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Bsoton: frigging hot. 30 miles out on the water: nice temperature. Really windy, though. Seasickness: none. But my legs got a workout from 'surfing', balancing on the top deck while not holding onto stuff. Mitchell compared it to an elliptical machine in 2D. Surprisingly tiring.
But that and wearing jeans and hauling a jacket around (I hadn't known how cold it'd be, I came prepared) didn't keep me from exploring Boston more once we got back. It may have been over a month since I was last in the city. Walked down the Greenway a bit, then found myself attracted to some giant shell-like entrance to what turned out to be Rowes Wharf Walkway. Not doing that well, a bunch of available office space. But looked nice, and to the south I found an unexpected bridge, which I took naturally, leading to the courthouse and a modest botanical garden, and signs about Fan Pier and the cleanup of Boston Harbor[1]. Further walking led me to the Westin Waterfront, turning my intrepid exploration into something that felt rather mundane. Unfair; not like I'd been in that particular area before, but I'd imagined I'd found a bigger area of novelty.
I'd meant to try out Vietnamese in Chinatown, but decided to look at the Hei La Moon dinner menu, and my legs said "stay". The dinner menu looks unexciting, though some of the food on tables looked more so. But even more exciting were trays of dim sum, so I asked, and yep there's a dim sum menu and they'll make it fresh for you.
:usericon:
The waiter was honest. "Just you? That's a lot of food." "I know. I'll just take the rest home." 15+ pieces got eaten, 9 made it home. I should have eaten less.
I'd grabbed Niven's Limits as a lightweight short story collection to read on the boat if needed. "Lion in the Attic" is pretty good, "A Teardrop Falls" (berserker story) is good, "Spirals" (manly men and women colonize space despite the downers of Earth) is ehhh. I probably liked it when younger, but now the misanthropy gets to me. Also the dubious economics. Not impossible economics; Zimbabwe basically did what he describes the US as doing. But still. I did note part of the problem was a tax revolt, and part of the solution was Americans paying their taxes again...
[1] When Ehrenhalt talked about Chicago's recovery in The Great Inversion, one factor mentioned was old effort to clean up Lake Michigan, or at least stop contributing to it. Chicago has a nice shoreline now, one rich people are willing to pay to see. And beaches are safe to swim off of; they might have been as a kid too, though the lake was surprisingly out-of-mind for being about 4 miles from it. By contrast, other Great Lakes are still industrial dumps, which probably doesn't help e.g. Buffalo or Detroit. So, I've moved to Boston, conveniently after considerable effort to clean *it* up, with proper water treatment plants rather than dumping stuff into the harbor...
See the
Sometimes this sort of thing makes me come up with examples or counter-examples from my own life, which I've been advised can be annoying, but I can do whatever I want in my LJ, haha. Mind you, I didn't have a huge concept of children's books let alone YA as a kid, and was doing things like reading Mallory at 7 and Moby Dick at 8, but anyway, here's what I can remember, in order of my digging them out of memory:
( Mercy cut )
Side note: Wikipedia says of Alexander's Vesper Holly: "Vesper is young and wild; not at all the proper Victorian schoolgirl. Alexander describes her as having "the digestive talents of a goat and the mind of a chess master. She is familiar with half a dozen languages and can swear in all of them."[2]" I should go re-read it, especially since anima_mecanique liked it a lot as a kid. I remember jack-all.
See the
Graeber notes that the mainstream view of money as emerging from barter spot trades goes back to Adam Smith (Graeber 2011: 24). The modern neoclassical economics profession is obsessed with barter because they regard money as a neutral veil and their “real” analysis of economies is essentially that of a barter system
I'm currently reading The Big Problem of Small Change, a book Amy was reading sometime after we met. It includes (page 93 hardcover, Medieval Ideas About Money; Qualifications) the followomg translation of a bit from the Roman Digest (of law), 18.1.1, written by the Roman jurist Paulus before AD 235 (when he died.)
