November 1, 2009
"The dash don't be silent."
Laura Wattenberg on Ledasha, Legends, and Race [Part Two | Part Three] "Why does it matter? We tell funny stories all the time without believing them. (Does anybody really think that a priest, a rabbi and a chicken walked into a bar?) I believe it matters in the case of urban legend names because they're not merely humor...and they're not random. They exist in a complex social setting, and they serve a subtle and consequential purpose. They are proxies for talking about race."
Article about the environmental impact of pets.
Should owning a great dane make you as much of an eco-outcast as an SUV driver? Yes it should, say Robert and Brenda Vale. Article about the environmental impact of pets.
Losing my Religion
Deconversion 2.0. A series of Youtube videos detailing the author's separation from his faith. His diction, with...pauses, is a little odd to get used to but worth getting around.
After the Wall
Fuckin' Bonfire.
Suzi Barett made a video to dissuade her actor friend OT from moving to Los Angeles. Very NSFW language [more inside]
It was a lone tree burning on the desert.
A lecture from Professor Amy Hungerford on Cormac Mccarthy's Blood Meridian.
Part one and two. [more inside]
Talking about Type
Type Design on the Radio. TTBOOK (previously) does an hour-long program about typography (podcast here, RM stream here). Segments include interviews with Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones of Gotham fame (they say their "Obama Font" worked best of those in the campaign; others agree), a Verdana-centric interview with Matthew Carter (he comments on the IKEA kerfluffle), and interview Kitty Burns Florey, author of Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting . [more inside]
The Latvian Crisis
Latvia's Tiger Economy Loses Its Bite: Less than a year after Latvia joined the E.U. in 2004, its growth rate topped all of Europe. As global stock markets overheated and competition for investment opportunities intensified, Scandinavian banks showered Latvia with cheap credit. Now, with the highest unemployment in Europe, and propped up by $10 billion in IMF loans, Latvia's economy struggles to stay afloat.
Yotta vote against this
Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven't yet been named. Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may one day become—a terrorist. [more inside]
"Britain punches above its weight"
Britain: the birthplace of globalisation in the 19th century; ruler of a worldwide empire. But why, over a century later, is the UK still appearing as a major player on the political world stage? Its entire population of around 60m is comparable only with the population of California and Texas combined. Geographically it is a smaller size than Texas, and cut off from the larger and potentially more-politically-influential Eurozone. Is it relying on its history as a superpower, or on its current relations with superpowers? [more inside]
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