A flag embodies the hopes and aspirations of a country or state. It's more than just an emblem — it's a grand statement. So it's too bad so many flags are kind of boring. Here are some flags from throughout history (plus a few current ones) that bring some serious pizzazz.
    
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Bart Chilton, the commissioner of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, wants stronger financial regulations. He also loves movies. On Thursday, he combined those two things into the best financial reform speech ever.
Via: CFTC/MCT
Bart Chilton has been a commissioner on the Commodities Futures Trading Commission since 2007 and is easily the coolest financial regulator of all time. Look at his hair! Look. At. His. Hair.
Anyway, Bart Chilton gives speeches that are almost as amazing as his splendiferous blond locks. He gave one this February that was several riffs on the color red. But the one he gave today at the Yale Club in New York City, titled "Cinema of Uncertainty," may take the cake. It's a call for writing strong rules in Dodd-Frank, the 2010 financial reform and regulation bill, as explained through a ton of movie references. Here are almost all of them:
I know the Yale Club only from Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway of Gatsby fame who "...took dinner usually at the Yale Club." In fact in the new Gatsby movie Nick (Tobey Maguire) and Jay himself (Leonardo DiCaprio) mention the Yale Club. If you haven't seen it, The Great Gatsby (2013), my take is that it’s full-on super cinema. Go right after we're done here. In fact, if you do, it will be a great finale to our little mini movie montage here at the Yale Club.
Via: Tumblr.com
First, I extend a heartfelt greeting from the belly of the beast—the nation's capital. (By the way, Belly of the Beast—2003—direct-to-video (DVD) Steven Segal film. The action sequences are impressive, but the script is pretty hurting. Nuf said). However, government does seem like a beast at times, right? I came up from D.C. the other day and I can tell you that the town that continues to take a licking keeps on ticking. That's not welcome news to some of you. In fact, at times, I'm with ya.
Via: stevenseagal.com
Via: fanpop.com
French Worst Case Scenario: What if the Central Powers had won WW1?
Paz.alexTalk amongst yourselves.
It’s been 20 years since the movie came out and I need some closure.
Via: gonemovies.com
Grant Rising: First in a New Series of Civil War Map Books
A Kickstarter for “richly annotated color atlas of all of Grant’s Civil War battles in 1861-62, his early life, frontier, and Mexican War service.”
Yes please. I know an enthusiastic Lt. Colonel.
I’ve never seen anything like Moscow’s Zhivopisny Bridge before. It’s technically a cable-stayed bridge, like many around the world, but the giant perpendicular archway pier is totally unique.
Look out – communists are infiltrating the country with nefarious plans to sterilize our men, steal our women and convert children! Dramatic and overwrought, anti-communist ads and propaganda from the Cold War era attempted to inspire loyalty to democracy and fear of the atomic bomb-wielding enemy – and at the same time, somehow soothe Americans’ concerns about the possibility of ‘total destruction.’ These 15 examples include ads for everything from telephone services to milk, as well as pamphlets, comic books and films.
Would this poster make you feel any better about the possibility of total nuclear annihilation? The government distributed propaganda like this during the Cold War to soothe the fears of U.S. citizens after the military strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) Doctrine was put into place, which proclaimed that if either the United States or the Soviet Union dropped a bomb, the other would drop one in retaliation, continuing until both countries were destroyed.
The average citizen couldn’t exactly go out and ‘fight communism’ in any real way, but they were given plenty of small ways to support the cause. The public was asked to donate “truth dollars” to support causes like Radio Free Europe, which aimed to “keep up the morale of the Communist-ruled peoples, and express the kinship of the free nations, with the captive peoples.”
“If Russia and the Communists should win the next world war, many American men would be sterilized. In case the Communists should conquer, our women would be helpless beneath the boots of the Asiatic Russians.”
“Take a good look,” urges this advertisement, alongside an image of an undressed woman protecting her modesty. But it’s not really the woman that the Federal Sign and Signal Corporation wants you to notice. They’re just using her to call your attention to their air raid warning signal. “Other matters may have taken your attention, but few if any can be more important.”
This advertisement might seem like a joke, but it’s a real vintage Scot Tissue ad that first appeared in the 1930s. “Employees lose respect for a company that fails to provide decent facilities for their comfort,” it reads.
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For the many complicated ways that people shop for groceries – Giant has cheaper chicken soup, Whole Foods has better broccoli, the checkout line at Publix is shorter at night – research models of how people get their food are, for the most part, remarkably simple.
"The literature has been primarily assuming that people shop in the supermarket that’s closest to their home," says Anju Aggarwal, a research associate with the University of Washington's Center for Public Health Nutrition. Or, maybe, you hit the supermarket or corner store that's next to your office. "All of the research has been based on that assumption around the work neighborhood or the home neighborhood."
And so-called "food deserts" are usually defined by that first hypothesis: If you haven't got a grocery store in the neighborhood where you live, then you might as well have no meaningful access to food at all. As we've previously written, this thinking is starting to evolve to incorporate how people move around a city on any given day into a clearer picture of their food geography. In fact, earlier research from Washington's Center for Public Health Nutrition, surveying 2,000 people in Seattle's King County, found that few people shop at their nearest supermarket, and many travel quite far.
