Nicole sez, "Philebrity posted a haunting video of the recent demolition of the Drexel Shaft in Philadelphia. The tripped out music and slowly tumbling smoke stack aptly visualize a crumbling American economy."

He's One Bad Mutha- Shut Your Mouth! But I'm Talking About DREXEL SHAFT! (Thanks, Nicole!)

This is very funny stuff, but having looked at the markup, I have to say that I would ask for a different copyeditor in future. A lot of these edits ("avoid simplistic qualifiers" for "very") fall under the heading of "creative disagreement" not "helpful suggestion" or "correction." I've generally benefitted from copyeditors who know the difference, but on the rare occasion where I've had to deal with a couple hundred pages of redlines by a copyeditor who thought that he was my co-author, it's been quite a struggle.

Disgruntled Star Editor Takes Constructive Revenge (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Our friends at Good have a post up with striking images by photographer Mathieu Young. These photos were shot during harvest time (last year) in California's Mendocino County region, where an awful lot of marijuana is grown.

"On the one hand it seems like an illicit activity," Young told Good. "But on the other hand, you have a bunch of people who are living off the land, which is beautiful."

Picture Show: The Harvest [GOOD]
Full gallery here, in larger rez: The Harvest [ mathieuyoung.com ]

Speaking of poor children reminds me of Sitting Bull, as good an authority on our economy as anyone, even if he wasn't an economist and even though he died in 1890. After the Lakota were defeated, he joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West show for a season, but he never got ahead financially. He gave the bulk of his earnings to the street urchins who hung around the show. He was shocked that a nation powerful enough to conquer his people couldn't or wouldn't feed its own future. The white man was good at production, he concluded, but bad at distribution.

John Schwartz at the New York Times writes about what it's like to have a son in college whose job is to sit around with no clothes on. Hey, from the son's perspective, what's not to love, right? The only job requirement is that you have a body. Snip:

As a little boy, Sam once asked me: "Dad, is there a job where you get paid a lot and don't do much work?"

Being paid $15 an hour to sit around naked is one option. That's nearly twice as much as most other student jobs. And it's not like he's dancing at Chippendale's.

"There's a difference between nude and nakedness," says Charles Garoian, the director of the university's visual arts program. Context is vital: a stripper is naked to arouse prurient urges, while a nude model is there to unleash an artist's creativity.

[Image: Kalim A. Bhatti for The New York Times]

Charts to Help You Succeed in Online Dating: "If you're investing your time and money in an online dating service and want to increase your chances of getting a reply from someone you're interested in, don't tell them they're "hot." Instead, tell them you dig zombie movies."

Strategies for Happiness: "The shift from being a rat racer to pursuing happiness is not about working less or with less fervor but about working as hard or harder at the right activities -- those that are a source of both present and future benefit."

New Boom on Metal Detectors: "A 55-year-old metal detector enthusiast discovered a cache of Anglo-Saxon treasures earlier this month, estimated to be worth $10 million, in a farmer's field in Birmingham, England."

Using specialized Trojan horse malware, cybercrooks have been intercepting web-banking credentials from the computers of small and midsize businesses, and then initiating wire transfers to mules around the country. The mules are consumers who’ve been lured into fake work-at-home scams, in which their employment involves receiving money transfers and then forwarding the funds to Eastern Europe, either directly or through other mules.

The scheme has exploded in the last year, with the FBI estimating losses at $40 million so far, according to a recent story from WashingtonPost.com reporter Brian Krebs, who’s been closely following the attacks.

[ Image: Bank Safe Online UK ]

In a new exhibit opening in just a few weeks, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats will propose an antimatter-based mirror economy designed to boom as the regular-ole economy continues to tank.

"Economic equilibrium is upset by our unbalanced pursuit of material wealth," says the artist. "My plan is to offset materialism with modern science, by exploiting the economic potential of antimatter, which is the physical opposite of anything made with atoms, from luxury condos to private jets."

More:

The bank will serve as a hub for antimatter transactions worldwide, eventually financing the building of antimatter infrastructure and providing the public with a full range of investment opportunities. "But our first order of business will be printing money," says Mr. Keats. "Cash is the foundation of any economy, and an anti-economy is no exception."

Issued in three convenient denominations, ranging from 10,000 positrons to 1,000,000 positrons, and initially trading at an exchange rate of $10 to $1,000, the anti-money will be backed by antimatter stored in the bank's vault. Because matter and antimatter annihilate each other on contact, antimatter positrons will be continuously produced on location by decay of the radioactive isotope potassium-40.

(thanks, Mark Robinson!)

Today is the launch of my new novel, Makers, a book about people who hack hardware, business-models, and living arrangements to discover ways of staying alive and happy even when the economy is falling down the toilet. Weirdly, I wrote it years before the current econopocalypse, as a parable about the amazing blossoming of creativity and energy that I saw in Silicon Valley after the dotcom crash, after all the money dried up.

As with all my previous novels, the whole book is available as a free, Creative Commons download, under a NonCommercial-ShareAlike license that allows you to remix it to your heart's content and share the book and your mixes noncommercially. And as with my last two books, I've created a unique donations program that connects generous people with schools, universities, libraries, shelters, prisons and other cash-strapped institutions.

