Captives

“Let those who remain captives of ancient superstitions and fairy tales have their churches, chapels, synagogues, mosques, rituals and liturgical mumbo-jumbo; just don’t confuse the (pseudo)knowledge they traffic in with the knowledge needed to solve the world’s problems.”

-Stanley Fish, Are There Secular Reasons? - NYT

(Full disclosure: this quote was taken slightly out of context).

Coffee and the Enlightenment

Was coffee’s introduction into Europe responsible for fomenting the Enlightenment?

“…when coffee originally arrived as a phenomenon in the mid-1600s, it was not seducing a culture of perfect sobriety. It was replacing alcohol as the daytime drug of choice. The historian Tom Standage writes in his ingenious A History of the world in Six Glasses:

The impact of the introduction of coffee into Europe during the seventeenth century was particularly noticeable since the most common beverages of the time, even at breakfast, were weak “small beer” and wine….Those who drank coffee instead of alcohol began the day alert and stimulated, rather than relaxed and mildly inebriated, and the quality and quantity of their work improved….Western Europe began to emerge from an alcoholic haze that had lasted for centuries.”

Steven Johnson’s The Invention of Air, pages 59-60.

Coffee Culture

“… the open circulation of ideas was practically the founding credo of [...] eighteenth-century coffeehouse culture [...]. With the university system languishing amid archaic conditions, and corporate R&D labs still on the distant horizon, the public space of the coffeehouse served as the central hub of innovation in British society. How much of the Enlightenment do we owe to coffee? Most of the epic developments in England between 1650 and 1800 that still warrant a mention in the history textbooks have a coffeehouse lurking at some crucial juncture in their story. The restoration of Charles II, Newton’s theory of gravity, the South Sea Bubble–they all came about, in part, because England had developed a taste for coffee, and a fondness for the kind of informal networking and shoptalk that the coffeehouse enabled. Lloyd’s of London was once just Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse, until the shipowners and merchants started clustering there, and collectively invented the modern insurance company.”

Steven Johnson’s The Invention of Air, pages 57/58.

What I’m Reading: Wednesday

Linkfest:

Second WebOS handset dubbed Palm Eos, headed to AT&T – BGR

Ill kicks:

UBIQ eL Canvas Collection, via Kanye West.

Jonathan Rauch: “a libertarian shift in values” – Reason

“…a new ABC News/Washington Post survey was the first-ever national poll to show more people supporting gay marriage than opposing it. At the same time, other fascinating new polling data is showing (among many other things) increased political non-affiliation, support for decriminalizing pot, and a desire to open up relations with Cuba.”

Number of children in Japan slides to new low – Seattle Times

The news media found again to have a bias against falling population, saying that it “could eventually wreak havoc on the world’s second-largest economy.” When will they learn that the only measure that matters is per-capita GDP at PPP and the qualitative level of development, and not nominal GDP? It’s not havoc. If anything, shrinking is the opposite. It means less energy consumed, less pollutants emitted, less products consumed, and a healthier planet. Sounds like heaven to me!

Afghanistan’s only pig [in a zoo] quarantined in flu fear [lol]

Bristol Palin is now speaking out as an advocate for teens not fucking having any more fucking kids – Seattle Times

Bank of America Takes Lemons (They Don’t Have Enough Capital To Survive), Make Lemonade (We’ll Ask The Government For It!)

EtsyRAIN Spring Craft Show allows you to see locally produced Etsy goods in-person!

Apparently…

Via Shazzzam.

What I’m Reading: Monday

The G-1 Pool Table ($29,000) features a Vitrik playing surface that replicates the physics of felt:

Via Uncrate.

The North Face Mercurial Jacket ($350):

It has a baffled silver side made from Scholler fabric designed to reflect sunlight and vent heat out of the jacket, and because it’s reversible, you can have the smooth black side hold heat in and absorb sunlight to warm you.

The Sony-Ericsson Idou:

A 12MP cameraphone. Hot.