All buying and selling has its origin in exchange or barter. For in times past money was not so, nor was one thing called 'merchandise' and the other 'price'; rather did every man barter what was useless to him for that which was useful, according to the exigencies of his current needs; for it often happens that what one man has in plenty another lacks. But since it did not always and easily happen that when you had something which I wanted, I, for my part, had something that you were willing to accept, a material was selected which, being given a stable value (aestimatio) by the state, avoided the problems of barter by providing an equality of quantity (aequalitas quantitatis). That material, struck with a public design (forma), offers use (usus) and ownership (dominium) not so much by its substance (ex substantia) as by its quantity (ex quantitate), so that no longer are the things exchanged both called wares but one of them is termed the price (pretium).
The author calls this obscure; seems pretty clear to me. Nothing says it's an accurate story, of course. But it is 1500 years earlier than Adam Smith, though still several centuries after the invention of coinage.
A few pages later is another translation, this of the words of Pope Innocent IV, who lived in the 1200s.
We believe, however, that the king, by his right, and by the fact that money receives authority and general acceptance from his effigy or mark, can make money of somewhat less, but not much less value than the metal or matter from which it is made. Therefore, in the first case, when he wants to diminish a money already made, we do not believe he can do so without the consent of the people, but with its consent we believe that he can, just as anyone is allowed to renounce his right. And because the business of the king is considered to be the business of all, for this reason the consent of the majority of the notables of the kingdom suffices.
Bolding mine.
The authors add:
The passage comes from viewing seigniorage as a tax. At the time, kings were expected to live from the revenues of their own lands, and taxes could only be levied with the consent of the people. The treatise on money by the Germany scholar Gabriel Biel repeats this doctrine and adds arguments that debasement is a relatively efficient and fari form of taxation, falling on all classes alike.
I'm guessing most of us don't at a gut level think of "no taxation without representation" or "consent of the people" in association with medieval kings, thus this blog post. At one level that's from not correlating the contents of our minds propery, as "The Call of Cthulhu" put it, at least for those of us who know what the basic function of Parliament or the Estates-General was, i.e. to be persuaded by the king into approving taxes. But I think it's one thing to know of a couple instances of that (or more, after I read about Spain's Cortes-General), and another to read a 1200s Pope say so, so casually.
Of course the bit about 'notables' means we're not talking super democratic here. But still.
Also, this article on the Estates-General said things I condensed as
elective component: elected by monks, by rich people in towns, in 1302.
1468 towns elect an ecclesiastic, noble, and burgess. 1484 invites all
estates to elect; universal and direct suffrage for all orders, but
countrymen couldn't get to town, so elected electors to represent them.
Early lots of control over taxes, ceded during Charles VII out of
"weariness" in Hundred Year's War. Refused to grant a regency in 1484.
1484 had deliberation in common; 1560 had orders deliberate separately.
Advisory on legislation; petition; could grant right to modify
fundamental laws of the regime.
And finally, just because it's too cool not to share at every opportunity, one version of the oath of allegiance of Aragon's nobility:
"We, who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than us, to
accept you as our king and sovereign, provided you observe all our
liberties and laws, but if not, not."
I have to say, while I hate to buy into "democratic Europe, Asian despotism", I haven't heard of anything similar in Asia, particularly in China, Japan, and India. At least on a robust scale; early India had some republics, and Buddha was probably born in one than as a prince, but my reading of medieval India did not include kings having to wrangle taxes out of their subjects. Then again, India's history is kind of lacking in detail. China and Japan seem more pointed examples.
See the
What President Romney would mean for women. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/bl
IMF calls out Cameron's austerity measures. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0
Super round moon. http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-la
Grover Norquist compares closing tax leaving to Nazis
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0
on voluntarily shorter copyright terms
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/sj/201
veteran suicide rates. double the risk, 4x the risk for 17-24
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/opini
ancient bacteria
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/obs
chronotypes and school starting time teenage sleep
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/a-b
sleep as simple sit still, evolution of wakefulness
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/a-b
Heartland Institute in climate change trouble
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2
euro unemployment rate
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0
NAACP endorses gay marriage
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ele
See the
The order of content might be unusual; both books build up from simple cases. The micro book starts with the assumption of optimizing individuals, and talks about the decision theory of one individual, then game theory and the interaction of a small number of individuals, and only then about markets and the ideal interaction of $BIGNUM individuals. And it quickly sets up the big question: "Under what circumstances does individual optimization lead to outcomes that are good for the group as a whole?" And it talks about the benefits of trade and comparative advantage and how supply and demand curves work, but also the pitfalls of adverse selection, the prisoners dilemma, asymmetric information. It notes the limitations of economic Pareto efficiency, being necessary but far from sufficient for good outcomes. Competitive markets are awesome, but markets aren't always competitive. How taxes end up getting distributed among buyers and sellers (it largely doesn't matter who you put a sales or payroll tax on; elasticity will pass the burden around.)