Here's how it works: this page has instructions for profs, librarians and similar worthies to list themselves as potential recipients for Makers (please pass this URL around to people who might want a copy!). If you've read the electronic text of Makers and want to reimburse me, but don't want a copy of the print book for yourself, you can buy a copy for the institution of your choice. Everybody wins: you get to settle your karma while supporting your favorite bookseller, a library or university gets a copy of the book without having to divert its budget, my publisher gets the sale and I get the royalty and the sales-figure. I've facilitated the donation of hundreds of books this way, and it works great.

I'm launching Makers in the UK at Forbidden Planet in London tomorrow (Thursday) night at 6PM, and I'll be having the Toronto launch with Bakka Books at the Merril Collection on November 12. You can pre-order inscribed copies from either event, and they'll be shipped after I sign. (There's also a great indie bookseller near my office in London, Clerkenwell Tales, which will take your inscription mail-orders; I'll stop in a couple times a week to sign them for the duration).

There's also a US east-coast tour with stops in NYC, New Jersey, Boston and Philly, but the details are still being finalized. If you think you can make it to any of those places and want to get an email once the details are fixed, drop me an email and I'll send you a note once I have them in hand.

Let's see, what else? Oh yeah, this kick-ass Publishers Weekly starred review:

In this tour de force, Doctorow (Little Brother) uses the contradictions of two overused SF themes--the decline and fall of America and the boundless optimism of open source/hacker culture--to draw one of the most brilliant reimaginings of the near future since cyberpunk wore out its mirror shades. Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks, typical brilliant geeks in a garage, are trash-hackers who find inspiration in the growing pile of technical junk. Attracting the attention of suits and smart reporter Suzanne Church, the duo soon get involved with cheap and easy 3D printing, a cure for obesity and crowd-sourced theme parks. The result is bitingly realistic and miraculously avoids cliché or predictability. While dates and details occasionally contradict one another, Doctorow's combination of business strategy, brilliant product ideas and laugh-out-loud moments of insight will keep readers powering through this quick-moving tale.

Makers

A new augmented reality app from Layar allows Android and iPhone 3GS users to view recovery.gov contract dollars at play work in the real world.

Image above: an example of what those happy blue bailout bubbles look like, bouncing about on the thoroughly bailed-out streets of Washington, DC. My only criticism so far (I haven't tried the apps): instead of blue circles as representational icons, the designers really should have chosen taxpayers' tears. Snip:

Layar is an application that overlays your view of the real world with waypoints representing your favorite coffee place, the movie theatre you're trying to find, or in this case, where some of that $787 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going. If you have an iPhone 3GS or Android device you can install the Layar app for free and then search for "recovery" or "sunlight" within Layar to find this layer. The layer works best near large cities where you are most likely to find recovery contracts.

Recovery.gov Augmented Reality Mashup [Sunlight Labs, via Micah Sifry]

Layar Reality Browser [Layar]

A Graphic History of Newspaper Circulation Over the Last Two Decades [The Awl]

It would make a good companion to Matt Jones's Get Excited and Make Things poster.

Breathe deep and let go of things (via Die Puny Humans)

Over the past two days, Internet advocates in Mexico have been voicing outrage over a proposed 3% telecommunications tax in a number of ways -- including flooding Twitter with the hashtag "internetnecesario," shorthand for "the internet is a basic neccesity." Here's one English language blog post from one blogger who believes the tax would be terrible news, and here is another in Spanish. Background on the politics in this Reuters item. (image via trendsmap.com, thanks @wordwardness).

Because of the Collapse of 2008 financial reforms, the big investment banks are able to borrow money from the U.S. government at 0 percent interest. Then they can turn around and buy short-term bonds that pay 2 or 3 percent annual interest. Now they’re making 2 percent on whatever they borrowed. They can use leverage to increase this number, by pledging some of the bonds that they’ve already bought as collateral on additional bonds.

The paper shows the example of a high-volume seller who builds 1000 CDOs from 1000 assert-classes of home mortages. Suppose the seller knows that a few of those asset classes are "lemons" that won't pay off. The seller is supposed to randomly distribute the asset classes into the CDOs; this minimizes the risk for the buyer, because there's only a small chance that any one CDO has more than a few lemons. But the seller can "tamper" with the CDOs by putting most of the lemons in just a few of the CDOs. This has an enormous effect on the senior tranches of those tampered CDOs.

In principle, an alert buyer can detect tampering even if he doesn't know which asset classes are the lemons: he simply examines all 1000 CDOs and looks for a suspicious overrepresentation of some of the asset classes in some of the CDOs. What Arora et al. show is that is an NP-complete problem ("densest subgraph"). This problem is believed to be computationally intractable; thus, even the most alert buyer can't have enough computational power to do the analysis.

Arora et al. show it's even worse than that: even after the buyer has lost a lot of money (because enough mortgages defaulted to devalue his "senior tranche"), he can't prove that that tampering occurred: he can't prove that the distribution of lemons wasn't random. This makes it hard to get recourse in court; it also makes it hard to regulate CDOs.

Intractability of Financial Derivatives

Accountants have rigged the system. They create a stream to track the ancillary revenue from fees and they look like heroes when they can report they earned the airline millions of dollars of "new" revenue. But ask them if they can track the revenue we lose because passengers booked away or chose not to fly and they look at you like you have nine heads...