"There are people who live next to Whole Foods, but they’re driving to Fred Meyer," Aggarwal says (Fred Meyer is a lower-cost chain). And there are people who live next to Fred Meyer but drive across town to Whole Foods, where they perceive that the food is healthier and the organic selection better. "For you and me," Aggarwal says, "even though we might be living next door to each other, our food environment might be very different."
So how do you really begin to understand what a person's true food environment looks like? Well, you can stick GPS tracking devices on hundreds of shoppers and watch where they go over the course of a week.
Aggarwal and colleagues, working with the university's Urban Form Lab, recruited 493 representative adults from across King County and asked them to do just this (while also keeping a travel diary and answering questions about their food preferences and shopping habits). The researchers will now be analyzing the unprecedented data set collected over the last two years. But as a first swipe at understanding it, they asked Schema Design (the Seattle studio behind some other transportation visualizations we've highlighted) to map the results.
This video shows all 493 people moving as white dots around the city over a single week (their movement, captured at varying times, was compressed onto the map as if they were each tracked during the same week). The stationary blue dots are supermarkets that were visited by the sample group at some point during the study.
Mapping Health: Shopping for Health from Schema Design on Vimeo.
Effectively, this video illustrates the full extent of grocery opportunities available to people over the course of their weekly movement. The white dots don't necessarily stop to shop at the stores in this visualization. The video also records all the stores they passed, within 100 meters, during the day. The more people come into close proximity to a store, the larger its blue dot becomes over the week.
Schema also made a second video tracking the speed of movement by all 493 people during a single day. In this video, people moving faster than 10 miles per hour are traced in white. Those moving slower (likely by foot, bike, or driving through residential neighborhoods) are traced in blue:
Mapping Health: Slow/Fast Seattle from Schema Design on Vimeo.
That visualization begins to illustrate the difference between walkable parts of the city, and those places that are more likely accessed by car (or transit). Other recent research has shown that the characteristics of a neighborhood – whether it's walkable, whether it has a grocery store – are correlated with obesity. King County has no real food deserts. Everyone in the metropolitan area has some access to a full-service grocery store (96 percent of the people in this study also said that's where they do their primary shopping, not in smaller corner stores or bodegas). But learning about these other characteristics of a neighborhood may be relevant to better understanding why people choose the supermarkets they do and what kind of health outcomes they have.
The earlier Center for Public Health and Nutrition study, which included 2,000 respondents, found that people who shop in lower-cost supermarkets had obesity rates that were 10 times higher than people who shop in higher-cost supermarkets.
"Of course, it’s not Giant that’s making them obese," Aggarwal says. "We also have data on all the supermarkets in the area, and we saw that Giant carries the same things that Whole Foods carries. It's not that you won't find apples in Giant. It’s not that you won’t find vegetables in Giant." Although the brands and varieties may be different. "But still people are obese," Aggarwal says. "So it is something about the people who are shopping there, something about their attitudes, their economic barriers, their situations."
This means that once researchers better understand the real geography of where people access food, they may next be able to look into those very fine-grained individual decisions about why they go there and what they buy.
Above image via Schema Design.
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Awesome architecture, awesome ghost sign… The Acme Farm Supply building is located on the corner of Broadway and 1st Ave. South in downtown Nashville.
Coming soon to a theater near you.
The story of the citizens of Custer, Idaho, a thriving mining community that fell victim to black lung in 1910. Their population fell faster than a speeding bullet.
Via: Joe Belanger/ Shutterstock
The story of Prudence McKiernan, the unyielding woman who hoarded a record 642 cats in her studio apartment in St. Louis, Missouri.
Source: Warner Bros. Pictures / via: blissmaybe777.wordpress.com
A cutting-edge exposé of the Crystalettes, the Bronze Medal winners at the 2002 Lake Placid Senior Synchronized Skating Championship.
Source: New Line Cinema / via: synchroconfessions.tumblr.com
The riveting sequel to Schoolhouse Rock’s 3 is a Magic Number.
Source: 20th Century Fox / via: impawards.com
Sesame Street has launched a project to support kids with an incarcerated parent. Why is this needed perhaps you are wondering. Well: There are 2.7 million kids in the U.S. with at least one parent in prison. Great job, America. Really excellent job.
Graydon Gordian talked to Carol F. Burton of Centerforce, an org that helps families impacted by incarceration, about why this new initiative is so important. (“Some [kids] are doing pretty well. Others are faring poorly. We don’t even know what’s happening with a significant group of them. They fall under the responsibility of no public institution – none that provide support or care as we remove their parents from their home.”)
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Pollock, Dalí, Matisse, Klimt, Picasso, Mondrian, Klee, Boccioni, Kandinsky, and Miro, visually distilled.
For their latest masterpiece, my friend Giorgia Lupi and her team at Accurat — who have previously given us such gems as a timeline of the future based on famous fiction, a visualization of global brain drain, and visual histories of the Nobel Prize and the 100 geniuses of language — have teamed up with illustrator Michela Buttignol to visualize the lives of ten famous painters, using the visual metaphors of painting and the specific stylistic preferences — shapes, colors, proportions — of each artist.
