Link Banana

Weezer’s new music video is chock full of internet memes, and thus must be loved by everyone on the internet. That is all.

(via Waxy)

Two recent mentions of the psychological trick caught my eye. First: in his review of Nudge, John Cassidy — while pointing out that Senator Obama’s policies share logic with those of the book — offer this interesting test:

If you think you are too smart for this description to apply to you, try this simple mental exercise. Take the last three digits of your cell phone number, obtaining a number between zero and 999, and add two hundred to it. Write down the resulting figure and put the letters AD after it. Now, consider this question: When did Attila the Hun invade Europe?

Unless you are an expert on the Dark Ages, or your brain is unusually wired, the chances are that your answer will be pretty close to the date you write down. Say the last three digits of your cell number are 787 and the number you write down is 987 AD. Then, most likely, 900 AD will sound like a reasonable answer to you, and so will 1050 AD, but [440, the correct answer] will sound wrong. That was certainly how it worked when I tried the exercise.

Also, Matt Yglesias suspects a local developer is employing the technique to show why he should move.

I love a good bit of Farm Bill outrage, so here’s The Economist:

If you measure the success of a pressure group by its ability to cram lousy policy through Congress, you might imagine that Big Oil or Wall Street would top the league: they are the lobbies most berated on the campaign trail. You would be wrong. If there were any doubt, the past few days should have confirmed that America’s farmers are the capital’s handout kings.

Consider their latest masterpiece, the 2007 farm bill that Congress this week delivered, several months late, to George Bush. Congress and the farmers have conspired to make an already unjust agricultural policy—a system that has subsidised the “farming” activities of such paupers as David Letterman and David Rockefeller—even worse. Through a complicated and overlapping system of government-sponsored insurance, counter-cyclical assistance, disaster aid and legacy payments tied to nothing, the five-year, $307 billion bill lavishes cash on wealthy farm households, the main restriction on collecting it being a means test that applies to couples making more than $1.5m a year. And even that can be avoided by employing a reasonably competent accountant.

If you want to understand the problem in one simple step, take a look at the graph attached to that article.

David Brooks again earns my admiration. From his well-executed history of nerdiness:

But the biggest change was not Silicon Valley itself. Rather, the new technology created a range of mental playgrounds where the new geeks could display their cultural capital. The jock can shine on the football field, but the geeks can display their supple sensibilities and well-modulated emotions on their Facebook pages, blogs, text messages and Twitter feeds. Now there are armies of designers, researchers, media mavens and other cultural producers with a talent for whimsical self-mockery, arcane social references and late-night analysis.

They can visit eclectic sites like Kottke.org and Cool Hunting, experiment with fonts, admire Stewart Brand and Lawrence Lessig and join social-networking communities with ironical names. They’ve created a new definition of what it means to be cool, a definition that leaves out the talents of the jocks, the M.B.A.-types and the less educated.

I note this just because I’m rather surprised anyone actually bothered to conduct such a poll. But SurveyUSA did — maybe hoping that people like me would like to it? — their explanation is here.

(via Waxy)

File this one under “surprisingly compelling.” May I recommend the slideshow?

(via Boing Boing)

Speaking of places you rarely hear about, Michael Janeway offers an interesting synopsis of Puerto Rico’s tenuous relationship with America.

Puerto Ricans have never resolved their relationship with the United States. For almost 50 years after the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rican sentiment was divided between dreams of statehood and of independence. This ambivalence deterred the island from ever petitioning Congress for one or the other. And until mid-century, sporadic outbursts of violent nationalism haunted the scene.

Partly to put such extremism out of business, Congress in 1948 allowed Puerto Rico to elect its own governor and then in 1950 gave it an intricately designed, semi-autonomous “commonwealth” status short of statehood. Two years later, the island adopted its own Constitution, and Congress quickly ratified it.

Because I’m on a segue kick, Marian Tupy recently offered a comparison of Zimbabwe and Botswana. Though the comparison’s slightly insane — anything looks well-run when compared to a basketcase — it’s an interesting perspective on a country I rarely hear about. Some history of Botswana:

Botswana, previously the Protectorate of Bechuanaland, gained independence from Great Britain in 1966. Her new president, Seretse Khama, a descendant of the local Bamangwato chiefs, received his education at South Africa’s Fort Hare University and Oxford’s Balliol College. In 1948, he married a white woman, Ruth Williams, who clerked at Lloyds in London. Their marriage was political dynamite that was, at first, opposed by both the traditional chiefs in the Bechuanaland and by the government in South Africa, Botswana’s immensely more powerful southern neighbor whose white population had just elected a regime that wanted to increase racial segregation between whites and blacks. Fearing South Africa’s negative reaction, the British government banned the Khamas from the Protectorate for almost a decade.

The racial prejudice that the pair encountered from both sides of the racial spectrum proved to be formative. While most regimes in post-independence Africa sent their white populations packing, Khama and his successors strove for racial harmony. As a result, Botswana benefited greatly from the human and financial capital of her large white community, which totals 7 percent of the overall population. It is surely a sign of Botswana’s relative comfort with racial diversity that on April 1, 2008, Ian Khama, the first-born son of the country’s founder, took over the reigns of power in Botswana, thus becoming the first half-white leader of an African democracy.

