Tag dump

Friends and colleagues who know I blog, but don't read enrevanche regularly, sometimes ask me what I write about.

From now on, I'll just point them to this post.

Here's a little bit of found poetry for you - the trailing-18-month enrevanche tag dump.

1968, 2007, 24, 5768, 9/11, acc, ACC basketball, accents, accounting, activism, advertising, advice, affirmative action, Afghanistan, aimee mann, airlines, alcohol, allegories, alternative energy, AM.APMP, american history, Americana, Amy Winehouse, anecdotes, animation, anniversary, another roadside attraction, anti-semitism, apartment renovations, APMP, apple, applecare, applications, architecture, art, art and endeavor, atheism, atlantic coast conference, Austrian economics, authoritarianism, automobiles, autumn, awards shows, away for a few days, bad advice, bad faith, bad weather, Balko, banality, banking security, Barbaro, barbecue, barbecue sauce, barbers, Barnett, bars, baseball, basketball, beaches, bears, beer, beijing, Benazir Bhutto, biology, birthdays, bittorrent, BlackBerry, blacksburg, Blendtec, bloggage, Blogger beta, blogger parochialism, blogging, blogjuice, blognotes, blogroll, blood glucose testing, bloomberg, blowing shit up, bong hits, books, bop, bridges, bubble, Buckley, business, business strategy, business writing, busking, buzzwords, cabdrivers, CAIR, california wildfires, calling in sick, cancer, capitalism, capybaras, cardiovascular fitness, career, carnivals, Carolina, Carrie, cars, Castro, catblogging, CBGB, celebrity culture, cell phones, censorship, change management, changes, Chapomatic, charity, Charles Tyrwhitt, Chevron, china, cholera, Chow Bella, Chow Fun, chowderhead bazoo, chows, Christmas, CIA, cinema, cities, citizenship, civics, civil rights, class issues, classic cartoons, classical languages, cluelessness, co-branding, cobb, coffee, collaboration, collections, collective intelligence, collectors, college basketball, comedy, comic books, computer security, computers, condiments, Congress, conservatives, conspiracy theories, consumer products, contests, context, contracts, contrarian, convergence, cooking, cool stuff, cooperation with tyranny, Cormac McCarthy, corporate life, corruption, country retreats, courage, creative commons, creative destruction, creative expression, creative nonfiction, credit market, criminal law, Cuba, cuisine, cuisine rurale, cultural illiteracy, culture, currency markets, current events, customer service, d00d, Daily Telegraph, damn, damned lies, Darwin, darwinism, david pogue, daylight savings time, Deadwood, debacles, declining standards, demagoguery, Democrats, demographic fiscal suicide, demographics, depravity, derivatives, design, detroit, DHL, digital life, Dinesh D'Souza, disarmament, disaster preparedness, dishonesty, dissent, divorce rates, Diwali, Dizzy Gillespie, dogblogging, don surber, drink, drug policy, drugs, drumming up business, dude--what?, Duke, duke lacrosse, dynamite in small packages, e-learning, e-mail, early adopters, ecclesiastical polity, economic freedom, economics, education, elder care, elections, electoral politics, energy policy, English, environment, environmental policy, eschatology, essay question, estate planning, eternal truths, Etherbeat, etiquette, etymology, eulogies, everlasting godstoppers, evil, evolutionary psychology, excel, exercises in futility, fall, family, family trees, fast food, father's day, feminism, film, finance, firearms, five questions, flameouts, flowers, fontifier, food, foodies, foreign language software, foreign policy, Foreign Policy magazine, fraud, freakonomics, freedom, freedom of speech, freelance, fritter, FUD, fun with Myers-Briggs Personality Types, fundraising, futurism, gadgetry, gag reflex, gambling, games, gapminder, Gary Shivers, gastronomy, Gawker, geekery, geeks, genealogy, Geneva Conventions, Geni, genocide, geopolitics, ghastly overreaching, GI, gift-giving, global warming, gluttony, go bag, God Is Not Great, Gonzalez, Google, Google Maps, GOP, gospel, gourmand, gourmet, grand strategy, GrandCentral, gratitude, graydon, greenwich village, Greenwich Village Idiot, grits, groceries, groucho marx, guns, Guy Clark, GW Bush, H1B, hack yourself, ham, hamburgers, harry potter, haute cuisine, have a blessed day, Hayek, health, healthcare, Heinlein, heroism, hip-hop, history, Hitchens, hobbies, hollywood, home schooling, home-based businesses, homeland security, honesty is the best policy, honor, hoops, housing, housing slump, human rights, humor, hypocrisy, I hate those meeces to pieces, I see naked people, I'm sure I should find this offensive, ibm, ideal for home defense, idiocy, illin', immigration, in memoriam, in the future, in the news, income inequality, incompetence, independent film, indexed, India, inflation, information design, information sharing, information technology, information warfare, informed speculation, infrastructure, innovations, insanity, insomnia, insomnia cookies, insurance, internet, internet companies, internet radio, internet tablet, internet telephony, interruptions, interspecies communication, interviews, investments, iphone, iPod, ipod touch, Iran, Iraq, irony, Islam, israel, IT management, ITSM, IVR, James Brown, James Fallows, japan, jargon, jazz, Jesus, JetBlue, JetBlue blues, job-seeking, John Brown, Joshua Bell, junk science, ketchup, kidblogging, kitsch, knowledge management, knowledge work, Kos, krispy kreme, Krispy Kreme Challenge, La France, labor relations, language, languages, last one out please turn off the lights, late adopters, LDS, Lee Kuan Yew, lemurblogging, lemurs, libertarianism, libertarians, libraries, LibraryThing, lies, lies and the lying liars who tell them, life lessons, lifestyles, liquidity, literate hobos, Live Earth, living will, long war, Looney Tunes, Louis Armstrong, love and marriage, luck, lying, MacBook, macintosh, Madeleine L'Engle, madeleines, magazines, MAKE, managed services, management, management theory, manatees, manbag, manpurse, Mark Steyn, marketing, martial arts, MBA programs, MC5, McCain, mcmaster, mediocrity, meetings, MEGEN, memes, Memorial Day, metafilter, mice, michelin guide, Microsoft, middle east, milestones, Mister Gato, Mister Rogers, modern medicine, moleskines, monetary policy, monopolies, mountain philosopher, mouse brains, movie reviews, movies, Mr. Peanut, Mr. Pink, mres, mules, multitasking, music, music and cats, music reviews, musotik, mustard, My Maps, n800, Nadelmann, nagl, NASCAR, natural antidepressants, ncaa, neosoul, nerdery, nerds, net radio, networked applications, neuroscience, new economy, new media, New York City, New York Times, New Yorker, news, newspaper business, Nobel, nokia, nokia n800, nokia n810, Norah Jones, North Carolina, north korea, nostalgia, notebooks, numbers stations, nutrition, obama, obituaries, office software, office supplies, offshoring, oh dear, oil, one laptop per child, one of these things is not like the other, online business, online dating, online gaming, online learning, online tests, oops I did it again, open source, OpenID, opera, Oprah, outsourcing, overheard in new york, oversharing, pandas, paraphernalia, parody, patent law, PC, peak oil, pedantry, peer training, penal law, personal computers, personalDNA, petroleum, philosophy, phone, photoblogging, photography, physics, plane travel, playlist, pleasure-seeking heroin-addicted flamboyant wasters, plus ca change, podcasting, podcating, poisoning, poker, politics, poor impulse control, pop culture, Pops, portable, Postini, postmodernism, power of attorney, powerpoint, prescriptions, Presidential election, press, primateblogging, primates, primatology, primitives, prior planning preventing piss-poor performance, privacy, product reviews, Project Vote Smart, prophecy, proposal management, prosimians, Proteus, psychology, public health, punk, pyongyang, quechup, racial politics, racism, radio, railroads, raleigh, rankings, rants, rare books, ratings, rats, razors, rcir, Reason magazine, recipes, record collections, relationships, religion, Rem Koolhaas, remote work, Republicans, research skills, restaurant reviews, restaurants, retro architecture, reviews, Rickie Lee Jones, rights of detainees, RINO Sightings, RINOs, Robert Anton Wilson, rock and roll, rodents, roller derby, romance novels, Ron Paul, RootDownFM.com, roundball, Rove, Rudy Giuliani, rugby, satire, Savannah, SBUX, scandal, schadenfreude, schiavo, science, science policy, science-fiction, Scientists and Engineers for America, scotland the brave, Scott, Seattle, security, self improvement, sepia mutiny, serendipity, shoulder bag, shuffle, sic transit gloria mundi, sickness, signage, Simeon Booker, Simpsons, simulations, sin, Singapore, sins of omission, sisu, skydiving, slice o' life, slippery slope, smear campaigns, social bookmarking, social content aggregation, social freedom, social networking, social news aggregation, social sciences, sociology, sockpuppetry, software, Soldiers' Angels, SomaFM, sometimes life sucks, Sopranos, soul, South Carolina, southern, southernness, spam, Spanish, speaking ill of the dead, speech, spending, spinal tap, spring, Spy, Starbucks, statistics, stem cells, stimson, stock market, Stupid browser tricks, subprime mortgages, subway, suffering, sunrocket, surrealistic art, surveillance, survelliance, sushi, swimming directions, tagged, Tap into America, taverns, tax policy, technical support, technology, Ted Haggard, teh cute, telephony, television, Texas, textbooks, thanks, Thanksgiving, the asian century, the bleedin' obvious, The Breck Girl, the brits, The Economist, The Frog and Nightgown, the joys of air travel are without number, The kindness of strangers, The Little Willies, The Onion, The Wire, the worst are full of passionate intensity, theatre, Thelonious Monk, there is a spectre haunting Bergdorf's, they blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night, thinking bloggers, third parties, This American Life, this is not good, thought for the day, Tierney, Tog, tonsorial therapy, tools, torture, Tour de France, tourism, tournament, trade policy, trains, travel, travel guides, Triangle, truffles, trust, truth, TV, twitter, unaffiliated, Underground economy, universities, university admissions, urban legends, urban poverty, US elections, US history, us politics, usability, user experience, USS Intrepid, utilities, Valentine's Day, Valour-IT, venezuela, versalink, veterans, video games, videos, vinegar, Vint Cerf, virtual worlds, visualization, voicemail, voip, Vonnegut, Vox, Walter Reed, War on Drugs, war on terror, wave-adaptive modular vessels, waverly inn, Web 2.0, west village, westell, WFB, what he said, what's the plural of faux pas?, what?, whistleblower bill, White Trash, White Trash portfolio, whole foods, wifi, wiki, wikipedia, wild horses, William Gibson, wireless, Wodehouse, word, words to live by, work habits, work styles, workstyles, World AIDS Day, world politics, WRAMC, writers strike, yahoo, yankees, Yelp, Yeltsin, yingling, yoga, you goddamn kids get offa my lawn, YouTube, zagat, zombies