The artists include Jackson Pollock (whose meditation on art and life is a must-read and who had a pretty amazing dad), Salvador Dalí (whose little-known Alice in Wonderland illustrations never cease to delight), Gustav Klimt (who was a key figure in sparking the cross-pollination of art and science that shaped modern culture), Henri Matisse (who, unbeknownst to many, once illustrated Joyce’s Ulysses) and Piet Mondrian (who has even inspired artisanal cake), and each painter is represented by a cleverly designed pictogram reflective of his signature style:
Each visual biography depicts key biographical moments — births, deaths, love affairs, marriages, birth of children, travel — as well as notable and curious features like handedness (mostly righties, with the exception of Klee), astrological sign, and connections.
For a closer look, click each image to view the full-size version:
The visualizations are available as art prints on Society6.
You can see more of Giorgia’s wonderful work on her site and follow her on Twitter.
For an even more minimalist distillation of famous lives, see the delightful, if much less scholarly, Life In Five Seconds.
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You ain't never seen Hollywood stars like this. UK art studio Dorothy mapped hundreds of films and movie stars into these two wonderful constellation maps, The Golden Age and The Modern Day Hollywood Star charts.
See if your favorite movies and actors are listed:
The [Golden Age] chart is based on the night sky over Los Angeles on October 6th 1927 - the release date of Al Jolson's 'The Jazz Singer', the first feature-length motion picture with synchronized dialogue which heralded a new era for cinema and the decline of the silent film.
The 62 films featured include those chosen for preservation in the US National Film Registry due to their cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance; Academy Award winners; and a few personal favourites. Films include King Kong, The Wizard of Oz, It's a Wonderful Life, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca and Rebel without a Cause.
The [Modern Day] chart is based on the night sky over New York on June 16th 1960 - the date of the first showing of Hitchcock's 'Psycho' at the DeMille Theater. With its new approach to storytelling, characterisation and violence it is seen as a key movie in the start of the post-classical era of Hollywood.
The 108 films featured include those chosen for preservation in the US National Film Registry due to their cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance; Academy Award winners; and a few personal favourites. Films include Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde, The Exorcist, The Godfather, Chinatown, Star Wars, Pulp Fiction and Avatar.
View more over at Dorothy's official website: Link - via Cool Hunting
Last winter, St. Huberts Catholic High School for Girls needed a minor miracle. The school was desperate to raise $15,000 to send its robotics team to a championship-round competition in St. Louis.
In the not-so old days, students would have asked their friends and relatives for money, maybe posted a plea on their Facebook page. Not this time.
Instead, the school ran a sophisticated crowd-sourced donation campaign, hitting their target in just seven days. That success came courtesy an independent organization called the Faith in the Future Foundation, says St. Huberts' development director, Robin Nolan. The foundation's two fundraising experts quickly helped Nolan craft a strategy and locate the right tools (in this case, the Give2Gether website).
"We only really know our little corner of Philadelphia," Nolan says. "The experts [at Faith in the Future] have ideas from around the city and around the country. They bring ideas to us, and I can bounce my own thoughts off them."
Faith in the Future is the Archdiocese of Philadelphia's unprecedented response to its education crisis. In 2011, Philadelphia's Catholic school system had reached a breaking point. Enrollment was down 38 percent in its elementary schools and 34 percent at the high schools; all together, the schools had run up a $6 million deficit.
Church leaders considered trying to stem the losses by shuttering 45 out of 156 elementary schools and four of 17 high schools.
Instead, they opted to try something no one has ever done before.
• • • • •
From the beginning, Faith in the Future had two main goals as it set about becoming the first private organization to run a Catholic school system (its portfolio includes 16,000 students at 17 high schools and four special education schools): instigate a "metrics-driven management structure" and raise $100 million. It set about meeting that first goal immediately, first by centralizing many of the high schools' administrative functions. CEO Samuel Casey Carter, an "education manager" and consultant who speaks almost exclusively in business jargon, likened it to the streamlining a company would do after consultants move through.
The foundation also tried to ease the burden of Catholic school tuition by offering 125 $2,000-a-year scholarships for high school freshmen. (The average Philadelphia Catholic high school costs about $6,000 a year). Because the archdiocese set up Faith in the Future as an independent foundation, scholarship recipients were still eligible to receive state education vouchers.
But the ultimate goal, Casey says, is to help each school develop a unique brand. In St. Hubert's case, that's meant playing up the school's successful athletics program and sky-high college acceptance rate (99 percent of 12th graders are admitted to some type of post-secondary school).
"To be honest, I don't think we've changed our recruiting strategy," Nolan says. "But enrollment is way up now. I think it's because parents aren't worried about their kids' schools closing at the end of every year."
If Faith in the Future succeeds, it will be hailed as Catholic education's savoir. (Since 2000, 2,000 Catholic schools have closed across the U.S.) Early evidence offer some reasons for hope. In just a year, the foundation has trimmed the school system's deficit down to manageable $500,000. And though it has yet to fully rebound, enrollment is indeed 3 percent higher than initially projected.
First Things, a national Catholic magazine, and religious education expert Sean Kennedy cite Faith in the Future as a model that should be replicated across the country. That, Carter says, is precisely the idea.
But to claim real victory, Faith in the Future will have to prove that it can stave off growing competition from public charter schools. If you lump them all together, last year charter schools technically surpassed the Catholic Church as the nation's second largest school system, with over 2.1 million students and growing.