Things I learned about:
* Hotelling's Law and why businesses often cluster, like hot dog stands in the middle of a beach rather than spaced out. The book actually just mentioned it in passing, leaving me to think about it then look it up.
* How driving can be a prisoner's dilemma. I sort of knew this, but gained new clarity. Given traffic mixed between cars and buses (or streetcars), driving will always be a dominant strategy as far as speed goes, always faster than the buses. But if everyone drives, you get rush hour congestion. So cars can invade a high quality bus or streetcar system due to individual preferences yet still lead to a worse outcome arguably worth suppression.
* Auction types and how they're equivalent. Ascending auctions and sealed-bid 2nd price auctions both encourage one to bid one's true value, but will lead to the winner paying only as much as the second highest bid; descending auction and sealed-bid 1st price auctions lead to the top bid being paid, but also to that bid being lower than the winner's true value. Which to run? For the auctioneer it often doesn't matter, but I'd guess the first is psychologically less annoying for the bidders.
The second book also builds up. One country, two trading countries, the world. Here, there are two big goals: to explain how economies grow, and why they collapse, with the holy grail of sustained growth without crashing. Again, it's mainstream (or mid-century mainstream, anyway), combining classical views over the long term (creative destruction! trade is just like advancing technology! jobs get made despite massive changes in the labor force!) with Keynesian views over the short term (trade and tech make winners and losers! high unemployment can be sustained for silly and fixable reasons!) It also goes over basics like trade (again), GDP, role of government, money (and currency unions), financial system instability.
It's been noted, perhaps by both Krugman and Mankiw, that the issues where just about all economists agree are often the ones on which they're least listened to. Invoking a favored economist in a political fight? Cool. Listening to a consensus against rent control, minimum wage laws (as opposed to other means of helping the poor), and trade barriers? Uncool. The chapter on sustainability is blase about copper (prices go up, new sources or new substitutes get found, markets are good at this) but alarmed about global warming (seriously guys, market failure, like overfishing!) with a typical economist answer of a carbon tax (help the market do its job properly.)
See the
Currently am indeed in a reading/learning mode. First up is The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt. You could say it's about gentrification writ large, but the premise is more than that. If gentrification is well-off people taking over particular neighborhods, Ehrenhalt says for the past 15+ years well-off people have been returning to the inner cities in general. Gentrification of the city. The book is mostly several case studies exemplifying what he claims is a trend.
To specify the trend a bit more: it used to be cities had rich people in the middle, smelly factories in an inner ring, poor people in an outer ring. European cities still largely follow that trend, possibly minus the smelly factories these days. Central Paris is expensive, African immigrants go in high-rises in the "suburbs". London's less organized, but similar. It's the US that largely had rich people go to the suburbs and concentrate poor people in the middle, probably because of a mix of greater car love, cheap gas, GI Bill, and desegregation/busing/white flight. Also, the crime wave of the 1960s. But now some rich people are moving back, for a mix of expensive gas, the crime decline of the 1990s, and people having grown up in suburbs and not wanting to repeat the mistake. And, these days lots of immigrants are settling directly in the suburbs, for being cheaper and closer to many of their jobs.
It's not necessarily a mass migration; he doesn't say everyone's preferences have flipped, a bunch of the trends got interrupted by the 2007 housing crash, and there's kind of not enough pedestrian Jane Jacobs city for everyone who wants it, let alone everyone. (Part of the case studies is about how towns are trying to rebuild or reinvent themselves.) Still, there have been Changes. Property values in what used to be distressed urban neighborhoods have shot up -- and are staying up even in the Depression 2.0 -- and people are found living where they haven't before, like Wall Street! -- while suburbs are getting more poor people and crime.
