Avoid the monoculture, avoid the viruses

The Microsoft security issue for today is poisoned pictures...

If you want to switch to a [free] non-Microsoft browser to use instead of M$IE, download Firefox.

For an email program (also free) to use instead of Outlook Express, download Thunderbird but save a copy of your mailbox first! Thunderbird seems to have vaporized much of the email imported from Outlook Express (and Express can't find it either). The moral is probably "beware of beta software".


I recently made the switch to both these products, and have next to no complaints. I did have trouble placing an online order using Firefox, but that could have been due to my very nonstandard browser settings. Besides, viruses are considerably more trouble - as this poster said,

...the point of using Firefox is having a browser that I don't need to worry about. When I use IE, I'm not sure whether the next link will take me to an exploit.

Note: in this context, "exploits" are not good.

Special[ly] smart people issue

Update: I have superhuman powers: I can take the gems from some extremely interesting reading and make them sound dull and mundane. Just go read the originals.

Paul Graham -

I didn't mean to make the book controversial. I was trying to make it efficient. I didn't want to waste people's time telling them things they already knew. It's more efficient just to give them the diffs.

...curiosity [is] simply the first derivative of knowledge

and ( in The Age of the Essay)

[What an essay used to be, which is what it should become again:]
An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.
...Essays should aim for maximum surprise.
... Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get.
...
People trying to be cool will find themselves at a disadvantage when collecting surprises. To be surprised is to be mistaken.
...
History seems to me so important that it's misleading to treat it as a mere field of study. Another way to describe it is 'all the data we have so far'.

Favorites from the December 1997 Edge.org questions:

Arthur De Vany :

Why are decentralized processes ubiquitous in nature and society and why are they so poorly understood that people will sacrifice their autonomy and freedom for authoritarian, centralized solutions (gods, governments, and gurus) to personal and social problems?

Paul Ewald:

As biological and traditional forms of cultural evolution are superseded by electronic (or post electronic) evolution, what will be the differentially propagating "units" and the outcome of the natural selection among them?

Judith Rich Harris:

How can we reconcile our desire for fairness and equity with the brutal fact that people are not all alike?

Reuben Hersh:

Is there a way to enlarge our separate tribal loyalties, to include all our fellow humans?

Pamela Mccorduck & Joseph Traub:

When posterity looks back on the 20th Century from the perspective of a hundred years, what will they see as our greatest successes and worst follies?

Neal Stephenson:

Why can our minds do physics? That is, why does the behavior of the physical world map so neatly onto mathematical laws, given that those laws are (arguably) strings of symbols that our brains happen to be capable of manipulating, apparently as a fortuitous byproduct of some evolutionary process that made our ancestors better adapted to dodging hyenas in the Rift Valley? Why is it that a person sitting in a chair in a room can, by using those leftover hyena-dodging and buffalo-hunting neurons to manipulate symbols in his head, design wing flaps for a 747, or figure out what was happening one femtosecond after the Big Bang?

Edge's main World Question Center page, linking to the Q&A's for each year

Edge honcho John Brockman on the pre-history of Edge (near top of this page) -

James Lee [Byars] inspired the idea that led...to EDGE...He believed that to arrive at an axiology of societal knowledge it was pure folly to go to a Widener Library and read 6 million volumes of books...[instead] gather the 100 most brilliant minds in the world...have them ask each other the questions they were asking themselves...expected result, in theory, was to be a synthesis of all thought. But between idea and execution are many pitfalls. James Lee...called each of them, and asked what questions they were asking themselves. The result: 70 people hung up on him.

Special laundry issue

Actually this one's mostly fluff, or perhaps dryer lint.

A Fafblog classic Fafnir-and-Giblets face-off, Tide vs. All, with broader implications


And - [only?] in Nevada City - let us hope that this pet got reunited with its owner without delay -



Update: thanks to The Union for their collaboration on this issue.

