Presenting Tweenbots, "human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal." The kindness of strangers apparently also applies to anthropomorphic electronics:
Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, "You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”
Roy Blount Jr. wrote about the tone deaf for the Atlantic in 1982:
No national foundation exists for the singing-impaired. Nor does any branch of medical science offer hope. No one provides little ramps to get the singing-impaired up onto certain notes.
I'm a 52-year-old woman. Straight, married. I didn't know what
"teabagging" was, either, but as soon as I heard Rachel chuckling over
it, and read your recent comments regarding it, I googled. And learned.
And I laughed, too, because I didn't know the act had a NAME.
"Teabagging" is ... well, perfect. I'm still laughing.
Given my own generational ignorance on the subject, I suppose I can
forgive Scott Johnson for not knowing what the word implies, either.
But why in the world would he -- as a blogger putting his thoughts out
for the whole world to see, for goodness sakes -- not google the term?
I really worry about the GOP's seeming lack of brains and common sense, regardless of generation.
Orthodox Christian pilgrims run their hands through the flames of burning candles during the Holy Fire ceremony in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on April 18, 2009 in Jerusalem's Old City. By David Silverman/Getty.
The great paradox of "social networking" is that it uses narcissism as the glue for "community." Being online means being alone, and being in an online community means being alone together. The community is purely symbolic, a pixellated simulation conjured up by software to feed the modern self's bottomless hunger. Hunger for what? For verification of its existence? No, not even that. For verification that it has a role to play. As I walk down the street with thin white cords hanging from my ears, as I look at the display of khakis in the window of the Gap, as I sit in a Starbucks sipping a chai served up by a barista, I can't quite bring myself to believe that I'm real. But if I send out to a theoretical audience of my peers 140 characters of text saying that I'm walking down the street, looking in a shop window, drinking tea, suddenly I become real. I have a voice. I exist, if only as a symbol speaking of symbols to other symbols.
I'm an Army vet and a Navy family member
and prior to the invasion of Iraq I was one of the ragged, resentful,
and naive out on the streets demonstrating against the inevitable
invasion. Except I am neither ragged, resentful, nor naive. I was
exceptionally well informed and took to the streets out of a crisis
of conscience. The folks I stood vigil with and marched with were, for
the most part, some of the most thoughtful and gentle people I've ever
dealt with. Like me, most of the people I met out there were brand new
to the world of protest.
I live in San Jose and our traffic, although not as bad as Los Angeles, has always been bad. Lately I've noticed that the commute has gotten a lot easier. I was initially happy about that until I realized that the reason that the drive has gotten easier is because there are fewer cars on the road. With an unemployment rate approaching 10%, that's the difference between traffic jams and smooth transits. So now, whenever I get to work on time without having to sit through stop and go traffic, I find myself reflecting on the grim nature of this particular silver lining.
Jack Shafer says that the MSM should learn from the Huffington Post:
Instead of getting wigged out at the Huffington Post, offended sites would be smarter to glean a lesson from experience. Top journalists aren't going to like hearing this, but not everybody has time to lounge about with the 2,000-word masterpiece that you and your editor handcrafted. They want to get to the salient point, and they want to get there now. As heretical as it may sound, the Huffington Post is adding value by skinning alive that beautiful baby seal you just birthed and serving its fresh, beating heart to readers in a hurry.
Instead of feeling diminished by the Huff Post's excerpts, more publications might want to pre-empt the site by serving distilled versions of their own articles. That's right: Even the Post and the Times and the Journal can learn something about how to serve readers from the Huffington Post.
65-year old Toshiko Fukuda of Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, lost her
husband to asbestos on April 17th last year. Her husband, Motoo, was
diagnosed with mesothelioma in 2006, probably from the steel pipe
factory he worked at. He got worker's comp, but the disease ultimately
destroyed his lungs and left him with hallucinations for the remainder
of his life. Shocked, the widowed Fukuda started sending text messages
to her dead husband every time she thought of something she wanted to
say to him. Things like: "I couldn't live if I didn't think you were
still beside me. I can't live [without you]. I'm crying every day" and
"I want to call you 'Otosan' to my heart's content. Why do you have to
be inside such a small urn?" Every time she sent a message, the phone
by his home shrine vibrated (she made sure it was always charged).