One particular note: Chicago continued to lose people, down to about 2.7 million from the 3.3m of my youth, which made me sad. But apparently a lot of the recent losses are from the destruction of high-rise public housing like Cabrini-Green -- a synonym for crime-ridden hellhole -- which hasn't been replaced, so the losses are actually of poor black people. Meanwhile Chicago has been friendly to high-rise developments downtown or near downtown, and gentrification has crept out along the L tracks. He talks about Sheffield, once a working neighborhood, then a drug crime neighborhood, and now a land of million dollar houses. Which points to one reason he doesn't use 'gentrification': the actual modest gentry can't afford to live there!
This 'inversion' following transit when it can is a common theme in his examples. It sometimes happens even without people commuting to work on it that much; one saying is "it's not the train it's the tracks", investors liking the promise of long-term investment and stability offered by the tracks. Or perhaps the promise that the trains are there when needed.
He also has a chapter on Cleveland Heights, as an example of an old inner suburbs that's trying to adjust, which was of particular interest since I've been there once and a friend lives there. Others include Houston, Philadelphia, DC, various NY neighborhoods, suburbs of Denver, Phoenix...
Another interesting point: apparently suburban malls have been failing en masse. Some suburbs try to create little pedestrian town centers in the ruins, with newly re-created streets. Success varies.
See the
major emotions: my adaptive annotations
fear: don't eat me
anger: don't eat my child/food
sadness: someone ate my child
surprise: what's that?
disgust: that wasn't food!
contempt: you're beneath me
happiness: i ate/i had sex/my child done me proud/etc
Later he breaks happiness down:
16 possible positive emotions: 5 for pleasure from each of the 5 senses.
Amusement, excitement, contentment, ecstasy, wonderment, relief, fiero,
naches, elevation, gratitude, schadenfreude. He's not sure the last three are
emotions as opposed to other emotional states.
elevation -- feeling uplift from seeing surprising moral acts.
fiero -- From Italian. Pleasure-pride in a difficult accomplishment.
naches -- From Yiddish. Pleasure-pride in the accomplishment of your child or student.
There's an odd pleasure I experience a lot, which I don't know a name for. I guess it's closest to fiero, though sometimes secondhand or like elevation (pleasure from someone else's difficult accomplishment.) It's like solving puzzles, but these aren't deliberate puzzles, more like using a set of tools someone else provided in a surprising way, or making sense out of nonsense. I guess it's related to hacking, like building an operating system out of elisp, or a one-line program that generates cool graphical patterns. I should just give examples:
Firefly: eventually we realize that the show isn't just being coy about FTL or not, that there is no FTL, and that there's dozens of habitable and terraformed worlds in one system. At first this seems like bullshit, even with the humility proper to current planetary science. Then they say "multiple" stars and you're still skeptical. But then you learn that Castor is a real sextuple system in like the orbit of Pluto (two binary stars, themselves in a binary setup, and with another binary star revolving around the other four), and that there's another known sextuple (two triple stars), and you go huh. And gas giants can hold lots of large moons in a small space. And then you read some semi-canon explanation</i> with artificial gravity and sent-ahead terraforming probes, and moons and dwarf planets being compressed for a more Earthlike surface gravity, and you remember Paul Birch's ideas for mass stream momentum transfer to change orbits and rotations with tech we could do today, and you go "huh. Unlikely, but more possible than FTL."
Or (lots of RPG examples now), you known Dungeons and Dragons, and the magical spells and items and item creation rules provided, all meant to model vaguely medieval fantasy, but someone figures out how to make a post-scarcity society with wall of iron spells and decanters of endless water and you feel proud of them for building something surprising. (But if they notice that a ladder costs less than two ten foot poles, that's just exploiting an obvious bug and stupid.)
Or there's D&D's Great Wheel cosmology, based on a two axis moral alignment system that has never made sense, with planes of existence that have their intrinsic cool elements, and someone preserves most of those elements while using order/violence axes that make a lot more sense, and in fact making many of the elements even more sensible and attractive as variant afterlives, and you vow to use it should you ever run Great Wheel D&D.
Or there's Exalted, with a semi-standard fantasy trope of gods powered by prayer and worship built in, but later someone publishes a goddess who's found a niche as a voice mail service, taking messages in the form of prayer and passing them on in dreams, and you go "cool, yeah, that makes sense", and then you remember that the gods are in a Celestial Bureaucracy, and imagine underlings who run the equivalent of mailing lists...