Information overload: it's official

We’ve hit information overload: The amount of data people create now exceeds the amount of space available to store them.

People sent emails, took digital pictures, processed credit cards and generally did things that collectively created 281 exabytes of data by the end 2007, according to the research company IDC. (“Exabyte” sounds made up, but it’s a real term meaning 1,000,000,000,000 megabytes.) IDC also added up all the computer drives, backup tapes, CDs, DVDs, memory sticks and other devices that store data and estimated that their total capacity is only 264 exabtyes.

There aren’t data just drifting in the ether somewhere. A lot of the data that get created—say, an Internet phone call–never get stored. Other data get erased or recorded over. It’s the digital equivalent of a conversation going in one ear and out the other. But for the first time in human history, we couldn’t save all this information if we wanted to, according to IDC.

It's Official: There's Too Much Information (Wall Street Journal Business Technology Blog)

Oh, just a sudden impulse, I guess

A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a "voiceless" phone call for the first time.

With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice.

Nerve-tapping neckband allows 'telepathic' chat (New Scientist, 12 March 2008)

And here's the demo:

H/t: Marc Andreesen

This is your brain on jazz

It would come as no surprise to the late saxophonist and improvisational master John Coltrane, but when accomplished jazz musicians play free-form, their brain activity suggests a release of self-expression from conscious monitoring and self-censorship.

Such neural activity may lie at the heart of musical improvisation and perhaps other improvisational feats, propose auditory scientist Charles J. Limb of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and neurologist Allen R. Braun of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Md.

"What we think is happening is that when you're telling your own musical story, you're shutting down neural impulses that might impede the flow of novel ideas," says Limb, himself a trained jazz saxophonist.

Riff Riders: Brain scans tune in to jazz improvisers (Science News, 8 March 2008)

Fascinating article. They had to design a foldable, nonmetallic keyboard that would fit into an MRI machine, and then they did live brainscans of musicians as they played improvisationally:

The part of the frontal brain that has been linked to planning and self-censorship saw a marked decline in activity. At the same time, activity spiked in a small frontal structure that has been linked to being able to tell a story about oneself.

I miss quadraphonic stereo, actually

Carrie sends along the article below, along with a note: "At least we now know who's still using AOL."

Tech's Late Adopters Prefer the Tried and True (New York Times, 12 March 2008)

Excerpt:

Experts say that late adopters, or technology laggards, are not necessarily Luddites and can play a pivotal role in keeping the beat of innovation.

“Laggards have a bad rap, but they are crucial in pacing the nature of change,” said Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster in Silicon Valley. “Innovation requires the push of early adopters and the pull of laypeople asking whether something really works. If this was a world in which only early adopters got to choose, we’d all be using CB radios and quadraphonic stereo.”

Mr. Saffo said that aspects of the laggard and early adopter co-exist in most people. They may buy the latest digital camera, but end up using only a fraction of its features, or they may proudly tote an iPhone but still pay their bills by check, rather than online.

At 81, Jerry Gropp, an architect in the Seattle area, is a bit of both. He has a high-speed Internet connection through Comcast and Web e-mail accounts with Yahoo and Hotmail. But he still pays AOL for its dial-up service, largely because the desktop e-mail software packaged with it makes it easier to include maps, photographs and notes in the body of messages, rather than as attachments.

“I’ve been on this for about 20 years,” he said about AOL’s service. “In some ways, the old may be the best, combined with the new.”

Electronic health records: not private, not safe

In a recent survey of 307 healthcare information-technology managers, Cisco Systems found that investing in database security is the managers’ biggest priority. As hospitals shift into the digital world with electronic records and wireless devices, protecting data is becoming increasingly important.

But the Business Technology Blog also found something worrisome: The survey reported that 16% of respondents had a security breach at their organization in the last six months; 24% reported a breach in the past 12 months.

Wall Street Journal Business Technology Blog: Electronic Health Records Aren't Safe (12 March 2008)

In other words, assuming that this is an accurate sample, there's at least a one-in-four chance that your private health records have been compromised in the last year.

The abominable ho-man

Area codes in which Ludacris has ho's. (Strange Maps)

Something Ludacris has in common with Governor Spitzer: area codes 202 and 212 are covered.

Related (lyrics NSFW):

Shocking betrayal and rank greed

Discovering that the exclusive international ring of prostitutes known as the "Emperor's Club" charged up to $5,500 an hour for their services, New York governor Eliot Spitzer vowed to put an end to this price gouging practice.

Four people alleged to have run the "Emperor's Club" were charged with conspiracy to violate federal prostitution statutes, while two of them were also charged with laundering more than $1 million in illegal proceeds.

"That kind of excessive compensation is simply outrageous. Prostitution is allegedly a victimless crime,” Spitzer said in a press conference that took place only in our imaginations. “But now we see that its customers can become its victims.”

Spitzer added it was especially shameful that one of the most trusted names in prostitution had engaged in this shocking betrayal and rank greed.

Eliot Spitzer Vows To Crack Down On Excess Prostitute Pay (Dealbreaker, 10 March 2008)

I have a very vivid imagination, but even I am having a difficult time imagining just what a call girl is going to do that's worth $5,500 an hour.

Cuisiner avec les souris

Mister Gato has a strange new respect for authentic Vietnamese food:

There are some very interesting meats available for consumption in Southeast Asia. I’ve seen bugs, ostriches, dogs, snakes, bats, and even cats for sale. While I draw the line at domesticated animals and insects, I’ll pretty much eat everything else, just as long as it was prepared with love, looks appetizing, and smells good.