To celebrate the victory of fees over profit, several airlines used their first-quarter reporting to add still more ancillary revenue initiatives:

+ Delta Air Lines, which lost $693 million in the first quarter and suffered a 15 percent decline in revenue, will now charge you $50 if you check a second bag on an international flight.

+ Alaska Airlines will charge a first-bag fee of $15 on domestic flights.

+ US Airways is raising its checked-bag fees by $5 each if you don't prepay on the Web.

Constantine "Connie" Xinos is the president of the home-owners' association in a gated community in the Chicago suburb of Oak Brook. He dislikes being near poor people (he successfully blocked a permit for a senior's home, stating, "I don't want to live next to poor people. I don't want poor people in my town"). He reportedly worked to elect an Oak Brook village council who would shut down the town library, which he also campaigned against. When local kids showed up at town meetings to ask that their library be left open, he is quoted as saying, "I don't care that you guys miss the librarian, and she was nice, and she helped you find books;" and to the library staff to "stop whining."

The librarians are now attempting to unionize under the Teamsters.

Sydney was upset and "her little friend was in tears" after Xinos spoke at the meeting last week, says mom Hope Sabbagha.

"I wanted that kid to lose sleep that night," a grinning Xinos says Wednesday, as he invites me for a nearly two-hour interview in his Mercedes-Benz in the gated Oak Brook community where he lives. "This is the real world and the lesson, you folks who brought your kids here, is if you want something, pay for it..."

A poor kid who grew up in Berwyn and worked in his dad's cafeteria in Chicago, Xinos went to law school and served in the Marines. Xinos says he speaks for Oak Brook's view of the Teamsters when he says, "Nobody here likes those kind of people."

Xinos, who says he never had children in part because he wasn't sure he'd be able to support them, sprinkles the F-word throughout his conversations. He dismisses a recent library event involving dogs with a blunt three-word rant in which he bookends swear words around the word "that."

Ugly battle has librarians in Oak Brook turning to Teamsters (Thanks, Lynn!)

(Image: A dome and skylight brighten the center of the Oak Brook Public Library, Marcelle Bright/mbright@dailyherald.com)

Top 8 of 2008 CEO Compensation

(via Digg)

The mere fact that the Great Bearded Wizard of Albion, Mr Alan Moore, is behind a new journal, Dodgem Logic, should be enough to get a lot of us interested. But add in talents like the Josie Long, Graham Linehan, Kev O'Neill, Melinda Gebbie, Steve Aylett and others and I'm pretty much sold and I'd imagine so are most of us.

But it gets even better - this is a new underground journal that seems to be part entertainment, part grassroots activism/advice on all sorts of subjects dear to many boingers' hearts, from guerilla gardening to making your own clothes, living on no cash (something most of us will find essential these days!), steampunk guides to rebuilding collapsed civilisation...

Alan's daughter Leah and hubby John Reppion (themselves excellent comics writers) have the official release describing the first edition (which will come with a segment designed to take local content so it can be reworked for different areas - a great idea), which comes from Tony Bennet's great Indy comics press Knockabout (home to Hunt Emerson & Gilbert Shelton as well as UK publishers of the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). Is it just me or is this the perfect sounding journal for BBers?

Credit Report Card: A Truly Free Look at Your Credit Record (left): "Credit.com launched a new, truly free online tool called Credit Report Card, which gives you an easy-to-understand snapshot of your credit report, along with estimated scores from the different reporting agencies."

Should I Buy It? A Flowchart to Help You Decide: "The purpose of my 'should I buy it?' question and the purpose of April's flowchart is the same: to force you to stop and think before buying something. Sometimes, a small delay between impulse and action is all it takes to avoid making an unnecessarily costly purchase."

Immunize Yourself Against Sneaky Sales Tactics: "Using insight gleaned from Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational, Jeff Atwood goes through marketers' sleazy tactics, one-by-one, telling you how to avoid falling prey to them."

Can You Save Money with a Self-Watering Gardening Container?: "I bought three 'Ready to Grow Complete Kits' from EarthBox for $55 each and set them up on my deck. Besides all the components (including casters so you can roll the boxes around), they come with potting mix, a bag of organic fertilizer, and a bag of dolomite with trace elements. As the website says, all you need are plants and water."

Using Brain Scans to Beat the Free Rider Problem: "The house I live on is on a private street shard by about 20 other houses. The City of Los Angeles does not maintain the street, so when repairs are needed, the residents must pay for them. Over the last couple of years, a lot of big potholes have formed. Several of the residents decided something needed to be done about it, and sent copies of repair estimates to everyone who lives on the street. If everyone pitched in an equal amount, the price per household would be $2,500 to fix the street. Most of the households paid the $2,500, but a few refused to pay."

The High Price of Ignoring the Future: "Would you rather be given £45 in three days, or £70 in three months? That was the question put to 40,000 people who took part in an experiment conducted by the BBC and the University College of London."

Dan Pink on the Surprising Science of Motivation: "Dan has been studying the psychology of human motivation. In this video, Dan offers some counter-intuitive advice about using financial rewards to incentivize people."

