Essentials
theDiagonal is a personal blog by Mike Gerra, skeptic, technologist, psychologist, artist, humanist, collector of grand, eclectic ideas.theDiagonal blog connects the dots across multiple disciplines for inquisitive, objective and critical thinkers, exploring the vertices of big science, disruptive innovation, global sustainability, illuminating literature and leftfield art. It is on this diagonal that creativity thrives, big ideas take flight and reason triumphs.
Monthly Archives: October 2011
Monday, October 31, 2011
The Middleman is Dead; Long Live the Middleman
In another sign of Amazon’s unquenchable thirst for all things commerce, the company is now moving more aggressively into publishing.
From the New York Times:
Amazon.com has taught readers that they do not need bookstores. Now it is encouraging writers to cast aside their publishers.
Amazon will publish 122 books this fall in an array of genres, in both physical and e-book form. It is a striking acceleration of the retailer’s fledging publishing program that will place Amazon squarely in competition with the New York houses that are also its most prominent suppliers.
It has set up a flagship line run by a publishing veteran, Laurence Kirshbaum, to bring out brand-name fiction and nonfiction. It signed its first deal with the self-help author Tim Ferriss. Last week it announced a memoir by the actress and director Penny Marshall, for which it paid $800,000, a person with direct knowledge of the deal said.
...read moreSunday, October 30, 2011
The World Wide Web of Terrorism
From Eurozine:
There are clear signs that Internet-radicalization was behind the terrorism of Anders Behring Breivik. Though most research on this points to jihadism, it can teach us a lot about how Internet-radicalization of all kinds can be fought.
On 21 September 2010, Interpol released a press statement on their homepage warning against extremist websites. They pointed out that this is a global threat and that ever more terrorist groups use the Internet to radicalize young people.
“Terrorist recruiters exploit the web to their full advantage as they target young, middle class vulnerable individuals who are usually not on the radar of law enforcement”, said Secretary General Ronald K. Noble. He continued: “The threat is global; it is virtual; and it is on our doorsteps. It is a global threat that only international police networks can fully address.”
...read moreSaturday, October 29, 2011
Corporations As People And the Threat to Truth
In 2010 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations can be treated as people, assigning companies First Amendment rights under the Constitution. So, it’s probably only a matter of time before a real person legally marries (and divorces) a corporation. And, we’re probably not too far from a future where an American corporate CEO can take the life of competing company’s boss and “rightfully” declare that it was in competitive self-defense.
In the meantime, the growing, and much needed, debate over corporate power, corporate responsibility and corporate consciousness rolls on. A timely opinion by Gary Gutting over at the New York Times, gives us more on which to chew.
From the New York Times:
Friday, October 28, 2011
The Myth of Bottled Water
In 2010 the world spent around $50 Billion on bottled water, with over a third accounted for by the United States alone. During this period the United States House of Representatives spent $860,000 on bottled water for its 435 members. This is close to $2,000 per person per year. (Figures according to Corporate Accountability International).
This is despite the fact that on average bottled water costs around 1,900 times more than it’s cheaper, less glamorous sibling — tap water. Bottled water has become a truly big business even though science shows no discernible benefit of bottled water over that from the faucet. In fact, around 40 percent of bottled water comes from municipal water supplies anyway.
In 2007 Charles Fishman wrote a ground-breaking cover story on the bottled water industry for Fast Company. We excerpt part of the article, Message in a Bottle, below.
By Charles Fishman:
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Brokering the Cloud
Computer hardware reached (or plummeted, depending upon your viewpoint) the level of commodity a while ago. And of course, some types of operating systems platforms, and software and applications have followed suit recently — think Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). So, it should come as no surprise to see new services arise that try to match supply and demand, and profit in the process. Welcome to the “cloud brokerage”.
From MIT Technology Review:
Cloud computing has already made accessing computer power more efficient. Instead of buying computers, companies can now run websites or software by leasing time at data centers run by vendors like Amazon or Microsoft. The idea behind cloud brokerages is to take the efficiency of cloud computing a step further by creating a global marketplace where computing capacity can be bought and sold at auction.
...read moreWednesday, October 26, 2011
In Praise of the Bad Bookstore
Tens of thousands of independent bookstores have disappeared from the United States and Europe over the last decade. Even mega-chains like Borders have fallen prey to monumental shifts in the distribution of ideas and content. The very notion of the physical book is under increasing threat from the accelerating momentum of digitalization.
For bibliophiles, particularly those who crave the feel of physical paper, there is a peculiar attractiveness even to the “bad” bookstore or bookshop (in the UK): the airport bookshop of last resort, the pulp fiction bookstore in a suburban mall. Mark O’Connell over at The Millions tells us there is no such thing as a bad bookstore.