Now she's publishing a book with the loosely translated title Job
Transfer to Heaven Without Family-I Wanted to Be With You Longer, a
compilation of all her text messages from the past year that she hopes
will educate the public about the dangers of asbestos.
What am I doing now? I take depressing classes on the labyrinthine procedure of conducting short sales, orchestrate foreclosures, show buyers countless homes before they confess they'd like to "maybe wait a year or two," watch sellers break into tears as they sign a listing contract. Try to figure out how to market myself via social networking, which gags me, but what can you do? Lord knows, I live to Facebook, Twitter, tweet, blog, gather, LinkIn, YouTube, Gawk, Boing Boing, friend, Rain Actively, Digg, Xanga, Squidoo, Top Produce, and MySpace my way into the hearts of my buyers and sellers.
The new Atlantic is now online. Goldie looks at personal investing after the abyss:
It turns out that my crucial mistake was believing that the brokers and wealth managers and cable-television oracles who make up the financial-services industrial complex actually had my best interests at heart. Or so say the extremely smart—and wealthy—people I asked to help me figure a way out of my paralysis. One of these people was Robert Soros, the deputy chairman of the fund started by his father, George. I went to see him at his office, where he spent two hours performing an autopsy on my assumptions.
“You think a brokerage should be a place you go to pay commissions for fair and unbiased advice, right?” he asked.
While running a work errand that I hate doing, I saw a line of 60+ people lined up around the block in Los Angeles on Ventura Blvd in the middle of the day. I also saw a TV camera and a photographer. LA being LA, I figured it was a line of people auditioning for a reality show of some kind. Turns out everyone was waiting for the opportunity to apply for a server position at a local chain restaurant. As much as I hated the errand I was on, and the job I have, I valued it a lot more at that moment.
Morgan Meis tries to figure out why people are fascinated by pirates:
There is another aspect to our fascination with pirates. It is existential rather than political. It is about civilization and its limits, about our need for a sense of home versus a need to break those boundaries altogether. The sea has always played a big role in that dialectic. The sea is, potentially, an avenue for intercommunication and exchange among men. It is, in short, a vast shipping lane. But it is also an outer boundary. The land stops at the sea. The city stops at the sea. We human beings have conquered this earth, mostly and swiftly, but the sea is still unnatural territory for us, we aren't as sure on its surfaces as we are on those harder surfaces more suited to bipeds.
The pirate takes that insecurity and runs with it.
Someone just told Powerline's Scott Johnson what tea-bagging is. The post is an instant camp classic:
There is something funny going on here, if not exactly
where Cooper, Maddow and Sullivan find it. Cooper is widely reputed to
be homosexual. Maddow and Sullivan are of course public homosexuals. It
is funny in an ironic sort of way that these folks choose to disparage
the tea party protestors from somewhere inside the homosexual
subculture. Why not just call the protestors girly boys and let
everyone in on the joke? Or would that spoil the fun?
I can assure Mr Johnson that teabagging knows no bounds on sexual orientation - and the vast majority of tea-bagging is purely heterosexual - and no disparagement or celebration of the teabaggers' sexual orientation is implied or imagined. I believe in tea-bag equality for all - gay and straight - myself. So does Samantha.
Ever wonder why the GOP is losing the next generation?
Once this crisis is past, the next agenda for macroeconomists will be to help make the economy far more robust—enough to survive the blunders of politicians, bankers, and economists of the future. Taleb, the scholar of unpredictability, notes that nature achieves robustness through a redundancy that economists would consider wasteful: two hands, two eyes, etc. Blake LeBaron of Brandeis University suggests preventing huge crises by tolerating small disturbances, the way foresters use controlled burns to eliminate flammable underbrush. Perhaps out of the ashes of failure will emerge a better macroeconomics profession.
Note, too, the sequence of events as Allen describes them:
While
I was writing the piece, a very well-known former Bush administration
official e-mailed some caustic criticism of Obama’s decision to release
the memos. I asked the former official to be quoted by name, but this
person refused, e-mailing: "Please use only on background."
