View From a Height

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• Driverless Cars Heading Commercial
  CES is going to feature a little commercial toe-dipping into the driverless car market: While Google’s self-driven Prii have been stealing headlines for the better part of two years, upcoming offerings from Audi and Toyota will likely focus on vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication technology. Details are still under wraps, but this five second clip reveals what appears to be […]
• Socialist Amusement Parks
  Detritus from the heart of Berlin: Like most things socialist, it’s better in the imagination than in reality, and tends not to be well-maintained.
• The Union Pacific Railroads and Steamships (1900)
  Another cool map from the Big Map Blog:  
• Igloo Village Boasts 20 Thermal Glass Dwellings
  This hotel got some publicity last week.  Here’s the inside:

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• Last Week in Amazing Photos
  From NASA’s Dawn mission, the Cornelia Crater on the Vesta asteroid: More from Popular Science.
• Opera: The Strangest Art
  Opera certainly is odd, if taken at face value: The formal rules disguise the strangeness. The unnatural is successfully passed off as routine. It is to Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker’s credit that in their new book,A History of Opera: The Last 400 Years, they notice all this. Despite their evident love of their subject, […]
• ARPA Still Working on Solar
  ARPA is still funding solar research: They suggest that by using precisely structured materials to sort sunlight into several different wavelengths, it should be possible to direct each to a semiconductor that has been tuned to be the most efficient for that wavelength. The end result should be the absorption of more energy overall, allowing […]
• The Most Popular College Majors 2012
  Some of these students will find jobs.
• New High Speed Liquid Splash Photographs by Markus Reugels
  Edgerton reimagined:

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• The Bad Guys Get Smarter…
  Iran’s developing smarter Internet censoring software: For the moment, Iran deals with the nuisance of social networking largely by blocking the sites. Facebook and Twitter, for example, are completely banned. As such, many savvier Iranians are turning to VPNs, and the hope seems to be that limited social networking would bring them back into the […]
• ST:TNG NG
  5 Ways Star Trek: TNG would be different if they made it now: Semantic search is the great goal in the world of search: making computers understand not just what humans say, but what we’re really asking. And anyone who’s used Google daily over the past 15 years (meaning most of us) knows that semantic […]
• Roll Over Beethoven: Four Famous Musical Notes
  The history Beethoven’s Fifth in performance and in popular imagination: One key to the Fifth’s own cultural malleability—or ambiguity—is found in those first four measures, a masterstroke of misdirection. We tend to remember the four notes as severe and brooding, with a ponderousness that sits at extreme odds with the allegro con brio marking. That […]
• Majority Rules and the Filibuster
  Over at the Liberty Law Blog, Mike Rappaport argues that the Senate must be able to change the filibuster rule with a majority vote: The main reason why a majority of the Senate needs to be able to change the filibuster rule is that otherwise a simple majority of the Senate could effectively amend the […]
• The Student Loan Bubble
  It’s the financial portion of the higher ed bubble, and it’s about to get ugly.  Either defaults will begin in earnest, or you and I will be forced to subsidize them through a bailout.  Of course, since student loans are now exclusively financed through the government, anyway, we’re holding the bag, either way. Which is […]
• Pythagorean Theorem
  H/T Chart Porn:
• 1.8 million LEGOs Used to Create Map of Japan
  Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the LEGO equivalent of Commodore Perry’s Black Ships: Dubbed “Build Up Japan,” the event – rather than recreating existing landmarks – encouraged kids to picture what they want Japan to look like, and to create imaginary structures. The future of Japan was, quite literally, in their hands. And the kids […]
• The British Navy and the Slave Trade
  Via Lawfare: In the early 19th century the British government, responding to strong domestic pressure, undertook to suppress the transatlantic slave trade. Although the Royal Navy dominated ocean travel, Britain faced important legal obstacles. The slave trade was conducted on the high seas by vessels sailing under the protection of other sovereigns and was not […]
• The Founders and Finance
  Definitely on the reading list, Michael Greve reviews.  Among other points: To build a financial system meant building institutions (foremost, the Bank), and that in turn meant constitutional construction. Everyone on all sides eagerly mobilized the “original public meaning” of the Constitution, only to discover that it would carry only so far. Those arguments, moreover, were part […]
• Nanny State Goes To College
  Via Overlawyered: According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass. was in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act because it failed to * Continually provide ready-made hot and cold gluten- and allergen-free food options in its dining hall food lines; * Develop individualized meal plans for students with food allergies, and […]
• Manufacturing Slipping?
