Posted on August 25th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: indescribable.
The best reports are bold, public, rich in data and full of energy.
Posted on May 11th, 2006 by j.
Categories: indescribable, international.
Ethan, one of my favorite sparring partners in discussions about
most anything under the sun, carved out an hour the other week to
discuss language issues and equitable representation of the world’s
multitude of perspectives. We had an excellent discussion of the
subject, which became heated for a moment when it seemed we were
veering off into philosophy rather than a practical discussion of how
to improve the world’s current defaults.
He wrote a lovely blog post about the discussion here, and followed up with a quick evaluation of a metric we had discussed. (How can one not admire
a person who dashes off two new metrics before breakfast?) But there are a few points where I would like to differ.
(editor’s note : where’d the rest of this post go? –2/2008)
Posted on April 6th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: indescribable.
Alien to terra firma, that is. The Arapaima, fish- and bird-eaters that get up to 200lbs and 3m. The Tripod fish, fresh from WotW to you. If that isn’t enough alien nature, try browsing the pages of Bizarre Books…
Alien to terra firma, that is. The Arapaima, fish- and bird-eaters that get up to 200lbs and 3m. The Tripod fish, fresh from WotW to you. If that isn’t enough alien nature, try browsing the pages of Bizarre Books…
Posted on March 21st, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: indescribable.
A hearty welcome to new econ grad students, from two of its luminaries. Soon you, too, can speak this way.
Posted on March 14th, 2006 by .
Categories: indescribable.
Yeah, well, I like the category indescribable for this cartoon because there just isn’t much else to say about it.
Posted on February 26th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: indescribable.
It’s a bit late, but oh so sweet.
I found an Easter Egg in RL last month, near the Harvard Sq T-zone in Cambridge. Go all the way down the stairs, stand 5 feet to the left of the last change machine, and look up. There was a fully-inflated Valentine’s Day balloon stuck to the ceiling next to one of the lights. It remained there for well over a month…
Posted on December 30th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: indescribable.
Ira G. : Shatnes tester – when
mixed fabrics infest your favorite clothing… who you gonna call? –
and on the lookout for P-E-E-R-E-Rs, who can ruin a plate of food with
a simple glance. He’s lived his whole life in New York, but [almost] never eaten in any sort of restaurant.
”It was never discussed in the family,” he said. ”No one spoke
about it. But it was an obvious thing not to do… Let’s say you walked in
one end and you had to eat on the other end and there were people at
every single table… What
do you do along the way? Are you only going to look at the floor, the
ceiling, the wall, or people’s faces? Obviously you would peer into
other people’s plates. Just a quick glance. But if someone sets his
eyes on my plate, I can’t eat it anymore. Therefore I’m going to stay
out of public eating.”
He goes on to describe a peer who, well, peers into other people’s food choices. And nobody wants that.
”I went into this place
that has take-home food. And who walks in but my buddy the peerer. I
did an about-face and walked right out. Because I know he’s going to
look into what I get. And I just went home hungry. But I felt
comfortable with that hunger, because the peerer is not going to peer.”
More power to this kind of willpower.
Posted on October 2nd, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: indescribable.
Japanese squid-hunters catch legendary giant on film; return with one of its tentacles. My friend EC said of this story, appropriately, “I
heard this on the radio several days ago, but it was just when I woke
up and then I hit the snooze, and later I thought I had dreamed it.“
Posted on September 15th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: indescribable.
Old news already : mice that regrow organs and limbs. Injections of cells that can pass this power on to other mice. It’s a hazy Australian dream; but also apparently an understated reality.
Last weekend, Wistar Institute’s Ellen Heber-Katz presented a paper on these “MRL mice” at Aubrey de Grey’s Sens 2 conference. If you come across the full text, let me know.
Posted on September 14th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: indescribable.
Most of the people writing about New Orleans and other destroyed cities are confused about where to direct their purest, most blazing anger.
It shouldn’t be directed at the federal officials or other
meta-organizers who failed
to organize or prepare in time — although they were terribly
negligent, each relying on other parts of a broken system, and have
been wasting funds and abusing their responsibilities for years.
They deserve scorn and shiny, new jobs in a sector that can tolerate
incompetence. And their large, organized systems [FEMA, more recently parts of Homeland Security]
can be blamed for the hundreds of billions of dollars of damage and
other invaluable losses of private, personal historicity, which were
“5-year preventable”, even “1-year preventable”. But these
systems did not lead to the immediate deaths and serious illnesses in
the city, nor to the massive damage and losses which were preventable days after the storm hit.
No, the proper targets for this most pressing rage are local officials;
police and government officials and other forces in NO and surrounding
cities; regional and state planners with access to the closest sources
of help (and with supporters and constituents comprising the owners of
local trucking, shipping, and security outfits) who failed to do what
was necessary to save their immediate neighbors. Even, saints preserve us, the office of Mayor Nagin was extensively complicit in this catastrophe.
Hopefully you’ve already read the remarkable essay by Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Slonsky,
EMS workers from San Francisco who were in town for a conference, on
their adventures trying to escape the city on foot. Below is a
streamlined excerpt, to illustrate my point.
By day 4, our hotels had run
out of fuel and water… [the hotel] told us to report to the convention
center to wait for more buses.
…
The [National] Guards told us we would not be allowed into the
Superdome… and that the police were not allowing anyone else in[to
the Convention Center]… we asked, “
[Group of unknown size, grows while approaching the bridge]
We organized ourselves… As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs
formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close
enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads… The
sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting.