Bug alert - The Union's "Search Archives" is silently defective

Update: No longer silent; helpful warning has been added as of sometime on or before before Nov.21.

Local post; will appear mind-numbingly tedious to nonlocals...


Update: as of Oct. 7, editor says:

Swift Newspaper techs in Reno (where our site is hosted) says it is a problem with Publicus, our Web software. Publicus needs to reindex our archive. Problem is, Publicus tells us it has no time because of something to do with the Florida hurricanes...In any case, we are still working on it...

The results given by The Union's Search are incomplete. For example, typing Beason functionaries into the Search window brings up no hits, although both words are present in this piece; typing Weismann does not bring up his most revealing letter.

The Union staff is aware of the problem - "We are working on getting this fixed" - but haven't put any sort of caveat on the Search page that I can see, and I don't know how long it's been a problem, or what priority is being placed on fixing it, or if there's any pattern (be it devious or structural or ?) to which items don't come up on a search...

Caveat seekor.

For Blogger users only: changing your "0 Comments" text

[This post will only be of interest to Blogger users. It is the second in a series of 'Blogger tools' posts; the first was on creating boxed text.]

There's something just a bit painful about turning on Comments on your blog, only to find that Blogger's now shouting Comments (0) at the bottom of all of your carefully composed posts. They might as well just change the text to say "Nobody's reading your blog,so go out and get a life"...

Hence the need for a less self-denigrating way to indicate to the reader(s) that there is/is not reader-supplied commentary available for a particular post.

The following script will make the text say "Comment", "Comment (1)", or "Comments(574)", respectively, if the post has 0, 1 or 574 comments. To use it:

1. Edit your Settings to turn on comments, if they're not already turned on.
   
2. Save your existing template (Copy, Paste, Save As to a textfile somewhere...) in case something goes horribly wrong (yet subtly enough wrong that you went ahead and Saved the "bad" changes I'm about to suggest).
   
3. Edit your template:
   
   
   
   1. After the </title> tag (near the top), insert the following lines (Copy them from this webpage and Paste them into your template):
      
      <script language=javascript>
      <!--
      function myCommentDetailStr(id){
          if (id != '0'){
              if (id == '1'){
                  document.write(" (" + id + ")" );
              } else {
                  document.write("s (" + id + ")" );
              }
          }
      }
      -->
      </script>
      
      
   2. Find the "<BlogItemCommentsEnabled>" tag and the corresponding "</BlogItemCommentsEnabled>" tag; replace the text between (but not incuding) these tags with:
      
      
      <a class="comment-link" href="<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>#comments">
      Comment<script>myCommentDetailStr('<$BlogItemCommentCount$>');</script>
      </a>
      
      
      
   3. Preview your weblog to make sure that it looks ok;
      
   4. If so, Save your template changes
      
   5. Make a test post, publish it, add some commentary to it to test the script
      (no, your correspondent has not done this thoroughly)
      
   
   

Caveats:
As I said, it hasn't been really tested yet. Apparently one needs to "register" in order to comment; will modify this post when testing has been done.

Also, in the highly unlikely event that someone did comment on this blog back when it had Haloscan-hosted commenting and was not being updated...sorry. I didn't see your comment. It's gone.

Daily reckonings

Sorry, there are far more important things going on in this world but I've been collecting these and they have to go somewhere.

People seem to think they get richer by selling their houses to each other...so do economists believe they get richer by setting fire to their houses so they can build them back up.

we Americans aren't so stupid. In exchange for our factories, companies, businesses, land, buildings and other productive assets, we will have gotten nifty DVD players...and those thin-screened TVs...and nice automobiles...

What delicious irony...what a marvelous comeuppance...what fitter "reversion" to a mean, mean world?! After buying Manhattan from the savages for trinkets...we now sell it to Asians - and get trinkets in return!

Oh...we feel Nature's dagger deep in our own soft flesh.