Would You Steal Medicine to Save Your Spouse's Life?: "Heinz broke into the drugstore and stole the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have done that?"

Money Can Buy Happiness, After All, as Long as You Don't Spend it on Yourself : "It turns out that money can buy happiness -- provided you spend it on the right things."

The Curse of Winning the Lottery: "This article reports on the sad fates of eight lottery winners who experienced bankruptcy, drug abuse, and sometimes even prison as a result of winning the lottery."

"The United States would be mistaken to take for granted the dollar's place as the world's predominant reserve currency," the World Bank president, Robert B. Zoellick, said in a speech at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins. "Looking forward, there will increasingly be other options to the dollar."

A billion trillion, also known as a "sextillion," could be written as a 1 followed by 21 zeros. I know the dollar has weakened lately, but a sextillion dollars would still be a lot of money. The gross domestic product of the entire world in 2008 was only $60 trillion, so even if Chiscolm won it might be a little hard to collect.

"These are the kind of numbers you deal with only on a cosmic scale," said Sylvain Cappell, who is New York University's Silver Professor at the Courant Institute for Mathematical Sciences, and so presumably can count really high. "If [Chiscolm] thinks Bank of America has branches on every planet in the cosmos, then it might start to make some sense."

It is estimated the population of the underground community could be as many as 700. As well as credit-hustling, they earn their money off the wildly excessive city above by begging and "dumpster diving" - raiding bins and skips.

There are around 350 miles of flood channels running under Las Vegas. Most inhabitants are in the area under the city's strip.

Another couple, Amy and JR, have lived in the tunnels for two years, having moved to Las Vegas in search of work, wealth and a slice of the famous Sin City action.

Putting down the Twilight vampire book she is reading for the third time, Amy, 33, explains: "My husband and I have been down here two years this week.

"We were living with my mom in California but the house was full and we had to leave.

"I heard Las Vegas was a good place for jobs. It's the city that never sleeps, with all the bright lights, and I'd always wanted to come.

"But it was tough and we started living under the staircase outside the MGM casino. Then we met a guy who lived in the tunnels. We've been down here ever since.

(Image: AUSTIN HARGRAVE)

Inevitably dubbed the "90 nicker knicker allowance", this may or may not be the most reliable indicator yet that the credit crunch is over. (Business is apparently so hectic that the firm has also installed sleeping pods.)

Just minutes ago, the Pennsylvania State senate passed bill 1828 by a vote of 32 to 17. For all of you who have been following the saga over the city's budget crisis, this is indeed the legislation that was needed for the City of Philadelphia to avoid the "Doomsday" Plan C budget scenario, which would have resulted in the layoff of 3,000 city employees and forced the closing of all libraries.

We are enormously grateful to everyone who advocated on our behalf. More than 2,000 letters to state legislators were collected from our libraries, and countless others made calls and sent emails underscoring how important public libraries are to the economic, educational and social life of our city. We also thank our incredible library staff, who despite the threat of imminent layoffs continued to provide excellent service to the thousands of people who use one of the 54 libraries in our system.

Early this summer, it came to light that a veteran EVE player (known only as "Ricdic") had embezzled --and then sold in the real world-- over 200 billion ISK from Ebank, causing a run on the virtual financial institution. However, this was just the beginning of the problems for the player-owned bank. Recently installed Ebank Chairman Ray McCormack admitted that the bank had been mismanaged, and rules, safeguards, and controls were not enforced. As a result, it's been revealed that Ebank is 380 billion ISK poorer thanks to a number of defaulted loans. Because of the aforementioned mismanagement, it apparently took the bank's new officers a while to figure out just how far in the red their institution is.

At the moment, customer accounts will remain frozen until the bank manages to stabilize. According to McCormack, "withdrawals will be allowed once the bank achieves a maintainable equity status of 90% (1.8t currently); they will be stopped again should that fall below 80%."

Darren is an old pal of mine, and I've written about his amazing life and ethic for Wired and Forbes. This is fantastic radio documentary on him!

The Hunter Documentary

Direct link to MP3

Here, on a sleepy stretch of shoreline at the far end of Asia, is surely the biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history. Their numbers are equivalent to the entire British and American navies combined; their tonnage is far greater. Container ships, bulk carriers, oil tankers - all should be steaming fully laden between China, Britain, Europe and the US, stocking camera shops, PC Worlds and Argos depots ahead of the retail pandemonium of 2009. But their water has been stolen.

They are a powerful and tangible representation of the hurricanes that have been wrought by the global economic crisis; an iron curtain drawn along the coastline of the southern edge of Malaysia's rural Johor state, 50 miles east of Singapore harbour.

5. Design for Procrastination

Ariely conducted an experiment on his class. Students were required to write three papers. Ariely asked the first group to commit to dates by which they would turn in each paper. Late papers would be penalized 1% per day. There was no penalty for turning papers in early. The logical response is to commit to turning all three papers in on the last day of class. The second group was given no deadlines; all three papers were due in the last day of class. The third group was directed to turn their papers in on the 4th, 8th, and 12th weeks.

The results? Group 3 (imposed deadlines) got the best grades. Group 2 (no deadlines) got the worst grades, and Group 1 (self-selected deadlines) finished in the middle. Allowing students to pre-commit to deadlines improved performance. Students who spaced out their commitments did well; students who did the logical thing and gave no commitments did badly.

* Steer clear of offers of low-rate trial periods which auto-convert into automatic recurring monthly billing. They know that most people will procrastinate and forget to cancel before the recurring billing kicks in.

* Either favor fixed-rate, fixed-term plans -- or become meticulous about cancelling recurring services when you're not using them.

Top Shelf's MASSIVE $3 SALE kicks off today to celebrate the release of the SURROGATES on September 25th.

For the next twelve days -- thru Friday September 25th (the opening day of the film!) -- Top Shelf is having a giant $3 graphic novel web sale. When you visit the site, you'll find over 100 graphic novels and comics on sale -- with 55+ titles marked down to just $3 (!) and 45 other titles slashed! All we ask is that you hit a $30 minimum on sale and/or non-sale items (before shipping). It's a great opportunity to load up on all those graphic novels you've wanted to try, but just never got around to picking up. Get 'em while supplies last!

Please note that this sale is GOOD for retailers as well, and shops will get their wholesale discount on top of these sale prices. Certain minimums apply, so retailers please email us for details.

Just look at that list of all the things libraries do for our communities, all the ways they help the least among us, the vulnerable, the children, the elderly. Think of every wonderful thing that happened to you among the shelves of a library. Think of the millions of lifelong love-affairs with literacy sparked in the collections of those libraries. Think of every person whose life was forever changed for the better in those buildings.

Think of the nobility of libraries and librarianship, the great scar that the Burning of Alexandria gouged in human history. Think of the archivists who barricaded themselves in the Hermitage during the Siege of Leningrad, slowly starving and freezing to death but refusing to desert their posts for fear that the collections they guarded would become firewood.

Think of the librarians who took a stand during the darkest years of the PATRIOT Act and refused to turn over patron records. Think of the moral unimpeachability of those whose trade is universal access to all human knowledge.

Picture an entire city, a modern, wealthy place, in the richest country in the world, in which the vital services provided by libraries are withdrawn due to political brinksmanship and an unwillingness to spare one banker's bonus worth of tax-dollars to sustain an entire region's connection with human culture and knowledge and community.

Think of it and ask yourself what the hell has happened to us.

All Free Library of Philadelphia Branch, Regional and Central Libraries Closed Effective Close of Business October 2, 2009

Here's a scene from American Casino, a new documentary about the subprime lending scandal and the resulting $12 trillion Wall Street bailout. Another consequence of the meltdown -- the swimming pools of foreclosed homes have become mosquito breeding grounds.

How Foreclosures Breed Mosquitoes

If a deal is reached, it would be a major change for YouTube, which has largely offered free content supported by advertising. It would also put YouTube, which is owned by Google, in direct competition with services from Netflix, Amazon and Apple, which allow users to buy or rent movies online.

YouTube, which already offers some older free movies on its site, is talking with Lions Gate Entertainment, Sony and Warner Brothers about making newer titles available on the site, the person said. Scott Rowe, a spokesman for Warner Brothers, declined to comment, and representatives for the other two studios were not immediately available.

Feral Houses (via Neatorama)

Update: Crap, this is a duplicate. Ah, c'est la vie. Enjoy it again, for the first time.

(Warning: video is totally gross). Via this SF Gate item, a Chicago-based animal rights group called Mercy for Animals shot the video above of baby chicks being ground up alive at an Iowa chicken processing factory. It's pretty disgusting, and reinforces a personal decision I made to avoid consuming eggs that come from this sort of place:

Hy-Line admitted to the Associated Press that "instantaneous euthanasia" (e.g. grinding up male chicks) is a standard practice and claims that it is also supported by the animal veterinary and scientific community. (Male chicks are less valuable because they can't lay eggs or be raised quickly enough for meat.) Mercy for Animals estimates that 200 million male chicks are killed annually and United Egg Producers confirmed this figure.

I imagine attention festivals: week-long multimedia, cross-industry carnivals of readings, installations, and performances, where you go from a tent with 30-second films, guitar solos, 10-minute video games, and haiku to the tent with only Andy Warhol movies, to a myriad of venues with other media forms and activities requiring other attention lengths. In the Nano Tent, you can hear ringtones and read tweets. A festival organized not by the forms of the commodities themselves but of the experience of interacting with them. Not organized by time elapsed, but by cognitive investment: a pop song, which goes by quickly, can resonate for days; a poem, which can go by more quickly, sticks through a season. A festival in which you can see images of your brain on knitting and on Twitter.

I imagine a retail sector for cultural products that's organized around the attention span: not around "books" or "music" but around short stories and pop songs in one aisle, poems and arias in the other. In the long store: 5,000 piece jigsaw puzzles, big novels, beer brewing equipment, DVDs of The Wire. Clerks could suggest and build attentional menus. We would develop attentional connoisseurship: the right pairings of the short and long. We would understand, and promote, attentional health.

Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he'll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That's the state of your bacon -- circa 2009.