With the year of the rat in full swing, a group of friends and I recently ventured outside our comfort zones to try a Mekong Delta specialty—mouse.

Eating Mice Can Be Rather Nice (Serious Eats)

The Condiment Packet Gallery

The Condiment Packet Gallery
Originally uploaded by enrevanche.

My name is Chris Harne. I began collecting condiment packets in November of 2003. Initially the purpose of the collection was a more practical one. I came to the conclusion that ketchup was no longer a reasonable thing to spend money on. A handful of packets here and there would do just fine. I began to pick up other condiments as well. I stopped at a variety of locations in order to gather new types of condiments. It was around this time that I discovered how many different condiment packets existed. A collector by nature, the only logical thing for me to do was attempt to get every different packet design I possibly could.

I carefully remove the contents of my packets by slicing open the back along the bottom seam with a sharp blade. I rinse the inside of the packets thoroughly to ensure all traces of sauce are expelled. I then wait until the packets are completely dry before I place them in baseball card cases to preserve them cleanly and safely for many generations.

The Condiment Packet Gallery

(via Serious Eats)

To wake the deaf

Here's one I never thought much about: how do you reliably construct an alarm that will wake up a deaf person?

Alarm clocks for the deaf apparently work on the principle of vibration - you've got a clock hooked up to a disc or pad that slips under your mattress, and it literally shakes you awake when it's time to get up. (I think I'd opt for one of the vibrating wristwatches, myself.)

Japanese researchers have just come up with a possible alternative strategy: smell. In particular, the smell of wasabi.

A new type of fire alarm in Japan has been developed using the pungent smell of horseradish.

The device is drawing attention as a new way to warn people with hearing disabilities.

Medical equipment manufacturers have developed a technology to extract components of the strong odor of horseradish, seal them inside a can and spray them out.

Shiga University of Medical Science Hospital cooperated with the makers and carried out experiments to see if the horseradish smell can wake up people from a deep sleep.

Fourteen people, including those with hearing disabilities, took part in the experiments.

In the experiment, 13 out of the 14 subjects woke up in less than two minutes after the smell reached their noses.

The people with hearing disabilities were particularly quick to wake up, with one person emerging from sleep in just 10 seconds.

News Now Report: Horseradish fire alarm (WCTV Tallahassee, FL)

I wonder if the sleepers awoke craving sushi.

via BoingBoing

The onset of Madness

Next week, the ACC Men's Basketball Tournament:

There has not been a public sale of ACC Tournament tickets since 1966, and all tournaments since then have sold out in advance.

The week after that, March Madness sets in.

But tonight--in the last scheduled game of the regular ACC season--it's #1 UNC vs. #6 Duke. At Cameron.

I love this time of year.

Digital samizdat

"Самиздат: сам сочиняю, сам редактирую, сам цензурирую, сам издаю, сам распространяю, сам и отсиживаю за него." ("Self-publishing: I myself create it, edit it, censor it, publish it, distribute it, and get imprisoned for it.") - Vladimir Bukovsky

---

In the bad old days of the Soviet Union, banned books and articles circulated in underground print editions.

Xeroxing was out; the secret police--no kidding--controlled access to copy machines.

So usually these "copies" were transcribed by hand or typed, and duplicated in this means by faithful readers, so that the population of copies in circulation grew as they made their way through their readership.

This practice of making and passing copies on clandestinely became known as samizdat (самиздат)-- literally, "self-published"--and some tremendously important works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry originally circulated in the USSR in this way.

Wikipedia notes: "With increased proliferation of computer technologies, it became practically impossible for the government to control the copying and distribution of samizdat."

And how. When average citizens own a machine that can be a printing press, a radio station, or a TV station depending on what software you download, control of information becomes impossible.

The only thing you can do, in a world of PCs, is to attempt to ruthlessly control access to the network, and this is what totalitarian states ranging from Saudi Arabia to China have attempted to do.

And, of course, Cuba... where it isn't working either:

A growing underground network of young people armed with computer memory sticks, digital cameras and clandestine Internet hookups has been mounting some challenges to the Cuban government in recent months, spreading news that the official state media try to suppress.

Last month, students at a prestigious computer science university videotaped an ugly confrontation they had with Ricardo Alarcón, the president of the National Assembly.

Mr. Alarcón seemed flummoxed when students grilled him on why they could not travel abroad, stay at hotels, earn better wages or use search engines like Google. The video spread like wildfire through Havana, passed from person to person, and seriously damaged Mr. Alarcón’s reputation in some circles.

Something similar happened in late January when officials tried to impose a tax on the tips and wages of employees of foreign companies. Workers erupted in jeers and shouts when told about the new tax, a moment caught on a cellphone camera and passed along by memory sticks.

“It passes from flash drive to flash drive,” said Ariel, 33, a computer programmer, who, like almost everyone else interviewed for this article, asked that his last name not be used for fear of political persecution. “This is going to get out of the government’s hands because the technology is moving so rapidly.”

Cyber-Rebels in Cuba Defy State's Limits (New York Times, 6 March 2008)

Nearing his Canadian breaking point

Several years ago, I had the chance to visit a tech-support call center for one of the big computer companies. The technician gave me a second pair of headphones so I could listen in on his conversations with the hapless users.

I learned so much that day. I learned that all computer companies outsource tech support to dedicated call-center companies. I learned that the Users can be outrageously rude to these hapless tech-support reps, taking out their built-up frustration on somebody who had nothing to do with causing the problem.

And I learned that when they say, “Your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes,” that’s only partly true. They also record your calls so they can pass around recordings of the funniest ones.

[...]

A Canadian customer was calling to find out if there was a faster way to trigger menu commands than mousing up to the menus.

Agent: Certainly, sir. There are keyboard shortcuts for many of those commands. For example, suppose you want to trigger the Select All command…

Caller: Yes, I use that one all the time! How do I do it?

Agent: Well, you just press Control-A.

Caller (after a pause): Well, that’s not working for me.

Agent: Do you have a text document open in front of you?

Caller: Yes, I sure do.

Agent: OK, now press Control-A.

Caller: I am, but nothing happens.

Agent: The text isn’t highlighted?

Caller: No, there’s no change at all.

Agent: That’s odd. If you press Control-A, the whole document should be highlighted. Try it again. Press Control-A. Tell me exactly what’s happening.

Caller (nearing his Canadian breaking point): Listen. I’m pressing Control, eh? And nothing’s happening, eh?

David Pogue: Tech Support Gets a Reprieve While Users Take a Hit (6 March 2008)

Hat tip: Greg

America's most enduring policy failure

The writers of The Wire tackle the issue of American drug policy in the pages of Time magazine:

...[T]his [drug] war grinds on, flooding our prisons, devouring resources, turning city neighborhoods into free-fire zones. To what end? State and federal prisons are packed with victims of the drug conflict. A new report by the Pew Center shows that 1 of every 100 adults in the U.S. — and 1 in 15 black men over 18 — is currently incarcerated. That's the world's highest rate of imprisonment.

The drug war has ravaged law enforcement too. In cities where police agencies commit the most resources to arresting their way out of their drug problems, the arrest rates for violent crime — murder, rape, aggravated assault — have declined. In Baltimore, where we set The Wire, drug arrests have skyrocketed over the past three decades, yet in that same span, arrest rates for murder have gone from 80% and 90% to half that. Lost in an unwinnable drug war, a new generation of law officers is no longer capable of investigating crime properly, having learned only to make court pay by grabbing cheap, meaningless drug arrests off the nearest corner.

What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has. And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass. Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we've been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain.

Our leaders? There aren't any politicians — Democrat or Republican — willing to speak truth on this. Instead, politicians compete to prove themselves more draconian than thou, to embrace America's most profound and enduring policy failure.

The Wire's War on The Drug War (Time, 5 Mar 2008)

They don't wind up advocating decriminalization outright... but, as a first step, they do advocate for jury nullification.

Their article was so good and so short that I was tempted to reproduce it in its entirety. I damn nearly did anyway. Go: read the whole thing.

