It is time to suppress this sort of research. If we're not careful, people will start looking at contemporary dynamics. Please have your Posterity Docent initiate Elephant Protocol Mu now.

Also: I want the little bead-flow animations.

"The game of chess as always been viewed as an iconic representation of intellectual prowess. Since the very beginning of computer science, the challenge of being able to program a computer capable of playing chess and beating humans has been alive and used both as a mark to measure hardware/software progresses and as an ongoing programming challenge leading to numerous discoveries. In the early days of computer science it was a topic for specialists. But as computers were democratized, and the strength of chess engines began to increase, chess players started to appropriate to themselves these new tools. We show how these interactions between the world of chess and information technologies have been herald of broader social impacts of information technologies. The game of chess, and more broadly the world of chess (chess players, literature, computer softwares and websites dedicated to chess, etc.), turns out to be a surprisingly and particularly sharp indicator of the changes induced in our everyday life by the information technologies. Moreover, in the same way that chess is a modelization of war that captures the raw features of strategic thinking, chess world can be seen as small society making the study of the information technologies impact easier to analyze and to grasp."

"Guy Aldred is an obscure but important figure in the history of socialist thought. He sometimes crops up in histories of British socialism, syndicalist and labour organisation, but rarely in discussions of socialist theory. His uncompromising commitment to activism perhaps explains this neglect: as Aldred himself argued in a commentary on British anarchism, ideologies are too often shaped by the philosophical reflections of educated elites, leaving the thoughts of working class autodidacts who spend a lifetime standing on street corners, propagandising, ignored. Perhaps, too, his evangelical roots make his work an acquired taste: Aldred writes with moral certainty and conviction that leaves little room for debate. Most biographical accounts suggest that he was not an easy man to get along with and though he did not lack organisational skill, he found co-operation difficult. The pleasure he took in the pun of his name – ‘the man they all dread’ – was indicative of the problem. Yet Aldred’s ideas are compelling and the judgements he made in his early life were consistently revolutionary, libertarian, anarchistic and usually good. Aldred campaigned against marriage and for birth control in support of women’s liberation before the First World War; he encouraged conscientious objection in both world conflicts and publicised the vindictive abuse that COs suffered for taking their stance. In all his early writings, he elevated the struggles of common people – from religious non-conformists to convicts. Drawing on the reports of his comrades, Ethel MacDonald (1909-1960) and Jane (Jenny) Patrick (1884-1971), he supported the 1936 anarchist revolution in Spain [1] and until his later life, he consistently opposed the dogmatism of orthodox Marxism, whether it was expressed in the theoretical pieties of the European social democratic movement or, after the Russian Revolution, in the cold, physical brutality of the Stalinist regime. The passion with which he advanced these causes captures the spirit of an optimistic, utopian, romantic current of socialism whose hopes and ideals, squeezed by social democracy on one side and state socialism on the other, were ultimately disappointed but which remain inspiring."

"So what? Above a certain count, do the numbers even matter? Well, yes. The difference between the two estimates is large enough to change the way we look at the war. The new estimate suggests that more men died as a result of the Civil War than from all other American wars combined. Approximately 1 in 10 white men of military age in 1860 died from the conflict, a substantial increase from the 1 in 13 implied by the traditional estimate. The death toll is also one of our most important measures of the war’s social and economic costs. A higher death toll, for example, implies that more women were widowed and more children were orphaned as a result of the war than has long been suspected.

In other words, the war touched more lives and communities more deeply than we thought, and thus shaped the course of the ensuing decades of American history in ways we have not yet fully grasped. True, the war was terrible in either case. But just how terrible, and just how extensive its consequences, can only be known when we have a better count of the Civil War dead."

"Wigmore’s technique, like probability itself, is both wide-ranging and tediously painstaking; his book was popular only among insomniac judges. But now that computers can take on the numerical drudgery, it is proving its worth in just such tangled cases as Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s. The legal scholars Joseph Kadane and David Schum have applied a sophisticated extension of Wigmore’s method to the vast body of evidence from the case. Theirs is a remarkable achievement; their charts retain all the original complexities: the facts withheld or perverted, the hearsay, the lies told and disavowed on both sides, the charged political atmosphere of eighty years ago. They never discount a fact, no matter how far-fetched; they  simply give it its due weight in their dynamic structure.