And charters are not just rising up alongside of Catholic schools -- they're taking a gigantic bite out of their potential pupils.
Sister Kathleen Touey, principal at St. Matthews Elementary School in Philadelphia, says that in the past, every one of her graduates would go on to a Catholic high school. Now, a handful are choosing charters instead. "Parents just can't afford it," she says.
Carter isn't blind to this problem. But he believes that the right combination of scholarships and branding will woo families back.
Others aren't so sure. In an expansive Philadelphia Magazine piece last month, Philadelphia Catholic school alum Michael Callahan wondered whether Faith in the Future was making a mistake by focusing on high school recruitment, rather than investing in the schools' best feeder system -- Catholic elementary schools. He writes:
But the truth is, while O’Neill, Carter & Co. are raising both cash and the profile of the local Catholic high schools, the parochial grammar schools—the main feeders for those high schools—have been left to their own devices, with the Joan Stulzes of the archdiocese working feverishly just to keep the lights on and the erasers stocked. Faith in the Future often provides counsel to parish schools like Resso, but it holds no authority to enforce any of its recommendations; how the grammar schools are run lies where it has always lain, with the parish pastors. And as the bludgeoning headlines about the archdiocese’s sex scandals attest, we all know how good they’ve been at managing their fiefdoms these past few decades. And how open they are to advice on how to do it.
It's an interesting argument. But Touey sees it as a specious one. Her school, she says, is thriving -- though enrollment is down from its 1,350 peak, it's now holding steady at 950. St. Matthews is subsidized by its partner church, and a large proportion of parishioners send their children. "People move to this neighborhood to attend this school," she says. "We have tremendous community support."
It's obvious that Catholic schools are only going to get parents and students to believe in them again when they believe in themselves. The only real lesson we can draw so far from Faith in the Future and schools like St. Matthews may be that dioceses across the country need to back up that faith with aggressive investment and ambitious, workable plans.
Top image: Cynthia Farmer/Shutterstock.com
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Something that definitely feels unique to Pittsburgh is it’s love for intersections with more then 2 roads meeting. I’m not sure which civil engineer started this practice, but it causes an exponential level of inefficiency.
Here’s a few of my favorites:
As @mudlock reminded me on Twitter, in Edgewood you need to make sure you’re in the “U-turn, sharp left, or kind of left” turn lane.
In Squirrel Hill you have to figure out which way is straight at it’s famous 5-way intersection
Again, do you want to go left or REALLY left?
Another one in Squirrel Hill gives drivers a couple of choices at the intersection of Beechwood and Wilkins
There are a couple other examples of this around, I’ve always wondered how much efficiency could be gained by rerouting a road at the cities 5-way intersection so that one of the spokes goes into one of the main roads earlier, avoiding a confusing and unnecessary 3rd light cycle. What’s your favorite multi-way intersection?
The world-altering monetary miracle and/or freakshow that is Bitcoin was on full display at the Bitcoin 2013 conference in San Jose this May. There were more than a thousand attendees, among them bankers, libertarians, conspiracy theorists, sea-preneurs, developers, scantily clad vodka models, the Winklevoss twins, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, Soft Skull Press founder Sander Hicks, and a large fraction of the world’s Bitcoin experts. Also, in the lobby, roaming gangs of Imperial stormtroopers and superheroes, since there was a comics convention going at the same time.
So is Bitcoin a great invention, or a trainwreck in the making? Maybe!
Because it’s decentralized and no third parties such as banks or governments are required to guarantee transactions, Bitcoin has the potential to be a far safer, more transparent and more reliable medium of exchange than anything that has yet been tried. There is no Ben Bernanke, Mario Draghi or Shinzo Abe for Bitcoin, no way of devaluing it, no way to print more to bail out insolvent banks or buy up mortgages. Plus, Bitcoin could conceivably help to free the world of the skimming machinery of existing banks and payment processing systems. In this way, Bitcoin could be really beneficial for people to use as money. However, the politics of Bitcoin is, not to put too fine a point on it, diverse. Or incalculable, since Bitcoin is an entirely new kind of money.
“Bitcoin is politically neutral,” Gavin Andresen, the Chief Scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation, told me. “People love to put their own political values into it, and see them reflected in the Bitcoin system, and see how Bitcoin will help them achieve their political goals. Well, maybe? But as a technology person, I am actually a little skeptical of the extremes. So I don’t think Bitcoin is going to topple governments; I think governments are going to figure out how to tax it; even if the whole world were using Bitcoin, I think governments would still figure out how to make you pay your taxes.”
This seems certain to me, too. But there are many dueling agendas swarming all around this project, even now. I left the conference uncertain whether the potential benefits of Bitcoin can ever be tapped, because like everything else people invent, its potentialities, however great, are very liable to be swamped by the same lunacy, greed and incompetence that mess up all our other systems.
* * *
Bitcoin enthusiasts can be divided into three rough (and sometimes overlapping) categories:
• Geeks, who are irresistibly drawn to Bitcoin’s elegant and (apparently!) foolproof melding of software and network techniques to create trustworthy, spendable, savable money;
• Politically motivated participants, the motliest crew imaginable, cypherpunks, anarchists, libertarians, leftists and various disenchanted others, united solely in their opposition to the baroquely fucked-up monetary policies of modern nation-states;
• Speculators, who would just as soon be investing in coconut macaroons, if they thought there was a nickel to be got out of it.
