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Archive for September, 2008

New Work: ‘Beat IV’ | New at Pentagram | Pentagram

25 Sep
Shared by Ben Shoemate
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is famous for its illustrated editions, most notably Gustav Dore’s engravings of 1870. In response to this heritage, Hyland based his design concept around the idea that Heart wanted to produce a contemporary rendition of a classic, creating a design inspired by the graphic language of old books.

It would be intresting to collect these editions since this is one of my favorite poems.
Pentagram is a multi-disciplinary design firm with offices in London, New York, San Francisco, Austin, and Berlin.
 
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An email I got that is worth reading as it sheds light on the

25 Sep
An email I got that is worth reading as it sheds light on the $700 billion bailout and why it is the cure may be worse than the disease.

Dear Friends:

The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.

We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market's attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.

Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I'd only be repeating what I've been saying over and over - not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.

Still, at least a few observations are necessary.

The president assures us that his administration "is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets." Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?

We are told that "low interest rates" led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments - investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.

Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or "wildcat capitalism" (as if we actually have a pure free market!).

Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: "Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk."

Doesn't that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn't that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn't the federal government shown that the "many" who "believed they were guaranteed by the federal government" were in fact correct?

Then come the scare tactics. If we don't give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary "the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet." Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.

It's the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.

The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.

F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks' manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:

Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end... It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.

The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.

The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?

Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a "rescue plan"? I guess "bailout" wasn't sitting too well with the American people.

The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you're supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.

I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.

H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.

In liberty,



Ron Paul
 
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Rocks May Be Oldest on Earth, Scientists Say – New York Times

25 Sep

Canada.com

Rocks May Be Oldest on Earth, Scientists Say
New York Times - 14 hours ago
By KENNETH CHANG A swath of bedrock in northern Quebec may be the oldest known piece of the Earth’s crust. Researchers report that this rock is 4.28 billion years old and formed when the Earth was less than 300 million years old.
Oldest rocks on Earth 'discovered' Press Trust of India
Oldest rocks on Earth found in northern Canada Reuters
MSNBC - The Associated Press - National Geographic - AFP
all 236 news articles
 
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China shuttle blasts off, set for country’s first space-walk

25 Sep

China's Shenzhou 7 spacecraft is in Earth orbit, carrying a three–astronaut crew, one of whom is expected to make that country's first spacewalk this weekend. [More]

 
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Yay Hooray | Best use of Live Journal (Official)

25 Sep

via http://www.yayhooray.com/thread/115679/Best-use-of-Live-Journal-%28Official%29?page=362

 
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SocialBrowse Opens its Doors to the Public

25 Sep

After three months in private beta, SocialBrowse has formally launched their public beta along with some new features. It appears they made a concerted effort to listen to their beta testers and actually implemented many of the most requested features.

SocialBrowse allows you to share any website with your friends and contacts with the click of a button, which is added to your Firefox or Flock browser. Click the button with the dialogue bubble and you can leave a comment for others to see along with the website you shared. The button with the SocialBrowse logo opens the sidebar panel, which displays the social feed for all of your friends and their online activity in real-time, so there’s no need to refresh your browser anymore.

There’s also a leaderboard that displays the most active and popular members of SocialBrowse when it comes to sharing links. You earn a point every time someone shares a link that you’ve shared with the community, so it’s a Digg-like reward system which encourages members to share high quality content. It also helps members find interesting new information.

SocialBrowse does something interesting when it comes to new members. Instead of starting with an empty friends list like most other social networks, they actually add several of the most active members in the community just to give you a jump start to using the service. Obviously you can delete them in time if it turns out that you don’t like what they share, but it’s a good idea for giving newcomers a taste of what the service has to offer right out of the gate.

One of the new features that becomes obvious right away is the integration with Google, which means new members can now join SocialBrowse with their Gmail account with a simple click. While it’s not as sexy as an OpenID connection, it’s the next best thing.

Profiles are now more revealing and thus useful. Each profile page will show the user’s activity in a single column, with tabs to let you filter by the type of activity (shared link, comment, message, or everything).

The in-page embedded icons are more noticeable and show how many users shared each link in the page. Hovering over the icon expands into a more detailed view of the user(s) who shared the link, and some of their other recent activity.   Also, commenting has been improved to toggle open/close with a single click of the toolbar button. Opening the comment menu shows all existing comments for the current page and lets you submit your own, without ever leaving the site you’re on.

When it comes to sharing links via the toolbar buttons, you can actually save them to different categories such as Technology, Sports, Entertainment, etc. It’s all part of the click n’ save process, so it’s rather quick and painless and should encourage members to tag more often. Also part of this process is the ability to send a link straight to Twitter once you add your login information in the account setup area.

SocialBrowse is unique because unlike other social networks that do their best to keep you on their site, SocialBrowse actually does everything in its powers to push you off their site and into the World Wide Web so you can use their tools to share content with your friends and everyone else.

One could say that SocialBrowse is like a hybrid of GoogleReader + Digg + Twitter. What’s nice about their approach to things is that it doesn’t interfere that much with the way you work and play on the Web. It doesn’t force you to change your normal routine, which is a breath of fresh air. I’ve used countless services that let you share links with friends and no one makes that process easier than SocialBrowse. No more copy and pasting links to email or social networks just to share things with friends or colleagues. You simply click and share and you’re done.

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Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:

Firefox Plugin socialbrowse Expands Commenting Features (400 Invites)
Web 2.0 Invites for July 1st, 2008
Web 2.0 Invites for July 4th, 2008
Pownce To Launch Public API
coComment’s Google Desktop Widget Makes Comments More Portable
Socially Enabled Legal Documents?
Google Calendar Launches Public Directory

 
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24 Unforgettable Advertisements | The Best Article Every day

25 Sep

LEGO Advertisement

via http://www.bspcn.com/2008/06/29/24-unforgettable-advertisements/

 
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China Launches Space Walk Mission – New York Times

25 Sep

New York Times

China Launches Space Walk Mission
New York Times - 1 hour ago
Li Gang/Xinhua, via AP The Shenzhou VII spacecraft launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China's Gansu province on Thursday.
Video: Raw Video: China Rocket Launches, Spacewalk Next AssociatedPress
China's latest manned rocket mission to include spacewalk Los Angeles Times
National Geographic - Economist - The Associated Press - Register
all 919 news articles
 
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Google: ‘Beta’ Means What We Say It Means

25 Sep

gmail logoGoogle is probably the most prolific distributor of “beta” software in the world. Pingdom recently went through the entire stack of Google apps and found that nearly half of them (45 percent) are still officially at beta status.

Traditionally “beta” has been used to designate software that isn’t ready for prime time and may have bugs, yet millions of people use the four-year-old Gmail on a daily basis and, for most, Gmail is bug free. So why call it a beta?

The shorthand way of looking at software development is something like this: alpha = not ready, beta = still not ready, release candidate = still not quite ready and x.0 = finally ready.

So why would a company like Google want equate its products with what most people consider “not ready?” The answer is that Google doesn’t use the term beta according to the usual definition, it apparently has its own, private definition of beta.

In response to those questioning Google’s heavy, and possibly inappropriate, use of the word beta, a Google spokesperson tells NetworkWorld, “we believe beta has a different meaning when applied to applications on the web….”

The spokesperson never exactly gets around to what Google’s precise definition of the word beta is, but reading between the lines it would seem the company means something like “we’re still adding features.”

In which case, don’t expect most Google apps to ever come out of beta. Which isn’t really a problem, it is after all just a word — just be aware that Google has its own definition.

[Note that Webmonkey on the other hand is very much a beta in the traditional sense of the word. Try our RSS feed… see, beta.]

[via Slashdot]

See Also:

 
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X2 Resort Kui Buri » CoolBoom

25 Sep

x2-resort5.jpg

via http://coolboom.net/en/2008/03/13/x2-resort-kui-buri/

 
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