*Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization, Western lifestyle or European civilization is a term used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, belief systems, political systems, and specific artifacts and technologies that have some origin or association with Europe, having both indigenous and foreign origin. The term has come to be applied by people of European ethnicity to countries whose history is strongly marked by European immigration, colonisation, and influence, such as the continents of the Americas and Australasia, whose current demographic majority is of European ethnicity, and is not restricted to the continent of Europe. (more)

aka in your Own Private Idaho http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Own+private+Idaho. (more)

see War On Iraq (more)

where people go to escape a BigGov? (more)

For that Presidential Election (more)

Wouldn't it be lovely to use Web Services? (more)

Taylor Pearson on AntiFragile Planning: Optimizing for Optionality (without Chasing Shiny Objects) (more)

A lot of software teams rely very heavily on human QA testing still. (more)

*In economics, the invisible hand is a metaphor used by Adam Smith to describe unintended social benefits resulting from individual actions. The phrase is employed by Smith with respect to income distribution (1759) and production (1776). The exact phrase is used just three times in Smith's writings, but has come to capture his notion that individuals' efforts to pursue their own interest may frequently benefit society more than if their actions were directly intending to benefit society. Smith may have come up with the two meanings of the phrase from Richard Cantillon who developed both economic applications in his model of the isolated estate.[1] (more)

when members of a team stop thinking (more)

A Photo Voltaic power station, also known as a solar park, is a large-scale photovoltaic system (PV system) designed for the supply of merchant Solar Power into the electricity grid. They are differentiated from most building-mounted and other decentralised solar power applications because they supply power at the Electric Utility level, rather than to a local user or users. They are sometimes also referred to as solar farms or solar ranches, especially when sited in agricultural areas. The generic expression utility-scale solar is sometimes used to describe this type of project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaic_power_station (more)

Bob Stein (IFBook) gives his macro current thinking on the EBook future (Information Ecosystem Roadmap). I haven't published anything for nearly twelve years because, frankly, I didn't have a model that made any sense to me. (more)

David Skinner on critique of the Systems of Educating Kids from the Liberal direction: Ivan Illich, Paul Goodman, BillAyers, Marshall McLuhan, Charles Reich. History has not been kind to Illich or Goodman. Diane Ravitch dismissed their work in her history of School Reform, The TroubledCrusade, as a literary sensation... Yet many of Illich’s and Goodman’s arguments foreshadowed criticism later taken up by School Choice advocates on the Right.

The solar power tower, also known as 'central tower' power plants or 'heliostat' power plants or power towers, is a type of solar furnace using a tower to receive the focused sunlight. It uses an array of flat, movable mirrors (called heliostats) to focus the sun's rays upon a collector tower (the target). Concentrated solar thermal is seen as one viable solution for renewable, pollution-free energy. Early designs used these focused rays to heat water, and used the resulting steam to power a turbine. Newer designs using liquid sodium have been demonstrated, and systems using molten salts (40% potassium nitrate, 60% sodium nitrate) as the working fluids are now in operation. These working fluids have high heat capacity, which can be used to store the energy before using it to boil water to drive turbines. These designs also allow power to be generated when the sun is not shining. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower (more)

Paul Romer gave a talk at TED-Global about his Charter City concept. The video is online now. He's trying to encourage creation of cities like Hong Kong and the Special Economic Zone-s in China. Urbanization without Slum creation? Trying to get Urban Design right in advance (Big Design Up Front)? (more)

aka PV (more)

believer in Marxism/Karl Marx

Alan Moore interview on both Anarchism and Magick. This is one of the things about anarchy: if we were to take out all the leaders tomorrow, and put them up against a wall and shoot them— and it’s a lovely thought, so let me just dwell on that for a moment before I dismiss it—but if we were to do that, society would probably collapse, because the majority of people have had thousands of years of being conditioned to depend upon leadership from a source outside themselves. That has become a crutch to an awful lot of people, and if you were to simply kick it away, then those people would simply fall over and take society with them. In order for any workable and realistic state of anarchy to be achieved, you will obviously have to educate people—and educate them massively—towards a state where they could actually take responsibility for their own actions and simultaneously be aware that they are acting in a wider group: that they must allow other people within that group to take responsibility for their own actions. Which on a small scale, as it works in families or in groups of friends, doesn’t seem to be that implausible, but it would take an awful lot of education to get people to think about living their lives in that way. And obviously, no government, no state, is ever going to educate people to the point where the state itself would become irrelevant. So if people are going to be educated to the point where they can take responsibility for their own laws and their own actions and become, to my mind, fully actualized human beings, then it will have to come from some source other than the state or government. (Agency) (more)

Matt Haughey criticizes WikiEngines after his experience in making one pretty (2003-09-04-HaugheyPrettyWiki). I know this might mean a wiki could have 20 different templates, but them's the brakes, and people would prefer the flexibility and control over their look and feel. Repeat after me: a Wiki is not a CMS (Wiki As CMS). (But it's a reasonable critique re Spreading Wikiweblog.)

Emily Eakin on the Creative Class (members of The Craft? not necessarily) model of Richard Florida. "You cannot get a technologically innovative place unless it's open to weirdness, eccentricity and difference." As the article notes, this group was identified decades ago. NYC placed 9th on his index: I think per-capital measures are biased against huge cities - I think there's a need to hit a critical mass of a group, but that's in either portion-of-population or in raw numbers. Robert Cushing was hired by the Austin American-Statesman to test various models. (See series and list of researchers.) He found the creative model performed better than the Robert Putnam Social Capital model (see rebuttal by Putnam) and the Edward Glaeser Human Capital model. But his summary of the human-capital problem seems lame: "There are more than 100 university communities, and only 20 cities stand out as places in which it would appear that high-tech development (Silicon Valley) is quite outstanding." Do all 100 of those universities have strong tech departments, or are some of them fuzzy Lit-Crit towns? The latter would probably have a negative economic outcome ("oh, why bother excelling, it's just a social construct"). Can't find enough detail yet. But his points about cities which fail to embrance the Creative Class seems to echo my Two Economies concerns.