ideometric

DO WANT. Shelby Daytona coupe reproduction.

Exxon’s profits were nearly $90,000 a minute over the quarter, but it was less than Wall Street had expected. Exxon’s shares fell 4.6 percent, to close at $80.43. (The company calculates that it pays $274,000 a minute in taxes and spends $884,000 a minute to run the business.)

NYT

Recent research also supports the hypothesis that health can be passed down through generations […]

A long-term study that included more than 100 years of birth, death, health and genealogical records for 300 Swedish families in an isolated village showed that an individual’s risk for diabetes and early death increased if his or her paternal grandparents grew up in times of food abundance rather than food shortage.

“Evidence indicates that what you eat can affect your grandchildren’s brain molecules and synapses,” Gómez-Pinilla said. “We are trying to find the molecular basis to explain this.”

Source

So, what does that bode for our obese, diabetes ridden, genetically modified food-eating, hormone and antibiotic fed meat-consuming, cheap corn-obsessed food culture? We’re already dooming ourselves with unsustainable energy, environmental, and industrial food/farming policies (etc). Are we in the process of creating deeper problems embedded in the genetic make-up of future generations as well?

http://ffffound.com/

This is the best time waster ever. (And occasionally inspiring).

Vanity Fair maps the blogosphere. Part of it, anyway.

Obama had an 11 page essay in Foreign Affairs’ July/Aug 2007 issue. Dig the cosmopolitan, democratic emphasis. (Here, behind pay-wall).

America cannot meet the threats of this century alone, and the world cannot meet them without America. We can neither retreat from the world nor try to bully it into submission. We must lead the world, by deed and by example.

Such leadership demands that we retrieve a fundamental insight of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy — one that is truer now than ever before: the security and well-being of each and every American depend on the security and well-being of those who live beyond our borders. The mission of the United States is to provide global leadership grounded in the understanding that the world shares a common security and a common humanity.

Graduating in a week, time to figure out what I want to read for fun! These sound good. SUGGESTIONS WELCOME, RANDOM INTERNET PEOPLE! I need more non-fiction.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler (nice, it’s available as a free PDF).

“In Benkler’s view, the new “networked information economy” allows individuals and groups to be more productive than profit-seeking ventures. New types of collaboration, such as Wikipedia or SETI@Home, “offer defined improvements in autonomy, democratic discourse, cultural creation, and justice”-as long as government regulation aimed at protecting old-school information monoliths (such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) doesn’t succeed.”

The Future of Life by Edward O. Wilson

“This volume, his manifesto to the public at large, is a meditation on the splendor of our biosphere and the dangers we pose to it. In graceful, expressive and vigorous prose, Wilson argues that the challenge of the new century will be “to raise the poor to a decent standard of living worldwide while preserving as much of the rest of life as possible.” For as America consumes and the Third World tries to keep up, we lose biological diversity at an alarming rate. But the “trajectory” of species loss depends on human choice. If current levels of consumption continue, half the planet’s remaining species will be gone by mid-century. Wilson argues that the “great dilemma of environmental reasoning” stems from the conflict between environmentalism and economics, between long-term and short-term values. Conservation, he writes, is necessary for our long-term health and prosperity.”

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

“…a cerebral page-turner that pits corporeal man against metaphysical sharks that devour memory and essence, not flesh and blood. When Eric Sanderson wakes from a lengthy unconsciousness, he has no memory. A letter from “The First Eric Sanderson” directs him to psychologist Dr. Randle, who tells Eric he is afflicted with a “dissociative condition.” Eric learns about his former life—specifically a glorious romance with girlfriend Clio Aames, who drowned three years earlier—and is soon on the run from the Ludovician, a “species of purely conceptual fish” that “feeds on human memories and the intrinsic sense of self.” Once he hooks up with Scout, a young woman on the run from her own metaphysical predator, the two trek through a subterranean labyrinth made of telephone directories (masses of words offer protection, as do Dictaphone recordings), decode encrypted communications and encounter a series of strange characters on the way to the big-bang showdown with the beast.

There’s echoes of Cyberpunk, Borges, Auster; there is adventure on the high seas, lost love, an exploration of what it means to be human in the age of intelligent machines. “

Grid Systems in Graphic Design

“A Visual Communication Manual for graphic designers, typographers and three dimensional designers. Considered by most to be the definitive book on grid systems. This book is a must for any designer. “

The Graphic Artist and his Design Problems

In this book, Josef Muller-Brockmann intends to show the nature and the meaning of the design elements in typography, drawing and photography in advertising. An important visual tool that will give open-minded designers a worthwhile survey of the fundamental problems of design.

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

“Murakami’s 12th work of fiction is darkly entertaining and more novella than novel. Taking place over seven hours of a Tokyo night, it intercuts three loosely related stories, linked by Murakami’s signature magical-realist absurd coincidences. When amateur trombonist and soon-to-be law student Tetsuya Takahashi walks into a late-night Denny’s…..”

And maybe these too:

• The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria
• Espresso Coffee: The Science of Quality - Andrea Illy
• The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World By John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan
• How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas By David Bornstein

I’m planning to build a cafe racer over the summer. This is an animated mock up I made. I took the photo of the stock bike and painted over it in photoshop to show what I want to do to it (bigger version here).

I think the bike will cost around $1500, plus another ~$500 to pick up a cafe style seat and new exhaust, etc.

With gas prices set to tick past $5/gallon, a 40+mpg bike sounds good to me.

Cold War era ekranoplans. Gotta love the Soviets.Check out 8:30 in, where they decide that adding missiles would be a good idea. Naturally.

Matthew Yglesias writes:

Ambinder says that Barack Obama’s fifty state voting drive is more than a voting drive: “On election day, Obama might have more than a million individuals volunteering on his behalf. That should scare the beejeesus out of the McCain campaign and the RNC.”

One incredibly interesting question is to what extent the organizing tools Obama has put to good use thus far in the campaign can be made to work as tools of governance that put pressure on congress and so forth.

The US State Department has a government take on Snopes.com called ‘Identifying Misinformation’.

Don’t ask me. It was on Youtube.

The ‘What’s in your bag’ tag on Flickr is filled with the intricate little details that people collect, consciously or unconsciously, as markers of identity. These are self-portraits for the camera shy.

It also shows how much high-tech/communications gear we carry around with us on a daily basis. Some of these people look like they’ve got a Radioshack in their backpack.