dmarusic16

My point is that it’s precisely the wrong frame. And indeed, you make my point for me: we can do better than “hope”.

I’m certainly neither arguing for not looking at the past, nor for doing nothing. I’m suggesting that the universalist language of the founding, and then subsequently the brilliant rhetoric of Lincoln trying to knit together a country wrecked by Civil War, is not helpful. Elevating actual monstrosities to a religious plane leads to lots of handwringing about “atonement” and “repentance”, a lot of which ends up easy to dismiss by those less sold on the metaphor. Instead, sober discussion about the realities of race today, and even more importantly how those play out along class—an underdeveloped subject among most Americans—would be welcome.

America is a country, not a project of universal human redemption. Countries do horrible things at times, yes. And these things should be studied. But it’s high time we abandon the gauzy religious rhetoric (“original sin”) when we talk about the United States. It’s a hangover from Lincoln’s rhetoric, and in many ways it’s not healthy, as it prevents us from taking concrete steps to fix concrete problems.

Polar looks great! Just the kind of service I’m looking for. (Hope an iPad/tablet version is in the offing alongside mobile.)

Maybe I was reading too far into your statement. But in general terms, politics (and conflict in general) stems from a struggle over the power to allocate scarce resources towards conflicting conceptions of what is “good” or “deserving”. Often times, statements against privileging your own group to the detriment of others—and I concede you didn’t make that case directly, but I’ve often seen your comparison invoked in such arguments—implicitly assumes that politics, too, should be transcended. There is a sentiment that politics is a vestige of irrationality, and that if everyone was properly educated and could see the greater good, they would necessarily favor that over parochial group interests.

Are politics becoming outdated, in your opinion, too?

I can’t judge if the claptrap he quotes the geniuses spouting is effective, but the author’s screed sounds like a classic American snake oil salesman pitch.

One reason Europeans tend to misunderstand America is that they come from comparatively more homogeneous and therefore higher trust societies. America is overall better at integrating immigrants, but a solidarity deficit remains. Result: we don't get the nice socialized benefits. It's not the government as much as the polity.

So much credit goes to Villeneuve, who elevates scripts that could easily go wrong into works of art. See Sicario if you haven't, for example—a script that would have been a pedestrian drug war film in lesser hands.

Also: Consider the source. Sputnik is unreliable and Kremlin-controlled, and whatever analysis they cook up is usually FUD.

Yeah, that's very much not what the World Bank is about.

Holy Christ, I had no idea this existed. Awesome.

Not true: Mike Bostock's stuff is all over the NYT website very frequently. He and Jeremy Ashkenas seem to be key players over there. Very inspiring work from both of them.

Works great with d3.js too. Couldn't've made this map of the early days of the Ukraine crisis[0] without Natural Earth.

Also helpful to that end: the Global Administrative Areas[1] database.

Finally, it would've been impossible to even start getting my head around how to go about these things if it wasn't for this amazing tutorial by Mike Bostock[2].

[0] http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/03/03/the-noo...

[1] http://www.gadm.org

[2] http://bost.ocks.org/mike/map/

At the same time, D3 makes all sorts of smart decisions for you when you're making charts with it. I'm always pleasantly surprised, for example, by how D3 picks just the right number of tick marks on axes. Mike Bostock has taste and deep knowledge of how to make good visualizations, and it shows. A similar library made by a less able person would barf out way uglier charts.

This. I'll get properly excited when I see battery life for these things. I suspect there's an ugly surprise lurking there. Already that Moto looks ever so slightly too thick for me to not care. Now watch when it gets 4 hours of battery life.

You couldn't be more wrong.

My favorite thing about the demo video is how its completely bereft of ads. That probably won't be the case in practice—at least not for long.

Except I think the author has this wrong: it won't be "Air" but "Pro", and will be thicker than the Air and more expensive.

Capitalism in the sense you're using it isn't exactly a 'political philosophy'. Manufacture and trade is how human beings organize themselves and interact. If you're not taking that into account as you tackle the problem of a heating planet, you're bound to run into a brick wall.

I know it's sort of orthogonal to the point Schneier is making, but to my mind, many of his suppositions relating to Syria are off. I don't think doing preventative strikes even if we knew Assad was about to gas hundreds of civilians were on the table. That logic--prevention--was used in Libya and it has rightly fallen out of favor with the Obama administration, mostly because Libya has proven to be a real shit-show. In any case, attacking before a crime is committed is a dangerous precedent to set on the world stage, a recipe for perpetual war.

The limits of intelligence are real, but the Syria example is not the best one to use to illustrate the point.

I absolutely loved the first edition, and I will be chipping in. Great work Marijn.

That's right. Internet utopians need to come to terms with the idea that the world is and always will be a cruel jungle. There is emphatically no fix for this. All of human history is testament to this cold, sad fact.

Nope. Newspapers working with leaked documents like this usually give governments a heads-up that they will be running such and such a story and they ask for input on what should or shouldn't get published. They then take that into consideration.

It's why I'm liking the Stanford Algorithms course[1] being taught by Tim Roughgarden: it's all pseudocode. I thought about taking the Princeton one being taught by Bob Sedgewick (author of the book you're linking to), but I don't really know Java very well and don't have a pressing need to learn it right away. The pseudocode approach has so far been great to get this self-taught programmer thinking at a higher level.

[1] https://class.coursera.org/algo-004/

Looks like nice execution and everything, but guys, I have to ask, is Wordpress really that hard to set up? Copying Medium's theme shouldn't be THAT much work...

As a web designer, I despair of users upping the font size and screwing up the words-per-line. Which is why I like Safari's iOS-like pinch-zoom feature. I do wish all browsers would move in that direction and in the end disallow users to arbitrarily up font sizes.

That said, crazygringo's point is valid insofar as people do up their font sizes as a matter of course.

D3 is so very cool. And this is beautifully executed.

The Economist had a great article on this the other week: http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21582282-pension...

Malcolm Gladwell is a fool. Curtis is better, though far from flawless.