"Inflation," James Gray, editor of Contrarian Speculator, reminded us, borrowing a famous quote from a Dutch central banker, "is a little bit like wetting your pants. At first it feels warm and comfortable, but after a short while it becomes cold and regrettable."

when everyone is thinking the same thing, no one is thinking.

night class

I learned two things tonight.

1. Young rabbits that run out into the road will freeze rather than run when faced with oncoming headlights; so you the driver should swerve, rather than jamming on your brakes.

2. I did not and do not have the courage to do the compassionate thing, and run over it a second time.

Update: anyone with half a brain would have realized that there were alternatives - like letting it breathe exhaust from the tailpipe - feel free to draw the obvious inference.

Of course, if you _do_ swerve, that will probably turn out to be the wrong thing to do too. Damage to automobile, driver and passenger(s) is a real possibility.

Weblog population explosion in Nevada County!

[Reader, this is what's known as "hyperbole"]

Not only is The Union fearlessly getting ready to commence to begin dipping its toe into the future of journalism, but it also turns out (via above column) that earlier this month Nevada County acquired a new blogger, Russ Steele, proprietor of NC Transportation Infrastructure and NC Media Watch. He uses mostly the same terms I would, to describe goals and methods - "modest growth", truth, accuracy...but somehow ends up in a very different place. I still have enormous trouble understanding how this works.

Welcome to the local blogging fold, Russ and soon Rich.

Also NCTV now has a blog.

Sadly, the explosion has bypassed Yubanet - nothing new on their weblogs page. And Eric, Booktown is looking awfully stale.

[complaint deleted]

Machiavelli

I have been reading Machiavelli (The Prince and The Discourses), the former being the Strunk and White of power politics. Nevada County politics could be worse, at present it is still not common practice to "extinguish" (Machiavelli's euphemism, or his translator's) deposed rulers and their entire families.

Many passages jumped out, landing here:

...a general rule that never fails: a prince who is not wise himself cannot be wisely counseled, unless by chance he should have a sole counselor by whom he is ruled in all matters. There could be such a situation, but it would not last long, for the counselor would soon deprive the prince of his state. An unwise prince, having to consider the advice of several counselors, would never receive concordant opinions, and he would not be able to reconcile them on his own. His counselors would pursue their own interests and he would know neither how to rule them nor how to understand them...

...as all history proves by a multitude of examples, whoever organizes a state and establishes its laws must assume that all men are wicked and will act wickedly whenever they have the chance to do so....

there was never anyone who ordained new and unusual laws among a people without having recourse to God, for they would not otherwise have been accepted. This is so because prudent men know of many beneficial things which, having no persuasive evidence for them, they cannot get others to accept. Consequently, wise men who wish to avoid this difficulty resort to divine authority.

For example, the advent of general anaesthesia -

Religious traditionalists held that mothers ought to fulfil the "edict of bringing forth children in sorrow" as laid down in the Holy Bible.... One clergyman saw the new chloroform anaesthesia as "a decoy from Satan, apparently offering to bless woman; but, in the end, it will harden society and rob God of the deep earnest cries, which arise in time of trouble for help."... mutterings that infants delivered painlessly should be denied the sacrament...
[But then an anaesthesia advocate] cited Genesis 2:21: "And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof". Casting God in the role of The Great Anaesthetist ... the suggestion that God Himself employed anaesthesia helped carry the day...

Differences between the conduct of the multitude and the conduct of princes do not derive from differences in their nature, that being the same in both (though if there be some superiority either way, it will be found on the side of the people)...

it is not without reason that the voice of the people has been likened to the voice of God, for popular opinion is amazingly reliable in its prognostications, so much so that the people would seem to have hidden powers by which to foresee their future ills and triumphs...*

Steve Kurson, somewhere in Brad DeLong's comments -

• When are [crowds of people thinking independently] wise?
  When the crowd is diverse, and when members are making their decisions relatively independently of each other. Again, book is full of work demonstrating the value of diversity and the perils of what Surowiecki [author of The Wisdom of Crowds] calls dependent decision-making.
  
