Well into Q3 and autumn, and my SAD is already stirring in the back corner of my brain. But any season is Harvest season on the Web.
Lyrical cynicism · From the Cassandra Does Tokyo blog: Winning The Battle But Losing The War? — thoughts provoked by encountering the UK’s Fort Halstead. Defies summarization, but worth reading.
Fujifilmery · I continue my fannish obsession with this stuff, due to my continuing love affair with the X-E1.
Mark Schueler’s Continuing the Love Affair — A Practical Review of the Fujifilm X-E1 is one of the few considerations of the X-series from someone who’s also spent considerable time with the Oly OM-D shooters. I wrote a comment asking him for a little more direct comparison, and he obliged.
You want a comprehensive consideration of the X-E1? G. Dan Mitchell is your guy: Taking Stock of the Fujifilm X-E1 Mirrorless Camera.
Web death · Will your online presence survive you? Jonathan Zittrain talks about Perma.cc and the Internet Archive in Joining Team Archive: Perma and the Ongoing Effort to Preserve the Web.
Heroics · I’m talking about the New York City subway guys who scrambled and improvised and, to an almost unbelievable degree, minimized the damage: Could New York City Subways Survive Another Hurricane?.
Android Tablet Review · I guarantee that this is different from all the others you’ve read: The North Korean Tablet Computer Samjiyon (PDF).
Anger Management · As in, not angry enough yet about the banksters’ antics? Here they are Looting the Pension Funds.
Unbanning letters · Turkey has a shameful legacy of racist discrimination against its Kurdish population, but some progress is being made. Certain letters used in Kurdish but not Turkish were actually illegal, but now they’re not. What a world we live in.
General Giap · At one point in my youth, I got obsessed with Vietnam and read everything on the subject, including a couple of books by Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, who has to go down as one of the 20th century’s most accomplished soldiers, having played major roles in winning campaigns against France and China. He just died, and John McCain (yes, the American politician) has a personal angle. I don’t actually recommend Giap’s books, but I do recommend reading the story of his life, which was remarkable.
Internet snooping · I think that in the Ed Snowden area, if you’re going to watch one person to get a sense of what it all means, Bruce Schneier is probably the guy. He’s been writing some terrific stuff, and I particularly liked The Battle for Power on the Internet.
Related: The IETF, the chaotic standards disorganization that designs the Internet, is meeting here in Vancouver next week, and apparently Schneier is coming. I’ll be there. I myself think the egregious snooping abuse Snowden started the conversation around is more a political than a technical issue, but the IETF is well-placed to help out with anything that needs to be done at the technology level. So I’ll be paying 100% attention.
Climate Change · One suspects that our grandchildren, looking back (assuming they survive) may well hate us for our insufficient attention to perhaps the most important issue of our time. William Nordhaus has written The Climate Casino and it’s getting a lot of attention. Paul Krugman, in the New York Review of Books, writes about it in Gambling with Civilization, and usefully extends the discussion beyond the science to the politics.
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: John Cowan (Oct 31 2013, at 21:25)
Giap, like Washington, lost almost all his battles, but won his war.
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From: Al Lang (Nov 04 2013, at 00:37)
Hm, outraged links to outrage merchant Taibbi are kind of old... If you want something a bit more intellectually satisfying there are some *brilliant* finance bloggers out there doing much more perceptive work (e.g. Matt Levine at Bloomberg, Lucy Kellaway at FT, Felix Salmon at Reuters...). Oh, and, you won't find writers who know what they are talking about saying "bankster". :)
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