[from 1909] The Catskill Mountain water system being constructed for New York City is one of the most notable engineering enterprises ever undertaken. Ranking with the interoceanic canals at Suez and Panama, the Assuan irrigation works in Egypt, and the projects which are converting Western America's arid wastes into fruitful fields, the Catskill aqueduct, with its tributary reservoirs, probably surpasses any one of them in the variety of problems to be solved. Although undertaken by a municipality, these works in magnitude and cost compare with national enterprises.

Imperial Rome's longest aqueduct was fifty-seven miles in length; the Catskill aqueduct will be ninety-two miles long. Rome, with hordes of laborers from conquered domains, carried its aqueducts at the hydraulic gradient across valleys on imposing masonry arches. Modern explosives and rock-drills enable New York to tunnel in solid rock beneath valleys and rivers, avoiding masonry, which is now expensive, and which is likely to suffer in New York's severer climate.

The most interesting railroad of South America is of course the Transandine, which unites the two oceans by surmounting the backbone of the continent. Chile and Argentina are divided from each other for more than two thousand miles by the Andes, which are so high and so impassable at most points by any but trained mountaineers that there has been but little commercial communication between the people on the opposite sides of the range. The two countries, extending side by side for such a length, are very different from each other in climate, in natural re-sources, in the character of their populations, and this difference is due to the great mountain barrier. In the northern part of the continent the eastern side of the Cordillera is abundantly watered by rain, the western slope an arid desert. In the southern section, however, conditions are reversed; there the prevailing winds are from the west and these winds bring rain from the Pacific that water the western or Chilean side of the Andes but do not carry moisture over to the Argentine slopes. Here therefore Chile was fertile and well populated while the corresponding section of Argentina was unproductive and scantily settled [...]

From the Lago del Inca the railroad makes an-other sweep, ascends another slope and reaches a still higher basin at the foot of a giant ridge. Here, 10,486 feet above the sea, is the mouth of the great tunnel of the Cumbre, and on the summit of the pass stands the bronze statue of the Christ of the Andes, a figure of more than twice life size posed on a pedestal hewn from the rock, and turned to the north so as to bless both countries with its uplifted right hand.

History shows that all countries that have modernised aspired above all to leave the past behind as they did so. Korea sought to forget the horrors of civil war; Malaysia – its position as a natural resource appendage to Britain. Brazil aspired to put an end to the agrarian economy and to forget the years of military dictatorship; China – to overcome the heritage of the "cultural revolution" and decades of hunger and poverty. In this context, Russia's problem lies in the fact that it is showing no allergic reaction to the past – and the current authorities are doing everything to ensure that none develops. But the more the Soviet period is celebrated, the more harshly the 1990s are stigmatised, and the more actively anti-American or anti-western views are advocated, the less chance there is for modernisation.

[end] : These students did not regard college as a finishing school or a ticket punch. There was much more at stake for them than there had been for the Groton grads of an earlier day. (How many hours do you think they put in doing homework?) College was a gate through which, once, only the favored could pass. Suddenly, the door was open: to vets; to children of Depression-era parents who could not afford college; to women, who had been excluded from many of the top schools; to nonwhites, who had been segregated or under-represented; to the children of people who came to the United States precisely so that their children could go to college. For these groups, college was central to the experience of making it—not only financially but socially and personally. They were finally getting a bite at the apple. College was supposed to be hard. Its difficulty was a token of its transformational powers.
This is why “Why did we have to buy this book?” was such a great question. The student who asked it was not complaining. He was trying to understand how the magic worked. I (a Theory 2 person) wonder whether students at that college are still asking it.

designed to empower young people to find their own futures by bringing them face-to-face with the writings and objects of people who made an extraordinary difference. Like every game I make, it has one goal: to turn players into superempowered, hopeful individuals with real skills and ideas to help them change the world.

Back in the years of the Cold War, our public schools were blamed for contributing to the alleged missile gap and the prospect of losing the space race. Federal initiatives resulted in curricular priorities in our schools given to mathematics and science, to be led by university scholar-specialists. What students learned from these initiatives was that they did not like math and science. The consequence was that university enrollments in those disciplines plummeted, leading the president of the American Chemical Society to declare in his 1967 address at the society’s annual meeting, “We have committed a crime against a generation.” Earlier, Harvard University President James B. Conant had called for a moratorium on national testing. The situation is far worse today.

