Slate’s running a special issue on procrastination. So far, the best thing I’ve seen in it is Seth Stevenson’s “Letter to a Young Procrastinator.” A sample:
Stop resisting and embrace your procrastination. Don’t agonize in front of a blank computer screen. Don’t sit around for hours—intending to start your work any moment now—only to find that in the end you’ve accomplished zilch, save for ruining your own day.
This one’s been making the rounds. Stop motion animation made by careful graffiti is a fascinating thing to watch.
I’m sure this isn’t the best David Brooks column in recent weeks, but its another good and interesting one. His contention: the Bible — all dogmatism — is going to have a hard time in the next century.
In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.
Malise Ruthven has an interesting review of the theories about what makes people become Islamic terrorists. One theory:
Sageman pays close attention to family networks, with about one fifth of his sample having close family ties with other global Islamic activists. His point is strongly reinforced by Bilveer Singh in The Talibanization of Southeast Asia, his study of jihadist groups in Southeast Asia. Singh sees kinship as being a vital element in the makeup of al-Jamaat al-Islamiyah—the organization responsible for the Bali nightclub bombings in October 2002. The people who form terror groups have to know and trust one another. In most Muslim societies it is kinship, rather than shared ideological values, that generates relations of trust.
Speaking of the difference between the real and fake: a fascinating Flickr gallery comparing GTA IV’s Liberty City against real New York City sights.
(via Fimoculous)
Jason Kottke notes an interesting phenomenon. Rather than technology advancing to make computer-generated characters look eerily-but-not-completely lifelike, poorly executed Photoshops of real people can make them looks eerily-but-not-completely lifelike.
That’s what Rachel Dandielo argued is last weekend’s New York Times Book Review:
The year saw the advent of everything from Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and Dr. Seuss’ “Yertle the Turtle” to “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak, that year’s Nobel laureate in literature; the first American edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”; Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”; John Kenneth Galbraith’s “Affluent Society”; Philip Roth’s story “Goodbye, Columbus”; and Jack Kerouac’s “Dharma Bums” — not to mention Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape,” Harold Pinter’s “Birthday Party,” Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” and Orson Welles’s “Touch of Evil.” Robert Frank captured the uncertain tenor of the time in his 1958 photography book, “The Americans,” as did Jasper Johns in his 1958 painting “Three Flags,” in which he superimposed three American flags, each smaller than the next, transforming the familiar into the abstract, the iconic into the unsettled.
Designing the News has a pretty clever idea for advertising: using pictograms. Admittedly, part of the reason I like it is it reminds me of a childhood “activity books.”
(via Magnetbox)
The Economist is sounding the alarm about the troubling ease with which the extremely wealthy are stifling free speech worldwide by pressing cases in the most friendly countries. A few cases that have taken of Britian’s libel laws:
That followed a similar judgment last year against Rachel Ehrenfeld, a New York-based American author who has written about the support of some Saudis for Islamist terrorism. She was successfully sued in London by a Saudi for a book she had published in America that had sold only a handful of copies in Britain.
Obozrevatel (Observer), an internet news site that does not even publish in English. Like Ms Ehrenfeld, the defendants did not appear in court and judgment was entered against them in default. Damages will be set in a compensation hearing later this year. Schillings declined to comment, but a statement on its website reads: “By seeking redress in the courts of England, Mr Akhmetov will ensure that there will be a fair legal process.”
Further proof that Europeans — admittedly, with some justification — don’t have a clue about the geography of the United States.
Jake Adelstein has a fascinating Op-Ed in today’s Washington Post about his time covering the impotent policing of organized crime in Japan. A snippet:
Most Americans think of Japan as a law-abiding and peaceful place, as well as our staunch ally, but reporting on the underworld gave me a different perspective. Mobs are legal entities here. Their fan magazines and comic books are sold in convenience stores, and bosses socialize with prime ministers and politicians. And as far as the United States is concerned, Japan may be refueling U.S. warships at sea, but it’s not helping us fight our own battles against organized crime — a realization that led to my biggest scoop.