We questioned why we couldn’t cross the bridge anyway [as] there was little traffic on the 6-lane highw ay. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City.
…
All day long, we saw other families [attempt to cross the bridge]…
only to be turned away. Thousands… [A]s dusk set in, a Gretna
Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle… A helicopter
arrived and used the wind from its
blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff
loaded up his truck with our food and water. …read the entire essay
Emphasis added. It is one
thing to do wrong by people a thousand miles and two layers of
bureaucracy away; quite another to do wrong by people in your own
district, or even the next, who are suffering before your eyes.
There are a select few hundred people who were criminally negligent during this disaster, and most lived within a few hundred miles of its center.
Read the entire essay,
which is rather more severe than my quotes above.
Directing rage locally : “There will be no Superdomes in our city” …
Posted on September 2nd, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: indescribable.
The site maintainer[s? I'll be kind and assume it's one overworked
webmaster with other obligations] hasn’t had the time to update their
main page content to mention Katrina or link to relief efforts.
Clearly a northerner. A 6-page press release sent out today had two mentions of Katrina edited in at the last moment. The title of the release, “COALITION FORCES MORE THAN DOUBLE IN SIZE TO JOIN HOMELAND
SECURITY AND THE AMERICAN RED CROSS FOR NATIONAL PREPAREDNESS MONTH 2005“,
like its subtitle and leading paragraph, read like so much meaningless
copy, as though there were no disasters actually taking place at the
moment.
If you see Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff or American Red Cross Chairman Bonnie McElveen-Hunter
during their appearances today in DC, please thank them for me; each of
them added a single sentence about Katrina to their quotes in the
release. Ms. McElveen-Hunter is quoted as saying,
I hope the need to help with the current disaster is next on the “important messages” priority list.
Some local reps to contact to find out how well these national activities are preparing citizens for emergencies :
Posted on August 31st, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: indescribable.
What’s better than Evian-filled waterbras?
More excruciatingly wonderful than asbestos soles at a fire-walking
retreat? More rotationally inexplicable than a Klein bottle? More linked with metastatic melanoma than the tomacco plant? Wikiwax, Mark III.
That is all.
Posted on July 27th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: indescribable.
There are some stories that are just too silly to take
seriously. You often run across them in the news and in popular
books. And yet they are not jokes; standard news outlets and
publishers — if not the best, at
least internationally-known names — publish them and stand by
them. The canonical story format is: vague allegations, alarming
hyperbole, unsourced quotes, and unlikely statements presented without comment as fact.
Sometimes the subject is political, sometimes corporate, sometimes
“When chickadees attack!” human interest. In each case it is fun
to guess why the stories are being propagated.
The question for news reliability is, what does this say about how much
news accuracy or relevance matters to readers? Does anyone really
care to have reliable news? What kinds of guarantees do we have
from even the best articles? Are there particular classes of news
articles that can be as random and fictitious as you like without
damaging the societal web? Are there other types of news which
should be handled by only extremely reliable organizations?
A tip o’ the keys to Saadi for the pointer to this recent beauty:
Posted on May 12th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: indescribable.
“I spheterized this contest and turned this into my own personal barathrum! It was all about parabulia, baby! Take these other contestants, build them some feretories and throw them in my oubliette! It’s time to get badigeoned! It’s Buddiga time!”
This years-old review of a Spelling Bee championship reminded me somehwo of the asbestos / mesothelioma law adwords hype (asbestos, chronic pleural? mesothelioma [a kind of cancer], tax lawyers, criminal defense lawyers, insurance / auto accident / assault / new york lawyers [and all kinds of law?], and a few other terms were noted for being far more expensive than other adwords; with the assumption that the groups and people involved were skimming more than the usual amount of producer surplus off of the top of the stack… or that adwords was working oddly in their cases) and the asbestos-specific sites that started springing up. I will now never forget how to spell mesothelioma, or even pleural, things that were fully outside my vocabulary beforehand.
On the other hand, an honest blog by asbestos remediators about their work and field would be sort of interesting…
UPDATE: ESPN has pulled the archived story that was republished this past February; too popular? Only re-upped for a few months? I don’t know. But I’m naming one of my kids Buddiga. A little footnote on the certificate…
Posted on May 11th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: indescribable.
… which brains and hearts do nothing to relieve. I need to spend a few hours with good books.
Posted on May 11th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: indescribable.
Is it right to wish that someone rest in peace when they never wanted it in this life? I suppose Rest In Dance has an acronym with overtones…
Posted on May 5th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: indescribable.
There is nothing like listening to chamber music in a resonant stone chamber. Busch Hall just northeast of Harvard Yard is a fantastic example; you should jump at any chance to hear music there. For instance, I will be singing there this Saturday at 2pm, one of countless groups to use the space this week. If you have any time out of your schedule this week, head over there to visit; there will almost surely be some group or other performing or rehearsing in the main atrium.
I saw something funny on the way home after practicing there yesterday night, and immediately thought “Oh, I just have to [share] this [with my friends],” faster than my mind could fill in the two gaps in that thought.
Of course, none of these really cuts to the heart of the matter. For a long minute, I thought fondly of places where walking home meant stopping at a canonical park or bar or cafe, where a dozen people would be hanging around, chatting… where a good story could be counted on to spread through town, at least to anyone who knew the teller.
Postscript: I didn’t write about it anywhere; instead I drafted this post, got distracted by Real Work, and went to sleep. Now I can’t for the life of me remember what was so interesting.
