March 2011
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Denmark's New Digital Stamps →
Launching this Friday, users of the new service will text the word “PORTO” to 1900, receiving a confirmation text in reply along with a string of numbers and letters. These numbers and letters can then be written on the envelope as way of payment, rather than using a stamp, according to a report on Deutsche Welle. The service is currently only available for domestic mail inside Denmark and for...
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Promoting Ungrowth
via NYTimes.com
Updated March 28, 2011, 06:58 PM
Jennifer Bradley is a fellow with the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program. Her work focuses on land use and economic development in Great Lakes metropolitan areas.
People in Cleveland, Detroit, Flint and Youngstown, and in Bilbao, Leipzig and Turin, have plenty of ideas about what cities can do with vacant and abandoned land:...
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“In the final analysis, it has been Treasury’s broken promises that have turned...”
– Neil Barofsky, Where the Bank Bailout Went Wrong
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“I don’t know Libya, but my gut tells me that any kind of decent outcome there...”
– Thomas Friedman, Looking for Luck in Libya
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Veggie Burgers of Note Around Manhattan - NYC -... →
For my son Conrad, a veggie.
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Imagining The Unimaginable
The Fukushima Daiichi disaster continues to worsen:
Ken Belson and Hiroko Tabuchi, Confidence Slips Away as Japan Battles Nuclear Peril
The recent flow of bad news from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station has undermined the drumbeat of optimistic statements by government and company officials who have at times tried to reassure a nervous public that significant progress is at hand —...
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“Be smart enough to know how to be dumb.”
– Greg Melander - To be a good designer you have to be smart enough to know how to be dumb. I don’t mean dumb down your design. Rather, I mean simplify, focus, reduce the complex, listen, and learn. Then with this viewpoint you can produce something that the masses can have an attention span for.
...
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Watch- StreetFilms, Moving Beyond the Automobile Part VI: Highway Removal
So, big surprise: large-scale, top-down attempts to create order in cities will fail to accomplish what the designers hope. Example: Le Corbusier and Robert Moses attempted to bring rural dived highways into densely populated cities — NYC, San Francisco, etc. — to allow cars to drive at high speeds through urban...
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ericmortensen:
Fiona Apple - Extraordinary...
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“The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to...”
– Wendell Berry
(via azspot)
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“Former Social networking darling, Myspace, has seen its monthly unique visitor...”
– Desire Athow, 10 Million Users Leave Myspace Within A Month
“This is a great idea, because everybody’s knows that abortions are a classic...”
– Stephen Colbert, on South Dakota’s Neanderthal laws restricting abortion, on The Colbert Report (via mlee525)
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Continuations: Embrace Messy Data (To Reach... →
continuations:
I believe I have discovered an important reason why the government has a hard time making good use of the Internet: people who design systems for the government abhor messy data. They are used to setups in which every record is complete because the people populating the records are forced by law to be complete.
Another supporting argument for messiness-at-scale.
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Obama's pro-business record →
jonathan-cunningham:
Since Obama was inaugurated, the Dow Jones has increased more than 50% — from 8,000 to more than 12,000; the wealthiest recieved a massive tax cut; the top marginal tax rate was three times less than during the Eisenhower years and substantially lower than during the Reagan years; income and wealth inequality are so vast and rising that it is easily at Third World...
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“From the violence lite of its action sequences, to the Girl,...”
– - Annalee Newitz, “Sucker Punch” goes beyond awful, to become commentary on the death of moviemaking
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Losing Our Way - Bob Herbert →
Bob Herbert writes his final column for the NY Times after 18 years.
Herbert’s last piece focuses on the growing income inequality in the US (which is a direct proxy for political inequality), and the profound social immorality this represents. His tone is somber, and underneath I sense that he is deeply discouraged, angry, and afraid of what is to come. I also have seen his hopes for Obama...
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Time To Take To The Streets?
The NY Times editorial board is far too polite in its response to the ‘vicious politics’ that the House GOP is playing, proposing huge cutbacks on the Food Stamps and other social programs ta
grace-notes:
Sigur Rós - Hafsól
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Hey, Where’s My Robot Girlfriend?
Hey, Where’s My Robot Girlfriend? An Exploration of Sexual Robotics, Teledildonics and Carnal Technology
An illustrated lecture with sexual health researcher, educator and writer Laura G. Duncan Date: Thursday, March 24th Time: 8:00 PM Admission: $5 Presented by Morbid Anatomy
The robotic bride. The orgasm ray. The sex machine.
These classic tropes of science fiction – how fictitious are...
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“I continue to reject the position, ‘Well, it’s 2,000 megawatts of power; we need...”
– - Andrew Cuomo, regarding Indian Point nuclear power plant
via NYTimes.com 