  The Journal of Commerce is reporting that steel imports were up slightly month-to-month in November, but up 25% year-over-year.  This tracks with manufacturing, reports of the death of which have been greatly exaggerated.  But it’s not a good sign for the upcoming year.  Even as economic activity has rebounded, manufacturing has levelled off below its […]
• The Best Infographics Of 2012
  Still not too late to look back at the year’s greatest hits. Data viz has to be considered one of the fastest growing segments of design today, and thankfully, it’s growing in some exciting new ways. Where the Internet infographic was defined, for a period, by the dense, super-long column of facts and figures, we’ve […]
• FRED Excel Add-In
  I love the St. Louis Fed’s FRED database.  They now have an Excel plug-in, to let you import their data directly, without having to go to the site and save it as as Excel file first.  This is incredibly useful if you use the same series over and over, and don’t want to have to […]

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• You Keep Using That Word…
  In this case, “justice,” which doesn’t really mean what the left thinks it does. An interesting experiment is about to be conducted in London. A public-housing authority has constructed exact replicas of elegant early-Victorian townhouses on one side of Union Square in Islington, of the kind much coveted by bankers and lawyers in the nearby […]
• Debt Limit Chicken
  Professor Bainbridge takes a game theory approach, wherein the Republicans must persuade the Democrats that they really are crazy enough not to raise the debt ceiling, barring serious spending cuts.  Last time, given the election schedule, I thought the deal was defensible.  But Bainbridge’s reasoning now is sound: So there are the GOP’s choices: Give […]
• Bitterness, Cynicism Don’t Work Well
  Here, or in Israel:  A poll publicized in Haaretz last week found that more than half the Israelis who vote for left-leaning parties (54.4%, to be pedantic) “would leave the country if they could.” That’s twice the rate of right-wing voters. According to the survey, it is the economy, rather than politics, that accounts most for the […]
• Obama’s SecDef Nominee: ‘Let the Jews pay for it’
  According to JINSA official Marsha Halteman: “He said to me, ‘Let the Jews pay for it’,” said Marsha Halteman, director for military and law enforcement programs at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which led the battle to keep USO Haifa operational. Hagel’s campaign to close the storied USO port struck many observers, […]
• National Debt – Tennessee Ernie Ford Edition
  Via the Eeyores over at Zero Hedge, this cheery thought about the $1 Trillion coin: It was already a bad idea.  Now, it’s just stupid.
• The Great Swindle
  Roger Scruton asks how we ended up with so much fake culture: Hence for a long time now, it has been assumed that there can be no authentic creation in high art which is not in some way a ‘challenge’ to public culture. Art must give offence, stepping out armed against the bourgeois taste for […]
• US Shale Oil Reducing Direct Dependence
  Via Mark Perry: Prices are still largely a function of world markets, but the idea that Keystone XL, for instance, won’t help this is just silly.  And the Left keeps touting boutique energies like solar and wind as means to “energy independence.”  Can we please stop the ethanol mandate now? Note also that this peaked […]
• Mandatory Gun Insurance?
