“A new track from the studio … sort of. Great song, great singers, great vibe: Eno, Edge and Lanois make sweet harmony with the William Bell-penned classic.”

“The lesson of all this is that when insiders have broken a financial institution, the most direct remedy is to kick them out. Traders are hardly in short supply, and you don’t need to rely on the ones who made the toxic trades in the first place. Companies must always plan around the potential departure of even their star traders, or they are certain to fail. A.I.G. does not need to keep all of its traders, especially since it takes far fewer people to unwind a portfolio than to build it up.”

“The overarching challenge for uReach, CallWave, SkyDeck, SpinVox and Google Voice, etc is that they are working outside the system. These services are all chipping away at access to your actual telecom service. They’re fighting the network and the hardware which they don’t really control. All these services would be made moot if the cell phone companies just offered this as part of their package. Why do I need to manually enter some wacky forwarding codes to get voicemail transcripts? Why don’t Verizon/Sprint/T-Mobile/AT&T just offer it. It’s clearly possible, and they have the raw message data. More importantly to them, why am I paying $10 or $15 a month extra to other companies for this? They should want this money from me or offer it for free like Google.”

“Note: This is a dramatization, intentionally exaggerated to stimulate debate and cause trouble.
“There is diplomacy… slow, careful, responsible, respectful, long-term, and I love it!
“…and there is this: Fast, brash, not quite fair, meant to give you confidence to work with urgency (and diplomacy) for change.”

“I have an extensive collection of comic strips from the Yellow Kid to Get Fuzzy, and I thought it would be interesting to try to find out where grawlixes started and how they developed. By “grawlixes”, I mean icons representing unprintable words, occurring within speech balloons belonging to characters who are agitated. The images below are almost all handmade copies from the originals. They are quite faithful to the originals. American comics are shown in chronological order, followed by French comics also in order. A few comics were undated (n.d.) in the sources I consulted, and I’ve tried to put them in about the right spot.”

“Last month, the same government that says it “cannot just abrogate” executives’ bonus contracts used its leverage to cancel unions’ wage contracts. As the Wall Street Journal reported, federal loans to G.M. and Chrysler were made contingent on those manufacturers shredding their existing labor pacts and “extract[ing] financial concessions from workers.” In other words, our government asks us to believe that it possesses total authority to adjust contracts at car companies it lends to, and yet has zero power to modify contracts at financial firms it owns. This, even though the latter set of covenants might be easily abolished.”

“governmentattic.org provides electronic copies of hundreds of interesting Federal Government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Fascinating historical documents, reports on items in the news, oddities and fun stuff and government bloopers, they’re all here. Think of browsing this site as rummaging through the Government’s Attic — hence our name. Our motto: Videre licet.”

“The tension between record seekers — including journalists and nonprofits — and government agencies often stems from the fact that bureaucrats collect data to do their job; while the public often requests it to prove otherwise. “Government does not want to release the data, because people would draw … conclusions that government doesn’t want them to draw,” says Bill Allison, senior fellow with the Sunlight Foundation.”

“The language of grass strips is just one of thousands of areas of American life documented in the Dictionary of American Regional English, one of the oldest and most ambitious projects in the history of American lexicography. Dedicated to capturing all terms that are not part of standard English nationwide, DARE dates from the 1960s and will finally be fully published in 2010 (though its eventual digitization promises to enrich and expand the dictionary indefinitely).”

“Creative Time curator Nato Thompson will lead a discussion on Experimental Geography with Lize Mogel and Damon Rich, two artists who participated in his exhibition (for Independent Curators International) and book (Melville House) of the same name.

“The discussion will focus on the creative use of landscape hacking, cartography, locative media, and radical urbanism as a means of engaging with the politics of contested spaces. In presenting work from the show and book, the panelists will explore the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, and the juncture where the two realms collide.”

