Slow Takes


  • Chrenkoff
    "George W Bush is raising money - indirectly: "Outland Books, a New York publishing company, said today that it would donate $3 from each internet sale of its popular daily calendar, Presidential (Mis)Speak: The Very Curious Language of George W Bush, to the UN aid agency Unicef." I'm sure his contribution will be misunderestimated again."

  • how-to record on your ipod (for free) - hack a day - www.hackaday.com
    apple cripples recording on an ipod so belkin and griffin then have to sell us add-on devices for over $50 that can only record at 8khz, which is all pretty shitty. apparently (the rumor is) apple does this so people don’t use their ipods to record stuff they think we shouldn’t, like concerts, whatever. but don’t worry, there’s a way around it and you can record at high quality, all for free.

  • Mark Steyn: On tsunami's shore
    You would think an unprecedented tsunami in a region that has never been a U.S. sphere of influence would be hard to pin on the Great Satan. And, to be fair to the global rent-a-quote crowd, for an hour or two they were stunned into silence. But it wasn't long before they were back singing the same old song: Disaffected young Muslim men in Saudi Arabia, devastated coastal villages in Sri Lanka ... "These Foolish Things Remind Me Of U.S.A." You really need Cole Porter:

    You're The Pits

    With your massive armies

    You're The Pits

    And you cause tsunamis.


  • Michael Barone: The lessons of Clintoncare (1/10/05)
    Social security overhaul seems to be the Bush administration's first priority for 2005. To gauge the prospects of success, it may be helpful to compare Bush's formidable task with the No. 1 goal of the incoming Clinton administration in 1993, healthcare finance overhaul. On the surface, Clinton's odds of a win looked better in early 1993 than Bush's do today. But Bush actually has a better chance of prevailing.

  • Foreign Affairs - Grand Strategy in the Second Term - John Lewis Gaddis
    Summary: In his first four years, George W. Bush presided over the most sweeping redesign of U.S. strategy since the days of F.D.R. Over the next four, his basic direction should remain the same: restoring security in a more dangerous world. Some midcourse corrections, however, are overdue. Washington should remember the art of speaking softly and the need for international legitimacy.

  • TV to Go: TiVo Unveils Portable Service

    SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - TiVo Inc. pioneered digital video recording as a new way of watching television - when you want it. Now it could be TV where you want it, too. The long-awaited service feature called TiVoToGo, set to launch Monday, will give users their first taste of TiVo untethered. No longer confined to TiVo digital video recorders in the living room or bedroom, subscribers will be able to transfer their recorded shows to PCs or laptops and take them on the road - as long as the shows are not specially tagged with copy restrictions. That's also the case for pay-per-view or on-demand movies, and some premium paid programming. Users also will be able to copy shows onto a DVD - soon after but not immediately at the service launch, company officials said.


  • Predicting 2005: Going Global >

    Web Globalization Goes Mainstream Based on surveys I've conducted, discussions with executives at Fortune 500 companies, and a few recent discussions with reporters, the signs are pointing toward a very public year for the field of Web globalization. You may remember that Web globalization was a hot topic back in the heady days of 2000. But this time around, growth will be driven by real revenues. Amazon could see more than half of its revenues come from outside the US by the end of 2005, and definitely by 2006. And it won't just be the virtual companies that embrace Web globalization; we'll see companies from industries such as hospitality, retail and financial services launch multilingual Web sites --another sign that this emerging field has crossed over from luxury to necessity.


  • The Penny-Wise Aren't Foolish Anymore
    But in 2004, signs were abundant that small can be beautiful, too. In the stock market, less-heralded stocks crushed their larger, more famous brethren. Through Dec. 29, the Russell 2000 - an index of smaller-capitalization stocks - was up an impressive 17.32 percent for the year. That's almost double the return of the Standard & Poor's 500 (up 9.13 percent). And it dwarfs the meager 3.6 percent rise in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, composed of 30 titans of business.

  • Celebrity Butts 2004 is at an end so what better way to celebrate than to see the back of some gorgeous celebrities. These stunners have all had a great year and they're bound to have even more success in 2005. But can you guess who they are? We've been a bit cheeky and we're only showing you a snapshot of their bum along with a little clue to their identity.