Their conclusion?  Unjust though it is to summarize a book in a sentence, the balance of probability seems to favor the view expressed long ago by one of the defendants’ close companions: “everyone in the Boston anarchistic circle knew that Sacco was guilty and that Vanzetti was innocent as far as the actual participation in the killing.” So, there it is: whichever side our political instincts favor, we are destined to be half wrong.

Vanzetti’s last words were: "I wish to forgive some people for what they are now doing to me."  If we were all willing to make the extra effort to work out the probabilities, perhaps we might not need forgiveness so often."

"…I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer.…"

"How can you help? We're looking for readers' all-time favorite secondary worlds, from Middle Earth to Ring World, from Dune to Lankhmar and beyond...

We're taking nominations now. Just fill out the form below and submit it. That simple. If you feel like waxing poetic about your favorite second world, we might ask you if we can use what you write when it's time to go to press. Regardless, we'll keep you updated about which worlds get picked, and about the book as it gets closer to publication."

"Interpreters are couplers. They enable the two people, groups, or cultures to understand each other because they understand both. While the methods mentioned above can facilitate a further understanding of past food cultures, what about the other part of the connection—between people today and in the future? The historical interpreter has the unusual task of coupling people in one group about which she can only know a part, one group she knows well, and, if she publishes her interpretation in any form, one group in the future, about which she cannot know. The question is, then, not only what can we learn about meanings in the past, but how can we interpret those meanings to people today and in the future?"

"Before there were police forces so that you could run to the government to get it to evict trespassers from your land and recover your stolen stuff, there was... seisin: had you actually ploughed the land and reaped the harvest, protected the villages from Irish or Viking raiders, administered justice--or had others done so, or had the jobs been left undone? if you weren't man enough to do the job, it wasn't yours..."

"Blogger and activist Cory Doctorow argues that all new media – from sheet music to cable TV – is accused of piracy by the mainstream ... until it becomes the mainstream"

"More than 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements were also revealed by looking at infra-red images which show up underground buildings."

"One thing I really would like you to take away from this diary is a basic sense of how the United States, as a self-governing democratic republic, cannot long tolerate oligarchic and aristocratic ideas in its body politic. This is becoming an increasingly urgent issue for us today, because the American conservative movement today is basically a replica of the slavery-defending, anti-free labor, government-hating, insurrection minded, treason-breathing, violently inclined Confederacy. And, I want you to be able to instantly recognize and rebut the false histories that neo-Confederates have created. So, the first material I place before you is an excerpt from an important and emotionally powerful 1995 book, What They Fought For, 1861-1865, a masterful survey and summary of private correspondence from Civil War soldiers and officers, by James M. McPherson."

"Rivers change course, as you can see in the beautiful map below, which shows the river's meanderings." LOOK AT THAT MAP

"This special issue of Common-place explores food. It particularly investigates the production and consumption of food during the age of experiment, that period between 1820 and 1890 in the United States after the soil crisis of the early nineteenth century disrupted customary agriculture and before scientific agriculture became institutionalized nationally in the system of experimental stations legislated into being by the Hatch Act (1887)."

"[A]narchists resemble the American Founders, who saw the spirit of liberty as a necessary bulwark against concentrations of power, and were themselves partly embedded in international networks preaching revolution and social upheaval. In building a truly global economy, the great states have given anarchists the opportunity to rebuild their networks of sympathy and common political purpose across borders. Today’s anarchists want to change the world through distributed action rather than a pistol shot. It seems to be working out better."

