Recently Read

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises.

"Here's the real problem with people like Jake DeSantis. Throughout this whole period, they never were able to connect the dots — to grasp the fact that when they skimmed a million here or a million there off the great rivers of capital that flowed through their offices, that that money came from somewhere, from someone. To them, it wasn't someone else's money, it was just money, and why shouldn't they have it?"

Interesting. There's a symbolic language embedded in tagging that you can figure out or learn…

Oh, yeah. That's what I'm talking about.

That's really lame. If you don't have time to twitter, don't friggin' be on it.

"LGBT couples have yet to be granted the same rights to file our taxes jointly on a Federal level, and we can still be fired for being openly gay in the workplace. That's why you're encouraged to be seen on Tax Day, April 15, 2009, spreading your love with a KISS!" – sure, what the hell.

Wow has it been a long time since I've used IRC.

Jean Bartik's first job was as a "computer" – a human one. She went on to help program one of the world's first computers. Jean always loved math, and she was good at it. But when she was a young woman in the 1940s, there weren't many job opportunities for female math majors. When she heard about a job crunching numbers for a military research project, she jumped at the chance.

We just bought one of these… we have Model B.

If you’re considering adopting a dog anytime in the foreseeable future, you might consider helping to counteract a terrible trend at animal shelters: large dogs with black coats, when given up for adoption, are euthanized at a much higher rate than smaller or fairer-coated dogs, essentially because the public have an irrational fear of them.

Residents of poorer neighborhoods waited longer after reporting pothole, trash problems. THREE MONTHS LONGER.

If you work at the coalface, you deal with the real problems and issues, rather than sitting in a office discussing things in a detached way.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

An interesting cautionary tale for publishers – the newspapers are sinking faster, but publishers face all these same issues.

Design company that just redesigned Seed Magazine.

Melissa McEwan is brilliant.

Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun. Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time. Only 47% of adults can roughly approximate the percent of the Earth's surface that is covered with water.*
* Only 21% of adults answered all three questions correctly.

Here's a proposal; the seed of a big idea, perhaps: let loose. Think about the most unchangeable features of your city, and try to imagine them changed. Don't just daydream; come up with Big Ideas, grand plans for revolutionizing the way that your city works.

I need to go to this in the next few weeks