• Why are they wise?
  In part, it's because a larger group of people can simply draw on more information, is more likely to have diverse perspectives. But as Surowiecki explains early on, the core of the idea is actually a simple mathematical truism: if the group of problem-solvers is diverse, the errors they make in solving a problem will not be correlated. Therefore, those errors will cancel themselves out, allowing the information that's in the group to surface. This is a simple answer, but it is the answer.

A rather different perspective on the amazing reliability of popular opinion, from Bill Bonner of the Daily Reckoning:

A man on his own, driving down the road, will usually make the right decisions and more often than not end up where he intends to go. But put him in the great mass of voters or investors, and all his good sense seems to disappear out the window like a cigarette butt. All of a sudden he presses down the accelerator and heads for the nearest brick wall.

(in which case, he'll want to be driving the Mini Cooper)

Although given Mr. Bonner's credibility of late - pretending to believe that GWBush is pretending to be stupid, scoffing at global warming ("Global warming is just a hypothesis. Yet it is taught in school as though it were fact.") ...somebody's mouth might be bigger than his brain. [Note: Mr. B. did subsequently print in full(?) an expert's aghast response to his offhand dismissal of global warming - so I retract the anatomical comparison.]

* Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds had not yet been published

the discovered country

In Very Far Away From Anywhere Else by Ursula LeGuin (written very long ago), teenage protagonist Owen dreams up a country:

Thorn was a very small country, on an island in the South Atlantic...The wind blew all the time in Thorn. The coasts were high and rocky...steep cliffs over the sea...wind blowing over the long sheep pastures...the city...built of granite and cedarwood, looking out over the windy cliffs...

Thorn didn't have much government in the usual sense, but they had some institutions...one of them was called the Scholary. It was built part way up one of the highest mountains...had a huge library, and laboratories and basic science equipment and lots of rooms and studies. People could go there and take classes and teach classes...At night they all met, if they felt like it, in a big hall with several fireplaces, and talked about genetics and history and sleep research and polymers and the age of the Universe. If you didn't like the conversation at one fireplace, you could go to another one...

No, at the time this was written Thorn had not yet acquired an institution called the Demagoguery, or the Comment Spammery or the Trollery or the Pornery, but otherwise it does seem strangely familiar.

tangential, from a LeGuin interview -

There isn't much to watch on American TV now... Did you know that most of the laugh tracks they use are so old that the people you hear laughing at the sitcom are mostly dead?

Special New Age issue

Added Oct 25: Jeff Sharlet puts forth the thesis that George W. Bush is a New Ager; nice piece, including this comparison:

New Age religions are, literally, reactionary, responses to what’s been called the disenchantment of the world....Christian fundamentalism, meanwhile, is the child of the Enlightenment, a functionalist view of faith that’s metaphorically "scientific." It's scripture as read by a cranky engineer who just wants to know how God works...

As ye ask, so shall ye receive...Johann Hari grills the Dalai Lama, with tasty results: (via)

...criticisms...Tibet...romanticized...was a slave-owning feudal theocracy...Does he ever worry that he made a massive concession [rescinding Tibet's claims to independence] and got nothing in return?...are disabled children being punished for sins in a past life?....
"Yes, it [massive inequalities of wealth in the West] is wrong," he says as he smiles. "Why do the rich need so much? We each only have one stomach. Well, not you," he says, looking at my belly. "You appear to have two."

Littlewood's Law of Miracles -

Littlewood...defined a miracle as an event that has special significance when it occurs, but occurs with a probability of one in a million. This definition agrees with our common-sense understanding of the word "miracle."

Littlewood's Law of Miracles states that in the course of any normal person's life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month.

interesting observation -

One fact that emerges clearly...is that paranormal events occur, if they occur at all, only when people are under stress and experiencing strong emotion.

which makes them hard to study...or rather, hard to get the studies past the ethics committee.