  This strikes me as a terrible idea, since there are already plenty of laws on the books that make gun owners liable for the misuse of their weapons, either by themselves or other, but they’re asking economists, so Russ Roberts provides the coup de grace: But the logic is not quite as neat as it […]
• The Palestinian Authority’s Inconvenient Truths
  Khaled Abu Toameh highlights the seamier side of the world’s favorite underdogs: – Out of the 600 Christians from the Gaza Strip who arrived in the West Bank in the past two weeks to celebrate Christmas, dozens have asked to move to Israel because they no longer feel comfortable living under the Palestinian Authority and […]
• Afghan Documents and Ancient Jewish Life There
  A find to rival the Cairo Genizah, maybe the Dead Sea Scrolls? The Afghan collection gives an unprecedented look into the lives of Jews in ancient Persia in the 11th century. The paper manuscripts, preserved over the centuries by the dry, shady conditions of the caves, include writings in Hebrew, Aramaic, Judea-Arabic and the unique […]
• Ted Cruz – Tie Policies to Opportunity
  Ted Cruz invokes lefty favorite John Rawls (albeit somewhat inaccurately) in setting up new messaging for the GOP.  But he hits the right notes: Opportunity conservatism is a powerful frame to explain conservative policies that work. It covers the gamut of issues. Republicans shouldn’t just assail excessive financial and environmental regulations; we should explain how […]
• Not Surprising: Government Spending Destroys Wealth
  Via James Pethokoukis at AEI, a new study strongly suggests that the so-called fiscal multiplier for “stimulus” spending is less than 1, even in periods of high unemployment, meaning that even in a those situations where stimulus spending is supposed to do the most good, it still destroys vast quantities of wealth: We have investigated the proposition […]
• Ideology, Income, and Size of State Government
  As states become wealthier, ideology of the state government becomes more important in determining the size of that government: This paper theorizes that the impact of ideology on the size of US state governments increases with state income. This idea is tested using state-level ideology data derived from the voting behavior of state congressional representatives. […]
• More Evidence that CO2 Isn’t Causing Warming
  Via Powerline, Watts Up With That reports on a new study that claims to show that warming and CO2 emissions are perhaps correlated, but not causal: We use statistical methods for nonstationary time series to test the anthropogenic interpretation of global warming (AGW), according to which an increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations raised global […]
• Oriole Cafeterias’ Map of Baltimore (1947)
  The Browns wouldn’t arrive until 7 years later: Follow the link, see the whole map.
• Mark Lamster: I Love New York at Night
  A non-skyline slideshow:

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• “Proust is important for everyone”
  Mario Vargas-Llosa is no man of the right, but even he worries about cultural amnesia: If culture is purely entertainment, nothing is of importance. If it’s a matter of amusement, an impostor can undoubtedly amuse me more than a profoundly authentic person. But if culture signifies more than this, then it’s worrying. And I believe […]
• Government Motors, Government Airplanes
  Airbus and GM are both getting beaten like a drum by their competition.  At least Airbus admits government interference is part of the problem: But the fact that executives at Airbus concentrated so myopically on the A380 jumbo jet was also a product of politics at parent company EADS, where the French and German governments […]
• Turn, Turn to the Anglosphere
  Conservative MP Dan Hannan lays out the reasons why Britain shouldn’t fear leaving the EU if a new relationship can’t be negotiated.  Where it’s liable to stick? Hardest of all is the issue of the single market. Almost everyone agrees that Britain should remain part of a European free trade area. The trouble is that […]
• Calibrating The Messaging
  The Diplomat takes us through the problems in calibrating your rhetoric to signal just the right level of commitment to both friends and enemies. Messaging with adversaries can be just as fraught with problems.  Robert Dreyfuss’ recent post on how the United States and Iran managed to avoid a fracas over an air combat scrum in the Gulf […]
• 20 Breathtaking Examples of Winter Landscape Photography
  Yes, it’s cold.  But without winter, we’d never get shots like this: Go look at the rest.
• The Fiscal Cliff Deal From Overseas
  Mostly, and understanding that not much has really been resolved, and the President, like it or not (not), and despite promises that he’s “not gonna play that game again,” will have to negotiate with Congress over spending. Britain’s The Commentator: Megaphone politics doesn’t work and Obama should know this. Or at least he would if he […]
• Death Panels and CLASS
  Controlling only the House, Republicans will, for a little while at least, have to be satisfied with rear-guard actions against Obamacare, at least at the federal level.  But there is some small good news on that front. First, the CLASS Act, which was sold as reducing the deficit but would have ended up increasing it, […]

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• No Enemies to the Left – Al Jazeera Edition
  Jonathan Sabin at Commentary: Most Americans still think of Al Jazeera as the network that was Osama bin Laden’s outlet to the world in the years after 9/11. Since then, it has earned a reputation in some quarters as the best source of news about the Arab and Muslim world, especially during the Arab Spring […]
• Plus ca Change – Central African Republic Edition
  The current round of unrest in the Central African Republic brings back memories of an earlier round of unrest there from the Diplomad: About our Embassy in Bangui. Months before the coup attempt, some bean counters had decided to terminate the US marine guard detail there and at several other smaller embassies. The Pentagon, likewise, […]
• A Vested Interest in Palimpsest
  One word’s tour through cultural history: Like most autodidacts, I’m a spotty reader, subject to vagrant whims, led by meandering interests. “Palimpsest” is one of many personal guides for me. It can lead to the study of memory, to historical ideas about architecture, to geology, to art history. Stay with it long enough and you […]
• CO2 Emissions Today Are Lowest Today’s College Students’ Lifetimes
  Mark Perry points the finger at natural gas drilling.  So why do the NY environmentalists hate the planet?
• Evolution of Metrorail animation, now with Rush Plus
  Greater Greater Washington has an animated gif showing the evolution of Metro Rail since 1976. The map is so iconic that virtually every one of the entries in the site’s contest to replace it only came up with variations on its theme.
• The Endangered Mall Rat: An American Crisis?
  More dead malls on the way, according to Walter Russell Mead: It was only a matter of time before malls starting sharing the pain of the brick and mortar retail outlets they house. The real estate market has been slow to adjust to this new reality, and the amount of commercial real estate built for retail has continued […]
• The Value of Political Connections
  Quantified: The authors focus on lobbyists who used to be congressional staffers. In particular, they look at the revenue generated by these lobbyists before and after the senators or representatives for whom they once worked leave office. They find that, on average, when a senator leaves office, lobbyists who used to work for that senator […]
• Sotomayor’s Blow to Religious Liberty
  What’s at stake: Sotomayor’s decision illustrates just how difficult that task may turn out to be. Even if the owners of Hobby Lobby eventually prevail in court and their rights are upheld, a vengeful Obama administration determined to make an example of anyone who crosses them could have already destroyed their business. By sinking them […]
• The Proper Debate: How Best to Grow the Economy
  A somewhat contrarian view on the upcoming debt ceiling debate: Instead of political grandstanding around a redundant, made-up number, we should spend that valuable time debating how best to achieve robust growth given our current economic condition. The proper debate would be lively. Contemporary Keynesians advocate top-down, “intelligent design” economics — i.e., trusting government officials, […]
• EPA Costs US Economy $353 Billion per Year
  Richard Parker Windsor was unavailable for comment: Transparency is the lifeblood of democracy. Washington needs more of it, especially in the all-too-opaque world of regulation. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for example, is the most expensive federal regulatory agency. Its annual budget is fairly modest in Beltway terms, at a little less than $11 billion, but that’s […]
• Gas Drilling Is Called Safe in New York
  “We’re a $133 billion government.  Do you know what we’re capable of?” “Do you?” “Er, well, no, because they won’t tell us.” The state’s Health Department found in an analysis it prepared early last year that the much-debated drilling technology known as hydrofracking could be conducted safely in New York, according to a copy obtained […]
• Iran Spy Network 30,000 Strong
  This doesn’t make me feel a whole lot better: The spy service operates in all areas where Iran has interests, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Central Asia, Africa, Austria, Azerbaijan, Croatia, France, Georgia, Germany, Turkey, Britain, and the Americas, including the United States. Iranian activities in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela have raised alarm […]
• California Shooting Location Map
  Via Chart Porn:

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• The Ghost Of World War One
  That cultural paralysis produced by WWI was really the ground opening up underneath the West’s feet: And then…  And then the story failed.  Those we trusted, those in a position to know, sent waves of young men to be slaughtered for not much purpose at all.  They sent them to stack ten deep in death […]
• Boehner: No More One-On-One Negotiations with Obama
  Wow, talk about changing pitchers one batter too late: The negotiations approach has obviously become a trap. For one thing, Boehner has proven to be not very good at it. The president “negotiates” in bad faith and uses deadline pressure to slip bad bills through before legislators and the voters have any chance to read […]
• Health Care Law May Mean Less Hiring in 2013
  Fewer jobs, higher taxes, what’s not to like? Many businesses plan to bring on more part-time workers next year, trim the hours of full-time employees or curtail hiring because of the new health care law, human resource firms say. Their actions could further dampen job growth, which already is threatened by possible federal budget cutbacks […]
• What Are the Most Dangerous Countries for Banks?
  Investors looking to move money abroad remember that higher growth also usually means higher risks: “As we’ve seen the U.S. economy not do as strongly as we would have hoped in the last few years, we’ve seen a lot of our clients looking for new opportunities in emerging frontier markets,” says Angela Mancini, vice president […]
• For Camille Paglia, the Spiritual Quest Defines All Great Art
  I wonder what Jacques Barzun would have thought of this.  I like to think that in principle he would have approved, regardless of the execution or point of view of the writer. The art world is in spiritual crisis—it has not had a new idea in years. So argues the cultural critic and feminist provocateur […]
• States Letting Tax Increases Expire
  As Obama raises taxes, and Colorado considers doing the same, other states are letting their temporary measures expire: In 2009  residents approved a two-year surcharge on income tax rates for those earning more than $125,000 a year. The legislature declined to extend it in 2012, producing an estimated $133 million tax cut despite pressure by […]
• Poiticizing Pension Investment
  The New York City Teacher’s Retirement System is going to invest $1 billion in Hurricane Sandy reconstruction: Both are critically needed missions. It is understandable, the retirement system’s impulse to want to put some of its resources to work to help Sandy’s victims, who are neighbors in distress and some of whom might be system […]
• Keystone-Flavored TABOR?
  A Pennsylvania state senator is looking to our very own TABOR as a model: For the second year in a row, Folmer introduced the Taxpayer Protection Act, which would create a budgetary cap linked to population growth and inflation. “If you want to get taxes under control, you have to get spending under control,” Folmer said. […]
• Some Contributions to the Gun Control Debate
  Mitch Berg on Diane Sawyer, Rocket Scientist: So let’s set our levels right here; because a couple of college students, and media dilettante Diane Sawyer, couldn’t quick-draw faster than a cop carrying out a CQB drill, concealed carry is worthless? No – if you’ve taken any handgun training at all, you know that quick-draw shooting is very, […]

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• Popular Sovereignty on the Ropes
  Clare Spark on what the term means, why it’s critical to the American project, why it’s endangered, and what we can do to start restoring it: Rooseveltian internationalists, leaders of the American Studies movement, were fond of trouncing the Founders and Herman Melville’s character Captain Ahab as messianic and rabidly imperialistic. Thus “American exceptionalism” has […]
• Mapping the Republic of Letters
  Social networking, as it existed among the 18th-Century intelligentsia: “Mapping the Republic of Letters” is a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and international project in the digital humanities, centered at Stanford University. Since 2008, we have been creating visualizations to analyze “big data” relating to the world of early-modern scholars. We focus primarily on their correspondence, travel, and […]
• Why We Fight
  James Delingpole on why he’s so hard on the climate warmists: On a personal level, it’s a problem for us climate sceptics because it means we find ourselves continually being vilified – and denied airspace or funding or preferment – on the basis not of what we actually believe and say but on a grotesque […]
• The Littlest Generals
  Brothers in tiny Mexican town push for changes to nation’s strict gun-control laws: “Had we not been able to defend ourselves that afternoon with our own weapons, I don’t know that we’d be standing here today,” said Alex LeBaron, a state legislator who is leading a campaign to allow residents to arm themselves. “Without our […]
• Obama’s Tax Bill Comes Due
  As usual, Arthur Brooks nails it: After paying a lifetime of taxes on wages and salaries, business and farm profits and capital gains, Americans who save their money rather than spend it get the reward of giving 40% to Uncle Sam. As a political matter, the GOP also gave a big break to Democratic Senators […]
• The Artistic Legacy of the Great War
  Why did World War I produce a unique cultural paralysis? Everywhere, the Great War precipitated a cultural paralysis the like of which had not been known since medieval times. The causes of this precipitate ice age are elusive. Its consequences endure. A pattern of cultural response and expectation in wartime was set for the next […]
• Paul Krugman: Asimov’s Foundation novels grounded my economics
  This time, it’s social scientism: Let me be clear, however: in pointing out the familiarity of the various societies we see in Foundation, I’m not being critical. On the contrary, this familiarity, the way Asimov’s invented societies recapitulate historical models, goes right along with his underlying conceit: the possibility of a rigorous, mathematical social science […]
• The Folly of Scientism
  Scientists continue to overreach in their estimation of themselves: Is scientism defensible? Is it really true that natural science provides a satisfying and reasonably complete account of everything we see, experience, and seek to understand — of every phenomenon in the universe? And is it true that science is more capable, even singularly capable, of […]