Category: Uncategorised

Rereading the start of Charles Stross’ Accelerando. It’s exhilerating, because of how familiar it is: each year, the CCC is filled with proto-Macxs — Stross is just giving the present a shot of narrative adrenaline. And lovingly mocking reality while he’s at it — samba-punk, clothing tics and all.

The later chapters are also good, but I stop caring when it stops becoming recognizably human. Guess I’m a near-future kind of guy, for the same reasons I’m a reformer and not a revolutionary: the utopia that appeals is the one attainable by nudging the present in the right way.

Prospect gives Richard Florida a healthy battering:

Florida does not ignore the downsides of the shifts he describes; he just accepts them with a Panglossian shrug. Is income inequality increasing? Well, that’s because the upper echelon benefits from “creativity,” when in fact Florida’s “creative class” is defined to include essentially everyone in the highest-earning third of the work force — including the titans of finance, whose “creativity” has turned out to be deeply destructive. Are good factory jobs melting away? Sure, but that just means the country needs to make service jobs better paying and more fulfilling.

There’s a snowclone in the form of “The X that ate Y”, where Y is usually a city. Examples, mainly via Google:

“The painting that ate Paris”

“The blog that ate Manhattan”

“The cars that ate Paris”

“The database that ate American business”

“The genetic algorithm that ate Calcutta”

“The blob that ate everyone”

Can anybody tell me what the original version is?

Is

there an original?

[asked for no reason beyond idle curiosity]

Dealing with shrinking cities in eastern Germany:

One of the IBA’s more radical ideas is that of “city islands” in Dessau-Rosslau. The planners have “kind of disassembled the city into pixels and put it back together again using a cut-and-paste method,” as Brückner explains. According to the concept, Dessau-Rosslau would abandon the model of a more compact central city, leaving only islands of houses. “Buildings will be cut out and in the empty spaces we will insert countryside,” Brückner explains.

WaPo stats on healthcare voting in the US. Show (by eyeballing, anyway, & as pointed out by James of England) no correlation between voting patterns and either health industry donations or number of uninsured constituents.

This strikes me as pretty weird. Maybe an excuse to load the data into pandas and play round with it.

The EU parliament are something like the House of Lords — you don’t tend to pay them much attention, or really trust them, but every now and again they come through and Do The Right Thing when the rest of the Powers That Be are in thrall to some ridiculous lobbyist-enhanced monstrosity.

Last week is one of those cases: the European Parliament has passed a resolution thoroughly condemning the secrecy of the ACTA negotiation process, in terms that are, compared to the normal EU bureacratese, pretty fierce:

2. Expresses its concern over the lack of a transparent process in the conduct of the ACTA

negotiations, a state of affairs at odds with the letter and spirit of the TFEU; is deeply concerned

that no legal base was established before the start of the ACTA negotiations and that

parliamentary approval for the negotiating mandate was not sought;

Rolling Stone still has an incredible collection of writers:

The biggest spill in the history of corporate hog farming happened in 1995. The dike of a 120,000-square-foot lagoon owned by a Smithfield competitor ruptured, releasing 25.8 million gallons of effluvium into the headwaters of the New River in North Carolina. It was the biggest environmental spill in United States history, more than twice as big as the Exxon Valdez oil spill six years earlier.