Or looking at the Blue Rose magic system, and realizing that if I dropped the Shaping Arcana, the rest could emulate a lot of Tolkien magic, including the corrupting sorcery, pretty well, even to building the Rings of Power. But Blue Rose was designed for romantic fantasy, not epic! Go me!
Or again in Exalted, my combining some obscure Charms and rituals to create a society of enlightened mortals with a Sidereal patron and integrated afterlife and Wyld polders, and I'm proud of having built this out of the provided elements, even if I haven't properly written it up yet... but if I try to imagine a fantasy society on my own, free of any constraints or strong influences, my mind blanks out at the sheer openness of it all. Magic can do anything, until you pick constraints, but picking my own? Feels artificial, I should go do something useful...
So yeah, partly it's hacking RPGs. But also married to that "making sense out of incoherence" a la Firefly and the Great Wheel, which also applied to reading Mere Christianity and seeing Lewis give a metaphor for the Holy Trinity that almost made sense. Doesn't quite seem like hacking. A joy in rationalization? Mystery-solving? I don't know. Maybe it's entirely unrelated emotions that I happen to associate because RPGs are often both hackable and nonsensical, whereas computer programs and (theology or sloppy SF) tend to be separate.
A friend calls it lateral thinking, which certainly applies to some of the 'hacking' "make it do something unexpected" stuff.
See the
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/s
Argument that libertarians should be friendly to train, which were fine and profitable until crushed by government subsidies of roads and airports. It notes a 1935 law barring US electric utilities from owning streetcars, despite their natural connection.
http://keephoustonhouston.wordpress.c
Tangentially, I've amused myself for a long time with the thought that US libertarians tend to be rural or suburbanites fantasizing about dispersed living, but actual 'Libertopia' would look like a handful of zoning-free megacities with few and expensive services in the rural hinterlands.
me on libertarian countries
http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/20
ial-insurance-state/#comment-529769358
On balance bikes. Also links to an old book on bicycle and tricycle designs, and bicycle physics. http://www.slate.com/articles/life/fami
witch fighting fertility cult
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benand
George Lucas to build low income housing in revenge
http://www.movies.com/movie-news/ge
lighting efficiency
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/201
ight/
break up sitting
http://care.diabetesjournals.org/conten
See the
My 'blogging' is a Livejournal, mostly link dumps, book reviews, observations of my daily life and updates for my friends, intellectual musings, and travel logs. Emotional drama, insofar as I have any these days, mostly stays in direct private communication with friends, so have no fear.
Top blogs I follow are Paul Krugman, Do The Math, Rocketpunk Manifesto, and Bleeding Heart Libertarians. I spend far too much time on RPG.net; high level moderation makes it one of the most pleasant and interesting places on the internet to talk about stuff. Oddly I forward a lot of the first two, and much less of the rest especially the last.
Past posts of particular interest (long but doubling as a handy reference for me):
( Mercy cut )
Others might be found at http://www.livejournal.com/tools/memori
And there's lots of other tags.
See the
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/ma
Italian anarchists kneecap nuclear executive
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/ma
Pentagon course was teaching Islam is the enemy, and the destruction of Mecca
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/ma
Romney thinks Russia is our top enemy
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/12/us/po
"Russia figures prominently in Mr. Romney’s book, where he calls it one
of four competitors for world leadership, along with the United States,
China and “violent jihadism” embraced by Iran and terror groups."
NY prosecutor favoring ultra Orthodox
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/nyreg
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/nyreg
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"If anyone was offended I apologize for the incident I don't remember."
"Hey, would my old friends like to be character witnesses?"
Friends: "No. Actually you were an asshole."
Reporter: "So, Mr. Romney..."
"Jobsjobsjobsjobs"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/e
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/e
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/20
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/e
What's wacky is a contrasting story that just popped up about another Republican in 1965:
Dubya: "Shut up. How would you like to walk in his shoes?"
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/05/co
The GOP is being surprisingly reticent too:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/us/po
"Let's not talk about equality or rights. Jobsjobsjobsjobs."
