Category: linkstream

A running log of all the links/bookmarks I share.

The Motorist’s Identity Crisis

What are the social connotations of cycling? If you’re driving, and you see someone on a bike, are you more likely to think they’re a loser?  That they’re poor?  That they ride because they have no other choice?  Or will you be irritated by their smug sense of superiority?  Can the same drivers have both of these experiences?  They only make sense when the drivers themselves never ride.  When it’s us and them.  The connotations of cycling are changing, and I think that’s a good sign.

Egypt: The January 25 Uprising and Implications for U.S. Foreign Policy

Congressional Research Service report on the implications of the Egyptian revolution for US foreign policy (pdf).  Also has good background on the nature of our relationship with Egypt, including our ongoing aid package and political pressures.

UNDP Report on Arab States in 2002

A warning from the UN Development Project in 2002 describing the problems and frustrations of the Arab world.  Chief among them western support for their oppressive dictatorships.  It’s not like we didn’t know there was a problem here.  We just chose to ignore it.  America FTW!

UNEP Green Cities Report

UN say cities are green, need to be greener (pdf).  Cities provide higher standards of living, and more economic opportunity with less energy, materials, and land use.  They house 50% of the world’s people, but account for 60-75% of the world’s emissions, not because they’re inefficient, but because city dwellers are disproportionately rich.  Interesting data points: Tokyo and Paris dwellers emit half as much carbon as New Yorkers or Londoners.  São Paulo is as rich as Mexico City but with 1/3 the emissions.  Delhi is 1/3 as rich as São Paulo, but with the same emissions.

Leveraging digital design in synthetic biology

Automatic Design of Digital Synthetic Gene Circuits from PLoS Computational Biology.  They seem to be saying look, real biology isn’t generally digital, and all that continuum behavior means we need a bunch of new and complex tools to do anything with it.  However, there are plenty of instances of pseudo-digital biological control systems, and we’ve already got a gigantic toolbox from EE/VLSI world for building very complex digital circuits, so why not limit ourselves to using an artificially digitized subset of biology so we can leverage the existing design tools, and see how far we get?  Weird to think of this particular kind of very intimate digitization of life.  Talk about historical effects.  What would our post-dark-age descendants think, rediscovering a strange class of metabolic networks, in which everything is binary?

Pedestrianization Done Right

A post from David Hembrow in the Netherlands on what it takes to make pedestrianized spaces work by examining a new living/shopping development in Assen.  Make it clear that pedestrians have right of way over everyone, but make it easily accessible to bikes.  However, ensure that it isn’t a throughfare for bikes — only cyclists actually coming to the place as a destination should be there.  If you exclude both bikes and cars from the space, then you decrease the relative attractiveness of cycling unnecessarily, encouraging people to drive.

The Missing Wikipedians

An interesting analysis of the cultural biases of the Wikipedia.  As participation by the developing world increases, we need to come up with a better way of assessing “notability”.  Especially with English, shared language is not shared culture or context.  We in the west may see Kenyan pop cultural references as unworthy of note… but that’s not how they see it!  Personally I’d rather see it become a truly global repository of knowledge.  The less insular we are, the better.

Anki: intelligent digital flashcards

Aaron recently pointed me at Anki, an open-source flashcard system.  I’m using it to refresh my Spanish language skills, but it’s a very generalized system that one can use to remember just about anything.  You create linked “facts” (n-sided flash cards) and study them on your desktop, the web, or even a phone.  It reduces the overhead in studying a lot, and there are thousands of “shared” decks of flashcards you can use or build on.

The Rise of the New Global Elite

A nice long-form piece from The Atlantic on the phenomenon and dangers of the New Plutocrats… not just Lloyd Blankfein and his parasitic bankster ilk, but nearly everyone who stands at the so-called Commanding Heights of industry, including productive innovators.  The developed world was all to hot to globalize the economy when we thought we’d always stay on top.  But that was ridiculous of course.  Now “on top” is just a few people scattered all over, and most of us will slide toward the very large bottom if we’re not careful.