Michael Pollan talks about American gardeners (including himself) being unable to bring themselves to cultivate beauty, or to see that as their purpose. Instead, he says they cultivate virtue. Sometimes I wonder if American liberals also suffer from this affliction, except instead of seeking virtue at the expense of beauty, they seek it to the detriment of functionality. It doesn’t matter if this works, only that it’s right. And maybe American conservatives do this too.
Twitterfeed
- I think Stephen Chu is probably dreaming, if he thinks renewable energy can avoid being politicized #WREF2012 guardian.co.uk/environment/20… 2 days ago
- Will this route to WY be a fine way to spend a few days in early May? Or a cold, muddy death march? g.co/maps/yn7x6 Stay tuned... 2 weeks ago
- Making Bryan's margaritas and patching flat tires for Around the World. 3 weeks ago
- And instead of a puff of fragrant smoke, we have helicopters and fishmeal, and a neon clad gestapo. Yes on 64. 3 weeks ago
- Listening to @therealshpongle while crafting utility regulations & city transportation demand management policy #FascinatingModernAge 4 weeks ago
Linkstream
- Teaching Good Sex:
A Quaker prep school in Pennsylvania has a novel approach to sex education: it's co-ed, respectful of the students, and sex-positive. The full semester of curriculum almost makes you think that the school wants the kids to have good sex -- safe, emotionally fulfilling, and pleasurable -- when they're ready, and no sooner. What an idea. I knew I liked something about the Society of Friends.... - Fox on grad students in climate science:
An open letter to Donna Laframboise, who's just written a book entitled "The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World's Top Climate Expert," about how mere graduate students have given input to and even played leadership roles within the UN's IPCC process. Shock. Horror.... - To: Professors; Re: Your Advisees:
To: Professors; Re: Your Advisees. So many PhD advisors are so bad at academic and career advising, that there's now a cash market for consultants who will do their job for them. Paid by graduate students of course.... - Area Woman Excited To Finally Experience Unbearable Loneliness Of Having Her Own Place:
Area Woman Excited To Finally Experience Unbearable Loneliness Of Having Her Own Place. This is, thankfully, not a problem we have here at Masala.... - The U.S. Postal Service Nears Collapse:
BusinessWeek on the End of Mail. Honestly, I can't wait for the USPS to collapse. It's a garbage delivery service as far as I can tell, and it sounds like virtually all of their plans for pulling out of the dive are related to serving that industry better. FedEx and UPS kill them on parcels, and real, personal mail is so rare these days I don't think I'd even notice if it vanished.... - Scientific Process Rage:
Scientific Process Rage. Science doesn't work like in the movies. In reality, there's a lot more cursing and crying.... - The PhD factory:
Nature notes that the world is producing more PHDs than ever before. And asks it time to stop? Graduate education isn't like a pyramid scheme, it is a pyramid scheme. And like all such schemes, it will eventually end in ruin for most of the participants. Something has to change. Why not sooner, and pro-actively, rather than later and in shambles?... - Tarsnap - Online backups for the paranoid:
Tarsnap looks like a good offsite backup option, if you're afraid of snoops and spooks and gagged subpoenas, but not of the Unix command line. Spideroak looks like a more user friendly application with the same zero-knowledge ethic.... - Ecstasy does not wreck the mind:
A Harvard Medical School study designed to address the shortcomings of earlier research was unable to detect any long term negative effects in MDMA users. The main difference in the new study was that both the control and user populations were all-night ravers -- some straightedge, and some not, and the ones using, using only MDMA. The results suggest that previous studies were observing the negative effects of all-night dancing, dehydration and sleep deprivation... not MDMA! Full article hid... - Yahoo! is De-rezzing:
Where does the data go when the host dies? Yahoo is coming apart at the seams, and they're taking the social bookmarking site Delicious with them. I use this service to generate the linkstream in my sidebar here. Thankfully, I've had WordPress importing all that content weekly for a long time, so I'm not in danger of losing any information. I just have to deal with the pain in the ass of figuring out a new way to implement this functionality. If you care about information you must be constan...
- Teaching Good Sex:
