The Big Picture has a pointer to this Google Spreadsheet of a buying versus renting cost comparison: .
It’s neat, but you have to save a copy to your own Google account before you can modify the values. There are a couple issues, having to do with dependent variables that aren’t well linked to other [...]
Amazon has taken the brilliantly evil “using porn to defeat captcha” idea and put it to good use in their experimental Amazon Mechanical Turk. (The name comes from 18th Century chess automaton hoax, where the chess-playing “robot” actually consisted of a chess master dwarf moving the levers, as this page explains).
The Amazon system [...]
At the beginning of the month, I submitted a few photos to Shutter Stock, a micro-stock photography site, to see if any income can be generated from the pool of photos I’ve been taking. It took a while for their reviewers to get to my submission batch, but I had a fair number approved [...]
This is perhaps a few weeks late in terms of the blogosphere commentary flurry — if Internet-years were similar to dog-years, the lifespan of hot topics on blogs resembles that of mayflies — but, arguably, this is for my own thinking in the form of future reminders than anything else.
Anyway, what New Orleans experienced was [...]
We picked up Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild after seeing it in one of the Alaska bookstores, in the large “local interest” section. I had actually heard of the story before, around the time it happened. As Krakauer noted, it made national news for a little while, and he wrote an Outside magazine [...]
History did not turn on its hinge yesterday. 7/7 will simply become another stanza in the litany of atrocities that go back to 3/11, to Bali, to 9/11 — when history did turn on its hinge and our perception of the world changed. It was London’s worst day since the Second World War, [...]
This morning, we woke to NPR’s obituary and discussion of George Kennan, father of Cold War containment. This piece began by noting that Kennan regretted the costs of containment and establishes his genius by reviewing the Long Telegram and its place in history. NPR notes that this was a “relatively tough” policy against [...]
In terms of the big public arts projects in New York, I kind of liked the cows more than the Gates, now that I think about it. As noted, if the Gates had been done when they were first proposed, it would have been a mighty civic gesture, perhaps the beginning of a reclamation [...]
I read Victor David Hanson’s Carnage and Culture last year, coincidentally soon after reading Creasy’s Victorian-era survey book Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World
The earlier book consisted of relatively brief descriptions of the various battles that Creasy believed shaped history, the pinnacle of history being (of course) the British Empire of the 19th Century. [...]
This past week’s New Republic’s cover article was Peter Beinart’s “A Fighting Faith”, a post-election call for American liberals to confront Islamic totalitarianism, or else fade into irrelevance. Though these ideas have been floating around for a while, at least in general, this is a significant article, as it comes from one the flagship [...]