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This is very sad, but also very interesting. There’s something touching about the earnestness of the government’s reaction. And a 111-year old mummy, upstairs for the sake of fraud, is too strange for words.

Japan, Checking On Its Oldest, Finds Many Gone – NYTimes.com

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Sobering & unsentimental..

A Global Graveyard for Dead Computers in Ghana – Slide Show – NYTimes.com.

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Kind of interesting musings on how journalists assimilate information. Michaels suggests we “widen our aperture”, which would of course lead to narrower depth of field, rather than wider. He’s maybe optimistic in supposing that journalism can do much to anticipate events, rather than capture them in retrospect. But his central point that 24/7 news doesn’t necessarily bring timeliness is a good observation…

Fog of war: What are we missing? – USATODAY.com

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Saw him sing this on Monday, and thought it was very good. Hope you like it also…

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Yes, that’s right, this site has at long last been updated. Expect a steady stream of thoughts, and a less steady stream of articles. Thanks for coming to visit!

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On the difficulties of being sane in the Republican Party:
(Mother Jones)

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It’s often plain old self-aggrandizing when people come clean about what they told the president in an off-the-record meeting, but Garry Wills does a pretty good job of it here.

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Services like Date Check, Zittrain said, could soon become even more
sophisticated, rating a person’s social desirability based on minute
social measurements — like how often he or she was approached or avoided
by others at parties (a ranking that would be easy to calibrate under
existing technology using cellphones a…nd Bluetooth).”

The Web Means the End of Forgetting

Okay so the question of forgetting is of course on many people’s minds, including mine, but this story doesn’t do much more than ponder it, raising both unrealizable techno-fixes and unrealizable techno-fears, like the above. Really? Easy to use bluetooth and cell phones to figure out what people are doing at parties? Gimme a break.

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This guy makes some insightful and sympathetic critiques of the post series…
On the Washington Post’s ‘Top Secret America’

Now that it’s all out there, here are a few thoughts on the Washington Post’s Top Secret America project. Having done newspaper projects myself, I’m a little reluctant to critique, because I know how much work goes into them; the reporting (especially in this case, where the much of the subject […]

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Whose conduct grew ruder and ruder,
Till at last with a hammer
They silenced his clamour,
By smashing that Person of Buda.

Book of Nonsense, Edward Lear

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Whose face was pervaded with smiles;
He sung “High dum diddle,”
And played on the fiddle,
That amiable man of the Isles.

Nonsense Omnibus, Edward Lear

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