Whatever they may say about giving poor students a leg up, their real priority is nothing short of the total dismantling of our public educational institutions, and they've admitted as much. Cato Institute founder Ed Crane and other conservative think tank leaders have signed the Public Proclamation to Separate School and State, which reads in part that signing on, "Announces to the world your commitment to end involvement by local, state, and federal government from education."

But Americans don't want their schools dismantled. So privatization advocates have recognized that it's not politically viable to openly push for full privatization and have resigned themselves to incrementally dismantling public school systems. The think tanks’ weapon of choice is school vouchers.

calculating the amount of the historical federal subsidy of the Internet “depends on how one parses government spending—it’s fairly modest in terms of direct cash outlays. But once one takes into account rights of way access that were donated and the whole research agenda (through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, etc.), it’s pretty substantial. And if you include the costs of the wireless subsidies, tax breaks (e.g., no sales taxes on online purchases), etc., it’s well into the hundreds of billions range.”4 For context, Meinrath’s estimate puts the federal investment in the Internet at least ten times greater than the cost of the Manhattan Project [...]

The early Internet was not only noncommercial, it was also anti-commercial. Prior to the early 1990s, the National Science Foundation Network, the forerunner to the Internet, explicitly limited the network to noncommercial uses. If anyone dared to sell something online, that person would likely be “flamed,” meaning that other outraged Internet users would clog the individual’s email inbox with contemptuous messages demanding that the sales pitch be removed. This internal policing by Internet users was based on the assumption that commercialism and an honest, democratic public sphere did not mix. Corporate media were the problem, and the Internet was the solution. Good Internet citizens needed to be on the level; they should not hustle for profit by any means necessary [...]

In the realm of the Internet, a state-corporate alliance has developed that is matched perhaps only in finance and militarism. It makes a mockery of traditional economics, with its emphasis on an independent private sector responding to a competitive market. It also makes a mockery of the traditional liberal notion that capitalist democracy works because economic power and political power are in two distinct sets of hands, and that these interests have strong conflicts that protect the public from tyranny. Examples of how large communication corporations and the national security state work hand-in-hand are beginning to proliferate. The one that was exposed—and is singularly terrifying—concerned how, for much of the past decade, AT&T illegally and secretly monitored the communications of its customers on behalf of the National Security Agency.27 The more recent stories of how Amazon and PayPal/eBay cooperated with the government in the WikiLeaks affair may not be in the same league, but they point to the demise of the separation of public and private interests at the heart of liberal democratic theory [...]

The future increasingly looks like one where the wireless Internet world will come to equal or exceed the traditional wireline broadband sector, and this will be a proprietary system that does not practice “network neutrality” or have the openness long associated with the Internet. We should expect more great mergers among and between the largest media, telecommunication, computer, and Internet corporations, along the lines of Comcast-NBC.

As the authors of a 2011 report by the New America Foundation put it, we are entering a world of digital feudalism, where a handful of colossal corporate mega-giants rule private empires. Advertising will be given every opportunity to exploit the system, and any meaningful notion of privacy will have to be sacrificed. “For once the fate of a network—its fairness, its rule set, its capacity for social or economic reformation—is in the hands of policymakers and the corporations funding them,” one of the earliest champions of the democratic Internet recently observed, “that network loses its power to effect change.” It is a world that would have been considered impossible not too long ago, but it is the destination at which one inevitably arrives, if capitalism is behind the steering wheel.

Then came Top Gun. The man calling the shots may have been Tony Scott, but the film's real auteurs were producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, two men who pioneered the "high-concept" blockbuster—films for which the trailer or even the tagline told the story instantly. At their most basic, their movies weren't movies; they were pure product—stitched-together amalgams of amphetamine action beats, star casting, music videos, and a diamond-hard laminate of technological adrenaline all designed to distract you from their lack of internal coherence, narrative credibility, or recognizable human qualities. They were rails of celluloid cocaine with only one goal: the transient heightening of sensation [...]

Such an unrelenting focus on the sell rather than the goods may be why so many of the dispiritingly awful movies that studios throw at us look as if they were planned from the poster backward rather than from the good idea forward. Marketers revere the idea of brands, because a brand means that somebody, somewhere, once bought the thing they're now trying to sell [...]

Of course, it can miss; can't-miss movies miss all the time. But when a movie that everyone agrees is pre-sold falls on its face, the dullness of the idea itself never gets the blame. Because the idea that familiarity might actually work against a movie, were it to take hold in Hollywood, would be so annihilating to the studio ecosystem that it would have to be rebuilt from the ground up.

life expectancy and wealth

There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism [...]

Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires [...]

...a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

We are entering the Anthropocene, a new geological era in which our activities are threatening the Earth´s capacity to regulate itself.

@8:00 ...our old paradigm of analyzing and pushing and predicting parameters into the future aiming at minimalizing environmental impacts is of the past. Now we have to ask ourselves: which are the large environmental processes that we have to be stewards of to keep ourselves safe in the Holocene and could we even...identify the...points where we may expect non-linear change and could we even define a planetary boundary...within which we have a safe operating system for humanity...we can only find NINE boundaries [including climate, ozone depletion, ocean acidification]

@12:00 ...the drama is that 200 countries have to simultaneously start moving in the same direction. But it changes fundamentally our government and management paradigm, from the current linear, command-and-control thinking, looking at efficiencies and optimization, towards a much more flexible and adaptive approach where we recognize that redundancy in social and environmental systems is key to be able to deal with the turbulent era of global change

[persistence to withstand shocks, transformation from crisis to innovation, adaptation]

@13:00 examples of new approach: Latin American farmers, Australian Great Barrier Reef, Swedish wetlands

@15:45 Elinor Ostrom's work clearly shows that we can govern the commons if we invest in trust, local action-based partnerships and cross-scale institutional innovations

[see Umair's write-up after Ostrom's Nobel:
http://pinboard.in/u:Taryn/b:ddef9f501c1d
-and-
Lewis Hyde (author: The Gift) on The Commons:
http://pinboard.in/u:Taryn/b:a60ab6dde9d3 ]

@17:20 ...incremental change is not an option. We are facing the largest transformative development since industrialization. In fact, what we have to do over the next 40 years is much more dramatic...than what we did when we moved into the situation we're in today.

1. call everything an experiment
2. when you're given the go-ahead from authorities, go fast
3. build up a user base
4. when you achieve your objective, don't be afraid to be nice
5. keep asking, keep re-phrasing the question
6. when you get the microphone, make your point clearly
7. get standing
8. try to get the bureaucrats to threaten you
9. look for over-reaching
10. don't be afraid to fail

Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country's industrial might.

Bloggers carry so much influence that many senators have a young press aide dedicated to the care and feeding of online media. News about, by, and for a tiny kingdom of political obsessives dominates the attention of senators and staff, while stories that might affect their constituents go unreported because their home-state papers can no longer afford to have bureaus in Washington. Dodd, who came to the Senate in 1981 and will leave next January, told me, “I used to have eleven Connecticut newspaper reporters who covered me on a daily basis. I don’t have one today, and haven’t had one in a number of years. Instead, D.C. publications only see me through the prism of conflict.” Lamar Alexander described the effect as “this instant radicalizing of positions to the left and the right.” [...]

On July 21st, President Obama signed the completed bill. The two lasting achievements of this Senate, financial regulation and health care, required a year and a half of legislative warfare that nearly destroyed the body. They depended on a set of circumstances—a large majority of Democrats, a charismatic President with an electoral mandate, and a national crisis—that will not last long or be repeated anytime soon. Two days after financial reform became law, Harry Reid announced that the Senate would not take up comprehensive energy-reform legislation for the rest of the year. And so climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans’ care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world’s greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing. Already, you can feel the Senate slipping back into stagnant waters.

[ see also: Todd Purdum's "Washington, We Have a Problem"
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/09/broken-washington-201009?printable=true&currentPage=all ]

After the U.S. emerged from the darkness of World War II into the daylight of economic expansion, ad executives reignited their efforts to develop proprietary theories that could both define advertising's value and link it to an agency's own offerings. As often as not, these theories derived from contemporary psychology. The improbably named Norman B. Norman, a creator of the TV game show "The $64,000 Question," anchored his Norman, Craig & Kummel agency to the theory of "empathy." An elegant British import, David Ogilvy, said it was "brand personality" and not "any trivial product difference" that drew consumers to products. His one-time brother-in-law, Rosser Reeves of the Ted Bates Agency, disagreed. To Reeves, repetition of a "Unique Selling Proposition" -- he explained it as "getting a message into the heads of most people at the lowest possible cost" -- was the foundation of advertising.

Battles between agencies over their scientifically designed products began to resemble religious crusades. Brand image, George Gallup huffed, was just a "passing fad." For a time, Ogilvy and Reeves stopped talking. "Each shakes his head," wrote Martin Mayer in his delightful chronicle of advertising in the '50s, "Madison Avenue U.S.A.," "over the way the other wastes his clients' money."

No wonder: there was vast wealth at stake. The end of the war and the march of suburbanization were fueling a demand for consumer goods unlike any the country had ever seen.

What makes the picture an even more compelling find is that several art experts said it was created by the photography studio of Mathew Brady, a famous 19th-century photographer known for his portraits of historical figures such as President Abraham Lincoln and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Stapp said the photo was probably not taken by Brady himself but by Timothy O'Sullivan, one of Brady's apprentices. O'Sullivan took a multitude of photos depicting the carnage of the Civil War.

In 1862, O'Sullivan famously photographed a group of some of the first slaves liberated after Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

[from Science Museum, London; see "related objects" and interactive psychiatric tests]

these pics and words by Allan Tannenbaum make it vividly clear what NYC was truly like back then

The first and overwhelming conclusion of this project is that in studying economic history, we tend to systematically ignore the role of violence, the absolutely central role of war and slavery in creating and shaping the basic institutions of what we now call "the economy". What's more, origins matter. The violence may be invisible, but it remains inscribed in the very logic of our economic common sense, in the apparently self-evident nature of institutions that simply would never and could never exist outside of the monopoly of violence – but also, the systematic threat of violence – maintained by the contemporary state [...]

Debt was the hinge that made it possible to imagine money in anything like the modern sense, and therefore, also, to produce what we like to call the market: an arena where anything can be bought and sold, because all objects are (like slaves) disembedded from their former social relations and exist only in relation to money [...]

the period of the rise of capitalism, the industrial revolution, representative democracy, and so on. What I am trying to do here is not to deny their importance, but to provide a framework for seeing such familiar events in a less familiar context. It makes it easier, for instance, to detect the ties between war, capitalism, and slavery. The institution of wage labour, for instance, has historically emerged from within that of slavery (the earliest wage contracts we know of, from Greece to the Malay city states, were actually slave rentals), and it has also tended, historically, to be intimately tied to various forms of debt peonage – as indeed it remains today. The fact that we have cast such institutions in a language of freedom does not mean that what we now think of as economic freedom does not ultimately rest on a logic that has for most of human history been considered the very essence of slavery [...]

*** thinking about debt outside the twin intellectual straitjackets of state and market opens up exciting possibilities. For instance, we can ask: in a society in which that foundation of violence had finally been yanked away, what exactly would free men and women owe each other? What sort of promises and commitments should they make to each other? ***

starts with the "pathology of un-earned advances" that takes publishers' working capital out of what they do and hands it to authors; moves to end of "golden age" of men in tweed jackets publishing each other as society allowed for a falling away of bigotry = first revolution in supply chain; second moment = digital (desktop publishing ala Kinko's, not even web-related); Netflix Prize to illustrate that novels break algorithms and 21st century is about sorting out demand, not sorting out supply (20th) --> how do we manage risk now that we cannot control supply ie: how do we manage demand; the commonality between people who have read the same book is huge b/c of time investment (as opposed to broadcast); goes into business model stuff and and leaves a lot on the table w/ happy talk; "enhanced e-books" || CD-ROM; "only way to manage demand is to own the community" and PUBLISHING IS A MARKETING STRATEGY FOR THE OWNER OF A COMMUNITY]; talk of "brand equity"

Shatzkin uses similar language:
http://www.idealog.com/blog/what-i-would-have-said-in-london-part-2

Doc Searls on branding:
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/vrm/2010/04/27/getting-real-and-vrm/

[wooden box]

Mark Zuckerberg: "We look forward to a future where all experiences are this easy and personalized, and we’re happy today to take the next important step to get there."

Of course, then we no longer have the Web. We have the Union of Soviet Social Graph Vendors.

This will fail, of course. But it will take some time. Or, more to the point, waste it. [...]

You always go wrong when you characterize competent human beings as weak and helpless — and then tell them your stuff is their only hope.

tiny little apartment

“This is the first paper that’s taken a specific institution of this kind, and shown real evidence of the long-running impact of colonialism in Latin America and Peru today.” [...] Dell would also like the paper to usefully complicate ideas about growth in Latin America. Other economists have argued that the region has lagged economically because of its inequalities — because, for example, Latin America had structures like the hacienda system with a few large landowners, as opposed to the plethora of smaller, secure property owners in North America. But as Dell points out, because smaller landholders in Peru lacked solid property rights, the hacienda system, for all its inequalities, actually engendered greater public investment.

The conventional “top-down” history of American education is at best incomplete. Instead, Fischel offers a “bottom-up” history that, with a few parsimonious concepts, explains quite a lot about the development of the American school system.
Two such concepts carry most of the burden. School systems have been structured to enhance homeowner property values while facilitating the build-up of place-based social capital. The first goal, enhancing property values, explains the evolution of the school system. The second, building place-based social capital, explains the system’s abiding resistance to reformers trying to change it [...] communities accepted these near-universal standards and structures with no central authority imposing them. Local homeowners everywhere understood that they had to incorporate these changes to compete with other communities for new residents [...] The book would be much more compelling throughout if he offered his bottom-up theory for the development of school structures but conceded that, once created, those structures engender organized interest groups that make the structures inflexible to changing needs and potentially better ideas. Perhaps we have met the enemy and this time he isn’t us: he’s the teachers unions.

for images you make where some part of a modern day scene is overlapped by an old photograph.

Apple's origins were pure Steve Wozniak, but the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad are the products of the company's other founder. Steve Jobs' ideas have always been in tension with Wozniak's brand of idealism and the founding principles of Apple. Jobs maintained the early, countercultural image that he and Wozniak created, but beginning with the Macintosh in the 1980s, and accelerating through the iPhone and climaxing with the iPad's release this month, he has taken Apple on a fundamentally different track, one that is, in fact, nearly the opposite of the Wozniak vision [...] The ideology of the perfect machine and open computing are contradictory. They cannot coexist [...] in 2010, the iPad takes the same ideas to their logical extreme. It is a beautiful and nearly perfect machine. It is also Jobs' final triumph, the final step in Apple's evolution away from Wozniak and toward a closed model [...] the iPad is handy tool for getting well-produced content from the industries that make it. And even if it doesn't do everything a computer does, it still does most things. Still, it is meant for consumers not users, and as such has far more in common with the television than the personal computer.

The carriage house is a completely separate residence from the surrounding apartment buildings, and goes by the address 422 1/2 West 46th Street. this carriage house was built pre-1800 and is the only surviving building in the area dating back to when Times Square and Hell’s Kitchen were farmland.

[!! wow !!] The key to thinking mathematically about curved shapes is to pretend they’re made up of lots of little straight pieces. That’s not really true, but it works … as long as you take it to the limit and imagine infinitely many pieces, each infinitesimally small. That’s the crucial idea behind all of calculus.

The U.S. needs to cut emissions by 80 percent and I doubt there's any way our house can do its part or even come close. Will old houses like ours be part of the low-carbon future? Or do they ultimately need to be torn down, leaving deep scars in our cities and towns?

[see how-to: http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=five-tips-for-people-who-love-both-2010-04-02 ]

Ostensibly, schools are educational institutions, but their latent function is social and quite inimical to educational purposes. It is the way in which U.S. schools are organized that is the problem, Coleman says. They resemble jails, the military, and factories: all of these institutions are run by an “administrative corps” that makes demands upon a larger group (students, prisoners, soldiers, workers). In response, the larger group develops a set of norms that govern the choices individuals make. “The same process which occurs among prisoners in a jail and among workers in a factory is found among students in a school. The institution is different, but the demands are there, and the students develop a collective response to these demands. This response takes a similar form to that of workers in industry—holding down effort to a level which can be maintained by all.

infographic with a ton of facts and figures about Google

What ultimately caused Beach’s railway to cease operations in 1873 was the financial panic that led to the Long Depression. After years of rapid postwar economic expansion, a series of financial blows led to bank failures and dried-up credit markets, which would have prevented Beach from expanding his subway, even if the governor had approved it.

The situation is eerily reminiscent of the modern economic crisis and current debates about high-speed rail. Beach himself offered a warning to future railway builders:

Everybody in New York wants rapid transit, but, strange to say, the moment that any body sets to work with a definite plan for its realization, they are vigorously opposed and the work prevented.

Elevated lines eventually gained popularity because of their lower cost. Thus the Interborough Rapid Transit Company didn’t begin underground public transit service until 34 years after Beach’s demonstration line first opened.

Despite its appearance in Ghostbusters II, no elements of Beach’s subway remain. The station was lost to fire in 1898, and the tunnel was destroyed during construction of a Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit tunnel in 1912. Today’s City Hall station occupies the former tunnel’s footprint.

“Hunger is healthy and the pictures do look better when you are hungry,” Hemingway concludes evenhandedly. “Eating is wonderful too.”

Still, Hemingway’s two kinds of hunger--the hunger that gnaws at the belly and the hunger that fuels artistic ambition--are central to any discussion of how poverty is represented by American artists and writers. Now three books have appeared that seek a fresh understanding of depictions of the poor in American life--what Morris Dickstein calls “the starvation army.” Edmund Wilson--who crisscrossed the desperate country as a roving reporter for this magazine in 1931 and 1932, contributing to what Alfred Kazin called “the vast granary of facts on life in America put away by the WPA writers, the documentary reporters, the folklorists preparing an American mythology, the explorers who went hunting through darkest America with notebook and camera”--once observed “how difficult it is for persons who were born too late to have memories of the Depression to believe that it really occurred, that between 1929 and 1933 the whole structure of American society seemed actually to be going to pieces.” Perhaps the experience of the past year has made it somewhat easier to imagine.

It is good to be reminded that poverty did not enter American literature with the crash of 1929 and the stark photographs of the Farm Security Administration.

Elizabeth Partridge takes the past off its pedestal and shows how ordinary people, children among them, can sometimes tip the balance and help determine the outcome of events.

the enlightenment, locke, voltaire

It was part of the fuselage of the historic plane, exposed by a blue moon (the second full moon in a calendar month), the lowest tide ever recorded at that site and an unprecedented melting of ice. "It was probably one chance in a million that these conditions just allowed us to spot it," said David Jensen, the chairman of the Mawson's Huts Foundation, the Australian government-backed organisation that led the search.

Mawson had hoped to stage the first flight over the Antarctic ice cap, but the plane crashed on the Australian mainland before he set sail. No one was hurt, but with the wings damaged and no time to repair them, the explorer adapted the craft to haul his sledges, adding skis to the undercarriage and a special tail-rudder.

After the Vickers' engine failed in sub-zero temperatures, Mawson dumped it at Cape Denison, at the head of Commonwealth Bay. It was still sitting on the ice when he returned in 1929 and 1931, and in 1975 it was photographed after a big ice melt. But without the "fluke" conditions on New Year's Day, it could have disappeared without trace, said Mr Jensen.

"The tide would have come in and we would never have seen it again," he said. "It's a remarkable find in remarkable circumstances." Mr Jensen said the plane, rediscovered almost a century after being abandoned, was "part of aviation history".

Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change. [...] Classically, the problems attributed to schooling are really society problems -- dropouts, druggies, unhappy people, unemployable people, teen pregnancies, uncreative people, ignorant people, angry people, violent people, uncritical people, and so on. But school somehow plays a part in how people develop and is seen as a potential way to prevent much human suffering. It is thought somehow test scores relate to these problems. Problems with the results of schooling and test scores are often thought to be from lack of success due to the failure to try harder of one or more of the groups of students, teachers, parents, administrators, or legislators. If only kids were more motivated by higher standards, if only parents were more involved, if only teachers were given pay raises for performance, if only administrators were more "hands on", if only legislators would put more money into education, then all these problems would be solved, so it is thought [...] truly modern technology
like nanotech replicators or flexible manufacturing powered by internet
connected computers means we can allow the masses to go back to that sort
of lifestyle revolving around family and community humans are so well
adapted for, where production of food or goods is only incidental, not
central. And where productive activity can then play other, deeper, roles
in building character and relation and meaning, unconstrained by a need to
maximize material output at the expense of spiritual output.