  • 100 things we didn't know this time last year 1. Street brawlers sometimes arm themselves with potato peelers, according to the Home Office, which wants to make them banned weapons. More details 2. Farmers plant their crops up to three weeks earlier than 15 years ago. In the 1960s, temperatures from January to March averaged 4.2C; it rose to 5.6C in the 1990s. 3. Brussels sprouts have three times as much vitamin C as oranges. .... 100. Bill Clinton sent just two e-mails while he was president.

  • Yoko Ono Appointed Spokesperson for New Chemical Castration Drug NEW YORK — Yoko Ono has been appointed spokesperson for a new chemical castration drug, tentatively called “Chop-Chop.” It has just been approved by the FDA after a lengthy delay. It seems laboratory rats wanted nothing to do with her because she was always in the way during recording sessions. “Let me tell you,” said Ms. Ono, speaking from her Chalet in Switzerland. “I know a thing or two about robbing males of their manhood. We considered calling the drug, ‘Balls-Be-Gone,’ but that’s the beauty of this drug. It leaves you with your balls intact.

  • Scientists develop fly-eating robot Scientists at the University of the West of England have developed a robot that powers itself by catching and eating flies. The carniverous robot, named EcoBot II, uses human sewage as bait to catch the insects.

  • Agog with blogs Bloggers offer access, megaphones to the showbiz underclass By JENNIFER NETHERBY Showbiz is blogging itself silly about insider comings and goings. The industry's underclass dishes everyone from Paris Hilton to Harvey Weinstein in a growing number of showbiz blogs....

  • Evolution is a Friend of Creation, says Evangelical Professor “Denying science makes us look stupid…People should not feel they have to deny reality in order to experience their faith.” Richard Colling, a biologist/evangelical, is swinging a new voice in the creation/evolution debate this winter: Darwin’s theory of evolution is compatible and complementary to the theory of intelligent design. Colling, who received a Ph.D in microbiology and chairs the biology department at Olivet Nazarene University in Bourbonnais, recorded his new symbiotic theory in his book, “Random Designer: Created from Chaos to Connect with Creator.”

  • Tsunami must be fault of the US In the past three days I have been impressed by the originality of the latest critiques of the evil Americans. The earthquake and tsunami apparently had something to do with global warming, environmentalists say, caused of course by greedy American motorists. Then there was the rumour that the US military base at Diego Garcia was forewarned of the impending disaster and presumably because of some CIA-approved plot to undermine Islamic movements in Indonesia and Thailand did nothing about it.

  • Words A Go-Go
    The NYTimes ran a contest for best alternative definition for words. The winner was "coffee (n.), a person who is coughed upon"... Second place went to "flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained".

  • Coric to Anchor CBS News?
    Moonves could easily justify the $20 million or more that he'd have to pay Couric: Aside from the ratings jolt she'd almost certainly give the evening news, she could also be deployed to do a raft of prime time specials and contribute to 60 Minutes. Twenty mil? Hell, David Letterman makes more than that.

  • NASA plans massive Mars rover
    Building on the success of the two wheeled geologists that arrived at Mars in January, 2004, NASA has begun planning a new rover mission to the red planet %u2013 the Mars Science Laboratory. Planned to be twice as long and three times as heavy as the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, the Mars Science Laboratory would collect martian soil samples and rock cores and analyze them for environmental conditions and organic compounds that could have supported microbial life now or in the past.

  • Camera Phone Tips
    We've compiled this list of camera phone tips and techniques to help us get the best results from our camera phones. They are not rocket science and will not guarantee crystal clear pictures like those you'd get from a Digital SLR - but they could drastically improve the shots your Camera Phone produces.

  • The network is the blog
    The blog network is made of people. We are the nodes, actively filtering and retransmitting knowledge. Clearly this architecture can help manage the glut of information. More subtly, it can also help ensure that no vital inputs are suppressed because nobody has to rely on a single source. If one of the feeds I monitor doesn%u2019t react to some event in a given domain, another probably will. When they all react, I know it was an especially important event. The resemblance of this model to the summing of activation potentials in a neural system is more than superficial. Nature knows best.

  • Doc Searls on BuzzAgent
    Several people have asked me what I think about BuzzAgent, so here's my joint answer to all of them: It sucks. Where Marqui is up front about what it's doing, and engaging bloggers in conversation (as well as promotion), BuzzAgent and its clients are being surreptitious and false, and spreading a virus of falsity through its agents. Mass market advertising has always been impersonal, and often (okay, almost always) fake. BuzzAgent's system allows advertisers to be no less fake, but in person, face to face. Even if the agents really do love the products they shill, their love is bought. Worse, it comes cheap.