And once you've read that, go read this:

One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008 (Pew Center Public Safety Performance Project)

...and reflect on that fact that, here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, we lock up more people (both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of our population) than any other country on the planet:

The United States incarcerates more people than any country in the world, including the far more populous nation of China. At the start of the new year, the American penal system held more than 2.3 million adults. China was second, with 1.5 million people behind bars, and Russia was a distant third with 890,000 inmates, according to the latest available figures. Beyond the sheer number of inmates, America also is the global leader in the rate at which it incarcerates its citizenry, outpacing nations like South Africa and Iran. In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children. In the U.S, the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750 per 100,000. (source)

In case you were wondering, the "1 in 100" figure includes people who are locked up in local jails awaiting trial, explaining the 1% incarceration rate vs. the 0.75% rate of imprisonment (people who have been tried and sentenced.)

Food fight

Food Fight is an abridged history of war, from World War II to present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict. Watch as traditional comestibles slug it out for world domination in this chronologically re-enacted smorgasbord of aggression.

Related:

• Food Fight home page
• Food Fight cheat sheet: identifying the foodstuffs

Hat tip: Popbitch

...but dammit, Chap had this at his place a couple of weeks ago, and I'm just catching up.

We are reasonably sure that she is, in fact, female, however

Oops:

In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South Central Los Angeles as a foster child who ran drugs for members of the Bloods, an infamous gang. The author’s biography on the back flap says she graduated from the University of Oregon.

The problem is that none of that is true.

Ms. Jones, a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, actually is all white and grew up in Sherman Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley of California, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in North Hollywood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. She is still a few credits short of a diploma from University of Oregon.

Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that published “Love and Consequences,” is recalling all copies of the book and has canceled Ms. Seltzer’s book tour, which was scheduled to start on Monday in Eugene, Ore., where she currently lives.

Author Admits Acclaimed Memoir Is Fantasy (New York Times, 3 March 2008)

See also:

Fawning New York Times book review here (26 Feb 2008)

Fawning profile from Times "House and Home" section here (28 Feb 2008)

You only learn who has been swimming naked when the tide goes out

[Warren] Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders, which was released Friday, has become something of a business institution, with the certainty that he will offer caustic comments and the hope that he will shed light on his investments.

This year, his scorn was aimed at the “financial folly” of lenders who financed the housing boom, since vanished, and at companies that use rosy assumptions of investment success to raise reported profits.

The comments, which were released after the market closed, came as Berkshire reported that fourth-quarter profit fell 18 percent, in part because of falling insurance rates. Net income decreased to $2.95 billion, or $1,904 a share, from $3.58 billion, or $2,323, a year earlier.

Mr. Buffett offered no commentary on Berkshire’s foray into the municipal bond insurance business, and no explanation of why he spent $1.5 billion to buy a 1.3 percent stake in Sanofi-Aventis.

But he was willing to say, in effect, “I told you so,” in recalling his warning a year ago about “weakened lending practices” in the mortgage market.

“Just about all Americans came to believe that house prices would forever rise,” he wrote. “That conviction made a borrower’s income and cash equity seem unimportant to lenders, who shoveled out money, confident that H.P.A. — house price appreciation — would cure all problems. Today, our country is experiencing widespread pain because of that erroneous belief. As house prices fall, a huge amount of financial folly is being exposed. You only learn who has been swimming naked when the tide goes out — and what we are witnessing at some of our largest financial institutions is an ugly sight.”

Buffett's State of the World: There's Folly in Wonderland (New York Times, 1 March 2008)

Related: Warren Buffett's 2007 Letter to Shareholders (BerkshireHathaway.com)

Thinking Inside The Box

Thinking Inside The Box
Originally uploaded by enrevanche.

"Please explain to me what's so wonderful about thinking outside of the box. I *like* it in this box. The cardboard is nicely shredded, and the old sheets and towels make a lovely, soft bed. Why would anyone want to be outside this box?"

Strange Maps: Barbecue Sauce Styles

Learned discourse from barbecue authority and UNC sociology professor emeritus John Shelton Reed, on the styles of barbecue sauce in use in South Carolina:

* The vinegar and pepper region covers the eastern quarter of the state. This is “a southward extension of eastern North Carolina-style sauce,” states Mr Reed.

* “The tomato region ditto for North Carolina’s Piedmont- or Lexington-style sauce, which is basically the eastern sauce with a little tomato added, still thin and vinegar-flavored.”

* The ketchup region is influenced by what they serve in Georgia “and most of the trans-Appalachian South – or for that matter in grocery stores – a thick, sweet, ketchupy sauce.”

* Unique to South Carolina, though, is “the mustard sauce of central South Carolina, (which) is unique to that state, and (which) gives it more distinct barbecue regions than any other.”

Strange Maps #246: Southern Sauce Sources

Delightfully, a commenter in the thread at Strange Maps made an appropriately-colored Google Maps overlay of the South Carolina Sauce Map.

See here for the North Carolina Google Sauce Map.

And there's much discussion, in the comments, of where the precise dividing lines are.

Barbecue is serious business.

52 stars on the US flag?

Thomas P.M. Barnett thinks he's figured out how the Union will next expand:

- Once Fidel Castro finally croaks and brother Raul gets to run things for a bit on his own, watch the practical brother experiment with markets while allowing some serious infusions of cash from "trusted" sources like China.

- Fast-forward a year or two, and tired Raul is replaced by some national unity committee that reflects the growing splits within the next generation of leaders over how far market reforms should proceed.

Meanwhile, the money seeping in from Miami's Cubans grows to a flood as travel restrictions are radically reduced in response to popular demand.

- Within five years, Cuba holds its first roughly free presidential election, and one or more candidates, with pockets bulging with greenbacks, stump openly for American statehood.

- Once that match gets lit, watch Florida hold every subsequent American presidential candidate hostage to the Cuba-statehood plank.

Once we move into that political territory, the pairing most likely to unfold is Blue State D.C. joining the Union alongside Red State Cuba, and I've got my first two new stars on the flag.

Barnett: The 51st State: Huge Upside-Down Question Mark (2 March 2008)

"Our worst critics prefer to stay"

The Freakonomics Blog recently held a contest to come up with a new six-word motto for the United States of America.

"Our worst critics prefer to stay" won, with 194 reader votes.

Runners-up:

Caution! Experiment in Progress Since 1776 (134)

The Most Gentle Empire So Far (64) votes

You Should See the Other Guy (38)

Just Like Canada, With Better Bacon (18)

Stephen Dubner observes further:

“Our Worst Critics Prefer to Stay” is, while perhaps not outrightly uplifting, a wonderfully concise acknowledgment of the paradox that a capitalist democracy inevitably is: a place that is often well worth complaining about, and which allows you to complain as loudly as you wish.

H/t: Chap

Get your wonk on

Docuticker.

DocuTicker offers a hand-picked selection of resources, reports and publications from government agencies, NGOs, think tanks and other public interest organizations.

The crack/EW nexus

“I have upon occasion compared directing a film to dragging a freight train up a muddy hill by a piece of string. Certainly there is a connection there to Fitzcarraldo [1, 2 - bc] —only in my experience whenever I turn around to yell encouragement to those supposedly helping me, I find them all sitting in the cars laughing, smoking crack and reading Entertainment Weekly."

-- Indie filmmaker Tom DiCillo, interviewed by indie filmmaker David Walker, at BadAzzMofo.com (29 Feb 2008)

Related: Black Santa's Revenge, a film by David Walker ("He knows when you've been naughty.")

Written, produced and directed by BadAzz MoFo creator David Walker, BLACK SANTA’S REVENGE is a two-fisted tale of yuletide vengeance reminiscent of the classic blaxploitation and revenge films of the 1970s and 80s—think William Lustig’s Vigilante meets Ivan Dixon’s Trouble Man. Adapted from the short comic book story drawn by Rusty Beach and written by Walker, the film version of BSR is filled with all the classic elements of exploitation cinema—graphic violence, gratuitous nudity, and tons of profanity—all crammed into a 20-minute running time.

Hat tip: Chap

Real change in Louisiana?

The three-ring circus of Louisiana politics has a new ringmaster--Bobby Jindal, the nation's first Indian-American governor--and he's pushed one of the toughest sets of ethics laws in the nation through the state legislature:

"I’ve talked to C.E.O.’s in New York, even the president of the United States," Mr. Jindal said in an interview, and when “you ask them for more investment, more help on the coast and other areas, their first reaction always is: ‘Well, who do you need to know? Who do I have to hire? Is this money going to end up in somebody’s pocket?’ ”

That had to change, the governor said, and he was using his “narrow window” — his honeymoon at the Capitol — to do it.

[...]

The new requirements will force all state legislators, as well as most other elected and appointed officials around the state, to disclose all sources of income, real estate holdings and debts over $10,000. (Judges are exempted.) Lawmakers and executive branch officials will no longer be able to get contracts for state-financed or disaster-related work. Lobbyists will also have to disclose their sources of income and will be limited to spending no more than $50 per elected official, per meal; splitting the tab, say among other lobbyists or legislators, will also be prohibited.

Louisiana Governor Pierces Business As Usual (New York Times, 28 February 2008)

Friends of mine who are still active in Republican politics are more excited about Bobby Jindal than any politician I can remember for a long, long time.

They're following Governor Jindal with great interest over at Sepia Mutiny, too:

Incidentally, here at Sepia Mutiny, our stringent anti-corruption rules dictate that bloggers have a free meal cap of exactly $4.60 — just enough for a single Kati Roll…

"Inserting a game cartridge at just the right angle to make it work..."

Obsolete skills.

(via Kottke)

Thought for the day: Understanding change

"We always overestimate the changes that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the changes that will occur in the next ten." - Bill Gates

Stuff White People Like: Bottles of Water

...[L]ately, advanced white people have been getting very upset about all of the waste that comes with drinking 15-20 bottles per week.

The leading edge of white people have started to use sturdier, refillable bottles. But do not assume this is from the tap. Most white people need to run their water through some sort of filter (Brita or PUR) before they put it into their bottle. This allows them to feel good about using a refillable bottle, but it also makes it more complicated, which they also like.

Previously, the gold standard was the Nalgene bottle, however recent studies have shown the plastic can leak toxins into the water. Currently, white people on the cutting edge are really into metal bottles of water with a twist cap. It is recommended that you buy one of these as soon as possible.

Stuff White People Like: #76 Bottles of Water

Oh, man. That one hits a little close to home... I've been rocking the Sigg bottles this year instead of buying water in plastic bottles. (In my defense, I was using them more than ten years ago, when I was an active outdoorsman.)

Related:

Review: "Leaderless Jihad"

In the Washington Post, David Ignatius reviews Marc Sageman's latest book, Leaderless Jihad.

Politicians who talk about the terrorism threat -- and it's already clear that this will be a polarizing issue in the 2008 campaign -- should be required to read a new book by a former CIA officer named Marc Sageman. It stands what you think you know about terrorism on its head and helps you see the topic in a different light.

[...]

...The first wave of al-Qaeda leaders, who joined Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, is down to a few dozen people on the run in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan. The second wave of terrorists, who trained in al-Qaeda's camps in Afghanistan during the 1990s, has also been devastated, with about 100 hiding out on the Pakistani frontier. These people are genuinely dangerous, says Sageman, and they must be captured or killed. But they do not pose an existential threat to America, much less a "clash of civilizations."

It's the third wave of terrorism that is growing, but what is it? By Sageman's account, it's a leaderless hodgepodge of thousands of what he calls "terrorist wannabes." Unlike the first two waves, whose members were well educated and intensely religious, the new jihadists are a weird species of the Internet culture. Outraged by video images of Americans killing Muslims in Iraq, they gather in password-protected chat rooms and dare each other to take action. Like young people across time and religious boundaries, they are bored and looking for thrills.

David Ignatius - The Fading Jihadists (Washington Post, 28 Feb 2008)

Related:

WFB, RIP

Original post, 27 February 2008:

Conservative intellectual icon William F. Buckley died today. He was 82.

The news just moved across the wires a few minutes ago; sad to say, most of the major news agencies are sure to have detailed obituaries that were prepared well in advance, since he had been sick for some time. But as of this writing, they're not yet up.

For more intimate reflections, National Review's blog The Corner will be the place to read in the coming days.

For my part, I will simply say that I began reading Mr. Buckley at a young age (around 14) and read him with pleasure and appreciation for my entire adult life. Although I never met the man, I did correspond with him a bit -- he was famously gracious about answering letters from readers -- and I feel like I've lost an old friend.

---

Bumped and updated, 28 Feburary.

Appreciation for Buckley from all points on the political spectrum:

Progressive author and history professor Rick Perlstein:

Nice people, friends, can disagree about the most fundamental questions about the organization of society. And there's nothing wrong with that. We must not fantasize about destroying our political adversaries, nor fantasize about magically converting them. We must honor that some humans are conservative and some humans are liberal, and that it will always be thus.

And some, simply are mensches. Last year Bill called me to ask if I would blurb his next book, about Goldwater. I chose not to. But damn: I bit my nails a little. I wanted him to blurb my book! Now he'd certainly take out his revenge by refusing. That's the way you're supposed to behave in the literary game.

He didn't. Instead, when a reporter came calling to ask him about Rick Perlstein, he said something remarkably sweet for the record—for all I know, one of his last public utterances. Then, after sending him the galleys of my book last, I heard back from him post-haste: another self-reproach. He would love to endorse it, but could not; he was too frail. This in an email obviously drafted by himself: letters were missing, words garbled.

Buckleyism to the end: friendship, and adversarialism, coinciding. All of us who write about politics, may that be our role model.

Reason's publisher, Robert Poole:

By creating National Review in 1955 as a serious, intellectually respectable conservative voice (challenging the New Deal consensus among thinking people), Buckley created space for the development of our movement. He kicked out the racists and conspiracy-mongers from conservatism and embraced Chicago and Austrian economists, introducing a new generation to Hayek, Mises, and Friedman. And thanks to the efforts of NR's Frank Meyer to promote a "fusion" between economic (free-market) conservatives and social conservatives, Buckley and National Review fostered the growth of a large enough conservative movement to nominate Goldwater for president and ultimately to elect Ronald Reagan.

Spencer Ackerman at The Washington Independent:

It’s impossible to overstate Buckley’s impact on America. No William F. Buckley, no National Review; no National Review, no Goldwater movement; no Goldwater movement, no Ronald Reagan… and on and on. Naturally liberals will find much of Buckley’s legacy to be ultimately malign. But what was undeniably valuable was how he forced mid-century liberalism, so self-satisfied, to rethink many of its basic premises, grapple with inconvenient truths and harsh assessments, and emerge (in my opinion) stronger.

We'll give the last word to Reason's Radley Balko, who remembers a time when "conservatism" meant something very different than it does today:

Buckley leaves an enormous legacy, but to the detriment [of] everyone, the right left Buckley years ago. Where Buckley stood athwart the tide of history and beat it back with wit, sophistication, and argument, we today get best-selling Regnery screeds from lowest-common-denominator clowns like Ann Coulter, Dinesh D'Souza, and Glenn Beck. Where Buckley mistrusted government and aimed to slow the world down, he's been usurped on the right by the likes of William Kristol and David Brooks, men who want to use government to remake the world in their own image. Where Buckley flourished in cosmopolitan Manhattan and took delight in life's finer things, modern conservatism has grown disdainful of the marketplace of culture, commerce, and ideas abundant in urban areas (witness the last election, where many on the right weirdly smeared John Kerry as a "latte-sipper"—real Americans apparently drink Maxwell House). In fact, today's Bush/neocon-right is often contemptuous of commerce itself, sometimes calling the voluntary, unchecked exchange of goods, labor, and services—a pure free market—"ugly" and "crude."

And don't miss Buckley's obituary in The Daily Telegraph.

Watch for Raul to start appearing at poker tournaments, soon

Best throwaway line of the new year, so far, goes to Nick Gillespie at Reason's Hit and Run blog (my italics below):

Earlier on Sunday, before the grand Oscar hoopla started, Raul Castro, the Jerry Van Dyke of communist tyranny, officially took charge of the revolution in Cuba...

Heh.

Like the Coen Brothers, the Castro Brothers March Deep into Oscar Night... (Hit and Run, 25 Feb 2008)

Amino acid test

In April 1993, a man in a balaclava mask escaped after sexually assaulting a 36-year-old woman in the town of Bridgwater, England. More than 13 years later, forensic detectives used an unusual approach to track the man down: A genetic trace that led first to his sister.

Known as familial searching, the U.K. technique has already helped crack 20 difficult cases and led to the arrest of several long-elusive murderers and rapists.

The innovation is propelled by the growth of Britain's DNA database, which holds the records of 4.2 million people in England and Wales, or nearly 8% of the population there, one of the largest proportions in the world. Anyone arrested -- including for minor offenses -- must provide a DNA sample, which stays in the database permanently, even if the person is acquitted. About a quarter of the profiles are of minors, some as young as 10.

The U.S. is now considering following Britain's lead...

The Gene Police (Wall Street Journal, 23 February 2008)

Blogroll revision: Fallen Icarus

While Kat's primary blogsite, formerly known as "The Wisdom of Change" (and blogrolled here for a long time) is being remodeled and renovated, you can find her over at Fallen Icarus.

A *tough* online civics quiz

Via Buck, here's a hard - but fair - online civics test, courtesy of AmericanCivicLiteracy.org.

I scored 93.33%, and was a little surprised to have done that well.

Readers, take the test and post your scores in the comments, if you dare.

If God had meant for us to do molecular engineering, He'd have given us brains

If you don’t have a super-fast, super-small computer in a few years, blame the moral majority. It turns out that most Americans find nanotechnology, the scientific field most likely to produce such a breakthrough, morally unacceptable.

That’s according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin who are studying people’s attitudes towards nanotechnology, an emerging scientific field that involves manipulating molecules and atoms. They found that just 29.5% of the 1,000-plus Americans surveyed said they thought nanotechnology research was morally acceptable.

In other news, at least 70.5% of Americans don't have the first freaking clue what "nanotechnology" is...

Nanotechnology Is Morally Unacceptable (Wall Street Journal Business Technology Blog)

Matters McCain

Earlier today, Carrie noticed this pricelessly understated, yet savage, description of Cindy McCain in a BBC News profile of the Presidential candidates' spouses:

The 53-year-old former Arizona rodeo beauty queen is seen as an asset to her husband's campaign, having long overcome the humiliating public exposure of her former addiction to prescription painkillers.

The knife slipped in so deftly, I didn't even see the blade until it was too late. Bravo, and ouch.

The big John McCain-related news of the evening, of course, is the New York Times story indicating that he may have a bimbo eruption or two to deal with... as Carrie noted, when a paper runs a front-page story with a quadruple byline, they've either been working awfully hard on it or want to look like they have.

Slumburbs

At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, “I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.”

In the Franklin Reserve neighborhood of Elk Grove, California, south of Sacramento, the houses are nicer than those at Windy Ridge—many once sold for well over $500,000—but the phenomenon is the same. At the height of the boom, 10,000 new homes were built there in just four years. Now many are empty; renters of dubious character occupy others. Graffiti, broken windows, and other markers of decay have multiplied. Susan McDonald, president of the local residents’ association and an executive at a local bank, told the Associated Press, “There’s been gang activity. Things have really been changing, the last few years.”

In the first half of last year, residential burglaries rose by 35 percent and robberies by 58 percent in suburban Lee County, Florida, where one in four houses stands empty. Charlotte’s crime rates have stayed flat overall in recent years—but from 2003 to 2006, in the 10 suburbs of the city that have experienced the highest foreclosure rates, crime rose 33 percent. Civic organizations in some suburbs have begun to mow the lawns around empty houses to keep up the appearance of stability. Police departments are mapping foreclosures in an effort to identify emerging criminal hot spots.

The decline of places like Windy Ridge and Franklin Reserve is usually attributed to the subprime-mortgage crisis, with its wave of foreclosures. And the crisis has indeed catalyzed or intensified social problems in many communities. But the story of vacant suburban homes and declining suburban neighborhoods did not begin with the crisis, and will not end with it. A structural change is under way in the housing market—a major shift in the way many Americans want to live and work. It has shaped the current downturn, steering some of the worst problems away from the cities and toward the suburban fringes. And its effects will be felt more strongly, and more broadly, as the years pass. Its ultimate impact on the suburbs, and the cities, will be profound.

The Next Slum? (The Atlantic, March 2008)

My people, my people, part XVIII

Down in Raleigh this week. Caught this little gem in the local newspaper:

A Raleigh lawyer was in the wrong when he removed a parking boot from his Toyota Land Cruiser in a private downtown lot and drove off with it, the state Court of Appeals ruled today.

[...]

In March 2006, Kirschbaum parked in a leased space in the private lot while he attend[ed] a lunch meeting at the nearby Caffe Luna. While he was in the restaurant, Quantum immobilized Kirschbaum's SUV with a boot and left a note that he could have the boot removed for a $50 fee.

Instead, Kirschbaum removed the tire with the boot still attached, replaced it with a spare and drove away. He initially refused to return the boot, telling a police officer that Quantum could bid on it on eBay...

Lawyer who drove off with parking boot loses appeal (Raleigh, NC News and Observer, 19 February 2008)

Oh, I hope in my heart that it's so, in spite of how little we know

A passing reference in a John Scalzi post led me to this great Wikipedia article on the Dunning-Kruger Effect:

The Dunning-Kruger effect is the phenomenon wherein people who have little knowledge think that they know more than others who have much more knowledge.

Dunning and Kruger were awarded the 2000 Ig Nobel prize for their work.^[1]

The phenomenon was demonstrated in a series of experiments performed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, then both of Cornell University. Their results were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in December 1999.^[2]

Kruger and Dunning noted a number of previous studies which tend to suggest that in skills as diverse as reading comprehension, operating a motor vehicle, and playing chess or tennis, "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" (as Charles Darwin put it). They hypothesized that with a typical skill which humans may possess in greater or lesser degree,

1. Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill.
2. Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.
3. Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy.
4. If they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.

Virtues requiring caveats are not virtues

TWENTY-SEVEN years ago, in the final days of the Iran hostage crisis, the C.I.A.’s Tehran station chief, Tom Ahern, faced his principal interrogator for the last time. The interrogator said the abuse Mr. Ahern had suffered was inconsistent with his own personal values and with the values of Islam and, as if to wipe the slate clean, he offered Mr. Ahern a chance to abuse him just as he had abused the hostages. Mr. Ahern looked the interrogator in the eyes and said, “We don’t do stuff like that.”

Today, Tom Ahern might have to say: “We don’t do stuff like that very often.” Or, “We generally don’t do stuff like that.” That is a shame. Virtues requiring caveats are not virtues. Saying a man is honest is a compliment. Saying a man is “generally” honest or honest “quite often” means he lies. The mistreatment of detainees, like honesty, is all or nothing: We either do stuff like that or we do not. It is in our national interest to restore our reputation for the latter.

Unforgivable Behavior, Inadmissible Evidence (17 February 2008, New York Times, Guest Op-Ed, Morris Davis. The author, an Air Force colonel, was the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, from 2005 to 2007.)

The dollar isn't doing too well against the euro, either

"Some soldiers have reported that the trading value of RCIRs when on exercise with MRE eating troops is 1 RCIR for 5 MREs on average. In Somalia, a crate of RCIRs would get you a US field cot."

Information on the "Ration de Combat Individuelle Rechauffable"-- RCIR, the French MRE.

Related: Earlier enrevanche experiences with (American) MREs.

Bar culture in Louisville, Kentucky

Louisville is awash in bourbon. And beer. It's a drinking person’s town, due in no small part to the state’s bourbon heritage and the city’s nickname-namesake brewery, Falls City. This is where the Old Fashioned was invented. It’s where Al Capone dodged the law during prohibition, ducking out of the Seelbach Hotel through secret passageways. And it’s where barkeeps plied their customers with rolled oysters and bean soup to keep them coming back. Louisville’s private clubs, hotel bars, and neighborhood taverns are rich with drinking history and lore, and there’s always time for another round.

In January Southern Foodways Alliance oral historian Amy Evans bellied up to many a bar in Falls City, chatting up bartenders, bar owners, and bar patrons, gathering their stories one drink at a time. She met with John C. Johnson, 50-year employee of the Pendennis Club, where the Old Fashioned was born. Greg Haner, fourth-generation owner of Mazzoni’s, talked about his family’s 100-plus-year history of making and serving rolled oysters. Edward Winfield shared stories of the legendary Seelbach Hotel and the much-loved Louisville bartender Max Allen Jr., whom he had the opportunity to learn from before he passed.