Cool HP PC concept:

Founding Father, Entrepreneur: The overlooked business career of George Washington

Laid-Off Foreigners Flee as Dubai Spirals Down – NYT

The Economic Stimulus Bill:

Via LoSC.

Smartphones pay off in schools – Seattle Times

What I’m Reading: Tuesday

Another example of religion only serving to divide us:

Muslim ads on county buses drive Jewish group to protest

Passports will be needed to buy mobile phones in the UK

Say goodbye to privacy (then again, this example comes courtesy of the nanny state, so we shouldn’t be so surprised).

Gordon Brown brings Britain to the edge of bankruptcy

Is the UK the next Iceland?

Biggest banks ranked by percent loss in market value:

Best performers (down roughly half): Santander (Spain), JPMorgan (US), HSBC (UK/HK). Worst performers (down 90%+): Barclays, Citigroup, Royal Bank of Scotland.

Strange effects from cellphone cameras (not photoshopped):

Los sensores CMOS baratos, como el del iPhone, no exponen el escena de una vez, sino que la escanean de izquierda a derecha. Si fotografías algo que se mueve muy rápido (como las hélices de un avión) puede resultar en imágenes extrañas en las que cada columna del sensor representa un momento en el tiempo distinto a los demás.

(Cheap CMOS censors like those found in the iPhone don’t take a single exposure, and instead scan a scene from left to right. If you photograph something moving quickly (like an airplane’s propeller) it could result in a strange image, in which each column of the CMOS censor displays a capture moments apart from its neighbors).

Curioso efecto óptico en cámaras sencillas – Microsiervos

The internet has changed the way we consume news. Nicholas Sarkozy wants to go against progress and bail out French newspaper publishers. It’s true that there is inherent value in having a strong, independent press, but there is no evidence that suggests that we’re losing that robust impartiality. In fact, only the method of news consumption is changing. Minus two points for Sarkozy.

Sarkozy quiere salvar a la prensa francesa – El Blog Salmon

Chinese Translation Cuts Out Parts of Obama Inauguration Speech

The Chinese translation of the speech, credited to the Web site of the official China Daily newspaper, was missing the word “communism” in the first sentence. The paragraph with the sentence on dissent had been removed entirely.

Anarchy anyone?:

It’s time to get rid of farm subsidies in the US and Europe:

Agricultural Subsidies: Corporate Welfare for Farmers – Reason Online

The US ought to allow online poker. California is going to this year, and will reap a massive tax windfall. Other states will follow suit.

Follow-Up: The Stakes Get Bigger – Reason

What I’m Reading: Friday

Real-life Tetris, in Australia:

Starbucks Torched in Greece:
(click to enlarge)

Greek riot aftermath 4 – Flickr

Looks like Google Android is going to take over China with this Lenovo phone (the Chinese have been keen on Linux handsets for years):

Nice Dilbert on solvency:

Via The Big Picture.

Wunderbloc (a NYC-based fashion/boutique/e-commerce site) is coming up with some photography that’s good enough to challence TheSartorialist:

Krystal Brown-Malone

Sasha Owen-Longfellow

Sony is trying to leapfrog the iPod Touch with a svelte touchscreen Walkman. Too little, too late:

Vertu’s got a sweet ode to Boucheron:

Corporate logos modified to reflect the gloomy economy:

A $300 billion foreclosure prevention program passed by Congress this summer to help up to 400,000 homeowners wound up larded with requirements, like requiring background checks and restricting eligibility for mortgage relief to people at risk of foreclosure as of March 1. As a result, fewer than 200 people have applied for the program since it opened in October, according to officials from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and no loans have been modified.

Loan Mod Datapoint of the Day, via Felix Salmon

What I’m Reading: Tuesday

Laptops are now almost free at Radio Shack

Percent of Loans in Foreclosure, 2007:

Via The Big Picture.

ASUS invented the Netbook, but Acer now wallops them in sales (I wonder whose margins are higher?)

LG tests LTE (the next generation of cellular/data networks) and gets 60mbps down and 20mbps up!