  • Jarvis' First Law of Media
    Whenever citizens can exercise control, they will. Today they are challenging and changing media -- where bloggers now fact-check Dan Rather's ass -- but tomorrow they will challenge and change politics, government, marketing, and education as well. This isn't just a media revolution, though that's where we are seeing the impact first. This is a chain-reaction of revolutions. It has just begun.

  • Friendship and Relativity
    If Einstein succeeded in transforming time into space, Gdel would perform a trick yet more magical: He would make time disappear. Having already rocked the mathematical world to its foundations with his incompleteness theorem, Gdel now took aim at Einstein and relativity.

  • Open Letter to a Digital World
    It's time for anyone running a Windows PC to switch to Linux.You see, the Windows platform is not just insecure - it's patently, blatantly, and unashamedly insecure by design and for all the lip service to security it's really not going to get better, ever. To make matters worse, it's more expensive and gives you fewer necessary applications right out of the box than Linux. Everyone, even Microsoft, knows this - they are just too afraid to say it. The tide is coming in. Nothing on this planet can stop it.

  • Books by the Foot ~ Books by the Yard
    We sell books by the foot and offer 2 catagories of books: Jeweltone at $9 a spine in quantities up to 250 and $8 a spine in quantities of 250 . Designer Mix are $13 a spine in quantities up to 250 and $12 a spine in quantities of 250 . We consider ten books equal to a foot and we ship a minimum ten books (one foot). Filling a bookcase couldn't be easier... Measure how many linear feet you need to fill, and then order by the foot from Book Decor.

  • Forget Cue Cards, Make a Teleprompter!
    Creative problem solving is a trait many creative professionals share, but perhaps no one possesses that skill more than Brian P. Lawler. See how he made a teleprompter with a laptop, Adobe InDesign, and some scrap wood.

  • Laura Bush's Christmas Letter
    And what with George Sr and Barbara having spent four very happy years here and Jeb hinting that he is quite keen to move away from Florida some time, we have come to regard it as family property In the end, fortunately, the landlords seemed to find the other couple completely insufferable and virtually begged us to stay on....

  • A Stoning in Iran
    The single job for a writer that would most certainly condemn you to hell in this life and the next has to be reporting for Reuters. Impervious to sense and humanity, this "Service" continues to pump out what passes for "reportage" using editorial rules and filters from somewhere in "the Stone Age". I use that term advisedly. Here's a full report that just moved over the wires from that bastion of religious peace, harmony and toleration, Iran.

  • Europe is Kaput
    In the major newspapers of the US east coast, to be sure, Europeans continue to read about their sad little concerns. What "red state" Americans hear, by contrast, is that Europe is dying, like the now-vanished "evil empire" of Soviet communism.

  • Kyoto is a Sham
    So what if a reduction in emissions by the means prescribed is impossible by 2050? Politicians don't want to hear it. And since politics very often consists of promising the impossible to the ignorant, the scientific bankruptcy of currently proposed Green initiatives is entirely irrelevant. Kyoto, like Peacekeeping is always good, though no one can say why. The climate change initiatives will continue to be put forward; they are an end in themselves.

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December 20, 2004

The Love of Libraries.

Libraries are not places of dry scholarship but living sensuality. In Love Story Ali McGraw and Ryan O,Neal get together with the library as backdrop; in Dr Zhivago, Uri and Lara find one another in a library. I have a friend, now a well-known journalist, who became overcome by lust in the British Library and was discovered by a librarian making love behind the stacks in the empty quarter of Humanities with a woman he had met in the tearoom. The librarian was apparently most understanding, and said it happened quite a lot.

Libraries are not just for reading in, but for sociable thinking, exploring, exchanging ideas and falling in love. They were never silent. Technology will not change that, for even in the starchiest heyday of Victorian self-improvement, libraries were intended to be meeting places of the mind, recreational as well as educational. The Openshaw branch of the Manchester public library was built complete with a billiard room.

Just as bookshops have become trendy, offering brain food and cappuccinos, so libraries, under financial and cultural pressure, will have to evolve by more actively welcoming people in to wander and explore. Finding a book online should be the beginning, not the end, of the process of discovery, a peeling back of the first layer: the word library, after all, comes from liber, the inner bark of a tree.

December 20, 2004 in Books | Permalink

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