Speaking of which, here's Johann Hari again, this time on animal rights -("Slowly it became clear how shallow it was to dismiss an entire movement because of the rantings of its thickest and most aggressive members...")

Cultural anthropology from a bicultural New Age skeptic (via) -

How did a card-carrying, aura-wearing, chakra-toting leader of the New Age become able to understand and eventually embrace the skeptical culture?

In my [new age] culture, you can't openly attack anyone or their character, and you can't use truly focused skepticism. In my culture...both the emotions and the intellect are considered troublesome areas of the psyche that do very little but keep one away from the (supposedly) true and meaningful realm of spirit...

Blue-green algae, one hell of a health supplement - Dietary neurotoxin linked to Alzheimer's

Neurotoxins from blue-green algae present in certain foods or water can accumulate in proteins and might cause brain diseases like Alzheimer's after many years, suggests a new study....[blue-green algae] are common in freshwaters and seas worldwide, and thrive in polluted, nutrient-rich waters.

Off-topic (more relevant to Old Age than New):
There are worse things than having your water polluted with bluegreen algae though - try backflow from a mortuary.

added Sept 23:

Clifford Pickover's ESP Experiment

Interview with a crop circle artist

No health benefit from prayer [on behalf of the unwell or infertile]; Chris Mooney has the story

On the other hand, there is evidence for the efficacy of acupuncture and aromatherapy (sorry, no URL here yet; saw it on the web though, so it's true. :-)

Added Oct 17: What the bleep were they trying to pull on us? From the [Ebert site] Answer Man's inbox:

While the film "What the [bleep] Do We Know!?" parades itself as a tell-all about quantum physics, it turns out that it's actually a 111-minute infomercial for ... that's right, the Ramtha School of Enlightenment. In fact, the three filmmakers, [William] Arntz, [Betsy] Chasse and [Mark] Vicente, are all devotees of Ramtha.

There's little to no accurate science in the film, and, as a physicist pointed out recently in your Answer Man column, the individuals who are quoted are pretty far from qualified experts on the field of quantum mechanics. Case in point: One of the persons expounding on causality and quantum physics (Dispenza) is a chiropractor. The film's sole purpose appears to be to promote the ideology of the Ramtha School of Enlightenment. A quick browse through their Web site will clearly demonstrate that the film's pseudoscientific nonsense comes straight from the teachings of the RSE.

Not only that, but Ramtha channeler JZ Knight has copyrighted him. Fear not, capitalism is alive and well in the New Age.

[Oct 18:] The ability to see auras is likely to be due to synesthesia:

Synaesthesia is a condition found in 1 in 2000 people in which stimulation of one sense produces a response in one or more of the other senses. For example, people with synaesthesia may experience shapes with tastes or smells with sounds. It is thought to originate in the brain and some scientists believe it might be caused by a cross-wiring in the brain, for example between centres involved in emotional processing and smell perception...

Special Economics And Financial Doom issue

Aug 11- added more quotes. More to come.

Guardian interview with Quantum fund co-founder (with George Soros) Jim Rogers -

The American dollar is a flawed currency and will collapse in value before the end of the decade, taking with it the prosperity of the American nation. Investors should be buying commodities - platinum, lead, wheat, sugar, oil, the sort of assets that haven't been fashionable for a quarter of a century or more. While you're at it, teach your children to speak Mandarin, the coming language of the 21st century. And don't encourage them to do an MBA: Tell them to be a farmer and do a real job.