So these quotes arrived in Allen's email inbox with no agreement that the quotes were off the record. Thus, Allen was free to publish them and identity for his readers what Bush officials were saying about Obama. But -- exact like Tim Russert -- Allen apparently treats his conversations with Bush officials as "presumptively confidential," i.e.,
like a good and loyal P.R. spokesman, he will only report what he
learns if they give him permission to do so -- even in the absence of
an explicit off-the-record agreement.
His story is well known by now. Wiki's entry on him is here. if you have not read Ron Suskind's "One Percent Solution", it's time you did. The significant Washington Post piece is here. The critical thing to remember is that the first person to be subjected to the torture program was not the person Bush and Cheney thought he was, gave up lots of useful (and accurate) information under traditional interrogation techniques, had no information that came close to the "ticking time bomb" criterion used to justify the torture program ... and was brutally tortured anyway. More to the point, the idea that CIA officers were begging to use these torture methods is nonsense. They were forced to do so by higher ups. And all of this took place before they had even instructed Bybee and Yoo to construct patently bad faith legal defenses for all of it. Money quote:
[T]he harsher handling produced no breakthroughs, according to one former intelligence official with direct knowledge of the case. Instead, watching his torment caused great distress to his captors, the official said.
Even for those who believed that brutal treatment could produce results, the official said, “seeing these depths of human misery and degradation has a traumatic effect.”
And what was the effect of this very dramatic and clear first foray into the dark side? It was not to reassess and pull back, given the horror and failure of the first act of torture; it was to press on, get legal cover, and set up a program to finesse and intensify torture. Part of the problem is that the president had already bragged in public that Zubaydah was a central figure, and Ron Suskind has argued that the torture was ordered in part to save Bush's face. Tenet denies that strongly. If it's true, then president Bush, if he still has a conscience, must have a hard time sleeping at night.
Torture, you come to realize, was the tip of the spear of the Bush-Cheney war on terror. After first blood, they sharpened it.
The comments by your dissenting reader and Abe Greenwald both contain a
typical point made by the pro- "coercive interrogation" crowd. Namely,
that the techniques used in the interrogations are not only not
torture, but that they are barely mild annoyances, and that it's
ludicrous to be making a fuss about them. Some have even gone so far as
to apply that characterization to waterboarding, calling it merely a
"splash in the face" or a "dunk in the water".
What bothers me about this viewpoint is that if these techniques are so
harmless, then how do they even work?
Like any human enterprise, the Atlantic is only sometimes all that it could be. The fact that conservatives have complained to me about the magazine's liberal bias, for instance, and liberals about its rightward tilt, doesn't mean that we've achieved a perfectly Broderesque balance between the factions; sometimes it just means we're promiscuous in our unfairness. And if you've picked up an issue last month or last year and found something that made you groan or roll your eyes, there's a perfectly good chance you were right to do so - that in that instance, at least, we aimed high but ended up blowing it.
Dish alum and former Palin booster Reihan Salam comes out against Palin:
Palin’s campaign antics can be forgiven. What can’t be forgiven is the ham-handed way she’s tried to build her national profile since she returned to Alaska. She’s abandoned the bold right-left populism that won over Alaska voters—and me—in the first place in favor of an increasingly defensive and harsh partisanship. After making her name as a determined enemy of Alaska’s corrupt Republican establishment, she recently called for Democratic Sen. Mark Begich to step down so the hilariously crooked Ted Stevens could get another crack at the seat. She loudly promised to leave federal stimulus money on the table before clawing that promise back with a whimper. One can’t help but get the impression that Palin is a clownish, vindictive amateur ... Has Sarah Palin undergone some kind of secret lobotomy?
Holla! I'm from Santa Maria myself and everything your reader says is completely true. My mother bought her present home -- a 4-bedroom, 2000 sq. ft. house -- for $125,000 in 1988, at the tail end of the housing glut of the late '80s. It was "worth" $550,000 at the height of the market in 2005, and now currently "worth" about $350,000, according to Zillow.com.