“Last night Sen. Chris Dodd admitted on CNN that he was responsible, under administration pressure, for language in the final version of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that explicitly permitted the types of retroactive bonuses that A.I.G. is under fire for doling out. The tale of this obscure amendment shows how important it is that Congress provide time for the public to Read the Bill—remember, the 1,000+ page stimulus bill was available to the public for only 13 hours before Congress began debating it, most of that time during the wee hours of the night. If the legislation had been available longer, perhaps this provision would have shriveled in the sunlight.”

“Here’s a handy map for the rest of the world, pointing out the exact location of NYC sitcoms. Oddly enough, these were all probably filmed in California. The untapped Williamsburg Hipster sitcom setting is plain to see.”

‘Writing in the International Journal of Food Science & Technology, the researchers note that jumbo squid mantle muscle used to make frankfurter-type products performed well in sensory tests.

‘The results suggest that the mantle muscle of the cephalopod could open up “a range of possibilities for product development”, wrote the authors, led by Anibal Felix-Armenta.

‘“The importance of the present study lies in that no work has been published about the elaboration of gelled-emulsified type value-added product made of jumbo squid mantle muscle,” said the researchers.’

“On its homepage Wikirank shows which Wikipedia articles are the most read and which pages are gaining in popularity. Additionally, you can find each article’s detail page via search. On the detail page you can find and article excerpt, traffic numbers and a (soon-to-be-embeddable) traffic chart that allow you to compare traffic with other topics (up to four).
…
“Wikirank is a testament to good, clean design and the power of existing web tools. It’s the first project from Small Batch, but it won’t be the last. I expect that their other projects will also focus on data visualization”

“School assignment to reinterpret the fairytale Little red riding hood.” (in infographic style)

“Last week in the creative thinking course I’m teaching at UW, we spent time listing idea killers. Statements we’ve heard, or used, that stop ideas in their tracks. Have any to add?

“Mostly these are used as thought inhibitors: they don’t require any thought to say. They’re used as flinch negative responses, dismissing without explanation. Unlike real critical thinking, which offers a path (e.g if you can overcome x, y and z we’ll consider it) idea killers are lazy dead ends.”

“Today’s Chicago Tribune’s masthead features the Twitter names of the publisher and editors.”

“But the larger problem won’t go away. And it’s not just a matter of people missing the biggest economic story of the last 20 years. It’s a matter of those who minimized it and those who blew it off because it didn’t fit their worldview continuing in their plum positions of authority. Mr. Stewart wasn’t rude enough to ask it, but over all his inquiries there hung the obvious question: Why do you still have a job, Mr. Cramer?”

“The Gazette’s Steve Buttry last week announced bold changes in the organization of the Gazette newsroom. Buttry was editor of the paper, but that role has passed to Lyle Muller, and Buttry has assumed a newly coined title: Information Content Conductor. I’m sure he’s the only guy in the country with that title right now.
…
“In explaining the conductor title, Buttry refers to its connotations in several other environments:
‘As a musical conductor does, I will be orchestrating the work of creative people. As a railroad conductor does, I will interact with the public to provide an orderly, satisfying experience. As an electrical conductor does, I need to carry energy in the staff and the community.’”

Video of beer-bottle dominoes from a Danish bar.

“Over the last nine years the Robin Hood Foundation and the city’s schools administration have built libraries in 62 schools in low-income neighborhoods. Some of the libraries, including those recently completed at three schools in the Bronx, have also come with the addition of permanent works by well-known artists.”

a true rogue’s gallery

‘Garrison began corresponding with an intellectual atheist uncle whose gentle questions helped her acknowledge her mounting crisis of faith. She wrote her uncle: “If, as I kind of suspect, it turns out that I don’t actually believe in a personal God, I know I’m going to be exceedingly pissed — knowing that I’ve done my best with the hand I’ve been dealt and it’s cost me a lot and it’s worn me down — only to discover midway through that the game is rigged and there’s no way I can win.”‘

