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I have always liked libraries, since I spend a whole summer in the British Library reading a massive ten volume translation of the Arabian Nights while at university. Having tried an office in Tribeca and appointing the cats as CTO and VP of marketing, working out of my apartment I am now basking in the marble and oak glory at desk 610 in the main reading room of the New York Public Library. Each desk space has an elegant bronze lamp and a brass plate with ethernet and power, where you can hook up your laptop and enjoy speedy Internet access for free. Adjacent Bryant park, one of Manhattan's best public spaces, also has very good free WiFi and Parisian style folding chairs on gravel paths.link » tags: [new_york] posted via Wists: permamark

Following on from the acquisition of Skype by Ebay, this weeks Economist leads with a prediction that everyone would have laughed at if it had been in Mondo 2000 ten years ago: 'the rise of Skype and other VOIP services means nothing less than the death of the traditional telephone business established over a century ago… the death of the trillion dollar voice telephony market… it is now no longer a question whether VOIP will wipe out traditional telephony, but a question of how quickly it will do so' What other sectors are toast: 2. Retail banking – retail banks are crap, expensive, lazy and complacent. Why do I have to mail pieces of paper that look like 19th century parchment 3000 miles to deposit virtual money via a building with travertine floors and 20 foot ceilings? 3. Photography – The number of art schools in Britain reflects the requirement…

This is from Time magazine: 'If a flood of Biblical proportions were to lay waste to New Orleans, Joe Suhayda has a good idea how it would happen. A Category 5 hurricane would come barreling out of the Gulf of Mexico. It would cause Lake Pontchartrain, north of New Orleans, to overflow, pouring down millions of gallons of water on the city. Then things would really get ugly. Evacuation routes would be blocked. Buildings would collapse. Chemicals and hazardous waste would dissolve, turning the floodwaters into a lethal soup. In the end, what was left of the city might not be worth saving. "There's concern it would essentially destroy New Orleans," says Suhayda.' Mark Schleifstein and John McQuaid quote Suhayda again, in a Weather Undergroud piece: "A catastrophic hurricane represents 10 or 15 atomic bombs in terms of the energy it releases…Think about it. New York lost two big buildings….

A potential perfect storm is brewing, just like all weather forecasting it's not 100% certain how big the storm is going to be, but despite what some conservatives say the risk is too great to avoid, and despite what some liberals say a storm buster may be available. Global warming, Global energy supply and Globalization – the free flow of energy, its availability and its effects – are changing on a global level, combining to produce a real threat to our everyday lives. Oil supply problems and the switch of industrial economies away from industry to services based economies are linked. Current oil prices are largely due to increased demand rather than supply problems. Service based economies are doing well because they are outsourcing production to cheaper industrializing economies like China but in doing so they have created a rival with a growing appetite for oil. One problem with the…

[This will be a new feature, if I can be bothered, a highly subjective news roundup with links to a few topical stories that have a different take on things or are quote worthy.] Beauty: Smart (apparently), good looking, eighty year old packs bags after losing all her money in gambling town: Miss America leaves Atlantic city “The 84-year-old Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey, which attracts the smartest and most beautiful women in America” and the Beast: Not so smart, not so pretty, 30 something loses some of her money in conservative town: Anne Coulter gets canned by Arizona paper because conservatives don’t like her “Many readers find her shrill, bombastic, and mean-spirited. And those are the words used by readers who identified themselves as conservatives” From (below) the Earth: Hollister Freelance asks what goes on in mind of an oil man who doesn’t believe in geology:…

Ben Trott, is clever and reasonable – and his piece on ping servers is a welcome antidote to idiots like me banging on about ping servers. I also think that for the larger publishers/providers, making an easily accessible update stream, as Sixapart are doing, is the right way forward. But this doesn't work for the multitude of individual sites. Secondly, Ben says: "Google and other search engines seem to do pretty well in keeping their indexes current, even though they don't receive any pings. And they're indexing billions of web sites, while there are only tens of millions of weblogs." Google don't allow search by date, except for news. With news search, they don't spider and index in the same way they do for ordinary websites, they harvest thousands of sites, not millions and they have to scrape headlines. Why should news or weblog search be architecturally different from ordinary…