"In addition to placing effective checks on the power of the captain, pirate government also provided harmony amongst the crewmembers. Harmony was essential to the business of piracy; pirates who got along with one another stood a better chance of success in their ventures. The author writes that, "Contrary to popular wisdom, pirate life was orderly and honest" (45). In order to maintain order and ensure honesty, pirates drew up "Codes," which outlined shipboard rules and regulations, and provided incentives to maximize individual effort. Each crew drew up its own constitution and ratified it by unanimous consent. …"

"During the century separating the 1830s from the 1930s, proponents of laissez-faire were so successful in advocating an economy that purportedly operated independent of the political system that New Deal supporters had to convince voters that the government could (and should) intervene economically on behalf of suffering Americans. In the 1930s, Dorothea Lange used a technology unavailable in 1837 to photograph the plight of economic victims in her composition "Migrant Mother." Shot in a California pea picker's camp during the Great Depression for the government's Farm Security Administration, the photograph is strikingly similar to "Specie Claws." The posture of the central characters is nearly identical. Both pictures appeal to emotion to make an argument about the effects of economic events on families.…"

"… This was not because they doubted whether there was a moral imperative to pay one's debts. Rather, they were shocked to see the idea of bank credit, based as it was on getting something for nothing, vying for the moral high ground. Credit of this sort was a speculation. Allowing it to flourish was one thing; granting it not only legitimacy, but moral status was horrific. If people were taught to consider their relationship with their banker as analogous to their obligations toward family, community, and state, the multitudes would indeed have come to ruin."

"… The Panic of 1837 launched America's biggest and most consequential economic depression before the Civil War. And it was the decisions and behavior of thousands of actors like Bieller that created a perfect financial storm: bringing an end to one kind of capitalist boom; destroying the confidence of the slaveholding class, impoverishing millions of workers and farmers who were linked to the global economy; demolishing the already disrupted lives of hundreds of thousands of people like Harry and Roberson.…"

"What, then, is the status of the crisis/knowledge nexus today, especially in light of an ascendant neo-liberalism that criticizes the earlier notions of social justice and obligation? Crisis continues to be capitalism's mode of operation. According to Naomi Klein's recent "disaster capitalism" argument, emergencies around the globe, including natural catastrophes, are now used to impose radical free-market policies. As for knowledge, government- and business-produced information is omnipresent and effortlessly accessible. Expert culture is thriving.…"

"Algorithmic historiography was proposed by Eugene Garfield in collaboration with Irving Sher in the 1960s, but further developed only recently into HistCite^{TM} with Alexander Pudovkin. As in history writing, HistCite^{TM} reconstructs by drawing intellectual lineages. In addition to cited references, however, documents can be attributed a multitude of other variables such as title words, keywords, journal names, author names, and even full texts. New developments in multidimensional scaling (MDS) enable us not only to visualize these patterns at each moment of time, but also to animate them over time. Using title words, co-authors, and journal names in Garfield's oeuvre, the method is demonstrated and further developed in this paper (and in the animation at this http URL). The variety and substantive content of the animation enables us to write, visualize, and animate the author's intellectual history."

"…Being on fire, you would probably apply powerful pails of water to put it out, and send off your man for the engines? You would do very wrong.…"

"One moonless night, while flying a routine training mission over the Pacific, I wondered what the sky would look like from 84,000 feet if the cockpit lighting were dark. While heading home on a straight course, I slowly turned down all of the lighting, reducing the glare and revealing the night sky. Within seconds, I turned the lights back up, fearful that the jet would know and somehow punish me. But my desire to see the sky overruled my caution, I dimmed the lighting again. To my amazement, I saw a bright light outside my window. As my eyes adjusted to the view, I realized that the brilliance was the broad expanse of the Milky Way, now a gleaming stripe across the sky.…"

"Issue 01 contributor Eugenio Recuenco recently updated his portfolio with a striking series of 12 images that span very different eras and cultures, all of which are united by one main character: the violin. The larger images can be seen on Recuenco’s site, and the full series can be seen here, after the cut."

"From Bill at Calculated Risk, an update to his regular comparison of job losses in post-war economic downturns. The severity of the current recession/depression remains the most striking thing, but we are looking awfully trough-like."

"When paper entrepreneurs look for solutions to America’s declining productivity and international competitiveness, they come up with paper remedies to stimulate large-scale capital investment: accelerated depreciation, tax credits, government subsidies, relaxation of antitrust laws.

Product entrepreneurs focus on techniques for improving output: better quality controls, improved labor-management relations, more effective incentives for managers and employees, more aggressive marketing and sales.