[really great multimedia] We spread the word — some people were ecstatic, others skeptical, demanding to see the agency report. Only a few hundred East Berliners had enough faith in the words of a long-despised party leadership to go straight to the wall and see if they could cross this forbidding structure — actually two walls, separated by a no man’s land of mines and barbed wire. But, as the hours ticked by, and West German television, a trusted source, reported that some people were managing to cross into West Berlin and West Germany, more and more went to try. [...] It was the only moment in my life when I pinched myself to see if I was dreaming. I had just crossed Checkpoint Charlie with this stranger, a woman exactly my age, 34, a citizen of Communist East Germany. [...] That autumn of 1989 was tumultuous — from Berlin I went to Leipzig, lodestone of East Germany’s revolution, then on to Prague for the equally delirious Velvet Revolution, next to Romania, for the violent end of the tyrannical Ceausescu, and to Bulgaria, where Communist leaders seeking change had deposed the dictator Todor Zhivkov almost unnoticed by the world since they acted on Nov. 10, 1989, when everyone was transfixed by Berlin.

Route 7 is, in other words, one of the old roads of America, a trail first broadened for horses, and, before that—and if I say probably it’s because I don’t really know—worn by Indians, most on foot, most of these feet in moccasins. It’s instructive to study how such a road begins, which (in this case) is in the wilderness of Champlain, and how such a road ends, which (in this case) is in the knot of car dealerships at the bottom of 7, as, in its journey from north to south and then to now, Route 7 re-creates the journey of the nation. What began in wilderness culminates in showrooms. What began in Indians culminates in salesmen. The car itself, the platonic idea of the car, is really a concrete expression of all that road, its products as well as its creator.

[photoessay] Over the last 100 years, the way we visualize and understand the complexity of the brain has evolved.

Immigrants played a major role in the growth of the New York labor movement in the early 20th century and, more recently, in the revival of unionism in other cities, like Los Angeles. It is hard to imagine a robust future for New York labor without significant immigrant involvement.

...in the Jim Crow south (Charlottesville, VA)

[re: the Mannahatta Project] @7:55 on a per-acre basis, Manhattan had more ecological communities than Yosemite does (there were 55 ecological communities on the island of Manhattan)

Now the more complete map of Mrs. Obama’s ancestors — including the slave mother, white father and their biracial son, Dolphus T. Shields — for the first time fully connects the first African-American first lady to the history of slavery, tracing their five-generation journey from bondage to a front-row seat to the presidency.

Earlier this week, 1.5 million people filled the streets of Berlin, Germany to watch a several-day performance by France's Royal de Luxe street theatre company titled "The Berlin Reunion". Part of the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall

...leading social scientists and legal scholars presented and discussed their research regarding the historical origins, psychological antecedents, and policy consequences of the free market ideology that has dominated legal discourse and lawmaking the last few decades...

If we bicyclists cede the Brooklyn Bridge walkway, then it might be a step toward winning the public’s respect. Then, just maybe, pedestrians would call a truce and recognize that their real enemy is the car, that bikers are like pedestrians in that they are just trying to get to work without the use of a gurney...We are all fighting to make the streets safe for something other than driving and parking. The livability revolution has begun. There is no turning back.

Editors Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors have pitched the biggest tent conceivable, pegging each of the chronologically arranged essays in the book to "points in time and imagination where something changed: when a new idea or a new form came into being, when new questions were raised, when what before seemed impossible came to seem necessary or inevitable." With this in mind, they've produced a compendium that is neither reference nor criticism, neither history nor treatise, but a genre-defying, transcendent fusion of them all. It sounds impossible, but the result seems both inevitable and necessary and profoundly welcome, too.

