The basic thesis of Martin Gurri's The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millenium is that "the information technologies of the 21st century have enabled the public, composed of amateurs, people from nowhere, to break the power of the political hierarchies of the industrial age." The result has been "the mass extinction of stories of legitimacy". Gurri believes this informational meteor strike has caused the political upheaval we see around us.
I think Gurri is spot on.
P.S. The image is of Jupiter.
P.P.S. 'Homo narans' simply means 'man told'.
CLARICE MAYNE - I WAS A GOOD LITTLE GIRL TILL I MET YOU
I got a subscription to The Wall Street Journal care of some extra points on one of my wife's credit cards. This has happened to us before, I don't know exactly what the circumstances were, but for some reason our account has become inactive and we have accumulated some points, not nearly enough to buy an airline ticket, but the credit card company feels compelled to compensate us in some way, probably to avoid one of those annoying class action law suits, so they gave us a subscription to a magazine or a newspaper.
This time, in amongst the fluff and dross, was the WSJ. That was an easy choice. Some of their editorials and opinion pieces show the sophistication, erudition and critical thinking of Fred Flintstone, but most of the articles, even the ones about really obscure stuff, are generally pretty interesting, and a heck of lot better than the stuff that passes for news from most other sources.
I was complaining to a friend not too long ago about the dearth of good sources of information and he told me he subscribed to Financial Times(London). I don't know whether it's any better than the WSJ, but it's from London, which is on the wrong side of the pond. I'm an American, I'll stick with the WSJ, at least until somebody offers me a free subscription to their competitor.
I did read the Economist for a while, but it eventually became apparent that they were in somebody's pocket. They were pushing some kind of bullshit agenda that sounds like 'something cooked up by some first year sociology students while sipping $5 lattes'. (That's not an exact quote. I read it recently, but I can't remember where. It sure stuck with me. Probably because I remember being a stupid college student.)
Anyway, I come across a book review in the WSJ, and since it's about music, I ask Osmany if he has heard of any the artists mentioned, kind of a cross cultural check to see how much we have in common. The book under discussion is Love for Sale by David Hajdu. The review was written by Eddie Dean. Names dropped in the review:
-- Blondie - Debbie Harry
-- Donna Summer
+ Bee Gees
+ Monkees
-- Duke Ellington
-- Billy Strayhorn
-- Bruce Springsteen - E Street Shuffle & Born to Run
+ Earth, Wind and Fire - Shining Star
+ Beatles - Tell Me What You See
-- From the year 1914 - I Was a Good Girl Until I Met You
-- Cool Jerk - 1966 - The Capitols
-- Dave Van Ronk
+ Bob Dylan
+ James Taylor
-- Joanie Mitchell - Hejira
-- Foghat
I knew most of them, though 1914 was a little before my time. Osmany recognized about half the names (+). Not too surprising since, until recently, he has been in Latin America.
I monkeying around with the Go programming language and I need to raise number 10 to a low power like 1, 2 or 3. That's easy enough, but is there some library function already written that will do that? I mean part of learning a new programming language is learning what's in all the various libraries. So I go looking around and the general attitude seems to be that this is so simple you may as well write it yourself, unless you want to use the floating point routine, which is fine except you incur the extra overhead of floating point numbers.
But then somebody points out that Wikipedia has an article titled Exponentiation by Squaring which is a dozen or so screens of mathematical gibberish, and the somebody else points out that there is the Simple Wikipediawhich also has an article on the same subject and it is only one screenful. I like Simple Wikipedia. I use Wikipedia all the time. Mostly it doesn't give me any trouble, but sometimes it gets really deep, and sometimes that is too deep for me.
The technique is overkill for my problem, so I will just roll my own.