From The Millions:
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Book Review: The Big Thirst. Charles Fishman
Charles Fishman has a fascinating new book entitled The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water. In it Fishman examines the origins of water on our planet and postulates an all to probable future where water becomes an increasingly limited and precious resource.
A brief excerpt from a recent interview, courtesy of NPR:
For most of us, even the most basic questions about water turn out to be stumpers.
Where did the water on Earth come from?
Is water still being created or added somehow?
How old is the water coming out of the kitchen faucet?
For that matter, how did the water get to the kitchen faucet?
And when we flush, where does the water in the toilet actually go?
The things we think we know about water — things we might have learned in school — often turn out to be myths.
...read moreMonday, October 24, 2011
Science at its Best: The Universe is Expanding AND Accelerating
The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics was recently awarded to three scientists: Adam Riess, Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt. Their computations and observations of a very specific type of exploding star upended decades of commonly accepted beliefs of our universe. Namely, that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
Prior to their observations, first publicly articulated in 1998, general scientific consensus held that the universe would expand at a steady rate forever or slow, and eventually fold back in on itself in a cosmic Big Crunch.
The discovery by Riess, Perlmutter and Schmidt laid the groundwork for the idea that a mysterious force called “dark energy” is fueling the acceleration. This dark energy is now believed to make up 75 percent of the universe. Direct evidence of dark energy is lacking, but most cosmologists now accept that universal expansion is indeed accelerating.
...read moreMondayPoem: Water
This week, theDiagonal focuses its energies on that most precious of natural resources — water.
In his short poem “Water”, Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us of its more fundamental qualities.
Emerson published his first book, Nature, in 1836, in which he outlined his transcendentalist philosophy. As Poetry Foundation elaborates:
...read moreSunday, October 23, 2011
Greatest Literary Suicides
Hot on the heals of our look at literary deaths we look specifically at the greatest suicides in literature. Although subject to personal taste and sensibility the starter list excerpted below is a fine beginning, and leaves much to ponder.
From Flavorpill:
1. Ophelia, Hamlet, William Shakespeare
Hamlet’s jilted lover Ophelia drowns in a stream surrounded by the flowers she had held in her arms. Though Ophelia’s death can be parsed as an accident, her growing madness and the fact that she was, as Gertrude says, “incapable of her own distress.” And as far as we’re concerned, Gertrude’s monologue about Ophelia’s drowning is one of the most beautiful descriptions of death in Shakespeare.
2. Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
In an extremely dramatic move only befitting the emotional mess that is Anna Karenina, the heroine throws herself under a train in her despair, mirroring the novel’s early depiction of a railway worker’s death by similar means.
...read moreSaturday, October 22, 2011
How Many People Have Died?
Ever wonder how many people have gone before? The succinct infographic courtesy of Jon Gosier takes a good stab at answering the question. First, a few assumptions and explanations:
The numbers in this piece are speculative but are as accurate as modern research allows. It’s widely accepted that prior to 2002 there had been somewhere between 106 and 140 billion homo sapiens born to the world. The graphic below uses the conservative number (106 bn) as the basis for a circle graph. The center dot represents how many people are currently living (red) versus the dead (white). The dashed vertical line shows how much time passed between milestones. The spectral graph immediately below this text illustrates the population ‘benchmarks’ that were used to estimate the population over time. Adding the population numbers gets you to 106 billion. The red sphere is then used to compare against other data.
Checkout the original here.
Send to KindleGreatest Literary Deaths
Tim Lott over at the Guardian Book Blog wonders which are the most dramatic literary deaths — characters rather than novelist. Think Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
From the Guardian:
What makes for a great literary death scene? This is the question I and the other four judges of the 2012 Wellcome Trust book prize for medicine in literature have been pondering in advance of an event at the Cheltenham festival.
...read moreFriday, October 21, 2011
When Will I Die?
Would you like to know when you will die?
This is a fundamentally personal and moral question which many may prefer to keep unanswered. That said, while scientific understanding of aging is making great strides it cannot yet provide an answer to the question. Though it may only be a matter of time.
Giles Tremlett over at the Guardian gives us a personal account of the fascinating science of telomeres, the end-caps on our chromosomes, and why they potentially hold a key to that most fateful question.
From the Guardian:
As a taxi takes me across Madrid to the laboratories of Spain’s National Cancer Research Centre, I am fretting about the future. I am one of the first people in the world to provide a blood sample for a new test, which has been variously described as a predictor of how long I will live, a waste of time or a handy indicator of how well (or badly) my body is ageing. Today I get the results.
