1. Good urban archaeology blog, mostly photos.
2. Defense of NYT vs. Huffington.
3. Are personal services an area of future job growth?
4. How to improve AP economics.
5. Zizek on Peter Singer, Lenin, Schubert, and other things.
6. Markets in everything: sensorial tableware.
4. Right-wingers call for more right-wing curriculum.
1. The Divine Lorraine may be my favorite building in Philadelphia. That building is most likely barren inside. Salvaged architectural antiques, even salvaged building materials, are all the craze in the architecture/design biz. You go to any salvage house in Philadelphia, and they are littered with stuff from The Divine Lorraine. And that is just the stuff that they are allowed to or admit to coming from the building. You hear stories of break-ins and double crossing amongst the poachers. And, of course, just from a building services standpoint, all copper, metals,etc. has most likely been stripped and sold for scrap metal. It is just a deteriorating shell, which is very sad. However, North Broad St. is starting to show signs of revitalization. Maybe a brave developer will take on the challenge.
Re: #7. The mere fact that Szabo accepts the problems in education, transportation, and real estate is to accept the thesis of TGS. For most people these are the lion's share of expenditures — especially the working and upper middle classes. Throw in the slowdown in life expectancy improvements with high health costs and it would take a truly enormous gain from communications and the computer just to offset this. Consider that many middle class folk don't have cell phones and others don't want smart phones and would be happy to drive mint condition cars from the early 90s while still flying in airplanes marginally better than those from the 1980s. While many of the improvements/surplus from high tech aren't monetized (like online buying) so too have we not corrected for the costs of maintaining a particular lifestyle. If I pay a premium for a nice house with more traditional neighbors, low crime, good schools, and within easy distance of the big cities that were more readily available in the 1970s, we are over estimating the value of modern housing (even correcting for the gains from more rooms or better physical construction or better plumbing).
Item 3 was deleted by craigslist. What was it?
Link #1 is one of the best you've ever passed along. It has found a permanent home in my RSS.
I always feel stupid when reading Zizek.
No matter how hard I try, I can't grasp what he's saying. I've gotten through Butler, and she is relatively comprehensible. I always end up getting this sneaking suspicion that he's pulling one over on us, and his fusillade of words is just babble.
Then I realize the reason I feel stupid for reading him is that I've read him N times and each time ended up coming to that same conclusion, and I've wasted valuable time repeating the process for the (N+1)th time.
Žižek is entertaining, but unreliable. A typical Žižekism is his reference to "the declination of the Latin verbs"? One declines nouns, conjugates verbs. His account of Singer is wildly inaccurate. But the words do flow merrily along!
I found this on Paul Kedrosky's website and it seemed very thought provoking:
Extreme events on complex networks
Vimal Kishore, M. S. Santhanam, R. E. Amritkar
(Submitted on 9 Feb 2011)
http://arxiv.org/abs/1102.1789
We study the extreme events taking place on complex networks. The transport on networks is modelled using random walks and we compute the probability for the occurance [sic]and recurrence of extreme events on the network. We show that the nodes with smaller number of links are more prone to extreme events than the ones with larger number of links.
I passed by and checked out the archaeology blog there and I really enjoyed the blog. Thanks for the link. It is really amazing that photography does a lot nowadays.
re Huffington vs Times–Sixty years ago, when I was a little kid, I didn't understand why my dad read the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal. Neither had any comics.
Fifty years ago, when I was a big kid, I understood.
Tyler, what's the obsession with Zizek? Do you actually take what this clown says seriously??
@Gabriel
Why is Zizek a clown? He is a self-defined Marxist, so that may be where the issue lies, but he is more or less pretty wellrounded and intelligent.
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