The Hudson Valley "...one of America's favorite places for the super weird [and classical music]..."; toward the end a brief discussion of opera houses throughout Hudson Valley

a riff on Mrs. Aster's list (400 who could fit into her living room); @7:30 Congressman Vito Mark Antonio - 1st person to bring Puerto Ricans into the city as a group

see: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/nyregion/09names.html

A locomotive hit a cow at East 58th Street in 1839.

After more than fifteen years of planning and more than eight billion dollars in funding, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), science’s groundbreaking effort to unlock the deepest secrets of particle physics, is finally complete. It is truly the grandest experiment of all time — the pinnacle of humanity’s quest for unification. Befitting the pursuit of cosmic grandeur and unity, it is set in a stunning location.

The race for the Higgs boson is loaded with the history of competition between American and European particle physics, and symbolizes scientific prowess and national pride. For the United States, finding this particle would be the perfect final chapter to a book filled with major scientific achievements. Failing to find it would be the latest in a long string of missed opportunities and heartbreak. PICTURE GALLERY: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/super-collider-gallery/

a patch of that lost landscape, so eloquently described by the Mannahatta Project (themannahattaproject.org), is evoked by a 2,200-square-foot native woodland garden being planted at Schwartz Plaza next to the Bobst Library on the New York University campus

At this point, the mental atmospheres of the rocket-powered space race of the 1960s and the sword-clanking single combat of ancient days became so similar you had to ask: Does the human beast ever really change — or merely his artifacts? The Soviet cosmo-champions beat our astro-champions so handily, gloom spread like a gas. Every time you picked up a newspaper you saw headlines with the phrase, SPACE GAP ... SPACE GAP ... SPACE GAP ... The Soviets had produced a generation of scientific geniuses — while we slept, fat and self-satisfied! Educators began tearing curriculums apart as soon as Sputnik went up, introducing the New Math and stressing another latest thing, the Theory of Self-Esteem.

ugh!! Dutch, Dutch, Dutch...And "American Indian", for real?

FFWD to @10:00 or so. Whoa.

“Dutch Seen: New York Rediscovered,” which runs from June 10 to Sept. 13 at the Museum of the City of New York.

Class issues in food production bug me. Specifically, it bugs me that industrialized farming techniques that have made farmers in the West relatively wealthy have also stripped most of the flavor out of common foods (see: chicken, pork, tomatoes, apples). It additionally bugs me that natural-tasting fruit is now either a luxury product for the rich (see: Whole Foods), or an unintended side-effect of widespread rural poverty in places like Moldova. It is nearly 2010

Harlem, 1970-2009: Photographs by Camilo José Vergara” is at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, through July 12. “Storefront Churches: Photographs by Camilo José Vergara” opens at the National Building Museum in Washington on June 20.

“One doesn’t want to psychoanalyze the court,” Mr. Kende said, “but you can see how they drew on the heritage of Iowa in the area of equality and seemed to see their own decision in that context.”

Our American culture embraces a host of microcultures—local traditions and ways of seeing the world that spring from some particular history and make different groups express our common Americanism in their own distinctive accents.

she came to it as an artist, and communicated her results in images of plants, flowers, and insects, more than words. It is tempting now to compare Merian's working method, with its emphasis on infinite patience, close attention to physical surroundings, and extreme intellectual independence, with that of pioneering women scientists like Jane Goodall or Barbara McClintock, but her story is more complicated than that. She was also peculiarly a child of her times and her surroundings, albeit a child with a large and emancipating talent.

Third Wave civilization begins to heal the historic breach between producer and consumer, giving rise to the “prosumer” economics of tomorrrow. For this reason, amongh many, it could– with some intelligent help from us — turn out to be the first truly humane civiization in recorded history.

In short, if it is sufficiently robust an innovation to qualify as a new paradigm, the open source story is far from over, and its lessons far from completely understood. Rather than thinking of open source only as a set of software licenses and associated software development practices, we do better to think of it as a field of scientific and economic inquiry, one with many historical precedents, and part of a broader social and economic story. We must understand the impact of such factors as standards and their effect on commoditization, system architecture and network effects, and the development practices associated with software as a service. We must study these factors when they appear in proprietary software as well as when they appear in traditional open source projects. We must understand the ways in which the means by which software is deployed changes the way in which it is created and used. We must also see how the same principles that led to early source code sharing may...