...read moreThursday, October 20, 2011
The Climate Spin Cycle
There’s something to be said for a visual aide that puts a complex conversation about simple ideas into perspective. So, here we have a high-level flow chart that characterizes one on the most important debates of our time — climate change. Whether you are for or against the notion or the science, or merely perplexed by the hyperbole inside the “echo chamber” there is no denying that this debate will remain with us for quite sometime.
Chart courtesy of Riley E. Dunlap and Aaron M. McCright, “Organized Climate-Change Denial,” In J. S. Dryzek, R. B. Norgaard and D. Schlosberg, (eds.), Oxford
Handbook of Climate Change and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Send to KindleWednesday, October 19, 2011
Berlin’s Festival of Lights
Since 2005 Berlin’s Festival of Lights has brought annual color and drama to the city. This year the event runs from October 12-23, and bathes light on around 20 of Berlin’s most famous landmarks and iconic buildings. Here’s a sampling from the 2010 event:
For more information on the Festival of Lights visit the official site here.
Send to KindleC is For Dennis Richie
Last week on October 8, 2011, Dennis Richie passed away. Most of the mainstream media failed to report his death — after all he was never quite as flamboyant as another technology darling, Steve Jobs. However, his contributions to the worlds of technology and computer science should certainly place him in the same club.
After all, Dennis Richie developed the computer language C, and he significantly influenced the development of other languages. He also pioneered the operating system, Unix. Both C and Unix now run much of the world’s computer systems.
Dennis Ritchie, and co-developer, Ken Thompson, were awarded the National Medal of Technology in 1999 by President Bill Clinton.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
Send to KindleTuesday, October 18, 2011
Mapping the Murder Rate
A sad but nonetheless interesting infographic of murder rates throughout the world. The rates are per 100,000 of the population. The United States with a rate of 5 per 100,000 ranks close to Belarus, Peru and Thailand. Interestingly, it has a higher murder rate than Turkmenistan (4.4), Uzbekistan (3.1), Afghanistan (2.4) , Syria (3) and Iran (3).
The top 5 countries with the highest murder rates are:
Send to KindleMonday, October 17, 2011
Selflessness versus Selfishness: Either Extreme Can Be Bad
From the New York Times:
Some years ago, Dr. Robert A. Burton was the neurologist on call at a San Francisco hospital when a high-profile colleague from the oncology department asked him to perform a spinal tap on an elderly patient with advanced metastatic cancer. The patient had seemed a little fuzzy-headed that morning, and the oncologist wanted to check for meningitis or another infection that might be treatable with antibiotics.
Dr. Burton hesitated. Spinal taps are painful. The patient’s overall prognosis was beyond dire. Why go after an ancillary infection? But the oncologist, known for his uncompromising and aggressive approach to treatment, insisted.
“For him, there was no such thing as excessive,” Dr. Burton said in a telephone interview. “For him, there was always hope.”
...read moreMondayPoem: And Death Shall Have No Dominion
Ushering in our week of articles focused mostly on death and loss is a classic piece by Welshman, Dylan Thomas. Although Thomas’ literary legacy is colored by his legendary drinking and philandering, many critics now seem to agree that his poetry belongs in the same class as that of W.H. Auden.
By Dylan Thomas:
- And Death Shall Have No Dominion
...read moreSunday, October 16, 2011
The Greenest Way To Travel
A simplistic but nonetheless useful infographic below highlights the comparative energy footprints of our most common means of transportation. Can’t beat that bicycle.
From One Block of the Grid:
Send to KindleSaturday, October 15, 2011
Remembering Another Great Inventor: Edwin Land
From the New York Times:
IN the memorials to Steven P. Jobs this week, Apple’s co-founder was compared with the world’s great inventor-entrepreneurs: Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell. Yet virtually none of the obituaries mentioned the man Jobs himself considered his hero, the person on whose career he explicitly modeled his own: Edwin H. Land, the genius domus of Polaroid Corporation and inventor of instant photography.
Land, in his time, was nearly as visible as Jobs was in his. In 1972, he made the covers of both Time and Life magazines, probably the only chemist ever to do so. (Instant photography was a genuine phenomenon back then, and Land had created the entire medium, once joking that he’d worked out the whole idea in a few hours, then spent nearly 30 years getting those last few details down.) And the more you learn about Land, the more you realize how closely Jobs echoed him.
...read moreFriday, October 14, 2011
A Medical Metaphor for Climate Risk
While scientific evidence of climate change continues to mount and an increasing number of studies point causal fingers at ourselves there is perhaps another way to visualize the risk of inaction or over-reaction. So, since most people can leave ideology aside when it comes to their own health, a medical metaphor, courtesy of Andrew Revkin over at Dot Earth, may be of use to broaden acceptance of the message.
From the New York Times:
Paul C. Stern, the director of the National Research Council committee on the human dimensions of global change, has been involved in a decades-long string of studies of behavior, climate change and energy choices.
...read moreThursday, October 13, 2011
A Commencement Address for Each of Us: Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Much has been written to honor the life of Steve Jobs, who passed away October 5, 2011 at the young age of 56. Much more will be written. To honor his vision and passion we re-print below a rare public speech given Steve Jobs at the Stanford University Commencement on June 12, 2005. The address is a very personal and thoughtful story of innovation, love and loss, and death.
Courtesy of Stanford University:
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
...read moreWednesday, October 12, 2011
Global Interconnectedness: Submarine Cables
Apparently only 1 percent of global internet traffic is transmitted via satellite or terrestrially-based radio frequency. The remaining 99 percent is still carried via cable – fiber optic and copper. Much of this cable is strewn for many thousands of miles across the seabeds of our deepest oceans.
For a fascinating view of these intricate systems and to learn why and how Brazil is connected to Angola, or Auckland, New Zealand connected to Redondo Beach California via the 12,750 km long Pacific Fiber check the interactive Submarine Cable Map from TeleGeography.
Send to KindleTuesday, October 11, 2011
Steve Jobs: The Secular Prophet
The world will miss Steve Jobs.
In early 2010 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned years of legal precedent by assigning First Amendment (free speech) protections to corporations. We could argue the merits and demerits of this staggering ruling until the cows come home. However, one thing is clear if corporations are to be judged as people. And, that is the world would in all likelihood benefit more from a corporation with a human, optimistic and passionate face (Apple) rather than from a faceless one (Exxon) or an ideological one (News Corp) or an opaque one (Koch Industries).
That said, we excerpt a fascinating essay on Steve Jobs by Andy Crouch below. We would encourage Mr.Crouch to take this worthy idea further by examining the Fortune 1000 list of corporations. Could he deliver a similar analysis for each of these corporations’ leaders? We believe not.
The world will miss Steve Jobs.
By Andy Crouch for the Wall Street Journal:
Monday, October 10, 2011
Googlization of the Globe: For Good (or Evil)
Google’s oft quoted corporate mantra — do no evil — reminds us to remain vigilant even if the company believes it does good and can do no wrong.
Google serves up countless search results to ease our never-ending thirst for knowledge, deals, news, quotes, jokes, user manuals, contacts, products and so on. This is clearly of tremendous benefit to us, to Google and to Google’s advertisers. Of course in fulfilling our searches Google collects equally staggering amounts of information — about us. Increasingly the company will know where we are, what we like and dislike, what we prefer, what we do, where we travel, with whom and why, how our friends are, what we read, what we buy.
...read moreMondayPoem: Further In
Tomas Tranströmer is one of Sweden’s leading poets. He studied poetry and psychology at the University of Stockholm. Tranströmer was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature “because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality”.
By Tomas Tranströmer:
...read moreSunday, October 9, 2011
Human Evolution Marches On
From Wired:
Though ongoing human evolution is difficult to see, researchers believe they’ve found signs of rapid genetic changes among the recent residents of a small Canadian town.
Between 1800 and 1940, mothers in Ile aux Coudres, Quebec gave birth at steadily younger ages, with the average age of first maternity dropping from 26 to 22. Increased fertility, and thus larger families, could have been especially useful in the rural settlement’s early history.
According to University of Quebec geneticist Emmanuel Milot and colleagues, other possible explanations, such as changing cultural or environmental influences, don’t fit. The changes appear to reflect biological evolution.
...read moreSaturday, October 8, 2011
Autumn, Courtesy of Google
Humans are habitual creatures. Even our collective searches on Google show a familiar regularity. The charts below plot our autumnal, internet-enabled consciousness, courtesy of Jennifer Jacquet over at Guilty Planet / Scientific American.
Send to KindleFriday, October 7, 2011
Misconceptions of Violence
We live in violent times. Or do we?
Despite the seemingly constant flow of human engineered destruction on our fellow humans, other species and our precious environment some thoughtful analysis — beyond the headlines of cable news — shows that all may not be lost to our violent nature. An insightful interview with psychologist Steven Pinker, author of “How the Mind Works” shows us that contemporary humans are not as bad as we may have thought. His latest book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,” analyzes the basis and history of human violence. Perhaps surprisingly Pinker suggests that we live in remarkably peaceful times, comparatively speaking. Characteristically he backs up his claims with clear historical evidence.
From Gareth Cook for Mind Matters:
