George Lakoff on The Obama Code:

Empathy-based values are opposed to the pure self-interest of a laissez-faire “free market,” which assumes that greed is good and that seeking self-interest will magically maximize everyone’s interests.

(via my homie Case)

Shaft-drive, steel framed, 2WD, [bio]diesel powered motorcycle. Long Way Round trilogy? Bueller?

Earlier this month, my iPhone had a life-altering experience. The gist: it fell off my bed, bouncing off the railing before falling a few meters to an abrupt landing, face down on the concrete floor below. As of now, it still works—so I haven’t bothered replacing it. The reactions from people when they see it range from horror to dismay to incredulousness: “is that wallpaper?”

I think of it like an Advent calendar: Every day, a chunk of glass glass comes off to reveal a bit more iPhone underneath.

Now, you too can have the post-apocalyptic 3G on your desktop.

In roughly a decade, the children of the generation who grew up with the internet and social media will be coming online. They’ll be creating their own online identities, with greater ease and comfort than their parents’ generation.

This medium will be used to communicate with their peers—but more profoundly, and almost wholly unlike our generation—to relate with their parents. Our generation is amassing our experience on the internet, indexed and cross-referenced, annotated with comments and (sometimes ephemeral) edges in the social graphs we’ve created.

Our children’s generation will not have to suffer the same awkward slideshows of their parents’ youth. The data, our experiences, will be there for the taking, at their leisure, not buried in dusty scrapbooks in attics and basements.

Their generation will be the first with such direct accessibility to the lives of their immediate ancestors. Our children—and their children—will be able to learn and discover their history, the pain and the successes of their forebears. They will know these things not through dim recollection and hyperbole, and not mixed with parable or lessons.

Today, if there is one at all, the litmus test for posting something online is something like “will my future boss see this?” or “is this something I want my mother to see?” At a certain point the question will change to “is this something I’m comfortable with my kids seeing?” The potential of unvarnished personal experience as an implicit gifted advantage to our children is a wonderful thing.

Holidays at King Walter’s Castle—always baller. Photo courtesy the lovely JZ.

If Katamari Damacy, Chad Pugh and Edward Tufte had a baby:

(via Crickets Chirping)

Ars Technica points out the most interesting part of Google’s publisher settlement. My favorite quote from the post:

Google solved the problem by throwing cash at it, signing up major libraries like Harvard and paying to scan just about everything in the building. Volunteers had been doing this with public domain texts for years, but nothing on this scale had been attempted before, and it filled a major hole in access to knowledge.

My friends got married at City Hall earlier this month, and it was beautiful.