Serious Eats/Southern Foodways: Bar Culture in Louisville, Kentucky — An Oral History Project

The interviews will be posted on the web at SouthernFoodways.com this spring.

Dribble-Drive Motion

Who the hell is Vance Walberg? How is his [basketball] offense spreading around the nation? And if his brainchild is the hottest thing in U.S. basketball, why is he out of a job?

Grant Wahl examines the Dribble-Drive Motion offense in the most recent issue of Sports Illustrated. ("Fast and Furious," 12 Feb 2008).

(via Kottke)

Dean Smith was an innovative basketball coach and, a legend himself, "descended" from legends: Smith was coached by Phog Allen at Kansas, who in turn was coached by James Naismith, the inventor of the game. Dean wrote what continues, today, to be the bestselling technical book on basketball theory in the world, but the offenses and defenses he ran during his career were developed and tested by others first.

Hell, Dean didn't even invent the Four Corners offense, in which the team with a lead near the end of the game tries to run out the clock... he just popularized it, so much so that the NCAA had to change the rules of the game and introduce the shot clock. The inventor of Four Corners was a coach you may not have heard of. (And a big chunk of Dean's Book On Basketball--the description of the shuffle offense--was written by an obscure coach named Bob Spears.)

That's what Grant Wahl's story is about this week... it's a fascinating look at how unknown coaches can revolutionize the games they make their anonymous livings at.

---

College basketball is the only sport I know anything about, or really care to.

It's mostly an accident of birth; I grew up as an inadvertent but reverent student of the game in the Triangle region of North Carolina--the place that Dick Vitale inevitably (and inaccurately) refers to as "Tobacco Road," where the legendary programs at UNC, NC State, Duke, and Wake Forest had us surrounded.

Like most North Carolinians, if pressed, I could do a fair job of offering color commentary on a basketball broadcast. My elderly aunt could give you a learned discourse on how to set a screen and execute a perfect pick-and-roll.

(It's a good thing I married a girl from Kansas. They also take their basketball seriously there.)

The (patent) claim vs. the reality

Philip Greenspun has some useful and interesting thoughts on Internet software patents:

A basic theory of human endeavor suggests that the smartest people who will ever work in a field are those who work in that field when it is new. When a technology is new and exciting, it attracts the best people that it will ever attract. No modern oil painter has ever developed the skill of Vermeer or Rembrandt, guys who pioneered the use of paints that were then new. In computing, among the pioneers were Alan Turing and John Von Neumann. Can we honestly look at Windows Vista and say "Whoa, the guys who built this are way smarter than Turing and Von Neumann"?

If programmers get dumber every year, how come we're smart enough to keep discovering clever new things to patent, things that those pioneers in computer science didn't dream of? We can buy all of our books on amazon.com and the early Internet pioneers couldn't go shopping online because they weren't smart enough to envision online shopping, right?

The answer is that the early Internet pioneers did envision essentially every service available on the present-day Internet. They wrote about it and distributed those writings to tens of thousands of people. They demonstrated prototypes, sometimes to rooms full of more than 1000 people, and distributed films of those demos. The only reason that we believe ourselves to be innovative is that we are too lazy to go to the library and read what was done in the 1960s.

If those old guys were so smart, why didn't they build amazon.com, eBay, and Google? Well, many of them died before the 50,000th person obtained Internet access. There wasn't much point in having an online store when there were only 50 or 100 computers on the Internet.

Read the whole thing. You wouldn't want to miss his timeline of Net innovations. :-)

Internet Software Patents (Philip Greenspun, 15 Feb 2008)

A team player

Please take me to work with you, Pops.


There's room in the briefcase.

Adventures in Change Management... again...

A poorly tested upgrade took down Research in Motion's network operations center, which in turn rendered most of the Blackberries in North America hors de combat.

Again. (This happened last April, too.)

Suggested reading for RIM IT management. (See also.)

Doubtsourcing

Set mostly in an office in India, "Doubtsourcing" aims to be to the outsourcing world what "Dilbert" has been to the U.S. cubicle set. Making fun of Indian workaholism in one cartoon, a job candidate receives an offer after boasting that he hasn't "seen the sun for 7.5 months."

In another, a U.S. manager criticizes the India team for being slow and uncreative. An Indian worker says the U.S. firm has changed its business model three times in three months, from online dating to insurance to pornography. "You just need to deal with ambiguity better," the U.S. manager says.

[Comic strip author Sandeep] Sood says that though "there's a lack of humor in the outsourcing industry," he finds it very funny.

LA Times: Finding the funny in outsourcing (10 February 2008)

Related: Doubtsourcing

Hat tip: Greg

Mr. Good Enough

When we’re holding out for deep romantic love, we have the fantasy that this level of passionate intensity will make us happier. But marrying Mr. Good Enough might be an equally viable option, especially if you’re looking for a stable, reliable life companion. Madame Bovary might not see it that way, but if she’d remained single, I’ll bet she would have been even more depressed than she was while living with her tedious but caring husband.

What I didn’t realize when I decided, in my 30s, to break up with boyfriends I might otherwise have ended up marrying, is that while settling seems like an enormous act of resignation when you’re looking at it from the vantage point of a single person, once you take the plunge and do it, you’ll probably be relatively content. It sounds obvious now, but I didn’t fully appreciate back then that what makes for a good marriage isn’t necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. Once you’re married, it’s not about whom you want to go on vacation with; it’s about whom you want to run a household with. Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way.

Lori Gottlieb: Marry Him: The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough (The Atlantic, March 2008)

They must be going through a lot of litmus paper

Ross Douthat, writing a guest op-ed in the New York Times:

After being denounced as a tax-and-spender and a pro-life liberal, Mr. Huckabee won four primaries in four Republican strongholds, including Alabama and Georgia. Mr. McCain split the frequent-churchgoer vote with Mr. Romney, and eclipsed him among evangelical Christians, even though the religious-conservative poobah James Dobson has promised to sit out the November election if Mr. McCain becomes the Republican nominee.

The failure of conservative voters to fall in line behind Mr. Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, among others, reflects a deeper problem for the movement’s leadership. With their inflexibility, grudge-holding and eagerness to evict heretics rather than seek converts, too many of conservatism’s leaders sound like the custodians of a dwindling religious denomination or a politically correct English department at a fading liberal-arts college.

Or like yesterday’s Democratic Party. The tribunes of the American right have fallen into the same bad habits that doomed their liberal rivals to years of political failure.

The Republican Reformation (New York Times, 10 February 2008)

The Hipness Tax

"The development of the neighborhood makes it impossible to succeed—it kills the goose that laid the golden egg."

Meatpacking District institution Florent faces a huge rent increase, and possible eviction; the overheated real estate market in the district it helped put on the map is driving it out of business.

The New York Observer: Will Meatpacking Pioneer Have To Pack It In?

(via Eater)

In this comment thread, I had a premonition of this in February 06: "Florent, one of my favorite places in the world, is still hanging on. I think Florent owns the building they're in; I fervently hope so, because otherwise rising rents will inevitably drive them out."

Of *course* Sammy Hagar has his own line of tequilas...

A-list celebrities don't really pimp food products. It's like doing TV commercials—it's okay in Japan, out of sight, but it seems far beneath the likes of Tom Cruise or Russell Crowe to do something so gauche in America. The exception is Paul Newman, whose vast food empire is about more than releasing a quickie, crappy product. The A.V. Club's Tasha Robinson has had a bottle of Olympia Dukakis-brand salad dressing (brought to you by the same defunct company that once foisted Erik Estrada corn chips on the world) on her desk since 1999: Inspired by that, we dug up some currently available products endorsed by marginal celebs.

Nectar of the demigods: B-list celebrity-endorsed foodstuffs (The A.V. Club)

Flowchart: Should you watch the Grammy Awards?

Service journalism from New York Magazine's Vulture blog.

Excerpt:

Ask Vulture: Should You Watch Sunday Night's Grammy Awards? (7 February 2008)

He loved Pig Brother

America was a free country, once, before the Barbecue Police put their boot heels on our necks.