What I’m Reading: Friday

Air-sick bag iPhone mount:

Via Engadget.

Who can get a 123% loan-to-value mortgage these days? George W Bush, that’s who! He’s just taken out a $3,074,239 loan from Community National Bank in Midland, Texas, to buy an 8,500 sq. ft. bungalow in Dallas which was appraised at $2.5 million earlier this year.

Via Felix Salmon.

Sprint’s going to leverage their WiMax network by offering dual-mode (i.e. CDMA high-speed cellular data combined with Clear WiMax) connectivity in one device. Good move.

Loving the Fisker Karma:

(click to enlarge)

Fisker Reveals the Production Karma – Wired News

Bellevue High School’s football team is ranked #56 in the nation. Somehow, our rival Skyline is ranked higher, at #22.

Via Rivals.com.

What I’m Reading: Wednesday

The 2008 Financial Bailout is larger (even when adjusted for inflation) than our WWII expenditures:

Nokia launches the N97 QWERTY touch-screen smartphone:

Cicero and the Roman Credit Crunch, 88 BC:

“…Cicero, the Roman orator, gave a speech in 66BC in which he alluded to the credit crunch. Cicero was arguing that Pompey the Great should be given military command against Mithridates VI, king of Pontus on the Black sea coast of what is now Turkey. He reminded his audience of events in 88BC, when the same Mithridates invaded the Roman province of Asia, on the western coast of Turkey. Cicero claimed the invasion caused the loss of so much Roman money that credit was destroyed in Rome itself.”

Out of your mind

The Bororo Indians, a primitive tribe who live along the Vermelho River in the Amazon jungles of Brazil, believe that there is no such thing as a private self. The Bororos regard the mind as an open cavity, like a cave or a tunnel or an arcade, if you will, in which the entire village dwells and the jungle grows. In 1969 José M. R. Delgado, the eminent Spanish brain physiologist, pronounced the Bororos correct. for nearly three millenia, Western philosophers had viewed the self as something unique, something encased inside each person’s skull, so to speak. This inner self had to deal with and learn from the outside world, of course, and it might prove incompetent in doing so. Nevertheless, at the core of one’s self there was presumed to be something irreducible and inviolate. Not so, said Delgado. “Each person is a transitory composite of materials borrowed from the environment.” The important word was transitory, and he was talking not about years but about hours. He cited experiments in which healthy college students lying on beds in well-lit but soundproof chambers, wearing gloves to reduce the sense of touch and translucent goggles to block out specific sights, began to hallucinate within hours. Without the entire village, the whole jungle, occupying the cavity, they had no minds left.

Excerpted from Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities.

What I’m Reading: Tuesday

Barack Obama won’t be the first black president (David Palmer was).

What will an Obama Presidency look like?

Black. No seriously, we elected an African American, and history suggests this has never happened before. Like most people though, history is wrong. There have in fact been many black presidents in America’s past. Our research indicates there is one who is a particularly strong comp to Barrack Obama. His name is David Palmer [of television's 24].

[...]

As Obama selects his staff, consider the precedent of David Palmer. Can we state, unequivocally, that Rahm Emmanuel is not somehow aligned with a crazy hawkish intragovernment syndicate with unclear objectives [AIPAC]? Precedent says No. Can we feel comfortable that Michelle is not some backroom political power broker and/or criminal mastermind? Precedent says No.

What will an Obama Presidency look like? – LoSC

T-Mobile is giving out free Motorola ZN5′s (on contract) this weekend only. Kodak 5MP auto-focus cam w/ xenon flash and WiFi are standard.

I want a Moncler coat for the slopes this season (they go best at Chamonix and Gstaad but work equally well in Aspen, Tahoe, and Sun Valley). They’re opening a new store in Aspen on Thursday

(click to enlarge)

Branding bomb: Samsung, WTF is BizBee? And why would executives want to buy products with such a childish name? Try again.

What I’m Reading: Last Week

The amount of tabs open in my Chrome and Firefox windows is astounding (I usually keep them open until I catalog them in these posts).