If we are to increase the economic pie, we will need to redress the balance of entrepreneurial effort. Which strategies will stimulate more paper, and which more product? "

"It seems proper to conclude with some very brief speculations about the kinds of questions that Martin’s anti-narrative narrative can help us to ask—both about his historical moment and about our own. To do so, we should return to an apparently throwaway moment in the first lines of Martin’s memoir—one that’s not about being hungry, but that does tell us more about the potentially distorting nature of story-telling. "The heroes of all Histories, Narratives, Adventures, Novels and Romances, have, or are supposed to have ancestors, or some root from which they sprang. I conclude, then, that it is not altogether inconsistent to suppose that I had parents too." Savvy enough to know that the memoirist is a literary character like other literary characters, and that the tale he would tell is subject to the rules established by other stories, Martin cultivates an ironic distance from his subject and underscores the artifice of his work.…"

"Please join us on March 24 for Ada Lovelace Day
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.!) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science.
Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines, whatever they do. It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited. Just sign the pledge below (click ‘pledge’ after you have completed the reCaptcha) and publish your blog post any time on Wednesday 24th March 2010."

"The effect of that “Yes, but…” is to make scholarly history complex and at the same time weaselly, uncertain and always whirling around to catch the interpretation sneaking up from behind.

The complexity that this creates is, of course, at odds both with the simplicity that Paul Krugman craved and that economics provided. It is at odds, as well, with the adversarial nature of the court room, in which opposing counsels must argue, without doubt or allowance for ambiguity, their side of the case. It is why Krugman was right to leave history behind, for that complex ambivalence is at the heart of the historical project. Staying with a subject whose central tenet he found repulsive would have been difficult, at best. It is why historians like Ambrose were wrong to testify for the tobacco companies, because their testimony came in service of an argument in which the essential equivocation was stripped away."

"I've been trying to think of something to say about this, but haven't come up with anything that hasn't already been said, and I have to go teach for most of the rest of the day so I'll turn it over to you. What do you think of this argument from Bruce Bartlett about why Congress worked better from the 1930s to the 1970s than it does today?:…"

"[W]hy didn't prints displace paintings the same way that printed books displaced manuscript codices? Why didn't it become expected that visual artists, like writers, would primarily produce works for reproduction?"

"The system in which they are relevant is not called the market economy, not the financial system or capitalism, but democracy. Democracy is about a community shaping its future together. And the media, in all its forms – print, broadcast and digital – is one of its most important creative forces. The proof of the relevance of the press is 177 years old, begins in 1832 and continues right up to the present day. It arises out of the entire history of German democracy."

"Yet this apparently uneventful transfer of power concealed profound alterations in the relationship between the English crown and its subjects, and set into motion the formation of a new kind of modern state, whose characteristics – vigorous promotion of economic development, broad religious tolerance, and free competition among political interests – still define liberal democracies today.

In his magisterial new book (for once, this overused adjective is warranted), the historian Steve Pincus takes aim at the traditional narrative of the Glorious Revolution, and sets out to prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that it was more than worthy of the name: a revolution that was contentious, sometimes violent and even bloody, that pitted two radical factions against one another and transformed England."

" The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent—in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique. McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism, contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch’s incredible assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, has one hundred pages of bibliography and notes. The entire right-wing movement of our time is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies. Sometimes the right-wing striving for scholarly depth and an inclusive world view has startling consequences: Mr. Welch, for example, has charged that the popularity of Arnold Toynbee’s historical work is the consequence of a plot on the part of Fabians, “Labour party bosses in England,” and various members of the Anglo-American “liberal establishment” to overshadow the much more truthful and illuminating work of Oswald Spengler."

"Not that anyone involved in these transactions is a war profiteer, mind you—they’re merely taking a lemon (the fall of the Berlin Wall) and learning how to make extremely profitable lemonade (the first Gulf War)."

"I got my data from Norgate Investor Services, (the same folks that provide my end-of-day feed). They only charge a one-time fee for the delisted data, while some of their competitors charge as much as 3x Norgate’s one time fee with the charge recurring annually!
Since adding the delisted database, I have not noted any great differences in the historical results of the systems I work with. I have stated a few times that it is my belief that short-term systems that hold stocks for a few days to a week are not likely to suffer greatly from survivorship bias. So far, this belief is proving to be true."

"The continued popularity of SSE among Republicans is doing serious damage to the economy. Last year’s tax rebate was wrongheaded and a complete waste of money that would have been better spent cleaning up the housing mess. I argued this case in another New York Times article, but the Bush administration’s obsession with tax cuts as the sole cure for every economic problem blinded it to alternative policies that might have nipped the housing problem in the bud and prevented the banking system from imploding."

"Though one of our most ancient holidays, Halloween wasn’t celebrated widely in America until the latter part of the 1800s. Ypsilanti likely didn’t celebrate Halloween for half a century after the city’s founding in 1823—the quote above is the first Halloween story to appear in old newspapers dating back to the 1840s."

"Every technology fits, in its own unique way, into a far-flung network of different sites of social practice. Some technologies are employed in a specific site, and in those cases we often feel that we can warrant clear cause-and-effect stories about the transformations that have accompanied them, either in that site or others. Other technologies are so ubiquitous -- found contributing to the evolution of the activities and relationships of so many distinct sites of practice -- that we have no idea how to begin reckoning their effects upon society, assuming that such a global notion of "effects" even makes sense."

"We must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable laws of economics. These so-called laws are, in actuality, the economic mechanisms of 13th Century monarchs. Some of us analyzing digital culture and its impact on business must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems."

"We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are."

"I was a little frightened of this craft. What if I opened it up and found a big, black, slimy....errrghhhh!!! What if I got sick from eating something that had sat around for 2 weeks? "

Maybe Ann Arbor will re-expose the buried Allen Creek

"We are looking at a concentration of political power in the US banking system that we haven’t seen since the 1830s: Shades of Andrew Jackson vs. the Second Bank of the United States. We put up with a lot from our banking elite in this country, but historically we draw the line at financial power so concentrated it can confront the power of the President."

"The only difficulty with this entire story was that it was not remotely true. There had been no sustained assault by the Chinese on the legations, no breakthrough, no last stand, and no slaughter. In fact, July 6th had been quiet enough that Private R.G. Cooper, one of the British soldiers holed up in the legations, had not mentioned it in his diary of the siege. The most pressing news of those few days was the discovery of a buried British cannon from 1860, which the defenders of the legations refurbished and put to use."

"It is no wonder that both the political and economic right look back at the McKinley Era for their ideal. No income tax, no universal suffrage in England, no popular election of Senators in the U.S., no insider trading rules, no restrictions on wage suppression. Now that is freedom!!

Prof. Thoma told me a few years ago that "Economics does not handle equity well". And after giving that some long thought I figured out why. Because classical economics does not handle popular democracy well. That is for some people in England everything was downhill after the Reform Act of 1832 with ultimate disaster delivered with Representation of the People Act of 1918, while in the U.S. it was the changes introduced with the 16th, 17th and 19th Amendments.

Damn democracy! Always screwing with this nicely designed business plan!"

Except, goddammit, that RealPlayer sucks.

" The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) provides information to the public and to policy-makers concerning the current use and flow of minerals and materials in the United States economy. The USGS collects, analyzes, and disseminates minerals information on most nonfuel mineral commodities.

This USGS digital database is an online compilation of historical U.S. statistics on mineral and material commodities. The database contains information on approximately 90 mineral commodities, including production, imports, exports, and stocks; reported and apparent consumption; and unit value (the real and nominal price in U.S. dollars of a metric ton of apparent consumption). For many of the commodities, data are reported as far back as 1900. Each commodity file includes a document that describes of the units of measure, defines terms, and lists USGS contacts for additional information."

"Most of the Lyceum topics were ones that to modern sensibilities would seem unbelievably trite, pedantic, and didactic. It's hard to get into the 19th-century mindset and grasp how anyone could sit through these talks instead of, say, trimming one's toenails. But this was a popular pastime, in a society with no radio, no telephone, no movie theater, no TV. Faced with the absence of those things, I might wander down to the Lyceum hall too, to see what my friends were presenting on."

'...paper read before the club by Calvin Thomas, entitled "The Devil"...'

"July 1940. Berrien County, Michigan. "Migrant fruit workers from Arkansas." 35mm nitrate negative by John Vachon for the FSA."

"The ad protests a bit too much that the higher cost of electrification is actually a LOWER cost once you figure in the benefits. People are creatures of habit, and I'm sure many Ypsilantians said, "No--the gaslights I've got now are fine, thanks." An imperfect analog today is solar power. Of course it's more expensive, and similarly offers benefits in the long run. Perhaps one day every home will come with built-in panels and we will look back on DTE as something as quaint as gaslight."

"And I worry that the idea that learning in relation to history can easily be kept within some type of bounds implies, to a degree, that the importance of history is its factual content. Generations of captive history students, face-down and drooling on their desks, indicate that approaches of this nature are not only unfortunately limited, but also a fatal blow to any intrinsic interest in examining historical/cultural change."

I had no idea; met a re-enactor at a party the other day. The world is full of interesting things.

"Can you blame us for being a defensive lot, we lovers of early American literature, when all about us we see America's political Founding Fathers (and sometimes Mothers) celebrated like rock stars, on t-shirts, in miniseries, and, most enviably, with best-selling biographical tomes? What about our literary Founding Fathers (and Mothers)? Anne Bradstreet? Edward Taylor? Charles Brockden Brown? Don't they too deserve a little name recognition: at least a spot on CSPAN or a line-drawing portrait on a bookbag? We who cherish early American books and writers come by our defensiveness honestly. It is a long-standing American intellectual tradition, pioneered by fine American literary minds like William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville, each of whom in his own way responded to that stinging question posed by Sydney Smith in the Edinburgh Review in January 1820: "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?""

"... Moreover, in order to raise capital and extend their credit over the long, unpredictable term of [an item's] market life, they often endorsed or guaranteed each other's promissory notes, in this way creating elaborate networks of mutual dependence. As a result, when one firm became insolvent, it often took several others down with it. But to make things even worse, many [brokers of these items] estimated their net worth based on unsold (and devalued) inventory rather than on a more realistic accounting of their assets. This meant that, at any given time, it was difficult for a [broker of these items] to know either his own true financial position or that of the firms whose notes he'd endorsed. Thus, by 1819, with many thousands of worthless [items] circulating as inflated currency, the bankruptcy of a [broker of these items] was a frequent occurrence."

"In 1790, an intense debate swirled around the debt issued by individual states and the government during the Revolutionary War, much of which had been scooped up by big-city speculators after it had plummeted in value. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton's proposal that the newly constituted federal government assume state debts was wildly unpopular among the agrarian types from Virginia. They loathed speculators and the cities in which they congregated, and they viewed the plan as part of Hamilton's scheme to concentrate power in the federal government."

"When someone makes a prediction, people post it to the site along with a brief description and a URL. We monitor it and change its status to true or false when appropriate."

"In other parts of the book, Brandeis goes on to challenge the conventional stereotype of the banker as conservative—on the contrary, he noted their “financial recklessness”—and he argued that Americans had systematically been “confusing the functions of banker and business man.” He argued for a system of smaller, more local banks.

I’ve been thinking of this lately, as our old friend urbino (who, alas, doesn’t come around here no more) has beaten almost every major pundit to the punch in arguing that if banks have grown too big to fail, then perhaps they ought to be stopped from supersizing themselves...."

"That Wilson regarded “reason and the senses” so highly that he thought the Bible could not “supercede” the findings of such demonstrates that his political-theology merits the label “rationalism.”"

"If memory serves, when there were about 300 Dalton stores, the sale of 6 copies a week constituted a “hot list” book and 6 copies a month was “warm list.” This was my first lesson in how few books sell enough to create statistical significance in any one store. That’s a critical thing to understand.

Soon, Dalton had established the concept of “model stock”, books that were automatically reordered based on sales. Smart sales reps learned quickly that getting a model was more important than getting a big quantity buy to the sales health of most books."