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maternal haplotype: most likely Ashkenazi Jew (yep)
paternal: Basque, Ireland (yep), or fringes of North Sea
global similarity: kind of whack. The bars imply a lot of similarity to everyone except non-Northern Africans. The actual numbers range from 67.7 to 63.5. I don't know if I can take this as suggesting no recent African ancestors.
ancestry labs: how does this even work? I get an obscure spreadsheet
ancestry finder: Not sure how this works. Shows far more chromosome 'coverage' for Eastern Europe than for Ireland, with no real indication I am Irish. I wonder if this is a function of who's signed up. Or most of Clan Sullivan emigrated to the US, since if I check the "show US" box that outstrips Eastern Europe.
Also, wow, a bunch of old messages from possible 4th or 5th cousins.
Hmm, drug sensitivity health data seems unlikely to alarm me... "caffeine: slow metabolizer. people with the slower version of the CYP1A2 enzyme who also drank at least two to three cups of coffee per day had a significantly increased risk of a non-fatal heart attack" Cute. Hmm, now I'm curious about my parents' genes. I guess I'd have to triangulate with my half-siblings or my father's surviving siblings.
antidepressant: typical. Atypical people have increased or greatly increased chance of remission, not less. Ditto for heroin: typical, and atypicals are more or even more likely to be addicted. Hmm, what about non-addictive people, who can smoke or dabble in drugs and then drop them?
Hey, it guessed my blood type.
Disease risks: bye!
No one reading this is gonna get why this userpic, huh.
See the
And as lj:bemused_leftist said, it follows a similar total non-violence, not even dinner-threatening, pattern. Though a servant does think Colin might have been improved with a thrashing.
Of course, the book does have rather higher levels of emotional abandonment to deal with, in fact such dealing is most of the book. _Heidi_ kind of cheats; we're told the Alm-Uncle is an ogre, but he's instantly good with and obedient to Heidi, no prolonged melting of the long-frozen heart.
It's also not the same physical book. Not just different illustrations, but a different format, so tactile memory has nothing to go on. Still, you'd I'd recognize more of the plot... not sure I read Secret Garden more than once, though.
What's now chafing me is that I remembered a fourth book (Adventures of Remi, not in local libraries, is the third) which I remember little about now, not even the title. It had actual magic though, and little fairies growing in flowers, or maybe bottles, in a greenhouse. And a wood somewhere. And, erm, that's it. I associate 'sparrow' with it for no known reason. Searching does nothing; I'm hoping my sister shared the book and remembers.
See the
It's a very non-threatening story. IIRC, not even Peter the goatherd gets threatened with a beating, though he probably implicitly fears one. Heidi, a troublesome orphan in a strange household with a hostile governess, is not spanked, not even threatened with being sent to her room without supper. The worst thing that happens is confiscation of some belongings, and more out of arrogance than malice, and a kindly servant rescues them anyway.
Peter hits the goats, until Heidi makes him stop.
This probably doesn't seem like much, to us in 2012, when hitting children and animals is out of fashion. But this is a book published in 1880; actual children were getting regular beatings well into the 1950s, and some corporal punishment is hardly entirely verboten today. And hitting goats with a stick to keep them in line is very mild compared to what's been done to animals historically, like burning them alive for fun. Other fictional orphans get nearly fed to witches, beaten, starved, taken in by criminals... Dickens is full of this, and those are the good endings.
So Heidi stands out as part of what Pinker calls the Civilizing Process and the Humanitarian Revolution. Lessons of self-control and kindness and literacy and piety for the kids, and modeling an idyllic peaceful kind and non-violent world where not even goats or bad boys get thwacked.
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Billy Bragg's Internationale: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk69e1Vc
Productivity growth and wage stagnation http://www.epi.org/publication/ib330-pr
[ "the government of Prime Minister John Sparrow David Thompson declared in 1894 the first Monday in September as Canada's official Labour Day." After Cleveland in 1887 for the US. *cough cough* independent country ]
See the
Someone else sang a version of Galadriel's Lament, from the MSU Tolkien Fellowship Songbook, so I did my version yet again for tune contrast.
I realized on the way home I'd completely forgotten I could do "Caretakers", from memory even! I'd been looking at I.R.A.Q. before Galadriel became mor salient. Oh well, something new for next time and Kate, and hopefully I can master some of the harder old/new songs off Snow Magic and Time Winds Tavern as well.
Unrelatedly, I realized the off-peak commuter rail only lets you board or exit at one door. There were a bunch of us bunched up at Porter; this seemed to defeat part of the efficiency advantage of a train, i.e. parallel boarding. The conductor said "what, you want someone to jump the train?"