This is a couple days’ worth:

LG’s Prada II debuts:

Fujitsu’s DoCoMo PRIME F-01A Hands-on:

(it’s waterproof, has a 3.5″ VGA touchscreen, 5.2MP camera, 30fps VGA video recording, and a fingerprint reader):

Zimbabwe’s inflation right now is somewhere north of 89,700,000,000,000,000,000,000% (imagine a society in which prices double every 22 hours!)

Honda’s FC Sport fuel-cell hybrid debuts:

Ford’s Most Advanced Assembly Plant is located in……Rural Brazil. No wonder manufacturers want to leave the USA! The UAW won’t allow such automated plants to be built here! I wonder why our auto industry is bankrupt?

Got a BlackBerry and use GMail? Now your contacts can sync seamlessly.

Now you can buy 50 euro cent coins that secretly contain microsd cards, 007 style:

What I’m Reading: Tuesday

NVIDIA has launched its power-saving personal supercomputer, the Tesla:

It runs on a GPU with various chipsets provided by others, including ASUS. Sick.

Flickr find: Faroe Islands (via A Continuous Lean):

(click to enlarge)

The Space Needle in 1962:

A genetic study of 3,200 Europeans shows the mix of genes of various citizens of the continent. The map on the left shows you the color-coding of countries, and those colors correspond to their citizens shown on the genetic map on the right. It shows that physical barriers such as the Alps and the Pyrenees limit the mixing of cultures, and geographically-isolate cultures, genetically.

via Microsiervos

How to combat procrasti…

Why Apple Won’t Allow Adobe Flash on iPhone – Flash would be the new preferred development environment, allow alternative music/video services that would cannibalize iTunes.

VERY interesting. I hadn’t thought about this angle.

Railroads brought us standardized time zones in 1883

What I’m Reading: Monday

Meat is murder: Tech Edition

The Bacon iPhone Sleeve

Wallet, Keys, Cellphone, and Flash Drive:

Meaty iPod Sleeve

Now you can floss those meats out of your munchers with bacon-flavored floss! (why didn’t I think of this?):

Mario Lopez’ War on Sleeves continues:

Dear A.C. Slater,

P.S. How much are we talking for you to show up to my work and call people “Preppy?” Five, ten bucks? Shoot me a figure which I’ll continually reject until you settle for a McMuffin.

You can now order Domino’s pizza through your TiVo (Praise the lord! Domino’s be thy name!)

Obama on 60 Minutes:

Barack Obama: My hope is that over the course of the next week, between the White House and Congress, the discussions are shaped around providing assistance but making sure that that assistance is conditioned on labor, management, suppliers, lenders, all the stakeholders coming together with a plan: what does a sustainable U.S. auto industry look like? So that we are creating a bridge loan to somewhere as opposed to a bridge loan to nowhere. And that’s, I think, what you haven’t yet seen. That’s something that I think we’re gonna have to come up with.
Kroft: Are there a lot of people that think that the country would probably be better off and General Motors might be better off if it was allowed to go into bankruptcy?
Barack Obama: Well, you know, under normal circumstances that might be the case in the sense that you’d go to a restructuring like the airlines had to do in some cases. And then they come out and they’re still a viable operation. And they’re operating even during the course of bankruptcy. In this situation, you could see the spigot completely shut off so that it would not potentially permit GM to get back on its feet. And I think that what we have to do is to recognize that these are extraordinary circumstances. Banks aren’t lending as it is. They’re not even lending to businesses that are doing well, much less businesses that are doing poorly. And in that circumstance, the usual options may not be available.

Bailout vs Bankruptcy, Obama Edition – Felix Salmon

Peek WANTS YOU to hack/improve their device. Wish Apple and Google would roll like this.

http://streetstyl.es/ – a street fashion photography aggregator. Now you don’t have to check 5 sites.

Send this to your Grandmother (or anyone you know still using an aol.com/hotmail.com/msn.com email address:

How to ditch your old email address (and jump into the 21st century)