The idea was to erect an island of intellectual freedom where young people could probe and question and develop their own ideas before reality closed in and everybody went to work for a private equity firm.

"It was an underground thing, but then it took off."

Dance Dance Revolution is firmly entrenched as a college craze.

Obama is the former rebel, who used to hang out with friends who smoked and wore leather jackets and stayed up late discussing "neocolonialism."

Bill Richardson is the jock and former frat boy who loves to dispense silly nicknames.

In practically all the foxhole memoirs there is a common villain: standardized testing, which the authors agree has been so overemphasized that it is now an obstacle to the very education it was supposed to measure.

Martin likes to say that he is of an age now when looking at himself in the mirror in the morning is like watching a low-budget horror movie with particularly lurid special effects.

I am kind of obsessed with cross-referencing.

I’m entirely with Dawkins in condemning redneck fascists from Texas to the Taliban. But the trouble with Dawkins is that he thinks that’s what religion is.

We’re seeing the winnowing of the live-music era in America, as well as the end of belief in the album.

For a left-winger like me, the problem is that either your children out-left you or they become fascists.

Rudy comes across as one of those hall-monitor types ...

"It isn’t easy to find a tall blond Jewish girl who is interested in the environment."

She nails the central question -- of her memoir and perhaps of her life -- with an extraordinary quote from Simone Weil. "One has only the choice between God and idolatry," Weil wrote. "If one denies God ... one is worshiping some things of this world in the belief that one sees them only as such, but in fact, though unknown to oneself imagining the attributes of Divinity in them."

McKibben’s aim in "Deep Economy" is relatively modest -- to change minds, to present "a new mental model of the possible." It’s a good time to try.

If you really want to party like a rock star, it helps to be a rapper.

See also Parts I, II, IV, V, and VI.

Hillary and Gore both emerge as A-student types, conscientious geeks, eager to prove themselves and acutely aware of what other people think.

He called her "an incompetent fool," but said he would vote for her anyway.

He was a blue-collar bigot as lovable as he was infuriating. She was an upscale bleeding-heart matron as misguided as she was well intentioned.

"It costs dearly to realize your life's dream."

"I instantly knew that a life of ‘divine debauchery’ should be mine." He soon came to see that divine drudgery was more like it.

In 1890, a drug manufacturer who wanted every bird found in Shakespeare to live in America released 60 starlings in Central Park. ... there are now upward of 200 million across North America.

The most interesting is Michael Taylor, the wayward son of a wealthy commercial real estate developer, a forestry school dropout who drives through Santa Barbara selling knives out of a Volkswagen Rabbit painted with zebra stripes.

Not everything has to be a "teachable moment."

A little secretiveness is, perhaps, a necessary lubricant in our social relations.

"Moral exhortation doesn’t change people’s behavior. Prices do."

"The son of a mill worker [can] pay $400 for a haircut. ... People around the world look at us and say, 'That’s what we want.'"

Edwards presents himself as the good Samaritan ...

"What we notice with tattoo artists, versus other kinds of indie artists, is that tattoo artists like making money."

"I have lost all hope," one woman said, walking at the head of 11 [dead] relatives, mainly children.

"I don’t beat them that much."

It seems now that the audience position for rock is coming closer to that of jazz around the mid-1970s. Most of the forefathers are still with us; increasingly, they seem to have something important to teach us. And we are developing strange hungers for music of the not-so-distant past that might be bigger and deeper than the hunger we originally had.

"I don’t think that they need more packaging. I think that they need context."

See also Parts I, III, IV, V, and VI.

From now on, they said, at least 50 percent of the reports about Russia must be "positive."

The wall is one of the centerpieces of a new strategy by coalition and Iraqi forces to break the cycle of sectarian violence. ... The soldiers jokingly call it "The Great Wall of Adhamiya."

The settlers are calling their compound "House of Peace," but are also considering "Martyrs’ Peak."

"The good thing is that you see these ideas gaining traction."

"Statements made by the chain of command during interviews for this investigation, taken as a whole, suggest that Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing business, and that the Marines need to get the job done no matter what it takes."

"There is no question that at the end of the day Tom is making the decisions."

"At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter a whole lot."

He has become a great improviser, the Miles Davis of the war.

"If he knew, then he was making a mistake. If he didn’t know, he was making a bigger mistake."