Our friends at GOOD Magazine have posted a neat item here -- Curt Smith, best known as co-founder of the band Tears for Fears, but now an independent, solo artist with a new set of fans, talks about the "musical value of sharing." Great stuff. Snip:

I got my first record deal when I was 18 years old--next year that will be about 30 years ago, so I have been doing it for quite a while. The industry when I first started was very much one-sided in the sense that it favored the industry and not the musicians. We would sign deals when we were quite young that were pretty bad across the board: from record deals to publishing deals, even management deals and touring. You just didn't make as high of a percentage as you would now. But of course that has changed over the years, especially in the last few years with the internet and sharing your music with people.

Technology has changed so much that now, people are quite capable of making records themselves. It used to be a very expensive process, but its not anymore. In the past, the industry controlled how your music got out there, so if you didn't have a record deal it would never be on shelves; there was no Amazon, there was no iTunes. There was basically just radio, and the record companies controlled that as well. Now, with the freedom of the internet, people can go and discover your stuff.

The down side is that there is now so much music, some form of filtering tool is required.

Curt is fun to follow on Twitter. So is GOOD.

I really dig Curt's current solo work, but I have been looking for an excuse to embed the video above on Boing boing for a long time, so I will. It's my favorite Tears for Fears song, and sometimes when I play it in my car, and I'm driving along PCH, it still makes my eyes well up with emo. (link: Pale Shelter)

From FORA TV, this video of a presentation by George Kembel, co-founder of the Stanford d.school, about the "Embrace," an extremely low-cost incubator for premature newborns. The challenge: design better technology to help keep premature newborns alive. The reality: the most at-risk newborns are in rural areas, far away from hospitals where $25,000 incubators are housed. The solution: a $25 "incubator" with materials that can be heated up in a pot of boiling water.

Awakening Creativity / FORA (thanks, Blaise Zerega)

The more important question is how long you have to work to eat something less gross than a Big Mac, of course.

An alternative Big Mac Index (via Digg)

For the uninitiated, Vlad Taltos is a human assassin in a strange world where humans occupy the eastern kingdoms and the rest is run by the Dragaereans, a long-lived elfin race whose sorcery is far more formalized than humanity's witchcraft (the human culture on Dragaera is based loosely on ancient Hungarian culture, and the magic is derived somewhat from Hungarian animist mysticism). Vlad lives among the Dragaera, pledged to the house of Jhereg, a mongrel house that you can buy your way into (the others are hereditary), whence come all the crime lords and assassins. In Vlad's storied, ten-volume adventures, he goes from street-punk to crime-boss to lordling to political operative, embroiled in a magnificently realized fantasy world that leaps off the page with a fascinating poleconomy, literary tradition, spirituality and history ancient and modern.

Vlad is a hard-boiled, wise-ass hero, whose narration is part of what makes the series so irresistible, laden as it is with deadpan humor, great observation, wicked emotional truths, and a keen gourmet sensibility (seriously: the food and drink in this book are so well described that I spent the entire time while reading it yearning for one of the marvellous cups of coffee or the hearty bowls of stew that Vlad subsists on through much of the tale).

The other thing about Vlad is that he grows, from an immature punk in the first couple volumes -- books that captivated the teen me perfectly -- into the rapidly wisening exile that we meet in Jhegala. In this volume, Vlad is on the run, driven from home by a political struggle that demands that he choose a side even though he strenuously resists it.

Now Vlad has come to the eastern lands, the human kingdoms that his family hailed from, which he has never seen before. He comes to Burz, an industrial town barely held in the balance between the mercantalists and the manufacturers and the peasantry who still work the land. Vlad's arrival shatters the uneasy peace and sets off a chain of terrible massacres that leave him trying to solve the town's mysteries before he becomes one of them.

This is Steve Brust doing Hammett's Red Harvest, the classic hardboiled novel that is the epitome of the "someone comes to town" kind of story. Brust's take on it is a tour-de-force of subtle characterization, mystery, mayhem, and a rare grasp of the invisible economic forces that shape our lives. Brust is one of the few fantasy writers in the history of the genre whose worlds have all the moving parts necessary to actually exist as economic realities, and here his virtuosity is right at the fore.

There are some spoilers in this volume if you haven't read the previous ones (and if you haven't, you ought to), but I don't think they're deal-breakers if you wanted to start here. If you've never read Brust, you're in for a treat. If you already follow the series, then you know why this is such great news.

Jhegaala

All the Vlad Taltos books

In the introduction to her book, Shell admits that she used to be obsessed with bargain prices, but says a "boot incident" changed her. She went to a shoe "mini-outlet" to buy a pair of boots for a New Year's party, and asked for "something special." The clerk showed her a pair of "buttery" leather Italian boots, but they were too expensive so she bought cheap knockoff boots from China that cost one-quarter as much as the Italian boots. After wearing the boots just once, she decided that they were "clunky and so uncomfortable" that she threw them into the back of the closet with the "heap of other unwearable 'good deals' in bad colors or unflattering shapes: a bargain hunter's pile of shame."

Cheapness, argues Shell, has ruined just about everything. Main streets, with knowledgeable clerks and friendly service, have been decimated by discount stores like Wal-Mart staffed with ignorant employees who don't give a damn. Customer service has all but vanished (A sign on the entrance of IKEA stores reads, "No One Will Bother You"). Factory outlets have become the "fastest growing segment of not only the retail industry but also the travel industry." Jobs were lost when manufacturers moved their factories overseas and used cheap labor to produce mountains of cheap junk. Products now come in two categories: stratospherically priced luxury objects or slipshod discount crap, with few mid-priced, well-crafted objects available, because craftsmanship can't compete in the mass market. (As Roger Price, author of The Great Roob Revolution said "If everybody doesn't want it, nobody gets it.")

So, how do we get ourselves off the cheapness drug? In her concluding chapter, Shell says individuals have to shake the habit themselves: "We can set our own standard for quality and stick to it. We can demand to know the true costs of what we buy, and refuse to allow them to be externalized, We can enforce sustainability, minimize disposability, and insist on transparency. We can rekindle our acquaintance with craftsmanship. We can choose to buy or not, choose to bargain or not, and choose to follow our hearts or not, unencumbered by the anxiety of that someone somewhere is getting a 'better deal."

For the last couple of years, I've been practicing pretty much what Shell recommends here. When I start thinking I need to buy something I first ask myself if owning it will truly make my family's life better in some way -- Will it save us time, or consume time? Do I have to learn a new user-interface to use it? What am I going to get out of it? What would happen if I put off buying it for a year? What else could I spend the money on that might be a better choice? Is it something I can hand down to my kids or will it break? Can it be serviced and repaired at home? Will it make our household environment more pleasant, or less pleasant? Will it clutter the house? how much storage space will it consume? These are then kinds of questions I now ask myself before buying something. The one thing I don't consider is how "cheap" something is. As a result, I don't buy nearly as much stuff as I used to (it turns out that my decision not to be cheap has made me more frugal and thrifty) and the things I do buy more often end up being well-made and improve the quality of my family's life.

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

The idea is that the cash-trading will at least take place among "real" players as opposed to those who join up merely to farm (I suspect "real" is a synonym for "rich" in this case, or at least "first world").

The other half of the CCP Games offensive against RMT is the 30 Day Pilot License Extension, typically referred to as "PLEX."

A PLEX is essentially an in-game item that represents 30 days of game time. They can be traded or given to other players, bought and resold. Once an EVE Online player has a PLEX in his or her possession, all they need to do is right click and credit those 30 days to their account.

The principle behind this is what's already been established by some of the free-to-play games on the market. Those with disposable cash in real life but who are short on time can buy game time codes and convert them into PLEX, so they have ISK to spend in-game. (One game time code = two PLEX.) When they sell PLEX on the market in EVE, that's money that players injected into the game that didn't go into the wallets of aklfjalkfjd and his merry band of ISK farmers.

Likewise, players who have more time to rack up the ISK through gameplay can buy PLEX in-game on the market, and play for another month without having to pay a subscription fee.

the way of the plex

(via /.)

Criminals -- mostly drug gangs -- tap remote pipelines, sometimes building pipelines of their own, to siphon off hundreds of millions of dollars worth of oil each year, the Mexican oil monopoly said. At least one U.S. oil executive has pleaded guilty to conspiracy in such a deal. On Tuesday, the U.S. Homeland Security department is scheduled to return $2.4 million to Mexico's tax administration, the first batch of money seized during a binational investigation into smuggled oil that authorities expect to lead to more arrests and seizures.

Krugman: Let me show my age here. What you came out believing if you went to the New York's World Fair in 1964 was that we were going to have this enormously enhanced mastery of the physical universe. That we were going to have undersea cities and supersonic transports everywhere. And there hasn't been that kind of dramatic change. It's not just that airplanes are no faster. My favorite test, which shows something about me, is the kitchen. If you walked into a kitchen from the 1950's it would look a little pokey, but you'd know what to do. It wouldn't be that difficult. If someone from the 1950's walked into a kitchen from 1909 they'd be pretty unhappy - they might just be able to manage. If someone from 1909 went to one from 1859, you would actually be hopeless. The big change was really between 1840 and the 1920's, in terms of what the physical nature of modern life is like. There's been nothing like that since. So we can do fancy information searches in a way that no one envisioned 30 years ago - as one of my colleagues at the Times, Gail Collins, likes to say all the time where are the flying cars?

Transcript

MP3

Snip from an op-ed by Barbara Ehrenreich (!) in the New York Times, which examines the moral and social impact of ordinances against the publicly poor. The op-ed is based on a new study from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty which found that the number of ordinances against the "publicly poor" are rising. More American cities, according to the report, are enacting and enforcing laws against "the indigent."

How do you know when someone is indigent? As a Las Vegas statute puts it, "An indigent person is a person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive" public assistance.

That could be me before the blow-drying and eyeliner, and it's definitely Al Szekely at any time of day. A grizzled 62-year-old, he inhabits a wheelchair and is often found on G Street in Washington -- the city that is ultimately responsible for the bullet he took in the spine in Fu Bai, Vietnam, in 1972. He had been enjoying the luxury of an indoor bed until last December, when the police swept through the shelter in the middle of the night looking for men with outstanding warrants.

It turned out that Mr. Szekely, who is an ordained minister and does not drink, do drugs or curse in front of ladies, did indeed have a warrant -- for not appearing in court to face a charge of "criminal trespassing" (for sleeping on a sidewalk in a Washington suburb). So he was dragged out of the shelter and put in jail. "Can you imagine?" asked Eric Sheptock, the homeless advocate (himself a shelter resident) who introduced me to Mr. Szekely. "They arrested a homeless man in a shelter for being homeless."