The irreplaceable, intractable, irascible, irredeemable Mogambo Guru, without whose voice(s) the literary economic world would be a much calmer and duller place -

...for every dude and dudette in the country that has a non-farm job, all 131 million of us swinging our Roy Rogers lunchboxes on our way to work where we slave all day at a job we hate, surrounded by morons, working for chump change, and I can't even leave my lunch in the refrigerator like everyone else because they put stuff in my sandwich when I am not looking, this increase in debt [in a single year] comes to $20,865 each. Each! This is just the damn increase!
...
What to do? What to do? I suggest that we all run around screaming how the sky is falling, and how we should all be loading up with large-caliber weapons and running for our lives because we are all doomed, doomed, doomed, as that is what I typically do. But Mr. Buckler [Bill Buckler of The Privateer newsletter] has also looked at things, as I have, and has concluded, as I have, that there is nothing that CAN be done, except running around screaming that the sky is falling and that we are all, as I alluded to earlier, doomed, doomed, doomed. As I am too busy wailing and cramming boxes of ammunition into a backpack to continue right now, I will leave it to the clever Mr. Buckley to come up with a simile to beautifully sum it all up. Rising to the challenge, he writes, "There is no 'solution' to this dilemma, just as there is no 'solution' for a man who finds himself in a barrel on the lip of Niagara Falls."

Pimco bond guru Bill Gross agrees, after a fashion -

...bad things can happen in a levered economy. Think of two garages - one with two cars and an immaculately swept floor and the other filled with boxes, newspapers, paint cans and numerous oily rags. Which one do you think has the better chance of going up in flames if a [geopolitical or policy] match or a faulty electrical wire creates Fahrenheit 451? That is an apt metaphor in economic terms when comparing a healthy non-debt ladened economy to one thriving on the creation of paper and artificially low interest rates.

...everything is as it should be. The Asians produce, we consume. The Asians save, we spend. The Asians export, we import. The Asians lend, we borrow.

'This symbiotic relationship has gone on for a long time,' wrote an inquiring Daily Reckoning sufferer. 'Why would it have to come to an end now?'

...U.S consumers have become like a giant leech, sucking up 80% of the world's savings. At some point, we keep warning, the foreigners are going to want to dump on a little salt to get rid of us.

and, veering off toward miscellany...

The Oldman passes judgement upon press coverage of the housing bubble, and finds it wanting.

Brad DeLong summarizes the current U.S. economic state:

It is hard to stress enough the extraordinary contrast in this business cycle between the (lousy) labor market situation and the (good) output growth situation and the (fantastic) productivity growth situation.

from BDL comments -

"Don't worry, your money has not been destroyed. It is only owned by somebody else."

Via Andrew Tobias -

"In finance, decay is more colorful than probity, and the prevailing direction of change in the past generation has only enriched the content of the narrative."

-- James Grant, Money Of The Mind

PQuincy in BDL comments -

perhaps we need to get used to the idea that we can't stay _much_ richer than everyone else forever. And since the overall wealth of the planet is not increasing all that fast, the most likely way we will stop being much richer is not that everyone else will catch up to us (the free trader's model), but that average prosperity in the US will decline.

It may not feel good, but it's hard to argue that this is entirely unfair. Nor does this mean that the average US consumer will be impoverished: but not as many will be able to keep affording big houses and 3 cars and so forth.

Daily Reckoning soundbites -

Apparently, we Americans are not buying quite as many things we don't need with the money we don't have.

and

Unlike business, which borrows to increase capital investment and employment, nearly every penny a consumer borrows is thrown away; he buys a hot tub for his back yard and ends up poorer and more vulnerable than before.

A veritable plethora of doom-mongering is on offer at Fiend's SuperBear Page.

moving right along, into utter irrelevance -
Armchair analysis of the economies of Middle Earth -

Lord of the Rings...[hobbits'] economic system...is essentially an idealised pastoralism, the middle ages minus disease and famine.

I'll concede though that the economic life of the elves is a mystery. They seem to spend most of their time poncing (sic) around in forests without any visible means of support. Perhaps as the immortal elder children they were all given substantial annuities before going to Middle Earth. Which raises an interesting issue, how do you value an annuity for an immortal being with an average existence of at least 10,000 years?

if you're not recognized as a genius when your work comes out, be patient: (via)

Dr. Tolkien has little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form. ... Now, how is it that these long-winded volumes of what looks to this reviewer like balderdash have elicited such [glowing] tributes...? The answer is, I believe, that certain people - especially, perhaps, in Britain - have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash.