"It’s kind of not a good idea," he said carefully, as if explaining something to a child.

"Our whole business is dependent on the trust of users."

They fancy themselves an Internet community like MySpace, but really it’s an alt-porn site with some culture thrown in.

Mr. Phillips duct-taped a woman to a chair, holding her for hours.

... he is confident that he can convert one of the world’s last big non-soccer-crazy nations to the sport, while also influencing the type of films that Hollywood produces ...

See also Parts II, III, IV, V, and VI.

Baghdad rocks on Wednesday, with three separate explosions killing at least 33 people and wounding dozens ... Wang Chung is back ... Violence in Baghdad was modest on Tuesday, with 25 bodies found; 17 bodies, found buried at a primary school in Ramadi, were discovered after students and teachers returned to the schools a week ago and noticed an increasingly putrid odor and stray dogs digging in the area ... More than 200,000 people have died in Darfur ... no one cares about a few more billion ... Iran supplies arms to the Taliban, whose PR engine apparently generates ballyhoo ... for US housing, the the worst is yet to come ... downtown LA is for real!, and you can thank Frank Gehry ... blond female twins with shaved heads, at the IFC Center ... Moral exhortation just doesn't cut it ... Continentals worry over antimissile missiles that might not work, to guard against an Iranian threat that may not exist ... watch as Chinese factory workers lose their social networks ... more enviable than a laid-off Citigroup worker ... PBS takes an "I'm OK, you're OK" approach to Islamic extremism ... Richard Perle is a fascinating study in rationalization ... the world seems to be full of 9-year-olds mastering everything ... we have surely lost more than the war ... Maliki has been seriously outplayed by Sadr, and the US is no help at all ... Yahoo's in trouble, but Semel is "all smiles" ... If you're IBM, the Indians are out to get you ... Vonage is so over ...

Streamlined NYT Sampler for 18 April 2007

Pentagon spy effort serves a purpose, by Mark Bowden

We are no longer in the Cold War, when spying meant monitoring the activities of an empire such as the Soviet Union. Infiltrating and targeting terror cells is work that requires boots on the ground - as with the unit in Jolo - who have relationships with the local military and police, who know the language, the culture, and the politics in obscure theaters of operation, and who are capable not only of gathering intel but acting upon it fast.

Some of the things Rumsfeld did were right.

He was also on the radio recently, talking about Iran.

Move over, James Bond

The problem is that audiences tend to prefer spy movies of the Mission: Impossible variety. Despite winning critical plaudits, The Good Shepherd has only made around $60m (£30m) in the US - a modest return for a big-budget, 167-minute all-star movie. Other downbeat spy yarns have also struggled. Michael Apted's Enigma (2002), about the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, failed to capture the public imagination. Cinema goers don't always warm to tales about desk-bound cryptographers or tormented double agents.

There is a revealing anecdote in Leo Marks's memoir, Between Silk and Cyanide, chronicling his experiences as a codemaker for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War. As far as Marks was concerned, he was doing work of the utmost national importance. But that wasn't how his neighbours saw it. They posted him a letter containing a white feather and the message, "shirker". To them, the idea that he could be contributing to the war effort by sitting in an office solving puzzles didn't stack up.

Manuel Castells, on blogs

Most importantly, the Internet increases the belief that you have power. And the belief that you have power, in Castells' formulation, constitutes real power.

Did you know that Larry Lessig gave the key note speech at the Al Jazeera Forum in Doha? (See also here)

An American Family

Ten years ago, HBO bought a pilot script for a show that no one—not creator David Chase, lead actor James Gandolfini, or any of the original cast—thought would ever get made. Today, The Sopranos is perhaps the greatest pop-culture masterpiece of... [ Read More (0.7k in body) ]

The evolution of tactics knows no mercy ...

"Children in the back seat, lower suspicion, we let it move through," Barbero said. "They parked the vehicle, the adults run out and detonate it with the children in the back."

In case you didn't know this about Esther:

Ms. Dyson is also a player.

For those in the Boston area:

Former president Bill Clinton will speak to Harvard University's graduating seniors at Class Day on June 6, the university announced today.

Class Day is a less formal, more student-focused celebration held the day before commencement. This year's commencement speaker is Microsoft chairman Bill Gates.

What's the deepest cosmic puzzle for the next 20 years?