This year’s dramatic runup in bitcoin prices—a bit under $120 today, on a fairly stable month-long plateau after a dramatic spike, and up from around $5 at this time last year—has vastly increased participation in the third category. Witness just a sampling of the Bitcoin venture and angel funds and investments announced in recent months: BitAngels, a new angel fund, raised over $12 million; Liberty City Ventures, $15 million; Union Square Ventures invested $5 million in Coinbase, a bitcoin wallet system; a $2 million-plus round for OpenCoin, developers of the new exchange, Ripple, with the participation of Andreesen Horowitz and Google Ventures; Founders Fund led a $2 million round for BitPay, a payment processor (Peter Thiel, who, as you may recall, made quite a lot of his zillions as a co-founder of the payment processor PayPal, is the creator of Founders Fund). None of these is a particularly large raise by Silicon Valley standards, but the total adds up to a significant and broad-based endorsement.
So in the last year, Bitcoin has gone from being a geeky, esoteric little project to become the subject of world news, of interest not only to the “investment community” but also to government regulators, whose involvement will likely alter the Bitcoin landscape in ways not yet foreseen. But all these developments are generally acknowledged among experts in the community to be inevitable preconditions to the wide adoption of Bitcoin.
* * *
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss of Facebook fame gave the conference’s keynote address. They recently told the Times that they have acquired about one percent of the existing bitcoins—somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000, or around $12 million at today’s rate of exchange. Separately, it appears, they are also investors in bitinstant, a platform for expediting the transfer of regular money into bitcoin.
The twins are as big, brawny and self-confident as one had been led to expect. Polished speakers they are not. They opened their PowerPoint with a slogan lifted from a refrigerator magnet they saw somewhere, a slogan often (and almost certainly wrongly) ascribed to former Apple pitchman Mohandas K. Gandhi (or “Ghandi,” in Winklevese):
“This is Ghandi, I hope everybody here knows who Ghandi is,” one of them said, bewilderingly, at the start of a narcoleptic speech entirely free of politics or cryptography, the single message of which was: “We’re a-gonna get rich, boys.”
The eye-popping irony of this opening scene—one of history’s most famous anti-materialists, hauled in with a spurious quote to lend a “socially conscious” or “revolutionary” gloss to the sentiments of the crassest profiteers going—was so poetically deranged that it cast a sort of psychedelic aura around the proceedings that lasted me all three days.
Anyhoo. Bitcoin! The shindig became less and less boring from the keynote onward, I must say. The whole conference generated a buzzing, crackling excitement throughout—the feeling of money about to be made. The crowd seemed to be wandering through a blizzard of business cards. Pin-drop silence for the panels and presentations—there were dozens of them, on alternative cryptocurrencies, regulatory matters, the long-term stability of the Bitcoin system, and so on, all over the map: crazy, or fantastic, or practical-sounding ideas presented by wonks, lunatics, lawyers, visionaries. (A lot of it is already available on YouTube.)
There was also an astrologer offering to divine the compatibility of your chart with that of Bitcoin (silly, really, since nobody knows where Bitcoin was born); a Bitcoin ATM; a screening of the trailer for an upcoming Bitcoin documentary. Lavish, nonstop conference catering buffets. Coffee and muffins, bagels and cookies for breakfast; pasta, salmon, grilled chicken and sirloin tips for lunch; fancy candy and energy bars, popsicles and ice cream in the afternoon; later, free booze, and the aforesaid vodka babes in hotpants and sky-high platforms dispensing their wares. Guys shaking hands, guys muttering excitedly on the phone, fielding pocketfuls of business cards, texting like mad.
And I do mean “guys.” Some 95% of those in attendance were men. The gender disparity made itself felt in a number of ways.
Several times, a familiar, catchy song filled the main hall: Swedish House Mafia’s “Don’t You Worry Child”—but with lyrics, I was enchanted to realize, about Bitcoin (!). “Just when the Cypriots were losing faith/That’s when I learned about the blockchain [...] Satoshi said/Don’t you worry don’t you worry child/Bitcoin has got a plan for you.” This was a “Zhou Tonged” song, and is easily outrunning a fusillade of takedown notices on YouTube and elsewhere. (The story of Zhou Tong is a long one, and wild.)
* * *
The venture crew arrived in San Jose with loafers freshly shined, counseling cooperation with the government agencies who have taken a sudden interest in Bitcoin this year, issuing new guidance for MSBs (“money services businesses”), and throwing a regulatory spanner in the works of Mt. Gox, currently the largest Bitcoin exchange. The good-boy attitude of the investor class sometimes doesn’t sit too well with the largely libertarian contingent that started the ball rolling for Bitcoin in its early days.
