Ramblings & ephemera
From Robert Sullivan’s “An Impala’s-Eye View of Highway History” (The New York Times: 14 July 2006):
Another traveler, Dwight D. Eisenhower, spent two months in 1919 driving a military convoy across the country; the shoddy roads left a lasting impression on him. After World War II he studied Hitler’s autobahn and concluded that the American military [...]
Posted on July 18th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, history | Comments Off
From Alex Bellos’s “Coke. Guns. Booty. Beats.” (Blender: June 2005):
In the slums of Rio De Janeiro, drug lords armed with submachine guns have joined forces with djs armed with massive sound systems and rude, raunchy singles. Welcome to the most excitingâ€â€and dangerousâ€â€underground club scene in the world. …
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is the glamorous city [...]
Posted on July 18th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, law, politics | Comments Off
From David HM Spector’s Unfinished Business Part 2: Closing the Circle (LinuxDevCenter: 7 July 2003):
The UNIX world is the result of natural evolution, not the outgrowth of a planned community. UNIX is a lot like New York City: dynamic, always reinventing itself, adapting to new needs and realities. Windows is a lot like Celebration, USA: [...]
Posted on June 14th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, security | Comments Off
From Andrés Duany’s “Classic Urbanism“:
From time to time there appears a concept of exceptional longevity. In architecture, the pre-eminent instance is the Vitruvian triad of Comoditas, Utilitas, e Venustas. This Roman epigram was propelled into immortality by Lord Burlington’s felicitous translation as Commodity, Firmness and Delight.
It has thus passed down the centuries and remains authoritative, [...]
Posted on June 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, business, history, science | Comments Off
From Marc Weingarten’s “The White Album“:
Among the many piercing flashes of insight to be found in [Joan Didion's] The White Album’s essays, many of which were written between 1968 and 1979 for publications like Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, and The Los Angeles Times Book Review, is one overarching fact of L.A. life – that [...]
Posted on June 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Language & Literature, history, politics | Comments Off
From Brendan I. Koerner’s “Your Cellphone is a Homing Device” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2003):
Law enforcement likewise views privacy laws as an impediment, especially now that it has grown accustomed to accessing location data virtually at will. Take the MetroCard, the only way for New York City commuters to pay their transit fares since the elimination [...]
Posted on June 4th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, business, law, security | Comments Off
From Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s “The Water Rush” (Oxford American):
Anywhere else, the four and a half acres of muddy, flat grass cross-hatched by asphalt paths and crowned by a green-pink-and-white gazebo would be the town park. Here in Berkeley Springs[, West Virginia], population 663, “the country’s first spa,†it is a state park. It is, in fact, [...]
Posted on June 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Richard Florida’s “The Rise of the Creative Class“:
[The key to economic growth lies not just in the ability to attract the creative class, but to translate that underlying advantage into creative economic outcomes in the form of new ideas, new high-tech businesses and regional growth. To better gauge these capabilities, I developed a new [...]
Posted on April 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, business, politics | Comments Off