Cory Doctorow:

"The difference between alchemy and science is if you tell people what you’ve learned."

Bruce Schneier:

"It’s the pollution of our age. How we will solve the data problem is what will define us as a people."

”Why isn't plain old pollution the pollution of our age? Last I checked we hadn't solved that ...

Some Hofstadter coverage:

An Idle Mind, or More? Alpha Oscillations and Consciousness

In the new issue of Seed, Douglas Hofstadter talks about "strange loops" - his term for patterns of level-crossing feedback inside some medium (such as neurons) - and their role in consciousness.

Strange Ways: A weaving together of minds, machines, and mathematics

Hofstadter argues that this lack of consciousness also applies to newborn babies. Although children are born with the basic apparatus to host a strange loop, it takes time for a self-representing feedback loop to form from the whirl of their experiences. In fact, Hofstadter argues that it takes several years for a child to develop full-fledged human consciousness.

On books about books:

John Sutherland's How to Read a Novel and Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer are mildly entertaining, more or less harmless bits of fluff, ideal for winter beach reading (You don't go to the beach in winter? Exactly.), while Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night is a real book, masterfully written and actually about something.

Francine Prose: "Instead of looking at works and point out what is wrong with them, why not look at brilliant works and see how they did it."

... and some books that made a palpable impression ...

Are you a fox?

Hedgehogs tend to be either spectacularly wrong or spectacularly right, and that last category smooths the path to greater formal recognition.

For more on fox/hedgehog distinctions in other disciplines ...

If you don't know these, do your own Google searches. This fear-ridden city has me all worn out.

All Hat, No Cattle

All Thrust, No Vector

I first noticed that 'stateful' isn't in the OAD that comes with OSX. (It's also not in the Firefox dictionary, but that's hardly surprising.) So I checked the unabridged OED, and it's only listed there as "rare", with the definition given as "Full of state or dignity; stately." Roughly the same definition is provided by Webster's Unabridged.

It seems like more than enough time has passed to warrant a more contemporary listing, at least in the unabridged dictionary.

Nanochick wrote:
I think its about time that the Memestreams Community and the people who work hard coding Memestreams in their free time get the recognition they deserve. Therefore, I have nominated memestreams for a "Weblog Award", and I hope others in the community will do the same.

Thanks Nano! I don't think anyone has nominated us for a Bloggie before. Frankly, if everyone who regularly reads this site nominates us, we stand a reasonable chance to get past the first round. That would certainly be fun. Apparently you can nominate a blog to multiple categories. I think "Best Community Blog" and "Best Kept Secret" are probably the best two for us, but I won't discourage other nominations. :) Just do it quick. Voting closes on January 10th.

Update on 2007-01-25: The nominations have been announced. MemeStreams is not on the lists.

Seventh Annual Weblog Awards

This is my year in review. Last year's is here: Scrubby Things, 2005 Edition; you can also review 2004.

The best way to fight terrorists is to go at it not like G-men, with two-year assignments and query letters to the staff attorneys, but the way the terrorists do, with fury and the conviction that history will turn on the decisions you make -- as an obsession and as a life style.

"If I were a Muslim, I’d probably be a jihadist."

He has lost hope for his country. All anyone can do, he said, is laugh.

"It's kind of like a vibrating 24/7 secretary."

... the tawdry, laconic demeanor of a pimp on weed ... "I make good tea okay?" ... We’re country.

"As the president has said, cut and run is not his cup of tea."

If you can play tennis as well as you claim to for as long as you say, you can patrol a village in the Sunni Triangle.

Life grinding against death, and losing. Nobody wins, finally.

For Muslims you cannot say, 'I’m a Muslim, but—' That 'but' does not work.

Their eyes are full of tears out of sadness that they are still unable to contribute.

This one is from late 2004, but it resurfaced in 2006:

People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything."

Back to 2006:

Those little yellow ribbons aren't really for the troops. The real purpose of those ribbons is to ease some of the guilt we feel ...

Karzai: "Those who cause us to suffer will burn in hell with us."

"We will bring you down, but it will be your own fault."

"I believe with every bone in my body that free people, exposed to sufficient information, will, over time, find their way to right decisions," Rumsfeld said.

At the time, you thought he was talking about the Iraqis. In fact, he was talking about Americans.

Is more ... [ Read More (1.3k in body) ]