I sponsored someone for a charity walk thingy. First time I've done that, vs. giving directly. Well, I gave her money for the charity, rather than sponsoring X miles, so I guess I still haven't. Not like I care a whit whether she actually walks 20 miles for hunger. But it was fun to expose her to Nobody's Moggy Lands and watch someone else's mind gets blown. And I don't think she even had the full background.
See the
At that rate, you could fit the US population into 60% of Los Angeles. At the lower more environment friendly densities of the solar envelopes, we'd sprawl throughout southern or coastal California, if you can call twice the density of Manhattan a sprawl.
http://www.densityatlas.org/ was linked to by the solar envelope article, though I haven't explored it.
City Data has neighborhood data, like so, though I haven't found anyway to browse. Google finds, though, so there must be a way.
See the
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9074
Long, originally published as 3 articles on Lowtechmagazine.
Which also informed me of the Chinese wheelbarrow, a highly efficient device for transporting loads (vs. the European wheelbarrow, which is convenient on a construction site.) Europe didn't have it, though a comment suggests Europe had enough waterways to not need it.
A Mormon flow chart is amusing. Lemba African Jews are interesting.
On the topic of cities, Jane Jacobs's 1958 essay on city design and streets vs. blocks.
Article from last year on health care systems around the world. Actually several linked articles, but I think you can figure it out. "Communist" China has totally fallen down on the health care front and is trying to reinvent universal health care. Oddly for once it's better to be rural.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/healthcare-ne
But not all links are awesome. On Israel Independence Date (don't save the date, it's set by the Jewish calendar), I learn of hunger striking prisoners being punished for their protest of indefinite detention without charge and ill treatment. Also, water cannon being turned on peaceful protest villagers. Which is probably a good thing for the overall cause, getting away from failed terrorism to the moral high ground. (Of course, I've been told one of the intifadas started out peaceful, until soldiers shot them.)
Someone's been leaking about Catholic church corruption. The Pope's response? Send in Opus Dei to hunt down the whistleblowers.
BTW, Pinker says pretty much every terrorist movement has failed to achieve its goals; the few exceptions had military or government targets, not civilian. (And if you have military targets, are you really terrorist?) Though he doesn't mention bin Laden wanting US troops out of Saudi Arabia, and didn't we eventually oblige?
See the
Re-read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Still fun.
Been reading Pinker's book on declining violence. Been enjoying it and taking some notes. Should post soon.
Been sleeping a lot/very late. Allergies I guess.
Filibuster Cartoons guy produced his new guide to Canada: http://www.thecanadaguide.com/
Tor books is going off DRM.
See the
This lowtechmagazine website seems to have a lot of interesting articles. Also long articles, it's not a site for casual dipping. The linked article is about the use of fossil fuels in medieval Europe -- mostly peat in the Low Countries. We think of Olden Tymes as renewable, wind and water and muscle, but that's kinetic energy. Thermal energy, for heating cooking and industrial processes, is a bigger component, and people have long been using coal or peat for those. But sometimes at bigger scales than others.
Article argues that Flemish then Dutch 17th century prosperity was fueled by massive use of peat, with 10% of the farmland ending up cut, burned, and replaced by water. Peat fueled industry and heated homes, meaning that imported wood could be reserved for construction. Prosperity was also helped by all that wind power, and also by the easy transportation of a coastal flat windy country with a high water table. Many canals were cut for transporting peat, then used for transporting agriculture. And the act of cutting the peat often created the canal.
Then the cheap peat ran out, while the English had figured out how to use coal in industrial processes despite the contaminating sulfur, the Dutch imported English coal at unfavorable rates, industry shrank, and urbanization reversed.
At one level it's really interesting. At another it's depressing: we've been dependent on fossil fuels for longer than realized, and now I can't think about falling back to 19th century levels, whether due to peak oil or due to some post-apocalyptic scenario, without wondering about how much coal was being used for those levels.
(Modernity: steam engines and turbines -- and why do we keep using steam boilers, and not turbines turned by coal combustion gases? -- convert from thermal to kinetic energy, while electricity can convert kinetic energy into heat and light. So can friction, but surprisingly badly.)
See the
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