Time magazine asks the question which is surely on some people's minds. Has Katrina got anything to do with global warming? The reality is probably not. But given that: 1. global warming is a reality; 2. that its early effects will not be sudden catastrophic failure of the environment but freak storms; 3. and that people clearly won't give a shit until its too late; – the responsible thing to do is to pretend that the Katrina storm has everything to do with global warming.link » tags: [global] [warming] posted via Wists: permamark

It is often taken as a given that the web is benign – that it allows the truth to emerge from an army of fact checkers. But what if, there was an inherent tendency for it to spread infectious and dangerous ideas. From conspiracy theory discussion groups to the spread of Islamic extremist ideas via the web, there is evidence that this may be the case. Remember the mysterious 'Piano Man' – found on a seashore, unable to speak, no identity, autistic genius who communicated only through his virtuoso piano skills? It was a story that reverberated around the blogosphere, in particular – could the power of the web unravel the mystery? Well, it seems that the truth is he could speak, was not autistic, could only play one note on the piano, and his identity has been revealed. The real explanation followed Occam's razor, being the most simple and…

There is definitely a tendency for certain people to despise wealth and consumption itself rather than its effects. There is no word for this that I know of, schadenfreude is close but not quite right- lets say armenfreude (poorhappy). The armenfreude are the people that like it when everyone can't drive fast cars and buy fancy goods, not really because it will damage the environment and squander resources, but because they possess that dour puritan streak that runs through Anglo-Saxon culture secretly wanting to pee on people's parades. This is the kick-off for Steven Levitt's attack on Peter Maas' piece on peak oil – that one should be skeptical of doomsayers – indeed. But then Levitt's single explanation of why peak oil is not a problem is that everything will be OK because markets are self correcting. I am no economist, but this looks like horseshit to me, it sounds…

Jeff Jarvis reports on the fact that Google are selling: 14,159,265 shares (the value of pi being 3.14159265…) There's a pun there somewhere – pi in the sky? After Om Malik's excellent piece on Google buying dark fiber, I wonder if their pie in the sky plan really is to fill it with ad supported free wireless. This would really make sense, pulling the rug from under Microsoft's feet by making the battle for the home page at a lower level than the desktop – Internet access itself.link » tags: [news] posted via Wists: permamark

The Olympics is obsessed with its identity and making money out of its brand. Except that its identity is entirely schizophrenic it can’t decide whether it is capitalist or socialist, and as such bears the hallmarks of party member vs citizens syndrome. Wannabe diplomat IOC members fly around the world drinking and eating indigenous food samplers and trampolining on 5 star hotel beds, to test them for Olympic springiness standards. Competitors sweat it out on the track and field and 2 star Olympic village barracks, to fight for a single gold coin to dangle round their neck. Words banned by the Olympics for brand infringement: Olympic motto: Citius, Altius, Fortius/Faster, Higher, Stronger, games, medals, gold, silver, bronze, 2012, sponsor, summer Words that could be posted by Bloggers to mess up search engine results: Shittius, Citius, Altius, Fortius, Faster, Higher, Stronger, more drugs, games, tired, old fashioned, medals, gold, embezzlement, silver,…

Genealogy is the second biggest hobby in the US after fishing, in terms of money spent. The size of this market and its rapid increase due to online Genealogy (like the startup I worked on before Moreover, Origins.net) has stimulated the use of mitochondrial and Y-chromosome tests to create family histories. What has long been suspected is now being shown – that a real number percentage of people's fathers are not who they think. This latest test (which is based on paternity claims data and therefore is high) suggests an incredible 4 percent. Even conservative estimates of illegitimacy rates suggest that if you trace your roots back over 100 years (not unusual for a genealogist), your family tree is probably inaccurate. link » tags: [news] [genealogy] posted via Wists: permamark