Dear Old People Who Run the World,
My generation would like to break up with you.
The death of journalism
- Did you feel that the institution of government was no longer the best way to bring change about?
- When you resigned from the AOGCC [Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission], that was a huge catapult for you. Do you think this might catapult you as well? Or do you see it as kind of a selfless move, more for the state than for you?
- What do you think is particularly wrong with what Obama is doing now?
These are a handful of the questions TIME magazine asked Sarah Palin.
They may as well have asked - “Why don’t you tell us why you’re brilliant?”
Pah!
"Stories are slices through complex webs of ideas, with connections through the river of time and the semantic space of causality and influence."
I didn’t know that amongst my categories of favourite things there was a space for finest acceptance speech.
But there is, and this is it.
On traffic
But why is traffic so unpredictable? After all, the number of cars on a highway during a typical weekday rush hour is fairly constant. And yet, even when there are no accidents - and most traffic isn’t caused by collisions - the speed of traffic can undergo dramatic and seemingly inexplicable shifts.
The key to understanding traffic jams is something known as “critical density,” or the number of vehicles that any road can efficiently accommodate. When this threshold is crossed - when too many cars are trying to cram onto the same six lanes of asphalt - the flow of traffic starts to breakdown. At this point, congestion becomes all but inevitable, as even seemingly insignificant events, such as a single driver tapping on the brakes, can trigger a cascade of brake lights. That’s when the highway becomes a parking lot.
"
We spend a lot of time looking for our spaceships and jet-packs, but – and consider this bit, it gets bigger and weirder the more you think about it – in a matter of days we can genetically sequence a mutant virus that’s jumped the species gap. People try to make an ordinary thing of that. There’s a strong tendency to cast the present day, whenever that may be, as essentially banal and not what was promised. Stop looking for the loud giant stuff. The small marvels surround us.
We have within us, suppressed as it may be these days, the urge to dramatise our landscapes. If you don’t believe me, visit any stone circle and you’ll get the idea. Understand that you live in a future quite literally beyond imagining even at the beginning of modern times. See the stage for how big and weird it really is, and let a little dramatic lighting into your life.
"Way back in college I had a marine biology teacher who learned I was just floundering on this big, amorphous topic, and I told him I was struggling, that I didn’t know what I was doing. And he said, “When you’re doing a big essay, it’s like you’re walking on the beach and you come upon a dead sea walrus and you’re curious about how he died. You can do one of two things. You can pick up that piece of driftwood over there and start bashing the flank. And all you are going to do is make blubber and hash of him. Or you can pick up that driftwood, go sit down on a boulder, pick up a rock and start sharpening the driftwood. It will take all afternoon, but by the end you’ll have a blade. Then you can do the autopsy, and in five minutes you’ll know what happened.” So when you’re dealing with a huge, amorphous subject, it’s best not to ask huge, amorphous questions. Better to spend ninety percent of your time honing the questions, and after awhile the subject will open up.
"
I’ve known for a long time that stunning boredom is the secret weapon of European integration. Europe succeeds precisely by being so entirely and utterly boring that the world’s most fractious and warlike peoples are, like… huh? What were you saying? Cucumbers? We freakin’ firebombed Dresden and you’re talking about cucumbers now?
That’s right, Hans, Francois, Giuseppe. You did firebomb Dresden and, that’s why you’ve been sentenced to sixty solid years (and counting) of cucumber regulations.
And it works, too.
"Her sentences stream out in all directions like children being released early from school."
— http://marbury.typepad.com/marbury/2009/07/palins-rational-decision.html
My favourite HYS of all time
Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.
John Lennon. He was talking about liberals.
[chuckm51], Austin,Texas, United States
via Speak Your Branes - A collection of ignorance, narcissism, stupidity, hypocrisy and bad grammar.
Cities are technological artifacts, the largest technology we make. Their impact is out of proportion to the number of humans living in them. As the chart above shows, the percentage of humans living in cities averaged about one or two percent for most of recorded history. (The chart’s Y axis is a logarithmic scale of percentage.) Yet almost everything that we think of when we say “culture” arose within cities. After all, the terms “city” and “civilization” share the same root. But the massive citification, or urbanization, that characterizes the technium today is a very recent development. Like most other charts depicting the technium, not much happens until the last two centuries. Then populations booms, innovation rockets, information explodes, freedoms increase, and cities rule.
India legalizes gay relationships
Surely, this is the greatest extension of human rights in history of the world, in terms of sheer numbers. I wonder if India will stop marriage-discrimination before the US or the UK? I wouldn’t bet against it.