"Or, you can call them the Pig Police, since they hate people cooking pigs in their own back yard!" Amante Enad, 55, of Wheeling told me Thursday.

"That's what I was doing, until they wrote tickets on me and took me to court. I said, 'What rights do I have to cook in my own back yard? Don't I have rights to cook a pig on my own property?' And they gave me the tickets.

If Pig Brother Is Watching, No Barbecue Will Be Safe (Chicago Tribune)

Hat tip: Greg

MIT Technology Review on the cable cuts

When the Internet suddenly collapsed early last Wednesday across the Middle East and into India, it provided a stark reminder of how the Net's virtual spaces can still be held hostage to real-world events.

Almost simultaneously, two separate undersea fiber-optic cables connecting Europe with Egypt, and eventually with the Middle East and India, were cut. The precise cause remains unknown: experts initially said that ships' anchors, dragged by stormy weather across the sea floor, were the most likely culprit, but Egyptian authorities have said that no ships were in the region.

Whatever the cause, the effects were immediate. According to its telecommunications ministry, Egypt initially lost 70 percent of its connection to the outside Internet and 30 percent of service to its call-center industry, which depended less on the lines. Between 50 and 60 percent of India's Net outbound connectivity was similarly lost on the westbound route critical to the nation's burgeoning outsourcing industry.

"This [fiber path across the Mediterranean] is a choke point, which until recently was a very lightly trafficked route where there wasn't great need for cable," says Tim Strong, an analyst at telecommunications research firm Telegeography Research. "There are many new cables planned for the region, but as it happens, they're not in service yet."

[...]

Undersea cable damage is hardly rare–indeed, more than 50 repair operations were mounted in the Atlantic alone last year, according to marine cable repair company Global Marine Systems. But last week’s breaks came at one of the world’s bottlenecks, where Net traffic for whole regions is funneled along a single route.

This kind of damage is rarely such a deep concern in the United States and Europe. The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are crisscrossed so completely with fast fiber networks that a break in one area typically has no significant effect. Net traffic simply uses one of many possible alternate destinations to reach its goal.

Not so with the route connecting Europe to Egypt, and from there to the Middle East. Today, just three major data cables stretch from Italy to Egypt and run down the Suez Canal, and from there to much of the Middle East. (A separate line connects Italy with Israel.) A serious cut here is immediately obvious across the region, and a double cut can be crippling.

MIT Technology Review: Analyzing the Internet Collapse (5 Feb 2008)

Beating a (terminally ill) horse

It's Tsunami Tuesday, and for the first time since I turned 18, I'm not voting in a Presidential primary.

I changed my party affiliation to "Independent" last year, and New York State runs a closed primary system. There's no vote and no voice for anyone who doesn't declare affiliation with a political party, and there's no political party in New York State that I'd care to be affiliated with.

Speaking of which...

A Hobson's choice is a free choice in which only one option is offered, and one may refuse to take that option. The choice is therefore between taking the option or not taking it. The phrase is said to originate from Thomas Hobson (1544–1630), a livery stable owner at Cambridge, England who, in order to rotate the use of his horses, offered customers the choice of either taking the horse in the stall nearest the door—or taking none at all. (Wikipedia)

If the horse in the nearest stall is worn out or diseased, sometimes you're better off walking.

If the two-party system were a horse, we'd have to shoot it.

I will vote in the general election, to be sure.

In the meantime, I'll try to grab some pictures from the New York Giants "tickertape" parade on Lower Broadway. It kicks off, pardon the expression, at 11 AM, about a football field's length from my office.

(The old traditions get harder and harder to maintain. Most of the newer buildings downtown have windows that can't be opened, and tickertape hasn't been used on Wall Street for two generations now, though the concept of a "ticker" is still very much with us in electronic form. The City is providing newspaper shredded in 12-inch strips as a substitute. You'd really hurt somebody on the street below if you tossed a Bloomberg terminal out the window, assuming you can even open it.)

Flickr and Creative Commons

Interior, Mission Dolores - San Francisco CA
Originally uploaded by enrevanche.

Hi Barry,

I am writing to let you know that one of your photos with a Creative Commons license has been short-listed for inclusion in the fourth edition of our Schmap San Francisco Guide, to be published mid-February 2008...


Related: Schmap

Dragging anchor

When two submarine telecom cables in the Mediterranean were cut last Wednesday, the outage was attributed to a ship anchor that severed the cables. When a third cable cut in the region was reported on Friday, it raised suspicions that there might be more to the outages than coincidence.

"I'm a security guy, and hence suspicious by nature," Columbia computer science professor Steve Bellovin wrote on the NANOG (North American Network Operators Group) mailing list. "The old saying comes to mind: 'once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but the third time is enemy action.'"

But list members who manage submarine fiber cables say such outages happen fairly often, but usually aren't noticed due to cable redundancy, which allows system operators to route around outages...

...other theories have emerged that might explain the proximity of the Mediterranean cable cuts... "One theory is that the cuts, reportedly caused by ships anchoring in rough seas, are actually a diversion to cover taps installed by a specially equipped submarine hundreds of miles away."

Datacenter Knowledge: Cable cuts, coincidences and conspiracies (3 Feb 08)

In heavy rotation: eMusic

I love eMusic.

eMusic caters to music lovers of all types in the underserved 25-54 demographic. It does so by cultivating a vast catalogue from the world’s top independent labels that spans every conceivable musical genre, by offering unrivaled music discovery tools and by providing tracks in a high bit rate (192K VBR) MP3 format with no DRM. It all adds up to a pro-consumer experience that gives subscribers the ultimate in flexibility, and just as importantly, ample opportunities to discover new, exciting music.

For a flat fee, you can purchase a package of downloads every month (I pay $19.99 for 75 tracks every month, or 27 cents a download for those of you too lazy to do the math at home; cheaper and more expensive plans are available for those who want to download less, or more, respectively.) One of the best features of eMusic is a preference matching engine that tracks what you download and suggests music you might like, based on what other users who have downloaded similar stuff are listening to.

Unfortunately for me, eMusic doesn't have an affiliate model, because I've certainly convinced a lot of people to try it; fortunately for you, they have a "get 50 downloads free" trial plan that you can check out for yourself.

Some recent eMusic finds, currently getting heavy airplay on iTunes at home, at work, and in transit:

• Ze Records has reissued Was (Not Was)'s "Out Come The Freaks," a compilation of their work from the early 1980s complete with remixes and bonus tracks.
• I've become very familiar of late with the gypsy-punk stylings of Gogol Bordello and the semi-deranged world music of Manu Chao.
  
• The jazz section is just tremendous and features some wonderful live recordings. In recent weeks, I've download Bud Powell (At the Blue Note Cafe, 1961); Sarah Vaughn (Live at the 1971 Monterey Jazz Festival); Thelonious Monk (Live in Paris); and Louis Armstrong (at a much earlier Monterey Jazz Festival, in 1958.)
• There are some delightful oddities, too. Last year, Lou Reed released an ambient music album called "Hudson River Wind Meditations." I've never seen it any place but eMusic.
  

All the buggywhips that are fit to flex

...[I]f you want to issue bonds to pay for FCC-approved snack cake manufacturing in a submarine on display at a national park by a sundress-wearing cigarette-puffing Levitra-popping Judy Miller, you're pretty much set.

Marc Andreesen, analyzing the expertise of the New York Times Company's Board of Directors: Inaugurating the New York Times Deathwatch.

In the bedding department, right next to the Quiltys

An online campaign by a group of mothers has forced Woolworths to withdraw a line of bedroom furniture for girls called 'Lolita'.

The Lolita Midsleeper Combi, a wooden bed with pull-out desk and cupboard designed for girls aged around six, was put on sale on the Woolworths website for £349.99.

[...]

A spokesman for the company said: "What seems to have happened is the staff who run the website had never heard of Lolita, and to be honest no one else here had either. We had to look it up on Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now."

The Daily Mail: Woolworths forced to withdraw LOLITA bedroom furniture range for girls

Oof.

(via)

Microsoft's pursuit of Yahoo

"It is a shotgun marriage, but the person holding the shotgun is Google."