“The paradox of transparency is that it may indeed reveal waste, fraud, and malfeasance, making things appear worse before they begin to get better. This is not something to be afraid of. It’s a sign of success.
“Nonetheless, the political atmosphere in Washington has grown so sensitive that the Obama administration initially felt the need to distance itself from Kundra, lest they be touched by even the faintest whiff of the D.C. scandal.
“We need to make sure that the transparency mission is not going to be hijacked by political considerations. What cabinet secretary, what governor, what mayor, what IT manager in local government, what supplier will support the Federal transparency initiative if whatever is uncovered will have to be weighed against the risk that the other party will take advantage?”

“The guys literally on the side of the road that you see digging ditches have to have a mobile phone in order to do that job. Day labor in many parts of Nairobi is organized via SMS.”

“Altogether, Downriver Revival is a remarkable time capsule — not just of Double U Sound, but of Ecorse, its surrounding towns, and all the pockets of local talent that have grown along the southern banks of the Detroit River.”

“While there is a disproportionately large number of legislators who are not digitally engaged and who have not sponsored large earmarks, you’ll notice that as digital engagement increases, there becomes fewer and fewer legislators who are sponsoring extremely large earmarks. The only exception to this rule is Nancy Pelosi who has a very large Digital Transparency Index (80), but has also sponsored a large number of solo earmarks ($15,667,000).”

“HackingCongress is a new hub for projects at the intersection of civics & technology, fostering civic engagement and education, advancing government transparency, and supporting communication with government. (“Hacking” has a dual meaning in the computer world and in this case it is positive slang for creative programming.) The focus of this site is on projects related to the U.S. Congress and state-level legislatures.”

“Because Stoppelman’s chief criticism of my article was that many of my sources were anonymous, for this follow-up I decided only to interview people who were willing to go on the record. Their stories are no less damaging: several said that the reps would offer to move negative reviews if they advertised; and in some cases positive reviews disappeared when they refused, or negative ones appeared. In one case, a nightclub owner said Yelp offered positive reviews of his business in exchange for free drinks.”

“iCream’s model enables customers to chose their own liquid base–BGH-free ice cream, yogurt, or soymilk (with low- and no-fat options), then add one of 32 flavors via syringe, then up to three topping and add-ins, a choice of sweeteners, and finally food coloring as garishly unnatural as you like (purple peach or pink green tea, anyone?). Yesterday for some odd reason they were pushing green on people, even offering a 10 percent discount if you were wearing it. Instead I went with the light-brownish pear flavor. I suppose for the sake of science I should chosen soy milk to compare to Roche’s, but parsnip wasn’t on the flavoring menu, so I took the ice cream.”

“A high tide floats all boats,” she said. “The more craft beers we have here, the more merry we’ll all be.”

“They are leaving, as you are not, with their integrity intact. Over the years, you have often prattled about your ‘legacy,’ by which you meant your money. You never understood. The legacy left by Marshall III [founder of the Chicago Sun] and Marshal IV [former owner of the Sun-Times and Daily News] was honorable, creative service to their community. You have pissed on that legacy.”

“It’s fine to praise Jon Stewart for the great interview he conducted and to mock and scoff at Jim Cramer and CNBC. That’s absolutely warranted. But just as was true for Judy Miller (and her still-celebrated cohort, Michael Gordon), Jim Cramer isn’t an aberration. What he did and the excuses he offered are ones that are embraced as gospel to this day by most of our establishment press corps, and to know that this is true, just look at what they do and say about their roles.”

“The American public is not blameless in what’s happened. But we are finally waking up to the level of arrogance that dominates wide swaths of corporate America, particularly Wall Street. These transcendently greedy people, who aren’t just indifferent to what the rest of us think but who actually believe they’re entitled to loot the treasury and our children’s futures, need a slapping down.”