To my eye, the horrible death of the housing boom is actually a Market Correction, and a badly-needed one. For much of the middle 2000s, we on the Central Coast lamented how cops and firefighters in Santa Barbara, couldn't actually afford to live there; they lived in Santa Maria, commuting 70+ miles each way. Now people can afford to get into the market again, because prices are returning to meaningful levels from their delirious highs.
With people like Jeff Emmanuel around, now seems like a good moment to revisit a brief passage from Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side." Mayer depicts what happened when a Bush-Cheney lawyer named Jack Goldsmith read through the tens of thousands of pages in a 2004 report by the CIA's Inspector General:
"As Goldsmith absorbed the details, the report transformed the antiseptic list of authorized interrogation techniques, which he had previously seen, into a Technicolor horror show. Goldsmith declined to be interviewed about the classified report for legal reasons, but according to those who dealt with him, the report caused him to question the whole program. The CIA interrogations seemed very different when described by participants than they had when approved on a simple menu of options."
Your reader's comments here are excellent, but I think he leaves out an important point. He correctly points out that the costs of government health-care is being borne by the privately insured. What he fails to mention is that the privately insured don't have real choice when it comes to the product they can buy. The current system of employer-provided health care has created a market for policies that would not exist in a real free market.
...as was the case with highway construction, improved rail service will create its own demand. Faster, more reliable trains will attract riders and drive investment. New investment will attract new riders, and so on. The result will be a more balanced, reliable, redundant transportation system, that also happens to be more convenient and greener.
I was a freshman at University of Maryland College Park in the fall of 1996. Back then, smoking pot then was stigmatized, but pretty common anyway. My roommate knew about my occasional habit (once or twice a month, tops) and did not approve. He knew I had a bowl in my part of our closet.
One morning, when returning from calc class, I found a campus officer in my room, being shown my bowl which had been removed from my closet by my roommate. He had called the police simply because he feared his future placement in the Israeli army was at jeopardy due to the bowl's presence in our room. This gave the police probable cause to search all of my belongings, finding a very small amount of 3 month old "shake" in the process.
James Surowiecki is somewhat puzzled by his fellow econo-pundits:
I would argue that there are good reasons to believe that the economy, while still very weak, is much closer to a bottom than it was two months ago, and that the Obama Administration’s management of the crisis—which we could only guess at in January—has been a net plus for the economy (and therefore for the stock market). Yet despite all this, the simple fact is that the stock market has not gone up since February. In fact, for all its ups and downs, after four months of action it’s ended up pretty much where it started. It’s a strange world, indeed, in which that counts as euphoria.
This video reminds me of a short movie that was put out in the 1950’s which imagined the United States invaded by the Communists. It featured Jack Webb and was called Red Nightmare.
I am a lawyer who has practiced in Washington
for more than 20 years. I'm not sure I have the words to describe my
reaction upon reading the Bybee memo, but it's fair to say it sent
chills down my spine.
Lawyers are a cynical lot - it comes with the territory - but we all
know that we have some basic obligations to our clients. One of them
is to tell them the truth, and not to conceal facts or law that the
client should know about. Even as you must represent your client
zealously in disputes, you are required as an officer of the court not
to hide adverse precedent. And failing to tell your client about cases
that run against the client's preferred result is a profound
dereliction of duty.
In that context, the Bybee memo is a lawyer's worst nightmare. It's an F-minus in law school, a zero on the bar exam, grounds for firing a first-year lawyer for an utter lack of understanding of what the practice of law requires.
Anyone with half a brain knows that ridiculous levels of taxation will be required for at least a couple of generations because of the spending splurge Obama has promised. The idea that we can sustain the deficits Obama is talking about (notwithstanding his rosy scenarios) is absurd. The idea that we can fund the proposed government spending solely on the backs of those who make more than $250,000 is absurd as well.
The view from my recession is grim. I am an executive recruiter in the construction industry. In recent years I have placed Presidents, CFOs and other senior managers with some of the largest commercial/industrial contractors in the country. I take pride in my work and my company's superb reputation in our industry. But lately things have changed around here; the party's over.
