Link Banana

Stuart McMillen, who does an interesting combination of commentary and cartooning, points out all the ways that in a post-communist world it is Aldous Huxley, not George Orwell, whose dystopia seems more prescient. He was inspired by a book I’ve tried to read more than once.

While digging around, I noticed a comment that was far to good to pass up:

So instead of reading Amusing Ourselves to Death, you can fit this simplified form of the introduction in-between television commercials.

(via K)

Fascinating:

The most widely known period of cargo cult activity, however, was in the years during and after World War II. First, the Japanese arrived with a great deal of unknown equipment, and later, Allied forces also used the islands in the same way. The vast amounts of war materiel that were airdropped onto these islands during the Pacific campaign between the Allies and the Empire of Japan necessarily meant drastic changes to the lifestyle of the islanders, many of whom had never seen Westerners or Easterners before. Manufactured clothing, medicine, canned food, tents, weapons, and other useful goods arrived in vast quantities to equip soldiers. Some of it was shared with the islanders who were their guides and hosts. With the end of the war, the airbases were abandoned, and cargo was no longer dropped.

In attempts to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again, islanders imitated the same practices they had seen the soldiers, sailors, and airmen use. They carved headphones from wood and wore them while sitting in fabricated control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses. The cult members thought that the foreigners had some special connection to the deities and ancestors of the natives, who were the only beings powerful enough to produce such riches.

(via Big Contrarian, in the context of this video)

Curious:

Comparing scans from tests with and without the opportunity to cheat, the scientists found that for honest subjects, deciding to be honest took no extra brain activity. But for others, the dishonest group, both deciding to lie and deciding to tell the truth required extra activity in the areas of the brain associated with critical thinking and self-control.

(via Lone Gunman)

I feel — and I’m not an economist — that this analysis is probably oversimplified, but I can’t tell quite how.

Why is China [forcing its economy to grow]? It doesn’t have the kind of social safety net one sees in the developed world, so it needs to keep its economy going at any cost. Millions of people have migrated to its cities, and now they’re hungry and unemployed. People without food or work tend to riot. To keep that from happening, the government is more than willing to artificially stimulate the economy, in the hopes of buying time until the global system stabilizes. It’s literally forcing banks to lend — which will create a huge pile of horrible loans on top of the ones they’ve originated over the last decade.

(via Ideas)

Marco said it better than I would:

I could quote some great part of this like I usually do, but if you just skim part of it and breeze by, you’ll miss the entire purpose of this article.

Rarely does someone’s blog post really make me take a step back from all of this and think for a bit. This did.

The Infrastructurist shares some of the most interesting, innovative, and annoying examples of advertising creeping further and further into our daily lives.

These maps aren’t new — I think I may have even perused them before — and contain no information I was really shocked by, but I still think they’re worth a gander. A fairly comprehensive pair is made by the percentage of people with religious affiliations across the country, and the churches with which the greatest number are affiliated.

(via Flowing Data)

Paul Krugman isn’t my favorite anything, and I’d never heard of Charles Stross, but their discussion of technology and the future is wide-ranging and imagination-tickling.

(via Big Contrarian)

Illustrator Aaron Zenz moved his refrigerator — spellcheck was invented for words like that — to the internet three years ago, and in honor of that anniversary he encouraged people to reinterpret his kid’s drawings. The results are pretty great.

(via @ironicsans)

Perhaps the oddest part of the story of the capture of Radovan Karadzic was that the accused war criminal was involved in new age medicine. While exploring the life of Dragan Dabic, Jack Hitt offers this tidbit about that seeming dissonance:

To American ears, the story of the war criminal hiding out among the new-age healers sounds like a classic when-worlds-collide narrative. But in Serbia, things are more complicated. […] In Serbia, then, the politics of alternative medicine became a haven for right-wing anti-Communists — an expression of ancient Balkan heritage. In the war against the Bosnian Muslims, Karadzic and his fellow Serb nationalists co-opted the one-string folk instrument known as the gusle and turned it into a cultural symbol of national pride. Most of the alternative healers I met either had a gusle on their wall or a pin of one on their lapel.

Though the image loading can be a little slow, this series of photos of non-places in Manhattan is fascinating. My concept of Manhattan — as someone who’s spent approximately no time there — is certainly expanded.

(via MeFi)

Whether or not it’s true, I found this story pretty interesting. The contention is that a Boston naval and aeronautical designer, rather than a British type consultant, created the typeface that The Times (of London) made famous.

(via Fresh Signals)

Like something from a fairytale.

(via kottke)

This article, about how surprisingly little we know about the people we’re closest to, called to mind a quote from A Tale of Two Cities:

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

I was kind of shocked that I hadn’t posted about this before, and then I realized that my original exposure to the topic came from the constantly solid audio program, Radiolab. If you prefer text, Keith O’Brien’s story (title link)  is what reminded me of the idea. From him I take this summary of the issue:

What he’d like to see more of, however, is in-depth discussion about animal welfare, how to best gauge it, and what to do about it if zoos are falling short of meeting animals’ needs. It’s a discussion that may lead to the conclusion that the zoos’ ultimate mission means giving up more of its animals, but Kagan’s all right with that.

Though The Economist’s attack on America’s sex offender laws is shot through with outrageous examples from Georgia that most Americans also find absurd, this was rather shocking:

Every American state keeps a register of sex offenders. Many people assume that anyone listed on a sex-offender registry must be a rapist or a child molester. But most states spread the net much more widely. A report by Sarah Tofte of Human Rights Watch, a pressure group, found that at least five states required men to register if they were caught visiting prostitutes. At least 13 required it for urinating in public (in two of which, only if a child was present). No fewer than 29 states required registration for teenagers who had consensual sex with another teenager. And 32 states registered flashers and streakers.

(via The Awl, where you’ll find this excellent comment)

Ever since the program started to run out of money — that seems to be the time most people found out it existed — the constant argument I’ve heard against the vehicle trade-in program is that junking those cars is clearly wasteful (even if it is stimulative). While that’s undeniable, the Green Lantern still thinks it may be good:

According to an early analysis from the Web site Cash for Clunkers Information—which estimated an average fuel-economy increase of 69 percent and total sales of 250,000 cars—the program would cut overall fuel consumption by about 76 million gallons a year and carbon dioxide emissions by about 737,200 tons annually. Using Chameides’ figures, it would produce about 1.7 million tons of CO₂ to manufacture those 250,000 cars, so we won’t really see those savings until a little more than two years from now.

Also worth considering, a thought from Steven Levitt’s about the economics of the program (from back when it was just a proposal):

Still, my guess is that unless the price the government pays for the clunkers is very high, the majority of vehicles that are turned in will not have been driven much, if at all.

The coolest chart of the month, no doubt: how American spend their time. (Yes, you’ve seen it already. Yes, I’m comfortable with that.)

Josh Levin spends some time with people who get paid to think about possible futures. They come up with a kinda-interesting list of ways America could end, but mostly this post is about career envy.

A noteworthy sidebar is the massive interactive chart (with an odd/innovative personality test built in) of way’s it could go bad.

From the school of “If you love something, don’t let go”, an encouraging story of a midlife non-divorce. Also interesting: the number of people who think it was an insulting, passive-aggressive, or vain story to tell.

(via kottke and mefi)