So far as the Feds are concerned, the recent takedown of private digital currency Liberty Reserve has frequently, and wrongly, been associated with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Run by “a former U.S. citizen and naturalized Costa Rican of Ukrainian origin” named Arthur Budovsky (he was pinched in Spain), Liberty Reserve currency wasn’t decentralized the way Bitcoin is, but was instead issued by the company itself, like a kind of scrip or IOU for dollars, gold or euros; a medium of exchange particularly suited to money laundering. Maybe this is my imagination failing me, but I can’t think of a good reason to pay to exchange regular currency for Liberty Reserve (or more to the point, to assume the substantial risks associated with entrusting money to Liberty Reserve itself, the sole authority over the currency) absent the need for total anonymity. The Liberty Reserve fiasco has, however, added another frisson to the ongoing regulatory nervousness around Bitcoin.
Libertarians, as I was after saying, generally dominated the Bitcoin conference; there was a lot of talk about the Free State Project, Ludwig von Mises (ho hum), and taxes. As you may have heard, these libertarians do not want to pay any taxes ever, because that is the perfect form of government. And if you are wondering how come no civilization in history ever managed to implement the perfect tax-free government before, that is just because you are an ignoramus who hasn’t heard of medieval Iceland. (Never you mind about Colorado Springs, several hundred of whose undertaxed residents, lacking an adequate fire department, lost their houses in a blaze of tax-free glory!)
Anyway, one libertarian group at the conference, whose attempt to found their own tax-free, “business-friendly” “country within a country” in Honduras was peskily foiled by Honduran citizens when they got wind of it, presented the news that they are making a new deal in an as-yet-unnamed country (waiting until the ink is dry, I guess). Then there is a group of seasteading types who are founding a business sea-cubator on a boat twelve miles from Silicon Valley (“outside the jurisdiction of the United States”) where they can hire all the cheap, H-1B-visa-less Chinese and Indian engineers they please. (Freedom!) For this purpose, they have already chartered the MS Island Escape. (Later I told my husband that this part of the show sounded like a giant Michael Crichton plot generator.)
Meanwhile, Internet Hall of Famer Brewster Kahle, freedom of information activist, co-founder of Alexa and founder and director of the Internet Archive (and the Wayback Machine), where employees may already elect to receive part of their salaries in bitcoin, is founding an Internet Credit Union: a splendid idea.
The roaring success of the M-Pesa system, a cellphone-based money transfer service founded in Kenya by Safaricom in 2007 and since exported to various African countries, India and Afghanistan, has not gone unnoticed by Bitcoin entrepreneurs. Many billions of the world’s “unbanked” people (a) have cellphones and (b) live in countries where fiscal corruption is rampant. Bitcoin is already easy to trade by phone using existing technologies outside the banking system, and despite some very wild blips in the exchange rate against USD and Euros, Bitcoin is actually more stable than a number of existing fiat currencies. It’s logical to suppose that countries whose banking systems and native currencies are the least stable are the most natural markets for the adoption of Bitcoin. There appears to be a ton of entrepreneurial activity in this area.
There’s so much more, I can barely scratch the surface. Such as, the highly credible analysis indicating that nearly 10% of the world’s Bitcoins have been stashed and never spent by Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s mysterious founder(s) (worth maybe $150 million at today’s rates). Or the stream of wild-eyed grad students who interrogated Erik Voorhees of SatoshiDice and bitinstant after his presentation, especially the guy who asked him about “the teleos of Christ.” Voorhees is this geekily elegant libertarian who waxed all rhapsodic about Bitcoin and how terrible governments are, etc. (He totally fooled me for a second by claiming to be a democrat, so deadpan is he.)
The libertarian, I have come to find, is naive in his own special way: for example, Voorhees said, “I trust profit seekers more than I do a politician, I think the incentives are better.” Oh, LOLs. They get fed up with those guys on the online Bitcoin Forum, too (much the best place, by the way, to learn about Bitcoin): “Oh spare me the libertarian bible thumping.”
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After the conference, I was tempted to characterize the Winklevoss speech as the paradigm of Bitcoinmania as it currently stands: a good idea, maybe even a great one, in the process of being misunderstood and misappropriated—perhaps fatally so—by a gang of clueless would-be plutocrats for their own ends. And yet. Experts and leaders in the Bitcoin community appear to be entirely unfazed by these and other dodgy-looking recent developments. They have placed their trust in the original design of Bitcoin, which they believe will be resilient enough to withstand whatever governments, ideologues and rent-seeking entrepreneurs can throw at it.
It is troubling—to me, at any rate—that Bitcoin is so widely seen as a path to personal wealth rather than a path to global economic fairness. A lot of Bitcoin entrepreneurs will tell you that it’s possible, and healthy, to seek those goals simultaneously; but it’s very easy to see which imperatives will prevail, should a conflict emerge.
I asked a number of people about this, and they all answered roughly the same way. But Mike Caldwell of Casascius—manufacturer of physical embodiments of Bitcoins!—put it best, I thought:
“The price of Bitcoins may go down if people break laws, if bad things happen. I don’t plan on breaking any laws, though, and I would certainly hope that regardless of what other people choose to do—break the law or go against the interest of the government that they live in—perhaps they’ll be held accountable for their own actions. And those of us who just want to use it to promote liberty and privacy can continue to do that, and not be bothered.”
Maria Bustillos is a Los Angeles-based journalist and critic.
