Tom Vanderbilt:

Who and where was this invisible metropolis? What infrastructure was needed to create this city of ether?

Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network.

The tilting CD tower gives way to the MP3-laden hard drive which itself yields to a service like Pandora, music that is always “there,” waiting to be heard.

But where is “there,” and what does it look like?

Have you read Vanderbilt's "Traffic"?

Ultimately, Traffic is about more than driving: it’s about human nature.

Data Center Overload

A 14-year old German boy was hit in the hand by a pea-sized meteorite that scared the bejeezus out of him and left a scar.

Boy Hit by Meteorite

I guess my big issue with the book world is that only rarely does anybody address the physicality of books, as if to do so is somehow an insult to “words,” which is kind of corny, and seems almost willfully self-blinding. The extreme is in France, where most covers are blank with just the title and author’s name, which is actually not a bad idea, like school uniforms, but then what next — all books set in the same font at the same size? A war between the pro italics and the anti italics camp? I think you can go too far.

The snippet doesn't nearly do this justice...

Doug Coupland -- Insects - Time Capsules Blog - NYTimes.com

So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack.

The Joy of Less - Happy Days Blog - NYTimes.com

Global investors spent about $250 billion building new power capacity in 2008, and for the first time the lion’s share of that money went to renewable sources, according to the United Nations Environment Program.

Clean Energy Funding Trumps Fossil Fuels - Green Inc. Blog - NYTimes.com

But let's look at the claim that using biofuels lowers overall carbon dioxide emissions. Essentially it isn't true. null

The Ethanol Lobby: Profits vs. Food - BusinessWeek

In weeks of closed-door negotiations with these Democrats, Mr. Waxman doled out billions of dollars worth of free pollution permits, known as allowances, to cushion any price shock caused by imposing a cap on emissions of heat-trapping gases.

In the end, 85 percent of all pollution allowances were given at no cost for various purposes, including compensating energy-intensive industries, state governments, oil refiners and low-income households, at least in the early years of the program. Mr. Obama’s position during the presidential campaign was that all of the permits should be auctioned, not given away, but the White House did not object to Mr. Waxman’s generous allocations.

Climate Bill Clears Hurdle, but Others Remain - NYTimes.com

NASA's triumphant mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope this week has cracked open a policy rift within the space agency, with a top NASA scientist saying that the United States is on the way to losing the capability of doing what it has just done so dramatically.

Successful Hubble Repair Mission Widens Policy Rift at NASA - washingtonpost.com

You may not know it, but if you have a wireless router, a cordless phone, remote car-door opener, baby monitor or cellphone in your house, the FCC claims the right to enter your home without a warrant at any time of the day or night in order to inspect it.

FCC’s Warrantless Household Searches Alarm Experts | Threat Level | Wired.com

Exactly two years ago today, the New York Times published an op-ed about copyright by a novelist. The piece caused something of a digital riot. As we learn now from his book, Digital Barbarism (HarperCollins 2009) (note: if you buy from that link, Creative Commons gets the referral fee), Mark Helprin was at the time completely ignorant about the hornet's nest he was about to kick. For him, the op-ed was a professional rapprochement with the New York Times, a chance to make things right once again (though why they were then wrong is a story left mysteriously (and thankfully) out of the book).

(Read the rest of this insanely long review in the extended entry. You can download a better formatted PDF here.)

The Solipsist and the Internet (a review of Helprin's Digital Barbarism) (Lessig Blog)