John Holbo in here -

Tolkien is so true to himself that he simply can't be untrue to anyone or anything else.

Denial is a river in Egypt

Real world depicted here. Anyone who thinks incompetent government (which begets incompetent oversight) doesn't matter needs to read it.

U.S. military officials tell NBC News, the unreleased images, show American soldiers severely beating one Iraqi prisoner to near death; apparently, raping an Iraqi female prisoner; acting inappropriately with a dead body; and Iraqi guards apparently videotaped by U.S. soldiers raping young boys.

Those "God Forgive America" bumperstickers are looking more and more appropriate.


As for me, I'll stay here and talk about real estate and hide my head in the sand, thank you very much. Hey,  I'm an American.


So, about that economy...

SF Chronicle says Sayonara, housing bubble (with nice summary at bottom)

Contrarian? time-shifted? extraplanetary? view from The Union AP article in last week or two, "experts say now's the time to buy"

The Daily Reckoning's advice (?!) on how to Make Money Fast:

See how easy it is, dear reader? You don't have to save, or work, or come up with a new invention or write a hit song. All you have to do is buy a house. And you don't need a penny to do it. Nor even much of an income.

Another gem from the Daily Reckoning -

Having gone deeper into debt to purchase McMansions and SUVs in recent years, how do baby boomers intend to spend their golden years? I predict that we baby boomers will turn our McMansions into bed and breakfasts for the increasing number of Chinese and Indian tourists who will be visiting our shores in the next fifty years. And we will provide complimentary shuttle services to our guests with our SUVs.

...as tourism becomes an ever more important segment of Nevada County's economy...

Salon on great big green monster mansions -

Environmentally correct housing has never been more popular. But even the most eco-friendly home may do more harm than good when it is super-sized.

Sarah Susanka and the Not-So-Big House here and here-

When someone buys a Mercedes Benz or Jaguar, they look for quality, comfort, and detail. Size has nothing to do with the appeal of these cars. If you wanted nothing but space, you could buy a truck. Why is it, then, that some people feel compelled to buy huge houses with empty, cathedral-like spaces that offer few comforts of home
...
We seek with square footage and ever-taller ceilings our notion of home, when in fact the feel we're looking for has almost nothing to do with size. Instead, it resides in a sense of comfort
...
Owners, saddled with impersonal, cavernous spaces, sometimes wonder what went wrong - why they feel so profoundly disaffected from the very place that is supposed to nurture and satisfy: home.

and

The current pattern of building big to allow for quantities of furniture with still more room to spare is more akin to wearing a sack than a tailored suit.

Union article on Hunter Black's rammed earth house out on the San Juan Ridge - hands down the most wonderful house I've ever met. I saw it shortly after seeing a house whose designers followed the "we'll make it TWICE as big!" philosophy. The contrast was huge too.

Not the greatest planning - apartments in the middle of nowhere (think Kingsbury Circle out in Alta Sierra?)

PZ Myers' hometown disappears-

Hometown? Kent, Washington. It was a nice little town when I was young, but visibly transformed during my teenage years into a desert of parking lots, banks, and gas stations. Now it's little more than a congested blot in the north-south traffic corridor to Seattle. In a sense my hometown doesn't exist anymore.

Brad DeLong still says "buy more house than you need" - a commenter responds:

I thought capital was supposed to move at the speed of light these days. I'm a little disappointed to hear that in order to maximize my investments I have to be chained to a big wad of matter whether I want it or not. I find it disturbing to think of orchards being uprooted as Americans who just wanted a little house leverage themselves out to the max...

Facing the ordeal of downsizing, with helpful hints on where to put the plasma TV now that you have a meager 1700 sq ft. Talk about deprivation...