Speaking of Mr. Keating, he also points out an interesting story from China Digital Times. Confusion about whether or not Zimbabwe’s government received the shipment that South African dockworkers refused to unload remains. On one hand:

THE ZIMBABWEAN government said yesterday that weapons carried by China’s so-called “ship of shame”, the An Yue Jiang, had arrived in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, despite an international campaign to prevent the 77 tonnes of arms reaching President Robert Mugabe’s regime.

On the other:

But China’s Foreign Ministry said the An Yue Jiang was on its way back to China, and denied reports the weapons had arrived in Zimbabwe.

“These reports are baseless and purely fictitious,” spokesman Qin Gang said in a statement on the ministry’s website (www.fmprc.gov.cn).

“The Chinese side has already said many times that the weapons sold to Zimbabwe will return on the An Yue Jiang. The ship is currently on its way back to China,” Qin said.

You probably missed it — I nearly did — but Joshua Keating points out that three important things happened yesterday:

Israel and Syria, technically at war since 1967, are holding historic peace talks in Turkey that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert described as a “national obligation.” The Lebanese government negotiated a compromise with Hezbollah, ending 18 months of violence and political deadlock. And Pakistan’s government defied the U.S. by agreeing to withdraw from Taliban-controlled territory in exchange for security guarantees.

They also make the point that this is clear sign of the current irrelevance of the United States to world politics.

This (temporarily down) has rightly been getting some loving. Jamie Livingston took a Polaroid a day, from 1979 until his death from cancer in 1997. mental_floss has collected some of the most interesting and telling shots.

These are both a little old, but worth examining.

• The Economist shows that Americans are clearly the most generous private donors to charities.
• While Stephen Dubner asks if they’re actually secretly selfish in how they give.

Last weekend’s New York Times Magazine had rather interesting story about the reemergence of one man bands. What makes them different from other solo artists?

“The era of solo performers — singer-songwriters and all that — is pretty much done. There aren’t any new solo performers out there that are interesting; now it’s all this assisted-performance type of thing.” When I asked him to clarify the difference between a solo performer and the music he made, Pallett was quick to oblige. “With a solo performer, what matters is the material — in the sense of the written song, the lyrics and so on — and the songwriter’s charisma; it’s about the personality that comes through in the music. There’s no technical aspect involved: nothing too difficult is attempted.” He gave a mock sigh of despair. “For better or for worse, there’s difficulty in a lot of what I do.”

Also, if you’re interested in challenging your opinion of that magazine, consider reading this diary of a girl you’ve never heard about (unless you’re big into the Gawker scene).

I feel vaguely like I’ve heard this story before, but it’s interesting nonetheless:

Jane Novak, a 46-year-old stay-at-home mother of two in New Jersey, has never been to Yemen. She speaks no Arabic, and freely admits that until a few years ago, she knew nothing about that strife-torn south Arabian country.

And yet Ms. Novak has become so well known in Yemen that newspaper editors say they sell more copies if her photograph — blond and smiling — is on the cover. Her blog, an outspoken news bulletin on Yemeni affairs, is banned there. The government’s allies routinely vilify her in print as an American agent, a Shiite monarchist, a member of Al Qaeda, or “the Zionist Novak.”

Your daily dose of “crazy/awesome” comes via Buzzfeed:

Instructions: stand still in front of a camera. 3…2…1…SHAKE YOUR FACE! Now take a picture! Icky meme or awesome party game? Your call.

Also from Buzzfeed, the charming photos of Fencing for Old People.

And it’s rather entertaining. A sample:

Q: What’s the most curious record in your collection?
A: In the seventies a record company in LA issued a record called “The best of Marcel Marceau.” It had forty minutes of silence followed by applause and it sold really well. I like to put it on for company. It really bothers me, though, when people talk through it.

(via Coudal)

Good Magazine has released their second set of interviews with expats in China. The first is here. They offer an interesting perspective on China and why one might choose to live there.

A fascinating argument:

Presidential candidates, take note: Long before they made their way into the workings of modern government, the democratic tenets we hold so dear were used to great effect on pirate ships. Checks and balances. Social insurance. Freedom of expression. So Leeson, an economics professor at George Mason University, will argue in his upcoming book, “The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates.”

(via Freakonomics)

Passport has pulled some maps from an interesting study, “Natural Disaster Hotspots: A Global Risk Analysis” (PDF).

They divided the world up into sub-national swathes of land and analyzed population and disaster data going back about thirty years for six disaster types: drought, flooding, cyclones, earthquakes, volcanoes, and landslides. For reasons of data accuracy and availability, the results are relative rather than absolute likelihoods that disasters will occur in various corners of the globe.

The study focuses on more significantly populated areas amounting to about half of the world’s land area. It approaches loss as potential damage to that which is “valuable but vulnerable includ[ing] people, infrastructure, and environmentally important land uses.” And what’s more, based on data from a Brussels-based research center, the study hints that disaster frequency is increasing.

I was struck by an article in the New York Times Book Review because, well, I’d never heard of the Colfax Massacre. Or perhaps I’d forgotten. In any case, it’s interesting reading about an important — and shameful — American event.

In the middle of the Colfax, La., cemetery stands a 12-foot-high obelisk. It’s weathered now. But in its day it must have been a grand sight, towering over the rows of gravestones, its marble glinting in the Southern sun. The monument was built as a tribute to three local white men, “the heroes,” according to its inscription, “who fell in the Colfax riot fighting for white supremacy” on April 13, 1873 — Easter Sunday. There is no mention of the estimated 81 black people who were murdered that day.