition would be a bitter loss. The Capsule Tower is not only gorgeous architecture; like all great buildings, it is the crystallization of a far-reaching cultural ideal. Its existence also stands as a powerful reminder of paths not taken, of the possibility of worlds shaped by different sets of values.

Founded by a loose-knit group of architects at the end of the 1950s, the Metabolist movement sought to create flexible urban models for a rapidly changing society. Floating cities. Cities inspired by oil platforms. Buildings that resembled strands of DNA. Such proposals reflected Japan’s transformation from a rural to a modern society. But they also reflected more universal trends, like social dislocation and the fragmentation of the traditional family, influencing generations of architects from London to Moscow.

Like lots of twentieth-century architectural movements, the Metabolists were at least as influential for their ideas as their actual buildings. (I remember studying them along with Archigram and Team X in David Brownlee's Art History 481B-- probably the most important class I took in college, given how often I use what I learned in it.) A lot of the more outlandish ideas from this period were never meant to be built-- drawings of walking cities were stimulating reflections on the nature of building in an impermanent world, but totally impractical-- but they made other, more prolific architects think differently about their work and the issues it raises.

Nakagin Capsule Tower, photo by dod: via flickr

In a way, I wonder if there's a useful comparison to be drawn between movements like these, or projects that remain forever on the drawing board but get talked about, and futurists and their work. Most of us don't build things, or write software, or craft strategies; the scenarios we write are intended to be provocations or stimulations (a hedge against them being wrong, which to one degree or another they inevitably are), and at best we have an indirect but positive influence on other people.

Composed of 140 concrete pods plugged into two interconnected circulation cores, the structure was meant as a kind of bachelor hotel for businessmen working in the swanky Ginza neighborhood of Tokyo.

Inside, each apartment is as compact as a space capsule. A wall of appliances and cabinets is built into one side, including a kitchen stove, a refrigerator, a television and a tape deck. A bathroom unit, about the size of an airplane lavatory, is set into an opposite corner. A big porthole window dominates the far end of the room, with a bed tucked underneath....

Each of the concrete capsules was assembled in a factory, including details like carpeting and bathroom fixtures. They were then shipped to the site and bolted, one by one, onto the concrete and steel cores that housed the building’s elevators, stairs and mechanical systems.

Nakagin Capsule Tower capsule, photo by pict_u_re via flickr

In theory, more capsules could be plugged in or removed whenever needed. The idea was to create a completely flexible system, one that could be adapted to the needs of a fast-paced, constantly changing society. The building became a symbol of Japan’s technological ambitions, as well as of the increasingly nomadic existence of the white-collar worker.

It's amazing how much work and expense goes into making the first example of something modular and standardized.

Of course, the great irony of building and construction standardization is that it hasn't produced a revolution in architecture. If anything, it's made it easier to throw up thousands of neo-Spanish colonial (or American colonial, or frontier, or postmodern-via-Miami Vice) houses in California's Central Valley, outside Phoenix, or in the suburban rings around Atlanta. Kurokawa was right that modularity and flexibility would suit "the needs of a fast-paced, constantly changing society;" but when married to the reality of real estate development, and the unreality of the mortgage market in the 2000s, the result was kind of architecture very different from what the Metabolists imagined-- a useful reminder for futurists that what we think of as "exogenous" factors often have a bigger impact on the futures we're trying to understand than the factors we do pay attention to.

Satisfying your Bollywood condom dance number needs

You know you want it....

In Boing Boing again

This time for a time lapse video of Hush's installation at the Carmichael Gallery (owned by the son of a friend):

Thanks, Pesco!

Milton Glaser on relationships

From Milton Glaser's 2001 "Ten Things I Have Learned," via Boing Boing and various other links:

[T]here is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.

The entire piece is pretty interesting. It gives me a bit of insight into why some people really like him.

Surprisingly interesting

In the Guardian:

The birthday present

When her husband [Brad] turned 40, Charla Muller couldn't decide what to give him, so she offered him guaranteed sex every night for a whole year. Could they manage it? And what would be the effect on their marriage?

It looks like it should be kind of a fluffy article, but there's actually some interesting stuff in it, largely because of the apparent ordinariness of the author.

Wasn't Brad's initial reaction right - 365 days of scheduled sex is surely a turn off? What about spontaneity? "I felt the opposite. I felt the pressure came off. He no longer thought 'Tonight is a big deal, the only night we'll have sex this month is now, it's got to be really special.' And for me, before nightly sex, I used to guiltily wonder when I was going to have the time or desire. With sex every night it meant that I had to find the time, and that when it happened it was no longer necessarily a big deal." What about the desire? "The idea was that it would come." In fact, Muller writes in her book, 365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy, "Regular sex was allowing for feelings of health and wellness that sparked a desire to have more sex. Sex is a great stress-reliever too. A nice relaxing romp with Brad was a wonderful distraction from feeling like the world would crumble if I wasn't out there battling dragons 24/7. I could relax, feel those endorphins pinging around my body and forget about my bad day. And perhaps best of all, our intimate moments were making me feel younger."...

Muller concludes with some advice for married couples: "However often you are doing it, double it. And six months from now, double it again. It's proof that you're here, alive and very together".

Ken Burns interviewed by Michael Krasny

Interesting to see what Michael Krasny looks like, after years of hearing him on the radio. Also onstage is Dayton Duncan, Burns' longtime collaborator.

Ken Burns at the Palace of Fine Arts

Burns and his long-time collaborator Dayton Duncan, an historian and writer.

Bell Brothers at Cafe Zoë

A local band appearing at my favorite cafe.

My friends are media geniuses

First I made it onto BoingBoing. Then Jess' Sad Guys on Trading Floors got nominated for a Webby. Then, I discovered that Princeton professor, Renaissance historian, fellow ex-American Scholar board member, and all-around nice guy Anthony Grafton has finally done something he can be proud of: his son Sam-- who I don't think is named after the character in Shane-- had a hilarious letter read on The Bugle, my favorite podcast of all time. (Bugle 70, near the end. It's the letter about penis-shaped helicopters. I've never heard John and Andy laugh so much at a letter.) Clearly our eventual collective dominance of all media is inevitable.

Hospital coffee, Palo Alto style

At the Palo Alto Clinic's surgical center.

Suck on it, Strunk and White!

Edinburgh professor Geoffrey Pullum launches an attack on "50 years of stupid grammar advice:"

April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a commemorative edition has been released.

I won't be celebrating.

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it....

[B]oth authors were grammatical incompetents. Strunk had very little analytical understanding of syntax, White even less.... [D]espite the "Style" in the title, much in the book relates to grammar, and the advice on that topic does real damage. It is atrocious.

Most notably, their treatment of the passive voice is a disaster:

[T]he bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don't know what is a passive construction and what isn't. Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses....

The treatment of the passive is not an isolated slip. It is typical of Elements. The book's toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules.

It goes downhill from there. Well worth reading in its entirety.

Passed Out Wookies

Jess just pointed me to Passed Out Wookies. These two from the Hall of Fame are extra special. Yet more proof that, as I've been arguing, experiments in collective intelligence show that the Hive Mind is really interested in only two things: cats and dogs doing cute things, and humans doing really stupid things.

Boing Boing love

I've got a thank-you on Boing Boing, in a post about protest art made with real but worthless Zimbabwean currency. I blogged this a couple days ago.

Another casualty of academic budget cuts: casual sports

Amid the serious stuff that the Chronicle of Higher Education reports about hiring freezes, mandatory pay cuts, and other reductions affecting universities these days, is this:

Michael K. McBeath, an associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University, likes to burn some energy in the middle of the day.

So do his colleagues. For years, roughly two dozen faculty and staff members hit the gym for a game of basketball around noon, three times a week.