Read the report that was the inspiration for this op-ed, produced by the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty (NLCHP) and the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH): Homes Not Handcuffs -- List Of "Meanest Cities" Released, and here is a direct link to the document (PDF)

We covered Doug Fine's radical off-the-grid lifestyle experiment last year on Boing Boing TV -- embed above. He is the author of Farewell, My Subaru: An Epic Adventure in Local Living, and he's still going strong out there on the Funky Butte Ranch. When he's not out in the fields turning the compost heap or feeding chickens, he's working on his next book, which I'm looking forward to reading. Doug has a thought-provoking piece out in this Sunday's Washington Post Outlook section, here's a preview:

I have a fiancee and a son to provide for, so I decided to take a hard look at our prospects for survival if our consumer safety nets went away. For now, my green lifestyle choices at my remote 41-acre outpost in the American Southwest are optional. You know, growing lettuce instead of buying Chilean. Using organic cotton diapers instead of buying Pampers. But what if one morning in, say, 2049, I wake up to milk my goats and find out that supplies are no longer streaming in from China and California? What would I do if both box stores and crunchy food co-ops suddenly were no more? In other words, I'm examining my place in a hypothetical post-oil, post-consumer society 40 years in the future.

Now, I'm not rooting for such a thing. Slave labor, forest depletion, climate change and global resource wars aside, globalization has a lot going for it. I love that I can email a musician in Mauritania and ask to download his latest album. And anyway, lots of people still see globalization as the economic model for the foreseeable future. But when I was covering the former Soviet Union as a journalist in the 1990s, every single person I met told me that they'd thought pigs would fly before the Politburo crumbled.

Pat Race of Alaska Robotics, whose "Buy Back Alaska" video was featured here a couple years ago, has created a new video about crushing absurdity of national economics. It's embedded above, and I think it's sweet and funny in a homey, dorky, "I made this!" way.

From the land of Sarah Palin, meth shacks, and aerial elk-massacres, he emails Boing Boing:

Alaska Robotics is Pat Race, Aaron Suring, Lou Logan, Sarah Asper-Smith, and whoever else falls into our cast of friends and family. We live in Juneau where we make short films, draw comics, and eat halibut. We organize screenings of locally made short films twice a year and also work to bring filmmakers, animators and writers north to teach workshops.

If you're interested, there are a bunch of other films on our site, I like these ones: Socks, The Big Joke, Butterfly Kisses, Town vs. Valley, Nipple Fire, High Five.

(See photo slideshow by Anna Bosch)

The police constantly watch all the goods and services that are sold illegally here: drugs, sex, fake IDs, even street food. Health inspectors have to dispose of all food that isn't to code and that might be unsafe. Sometimes they dump full carts of tamales into the gutter. And the gangs in the area, they charge rent to any vendors who sell goods on the streets that they've marked as their territory. Here's Antonio.

ANTONIO: It's dangerous. It's very, very dangerous. You have to be careful with the gangs, you have to be careful with the police, you have to be careful with the cars. There are a lot of dangers in the street.

The tamaleros play a game, sort-of like a high-stakes version of hide-and-go seek. And there are rules that all the street vendors have to follow.

ANTONIO: Don't throw trash in the street. Second of all, if you see the police, don't make eye contact. And the gangs have asked me to pay rent, but no I have refused to do that.

UPDATE Devin Browne says: "[T]he radio story was based on a multimedia piece Anna and I produced together which can be seen here."

The risky life of an L.A. 'Tamalero'

Design Observer has posted Part 1 of a fascinating email exchange between two of my favorite writers and thinkers, Douglas Rushkoff and Kurt Andersen. They each have new books out about the economy in America. Rushkoff's book is called Life Inc., and Andersen's is called Reset. Julie Lasky was the moderator.

Douglas Rushkoff: All I wanted to do [in writing Life Inc.] was show how we got here, how this way of life was sold to us in the 20th century by the very same folks who originally saw fascism as a great idea, and why I believed it to be economically unsustainable. Remember, now, every chief economist of every major investment firm or bank I spoke with insisted that the economy was sound, and that it was bound for increasing expansion. And none of them knew what I was talking about when I asked them about the biases of the money we use. "There were other kinds of money?" they all asked, amazed.

Kurt Andersen: Actually, the ideas in Reset germinated six or seven years ago, when I was deep into historical research for Heyday, my most recent novel, which is set in the mid-19th century. Through that research and writing, I acquired a new gut understanding of what I take to be the cyclical course of American economic and political history, and of the concomitant bipolar nature of the American character — that is, how America has always swung back and forth between Yankee prudence and manic magical thinking, between free-market worship and communitarian public-spiritedness, between financially driven busts and bubbly booms. Sometimes the cyclical swings are swift and extreme, and those violent swings can result in progressive political and economic rejiggerings of the system. So when the crash came last fall, followed by (and probably causing) the election of Barack Obama, I was inclined to take a longer view, and see it as a rare and potentially positive convergence of cyclical economic and political swings. And that led me to write Reset.