A Greek Orthodox priest holds a cross before an image of Jesus during the Apokathelosis, which marks the removal of Christ's body from the Cross which forms a key part of Orthodox Easter, in a ceremony at the Church of the Dormition of the Virgin in Penteli, north Athens on April 17 2009. Millions of Greeks flock to churches around the country this week to celebrate Easter, the country's foremost religious celebration. By Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images.
The response from Just One Minute that you published, accusing you of "miss[ing] the point", is itself an almost pure expression of missing the point. Money quote: "...attempting to criminalize non-violent political dissent ...is deeply problematic even if they do it with all the proper warrants."
Here's what's missing from their crack analysis - if indeed "they do it all with the proper warrants", then that strongly implies that there is a reason to suspect criminality. That's precisely what a warrant is, and why it's so important. How is it that they don't see this?
I haven't quite recovered from this Nineteen Eight Four parallel but here's another, noted by David Cole:
"Those methods, read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing," - Dennis Blair, yesterday.
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking
thirteen," - the first sentence in George Orwell's classic novel of the security
state, 1984.
You keep trotting out this argument that boils down to "I've lived under a nationalized health care system, you haven't. Trust me, it sucks." And for all I know, when you last lived in the UK, maybe it did suck. But as an American who's been living in the UK for the last six years, I can tell you my experience with the NHS has been almost completely positive. The doctors are professional, the facilities are clean, and I always can get help immediately. Two times I've had to dash out the door the moment after arranging an appointment to get there on time. The level of care for me has been indisputably superior to what I had in the US, even with good insurance.
Jack McHugh is still unsure about the market rally:
It’s been said, and I agree, that trying to foster sustained growth in an economy weighed down by too much debt is like trying to start a sustainable fire using wet logs. The matches and gasoline (some stimulus and a low funds rate) didn’t work on our debt-soaked economy, so Mr. Bernanke is resorting to the blowtorches and rocket fuel (a lot of stimulus and quantitative easing). I don’t know enough about the chemistry of combustion to accurately predict what will happen next. But my advice would be to stand well back and wait to see what happens next. I’ll risk being underinvested during this rally. Even if he’s successful, Mr. Bernanke might set fire to more than just the logs.
Julian Sanchez thinks I've been too hard on the tea parties:
I think Andrew Sullivan puts it a bit too strongly when he suggests that it’s pointless to complain about excessive spending unless you’ve got a detailed notion of what you want to cut. It probably makes sense to stress that there’s popular discontent with a general lack of fiscal restraint, rather than with any particular set of budget items. Certainly there’s no coherent policy program detectable at these rallies, but a big public demonstration doesn’t seem like a terribly good venue for laying that out anyway. If events like these serve any useful function—my suspicion is that they don’t, but one lives in hope—it’s in moving people from anger to engagement, preparing the ground for more useful and targeted activism down the road. I’m waiting for signs they’re actually moving people past the “anger” stage.
I'd be happy with just some vague declarations of what they'd like to cut - say entitlements and defense. The pork thing is irrelevant in the grand scheme of fiscal balance. How about a two-point plan? Or is that too much to ask?
Ryan Avent, who has taken over Felix Salmon's old gig blogging at Portfolio, is worried about the administration's stress tests:
...if the administration releases information suggesting that the tested banks are all basically fine, then the data is worthless. Markets will go on speculating on which banks are in the most trouble (and possibly be more pessimistic, generally, based on the government's bungling of the tests). If the administration provides meaningful information of any kind, on the other hand, markets will naturally assume that the weakest looking banks are the weakest banks, and will begin trading accordingly.
The way out of this problem I think is for the government to recapitalize the weakest banks before it releases the stress-test results, and then to release post-money stress tests showing that, as a result of its recapitalizations, all the tested banks are basically fine. It’s a risky strategy, but I don’t think Treasury has much choice at this point.
I think you may need to withdraw that nomination. Morrissey explained in an addendum what he's really getting at:
"Bybee and the OLC were asked what interrogators could do within the law,
and instead the OLC reverse-engineered a legal opinion to allow them to
violate it. I understand why they did, but it still violated the
statute...If we foresee a need to work outside the law, then change the law to make sure it covers those situations."
At least 108 people have died in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of them violently, according to government data provided to The Associated Press.
April 12, 2009 - April 18, 2009
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