"Can we learn anything from all this? Going back to the triumph-of-evil quote, we may ask, how can we defend ourselves from the bogus quote? It is clearly unreasonable for anyone to have to prove a quote bogus...."

A technical conference schedule from my Dad's papers.

"Most inventors are unsuccessful, and most patents never get used. Countries that are full of inventive genius don't necessarily have booming economies. Spreading innovations is a haphazard process dependent on luck, or culture, or fickle government support... it's not a golden road to wealth and power. Innovating is an easy process compared to "un-inventing" huge installed technologies. Asbestos got yanked out of American schools, but asbestos bricks are all over the "poor world.""

"We are defined by what we build. It’s not just the engineering ambition that designed these structures, nor the 20 people who died building the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s that we believe we can and decide to act. I’m happy to report our new President agrees when he says,

“In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.”"

"They’re boarding my plane. As I get ready to pack up my laptop and go, I feel as though I’m leaving something precious behind, and moving toward a future in which the landscape of my life has unalterably shifted. I don’t know what the future will be in this new place. But I don’t feel I’m alone."

"On his authority as Admiral of the battlestar Galactica, Edward James Olmos addresses a crowd in the United Nations chamber and gets them to condemn the use of the constructed term [edited] “race” with a shout of “So say we all!”"

"Nowhere, however, was the intellectual class anywhere nearly large enough to take power on its own. It relied on the support of other groups dissatisfied with the existing regime. Thus the Russian revolution only succeeded, after nearly a year of agitation, when railway workers went on strike, paralyzing the Tsar’s armies (already in disarray after the disastrous Russo-Japanese War). Yet once the intellectuals took power—in most cases, only to a limited extent—it became clear that their programs were not very appealing to their supporters. The rich disliked the intellectuals’ plans for popular education, which meant raising taxes, while the poor were dismayed to find their former allies trying to break strikes and disarm rebel groups. ..."

"This long essay, to be published in parts, tries to make sense of the libero-genic hope and potential of computer and communications technology in a framework that also makes sense of the dangers. I return to a an essay from the adolescence of liberalism - Benjamin Constant's 1816 "The liberty of ancients compared with that of moderns" - to argue that the liberating hyper-individualism of the web is also the source of its greatest dangers. It is now more urgent than ever for us to reclaim our ability to decide all together on our common futures: we need to exercise our collective freedom to preserve our modern liberty."

"Kowalski says that bars were used to grow political bases and owners were very civic-minded people. "Social organizations were formed at bars and city meetings were held at bars. Bars sponsored events and sports teams. They weren't just bars," Kowalski says."

"The resolution passed by your honorable body at your last session ordering the printing of the report of the Board of Public Works in pamphlet form and placing the distribution of the same in the hands of said board I hereby disapprove of, for the following reasons:

Such publication is not warranted by the city charter, which on page 75, section 41, prescribes the manner in which such reports shall be published, namely, in the official newspaper of the city [emphasis added]."

"Some of the claims here are sketchy — Geocities as a precursor to blogging? Really? — and suffer from web-centrism. After all, the world wide web was one of the LEAST interesting or effective things on the internet to spend your time on in the mid-1990s; usenet and email, which was mostly done over PINE or ELM servers in terminal clients, were where it was at. (I had a proto-blog my freshman and sophomore years of college whose “subscribers” were people in my email address book — most of whom were friends-of-friends I didn’t know.) All the same, it’s worth reading and remembering a little of what it was all like."

"But for Shlaes, as for the Liberty Leaguers, government isn't big unless it restricts big business; then big government is bad."

"Now, I won’t try to defend the idea that the Founders included Satanists in their vision for “religion in general.” But the following is a list of “religions” which they believed were “sound” and valid ways to God: Orthodox or unorthodox Christianity, Judaism, Islam, certain forms of Deism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Native American spirituality and pagan Greco-Romanism. Putting them together, you certainly get “religion in general” not “Christianity in particular.”"

"The open source blogosphere featured two articles the last week of December 2008 that inaccurately draw software-market history timelines from which the authors then inaccurately position the place of open source software in the information technology (IT) market. I doubt if the statements are intentionally misleading; they are most likely the result of ignorance or sloppiness."