“Did the banks realize the value of its protection held against AIG was zero? Of course they did – they aren’t as dumb as the media suggests. The reason they continued to pay the full market CDS offer (rather than a much lower level due to AIG’s massive wrong-wayness) to AIG was because they considered it a cost that allowed them to continue originating CDOs. If they could not offload super-senior risk to someone, their originating desks would be effectively shut down.”

click to get a new picture

“Maybe the single most interesting thing about this API is that the spec is published under a Creative Commons “Attribution” license, which means that pretty well anybody can do pretty well anything with it. I’m pretty convinced that if Cloud technology is going to take off, there’ll have to be a competitive ecosystem; so that when you bet on a service provider, if the relationship doesn’t work out there’s a way to take your business to another provider with relatively little operational pain. Put another way: no lock-in.
…
“Machine virtualization is a big deal, obviously. Lightweight lockin-free data-center virtualization might be bigger, I think.”

“Netdisaster lets you “destroy” any given Web page — with scribbling babies, rampaging dinosaurs, or defecating heifers. It’s like taking an anger-management course online.”

“Eddie has not only left us wondering whose side he’s really on, but also, because of the bonus backlash, he has managed to put the entire financial rescue effort in political jeopardy. That’s harsh criticism, I realize, especially for a respected business executive who volunteered to leave a comfortable retirement to take a $1-a-year job at the request of his government. But at some point you have to ask whether we’ve hired Gary Cooper for a role better suited to Clint Eastwood.”

“Running Hadoop on EC2 is easy. We’ve taken Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop, and packaged it up in an easy-to-use AMI and associated launch scripts.”

“At last! Apple finally brings 1984 technology to the iPhone with the addition of copy and paste.”

“Mr. Keene said jurors might think they were helping, not hurting, by digging deeper. “There are people who feel they can’t serve justice if they don’t find the answers to certain questions,” he said.

“But the rules of evidence, developed over hundreds of years of jurisprudence, are there to ensure that the facts that go before a jury have been subjected to scrutiny and challenge from both sides, said Olin Guy Wellborn III, a law professor at the University of Texas.”

“The official Seafood Watch recommendations help you make sustainable seafood choices quickly and easily–whether you’re eating at your favorite restaurant or sushi joint, or shopping at your local market. And at a time when the world’s oceans are severely overfished, your seafood choices make a big difference.”

“Manion’s been taking delivery of whole pigs from Swan Creek farmer George Rasmussen, which he turns into pork sliders and Cuban sandwiches on the new menu, rolled out last week. Rasmussen in turn hauls the grain back to Michigan and feeds it to his pigs.

“Lane says a couple grain pickups per week are rotated between Swan Creek and Slagel Farms, so wherever you see those names on a menu there’s a good chance the animal was feasting on Goose Island grain.”

“For too long Birmingham and the Black Country have failed to celebrate what is rightfully theirs, to claim the city and the region as the birth place of “heavy metal”. Its time to start celebrating!!!

“The ‘Home Of Metal’ project aims to create a digital archive of everything heavy metal from the 60s to now. An online library of images, interviews, stories and various pieces of memorabila dedicated to telling the story of Metal and its unique birthplace. Focusing on the innovators of the genre and those that continued to develop it: Black Sabbath , Led Zeppelin , Judas Priest , Napalm Death and Godflesh .”

“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.`”

“it’s not that the Library doesn’t necessarily *want* to share its database. It’s just that sharing it wasn’t a part of their mandate from Congress and they don’t want to upset Congress by stepping out of their mandate. The omnibus bill is an indication from the House to the Library that this would be something supported by Congress. (My understanding is that the Library has been seeking permission from Congress to do some of these things, probably in response to a previous push for this, but the omnibus legislation has been in the works concurrently.)”

“You see, Stewart’s real critique wasn’t about Cramer, it was also only marginally about CNBC. Instead, Stewart’s real rage comes from the role the modern media has created for itself: the role of cheerleader instead of watchdog, of favoring surface over depth, of respecting authority instead of questioning it.”