Distribution of train lines around the world
This story falls into the unusual but persistent overlap between pedestrian advocacy and vandalism. In Vallejo, California, last week, one man saw the need for a crosswalk at a dangerous intersection, and decided it was his job to make it happen.
Antonio Cardenas got arrested for trying to keep his community safe. Photo: NewsTimes
Anthony Cardenas, 52, grabbed some white paint and got to work at dawn to create his own makeshift crosswalk at the intersection of Sonoma Boulevard and Illinois Street. And he did a pretty decent job, according to the news photos. Maybe the geometry wasn’t perfect, but Cardenas definitely got his point across. And then he got cuffed.
Acting on a tip from a witness, police found Cardenas in his home last Thursday, where the retired U.S. Marine freely admitted to his paint job and explained that his goal was public safety. The cops placed him in the Solano County Jail with a $15,000 bail. As one officer told KTVU, the rogue crosswalk qualifies as vandalism.
Cardenas still faces felony charges. A Streetsblog reader forwarded a statement from the Solano County district attorney, who said the case is under review and Cardenas will be arraigned later.
But it hasn’t turned out all bad for him. An anonymous donor bailed him out of jail and he got a hero’s welcome once he got home, with neighbors hooting in support and TV news crews heaping attention on his cause.
A bandana-masked Cardenas told reporters he was simply trying to make the intersection safer after witnessing several crashes and almost getting hit a couple of times himself. “I got tired of seeing people get run over here all the time,” Cardenas told CBS Sacramento. He said he’d tried to voice his concerns before to public officials, to no avail.
Many neighbors who spoke to the press supported Cardenas and agreed that the intersection – four lanes and “easy for drivers to barrel through” according to the KTVU video – is a real hazard for pedestrians. “All you see is accidents, all day long,” one woman said. Neighbors also say the DIY crosswalk was getting a lot of use before authorities caught wind of it. Vallejo police dispute that collisions are common there, saying none have been reported.
According to KVTU, Caltrans will “grind and repave [the] intersection to erase any remnants” of Cardenas’ paint job, and has no plans to put in a permanent crosswalk.
This isn’t the first time Cardenas has painted a guerrilla crosswalk. He told reporters that after his first attempt painting markings at the same spot about a year ago, he hid out in LA for a while to evade arrest. But he doesn’t plan to try again. “This is not worth it,” Cardenas told the Times-Herald. “Even though I hate for people to be hit … I am not going to pursue this.”
Logan’s been paying a few visits to a check cashing store lately, and one of our readers directed us to this radio story from 99% Invisible, “a tiny radio show about design.” The segment addresses why check cashing stores are designed to specifically not look like banks:
3 CommentsMCGRAY: One of the most important things, maybe the most important things at this chain of check cashes, and you’ll see them at a lot of them, there was a big list of prices on the wall. And it was all really straightforward. And the prices for the most part, the prices were too high, but you weren’t going to wonder what something was going to cost. You weren’t going to wonder what they could do for you. And when I talked to people who chose to go to check cashers, a lot of them had had a bank at one point, they had signed up for a free checking account, but then all of a sudden they had these fees, and they would like read these statements that were pages long and they couldn’t figure out why they were getting charged what they were getting charged.
If you’re looking for an example of how government can help people and businesses by spending money and making stuff happen for them (aka socialism), you could do a lot worse than the Tennessee Valley Authority. Created in 1933 by a Democratic Congress and enthusiastically executed by American Zeus Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the TVA was transformative for people living in one of the country’s shittiest regions during one of the country’s shittiest times, where everyone had malaria and nobody knew how to farm and nobody had the electrick zoom juice, even. So the TVA fixed all that (pretty much) and then decided to keep hanging around and being awesome to this very day. It’s still run by Uncle Sam and still sells electricity to about 9 million customers without costing a cent in taxes. In fact, the company generates hundreds of millions of dollars of tax-equivalent revenue each year! So obviously our right-wing President Barack Obama has proposed selling off the TVA to the private sector in his 2014 budget proposal, and the socialist Republicans in Congress are hell-bent on stopping him!
We are pretty sure this is one of those times when our prankster-in-chief is just punking Republicans by being like, “Look I’ll propose something that is exactly the kind of thing you’re always howling for me to do, and you’ll reject it like awful toddlers and Wonkette will have a good laugh about it, cool?” And Republicans are like “Yes it is awesome when you make us look like hypocritical children because nobody actually notices and nothing ever changes except more people just start hating “government” and how we “fight” all the time, so by all means, propose away!” It’s win-win, you see.
So who are these socialistic Republicans, and why do they love socialism so much?
federal energy statistics show Alabamans and Tennesseans pay considerably less for power than the national average—earning TVA “the ‘mother love’ of a politically conservative region,” according to former TVA Chairman S. David Freeman.
That would explain why free-marketers like Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee) called Obama’s proposal “one more bad idea in a budget full of bad ideas,” saying privatization could lead to higher energy costs for his constituents.
Similar reservations have been expressed by Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) and Representative John Duncan, Jr. (R-Tennessee), who was quoted as saying that privatization is “something that has been proposed in the past and been determined to be a very bad idea.”