(via brijit)
As is always the case with managably sized bar graphs, I’m curious as too all that was left offo this one. The list provided is surprising. Greece easily wins the cigarette consumption race, and the United States beats notoriously-smoky France.
Every once in a while, something leaps out of this boring part in the election cycle and makes me pay attention. Today, it was this line from John Harwood on Meet the Press. He says it at the very start of the round table, at about 27:30 in the web video.
If we found out that there was a secret poker game when Tony Rezko was paying Barack Obama to write Jeremiah Wright’s sermons and to organize Muslim English professors form a new Weather Underground chapter, maybe Barack Obama could be stopped.
I’m generally a sucker for lists like this. I’m especially a sucker for lists like this when they feature childhood favorites like Full House.
The Economist’s Tech.view columnist thinks that the time is ripe for disappearing ink (or erasable paper) to replace the old-fashioned kind:
But once we’ve finished with the hard copies, they are often dumped in the recycling container, rubbish bin or even shredder. In a survey of its own printers, copiers and waste-paper bins, Xerox found that two out of five sheets printed were used only once and then discarded after a day.
That seems an awful waste. It takes around 200,000 joules of energy to make a sheet of paper. The average office worker in America prints out 1,200 sheets a month. The energy consumed in manufacturing that amount of paper—not to mention the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere in the process—is equivalent a 100-watt light bulb burning for a month.
Pundits reckon over 15 trillion pieces of paper are printed annually around the world—a figure that is expected to grow 30% over the next ten years. To feed our appetite for paper, whole forests have to chopped down. Surely it would be better if we could reuse our paper—in short, stick it back in the printer or copier rather than trash it.
I’m not quite sure how to react to these photos from Lebanon.
I thought I posted this yesterday… alas, Slate’s Explainer tackles the question of whether it’s Myanmar or Burma that’s refusing to let outside relief workers into the country.
Some err on the side of letting the country itself decide, while others don’t. On the Burma/Myanmar question, both newspapers and countries are divided over whether to recognize the switcheroo. Burma’s military leaders changed the English-language version of the country’s name to Myanmar in 1989, based on the short version of the country’s name in Burmese, “Myanma Naingngandaw.” While the United Nations adopted the new name in June of that year, the United States continues to call the country Burma because the change was never ratified by a legislative body in the country.
The Economist reports on a trend you’ll likely either find fascinating or disturbing:
Bloomington, a suburb of St George, has built a cul-de-sac around a huge boulder marked with petroglyphs—a model that will soon be followed by a developer near Salt Lake City. A site near Cortez, in Colorado, which is dotted with more than 200 Indian ruins, is being marketed as “America’s first archaeological development”: buyers can do their own excavations, but must bequeath what they find to a local museum. Perhaps the most extraordinary example is Mountain’s Edge, a half-built suburb near Las Vegas, where an ersatz archaeological dig has been incorporated into a park. Clearly, if a site lacks history there is a need to invent it.
There’s some fascinating stuff in Peter Carlson’s story about the non-governmental National Security Archive. Like this brief list of things they retrieved through Freedom of Information Act requests:
A CIA guidebook called “A Study of Assassination,” which advised right-wing Latin Americans on the most effective ways to bludgeon, stab and shoot their enemies.
A National Security Agency study revealing that the agency “deliberately skewed” its account of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which led to the escalation of the Vietnam War.
A 2002 Pentagon PowerPoint briefing on plans for the upcoming invasion of Iraq — code name “Polo Step” — that assumed that only 5,000 American troops would remain in Iraq by the end of 2006.
Perhaps the most famous documents obtained by the archive were the CIA’s so-called “Family Jewels,” which detailed the agency’s illegal wiretaps and attempts to assassinate foreign leaders. The archive filed its FOIA request for the “Family Jewels” in 1992. Fifteen years later, in 2007, the CIA finally released them, and they made headlines around the world.
(via brijit)