Now their roster has been cut in half — by anxiety.

As budget cuts have prompted the university to announce that it will shutter more than 40 academic programs, cut 200 faculty-associate positions, and force both faculty and staff members to take unpaid furloughs, far fewer people show up at the gym these days.

Mr. McBeath said many are just too worried about job security to risk an hour of lost work or a supervisor's raised eyebrow over a game of basketball.

This may not sound like a thing, but the decline of informal institutions like these-- weekly departmental get-togethers, faculty-student softball games, and the like-- are troubling.

Skippy 1, Groundhog 0

I love local news.

A hungry groundhog couldn't see its shadow -- or much of anything else -- after it got its head stuck in a peanut butter jar in Allentown yesterday afternoon.

Unable to see through the label-covered jar, the creature struggled to remove it from its head. Observers trapped the animal under a 55-gallon drum outside a Dunkin' Donuts at Airport Road and Lloyd Street and called emergency crews.

But a volunteer wearing protective gloves was able to move the squirming groundhog to a nearby garden and then remove the jar from its head around 1 p.m.

Thanks, Jess!

Brilliant protest sign

This is great: a protest sign made of worthless currency.

And we think the economy here is bad because it's hard to get financing for the spare 56" plasma screen TV. Zimbabwe has been dealing with inflation so bad, even its $100 trillion dollar note is worthless (and at one point it ran out of money to pay for the license to... print more money. It also then ran out of paper. Comedy gold!).

That's some serious inflation. Suck on it, Weimar Germany! You bunch of wimps. (Interestingly, the same firm that supplied currency-quality paper stock to Zimbabwe until mid-2008 also supplied the Weimar government.)

[via Britannica Blog]

Why there's a 33 on bottles of Rolling Rock beer

Finally, an answer to the eternal question: what does the "33" on the side of Rolling Rock bottles mean?

[h/t: Thanks, Jess!]

My daughter, after ten years in Silicon Valley

This evening we went to dinner at California Pizza Kitchen, in downtown Palo Alto. While we were waiting for our friends to arrive, Elizabeth went behind a tree.

"Look!" she said. "I'm in stealth mode!"

Idle Words on Kundera and dating

Maciej Ceglowski, creator of Wrong Tomorrow (our motto: time vs. pundits), may be my new favorite writer. Here he is on Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being:

One of the terrors of dating is Milan Kundera, and specifically, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the sexually-transmitted book that this Czech-born author has inflicted on a generation of American youth.

I fully recognize the important role of the dating book, that is, the carefully selected work you lend a prospective lover sometime in the golden honeymoon period between your second cup of coffee together and the first time you spend a night in the same bed without touching. In that short window of time, your partner is still a delicious mystery to you, an enigmatic and discerning being, and to her you are a dark continent of adventure and excitement, waiting to be explored. And so you lend her books that are funny, playful, and good subway reading, but also complex enough to hint at your Hidden Depths. Something unusual is a plus, as are lots of sexy bits, to serve as a reminder of the animal fires that burn within. And since you don't yet know one another too well, you try to choose a shotgun of a book that fires a wide pattern, thematically speaking. Like an early physicist studying the atom, you will hurl little bits of culture at your new love and collect valuable data about her inner life by observing the way they bounce off.

Given these requirements, it's not surprising that many people have gravitated towards The Unbearable Lightness of Being.... The problem, though, is that The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a really bad book. Milan Kundera is the Dave Matthews of Slavic letters, a talented hack, certainly a hack who's paid his dues, but a hack nonetheless. And by his own admission, this is his worst book.

The idea of new people being like atoms at the Cavendish, to be understood through indirect and oblique probes (Ernest Rutherford was widely acknowledged as the sexiest of the early 20th century's experimental physicists); the Dave Matthews comparison; the assault on a book so well-regarded that Daniel Day-Lewis was in the movie. Gold.

Actually, Wrong Tomorrow would be a great motto for a futurist: "Right Today, Wrong Tomorrow."