Ah, that country air...breathe deep... ("Foothill roads likely laced with asbestos" - analysis of Placer County gravel roads from airplane show serpentine-rich roads, serpentine tends to? often? always? contains asbestos)

Identifying the region's serpentine-covered roads raises residents' awareness of the potential hazard but may not necessarily prompt paving or other measures to cut the risk. Virtually all of the roads identified are private roads, meaning it's solely up to property owners to maintain them, county officials said.

Today's Sisyphus doesn't roll rocks; instead, he faces an eternity of remodeling. Or perhaps moving -

We have always been moving. We will never do anything else. The remaining stuff that's yet to be moved will keep expanding to fill an infinite number of boxes, an unending succession of U-Haul trucks. Only we will change, gradually growing older and more battered and decrepit, until finally we're used up entirely. When this happens we'll be propped up in front of the yard railing, on offer [to] any passersby who think they have some use for our remains.

Another perspective on housing is here. Followed by some lovely examples of comment spam. If there is an afterlife, the people who spew this stuff will be taking the down elevator.

more from the Daily Reactionaryckoning -

We drove by one subdivision after another, the houses getting bigger and bigger. Each one had a grand entrance and a bucolic address. Usually the place was announced with curved brick walls, iron gates, and an Anglican name such as 'Heathmont Downs.' You feel as though you might be entering the grounds of a private lunatic asylum.
...
"Some of these places are 6,000 square feet and more," explained a cousin. "And some of them are lived in by older couples without children. They don't really need the space. But it's a way to leverage the housing boom. A lot of people think they should buy the biggest, most expensive house they can...

truth? from fiction -

Many citizens set out to buy a house because of an indistinct yearning for which an actual house was never the right solution to begin with, and may be only a quick fix that briefly anchors and stabilizes them but never touches the deeper need, all the while managing to put them in the poorhouse.

Slate on consequences of Calif's Prop. 13

This creates some perverse effects, similar to those of rent control. People stay in big houses they no longer need because moving to a smaller place will mean a huge property tax hit. With these houses off the market, people who do need a bigger place have fewer to choose from and must pay more to get one.

It's always a good sign when you can still remember your password

It's been too long. The links are piling up. Here are some fluffy, inoffensive and friendly ones (if you don't have a Tuscan deck house in Orange County) -

Human nature hasn't changed much. Via Andrew Tobias some time back, possibly a rerun here too -

The poor man cries before your house, and you pay no attention... you stand there, confused over the choice of an attractive floor covering.
-- St. Ambrose of Milan (339-397)

One of many choice quotes from Harvey Skunklove -

[on TV home makeover shows that are] "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" only with a house instead of a person. Nine times out of ten people want their homes to look like Tuscany. How the hell are you going to make a deck house in Orange County look like Tuscany? I mean besides using hallucinogenics.

I know we can do better. I know we can, for the same cost that we are spending on these urban main street malls, build places that aren't wearing a plastic Italian mask.

and he had the greatest idea... wish I was in a position to implement it -

something I've always wanted to do: work on a rural greenfield project far off in the mountains and, hidden among the Oak Lanes, Crestline Boulevards, and Winter Creek Roads, name a street 'East 237th'. To keep people on their toes and all.

Introducing their readers to weblogs,
Time magazine (Meet Joe Blog) and the Dallas Morning News

very cool demo on making streets pedestrian-friendly (via)

on hiatus

Rebecca Goldstein:

It had been a narrow escape. I hadn't realized at the time the dangers with which I was flirting, the precarious nature of the world of property ownership we had almost entered: that world of intimate, complicated, aggravating relationships with painters, plumbers, carpenters, gardeners, and electricians. Much of the conversation at diinner parties was devoted to the intricacies of these relationships, the degree of sensitivity they required. And although they were always amusing tales, told with the lightness and gaiety suitable to the occasion, I could glimpse the soul suffering that lay behind...

William Levitt:

No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist, he has too much to do.

I'll be back.