http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/congresss-first-act-was-to-declare-war-on-math.html

And am impressed with his relevance. How familiar does this sound, in his intro to Part Two about the Industrial Revolution:

“Nowhere has liberal philosophy failed so conspicuously as in the understanding of the problem of change. Fired by an emotional faith in spontaneity, the common-sense attitude toward change was discarded in favor of a mystical readiness to accept the social consequences of economic improvement, whatever they might be. The elementary truths of political science and statecraft were first discredited then forgotten. It should need no elaboration that a process of undirected change, the pace of which is deemed too fast, should be slowed down, if possible, so as to safeguard the welfare of the community. Such household truths of traditional statesmanship, often merely reflecting the teachings of a social philosophy inherited from the ancients, were in the nineteenth century erased from the thoughts of the educated by the corrosive of a crude utilitarianism combined with an uncritical reliance on the alleged self-healing virtues of unconscious growth.”

The guy has incredible mastery with analog gadgetry

Google euthanized the Auckland Cat. It wasn’t me, I swear.

Dave Winer nails it for the open self-propelled internet.

From entry # 51 on my reddit today: “Why We Should Give Free Money to Everyone”, a riff on the goodness of basic income.

From entry # 55, “2040’s America will be like 1840’s Britain, with robots?”, a despairing look at how AI will put us all out of work.

But: put the two ideas together, solution.  Automation makes the cost of making things lower, so more money generated.  Basic Income decouples the money you need to live from paid work.  We’re wealthy enough now to start a basic income scheme, and the cheaper things get to make the more our basic income provides.  Won’t be long ’til we’re all doing the Green Mars thing, working on what we’re good at and what interests us, and living on the shared wealth.  We’ve talked about this before on this blog.

Funny how those two complementary ideas ended up next to one another in my reddit feed.

Seeking a Level Playing Field. Serious discussion of issues relevant to both women, and women in general, and all of us in the universal. But relegated to the Style section, NYT? Really?

Networked Music Review.

Looking forward to spelunking through their archives.

For anyone else who’s run into this: the latest TastyPie assumes you’re running Django with built-in migrations. If you’re not (like me), you’ll get an error

from django.db import models, migrations
ImportError: cannot import name migrations

Simple fix: in /lib/python2.7/site-packages/tastypie/, rename “migrations” to something else (I used “django_migrations”) and “south_migrations” to “migrations”.

13 Principles Week of Action: Secret Law is Not Law | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Oh, right. If it’s a “law”, we need to be able to know about it and understand it. Otherwise, as the author says, it’s law as in Kafka’s “The Trial”.