What, the government is providing a public good at a lower cost than the private sector!? IMPEACH etc. (Now you know how welfare-slashing, Social Security-privatizing, anti-Obamacare, anti-stimulus (usually) Republicans are able to retain the support of at least 50% +1 of their constituents: Big-picture purity combined with local-issue hypocrisy. Oh, you were not born yesterday, and you know that already? Then go read a book or something, see if we care. Or perhaps this lovely TVA factbook!)
[allgov]
Steven Soderbergh's celebrated new movie about Liberace, "Behind the Candelabra," tells the story of the flamboyant pianist's deeply closeted personal life, and his troubled 1970s love affair with a personal assistant.
Although it may now seem hard to believe, Liberace was a sex symbol for women --- not for nothing did the Chordettes, in their 1954 hit "Mr. Sandman," wish for a boy with "lots of wavy hair like Liberace."
Liberace, then 44, was booked into the Holiday House for 16 days. His first show was scheduled for Nov. 22, 1963.
But the sweet-smelling chemical also could cause people to get light-headed and pass out. (The Ramones' song "Carbona Not Glue" --- about huffing cleaning fluid to get high --- demonstrates that people knew carbon tet was powerful stuff.)
But up on stage, Liberace was smiling and joking only with great difficulty. After his first number, he remembered later, the room began spinning. Halfway through the performance, he was seriously nauseated.
True to his image as a lover of jewelry, furs and other gaudy trappings, Liberace used what he thought were his final hours to go on a shopping spree. He opened charge accounts at New York's finest stores --- including Saks and Tiffany's --- and ordered lavish gifts for friends and families.
The first patient in Pittsburgh to be treated with dialysis was Barbara Porr of Pittsburgh's North Side, who in March 1951 went into acute kidney failure after accidentally swallowing several tablets of disinfectant. Her life was saved with a dialyzer built by Allis-Chalmers --- a company better known for building farm equipment, and (ironically enough) based in Liberace's home town of West Allis, Wis.
But he never forgot St. Francis General Hospital. Although the hospital had hoped that Liberace would donate a substantial amount of money --- there is no evidence that he ever did --- Liberace did make personal appearances on behalf of St. Francis, and he supported its fundraisers and supplied its nuns with free tickets to his shows.
Fascination bleeds into fixation in this wonderful ongoing series of illustrations by a graphic designer who enjoys the nuances of fenestration in his favorite city.
Each piece in the series specifies not only the neighborhood (Hell’s Kitchen, West Village, East Village, Lower East Side, Alphabet City, SOHO, Williamsburg and more) but the actual address so truly curious fans can map out routes to find the source material.
From creator Jose Guizar, “The Windows of New York project is a weekly illustrated fix for an obsession that has increasingly grown in me since chance put me in this town. A product of countless steps of journey through the city streets, this is a collection of windows that somehow have caught my restless eye out from the never-ending buzz of the city. This project is part an ode to architecture and part a self-challenge to never stop looking up.”
There is a consistency to the visual language (from shapes to color palette) employed in each piece, which only serves to highlight the surprise differences between the various windows featured. Hacks and modifications make their way into the images as well, from protective metal grating and air conditioners to window-hanging flower boxes and curious cats. Even former windows, now filled in with bricks, or covered by doors, are candidates.
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At its height in the early Twentieth Century, the British Empire spanned a fourth of the world. That is why it was said that the sun never set on the Empire: it was always sunny in at least one part of Britain's possessions.
Except for a few Overseas Territories--mostly small islands--Britain has departed from its empire. Can it still be said that the sun never sets on it? According to Randall Munroe of xkcd, yes.
The biggest daylight coverage is provided by the Pitcairn Islands in the south Pacific Ocean. Those islands will experience a solar eclipse in April of 2342. Will the sun finally set on Britain on that date, assuming that it retains its current territory? No:
Luckily for the Empire, the eclipse happens at a time when the Sun is over the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean. Those areas won't see a total eclipse; the Sun will even still be shining in London.
In fact, no total eclipse for the next thousand years will pass over the Pitcairn Islands at the right time of day to end the streak. If the UK keeps its current territories and borders, it can stretch out the daylight for a long, long time.
But not forever. Eventually—many millennia in the future—an eclipse will come for the island, and the Sun will finally set on the British Empire.
(Images: Probert Encyclopedia, Randall Munroe)
Before Alex, the owner of Neatorama, says no, let's look at the features of this workstation:
Quebec City-based MWE Lab boasts that the appropriately sci-fi sounding Emperor 1510 LX comes replete with futuristic amenities including a five-monitor stand mounted on a retractable “scorpion tail,” a Bose sound system, reclining Italian leather chair, and rotating base.
MWE Lab is also throwing in a cup holder, because no matter how advanced we become, mankind will never find anywhere else to put their drinks.
Imagine the blogging I could do from this baby! That's a worthwhile investment of $21,100.
(Photo: MWE Lab)
The political divisions of South Asia in 1947
This is how I envision the meetings that occurred around the Beechwood Blvd (Greenfield) Bridge
And then, not too much later…
And so what was once one of the most beautiful art deco bridges, and a grand entrance into Schenley Park has gone from this:
to this today:
As @MichaelReaUSA points out on Twitter, you can’t make this stuff up.
Incidentally they are finally planning on repairing this (by blowing it up and starting from scratch), next year. I’m sure that won’t be a nightmare at all.
