Dan O'Huiginn

Tyler Cowen blames inequality on the tendency of the smart and rich to hang around with one another:

a common set of factors is driving inequality: equality of opportunity,  assortative mating, O-ring production, increases in the demand for talent driven by the leveraging of talent through technology. The forces are similar and so are the results, the money elite, the monetary elite, the power elite.

Francis wants to stop building insecure software. As a start, he is pledging not to use C/C++ for new projects. Choosing a different language for your work may not inevitably lead to safe code, but at least it’ll reduce the number of gratuitous buffer overflows we are geneating everywhere. And, well, you have to start somewhere.

[I’ve not signed, because I can imagine a few circumstances where I might want to write C/C++. But I’ll continue to avoid them wherever possible]

Can you keep a few dozen brilliant-but-disorganized geeks pointed in the right direction and collaborating productively? Supertramp is a very loose network of geeks and activists, linking up people who are working on mapping out political and economic power, and we’re looking for a cat herder to keep us in line.

The basic idea is this. My work on the Investigative Dashboard mirrors what Miguel Paz has done at Poderopedia, Friedrich Lindenberg at Grano or Chris Taggart at Open Corporates. We, and many others, have long been collaborating through code-sharing, and hackathons, and frenzied coding sessions at conferences. But we still spend too much time reinventing the wheel, and too little pushing the boundaries of what we can achieve. The hope is that by adding a thin veneer of co-ordination on top of that, we’ll be able to substantially increase our impact. Please, if you like the idea, think about applying.

Mississippi schools aren’t allowed to teach how to use a condom. One has resorted to an inspired workaround using socks.

Booking fees for A-list music acts. Supposedly you can get Coolio for <$30,000.

Most of us have pretty bad intuition about the relative populations of the countries of the world. I certainly do, despite my many attempts to improve.

Paul has found this map, which scales the world according to population:

My own approach has been lots of time staring at Wikipedia’s various listings of countries by population.

That’s a start, but it still leaves out the dimension of time. Why are our intuitions about population so inaccurate? Ignorance is part of the reason, but part is just being out of date. Even historical eurocentrism makes a bit more sense, when you consider that, fifty years ago, Europe had about thrice the population of Africa. Africa took the population lead some time this century, and by 2050 will have perhaps thee times the population of Europe.

So it wouldn’t have been so irrational if your grandparents gave France more attention than Nigeria. But general knowledge takes a while to catch up — a lot of it is inhaled in school, using books that might easily be a decade out-of-date, and we hold onto it for the future decades of our life.

So take a good look at wikipedia’s List of countries by past and future population. The 1950s figures, to my mind, correlate quite well with the size countries have in our popular imagination. China and India at the top, the US and Russia understood to be huge, then countries like Brazil, Japan and Pakistan, before reaching the larger European states.

The current figures seem far less familiar. Bangladesh is more populous than Russia, Ethiopia has twice the population of Spain, and so on. The estimates for the future get more alien the further the get. I’ve spent a fair while looking at the 2050 figures. While I can understand them in my head, I’m so conditioned to focus on Europe that I can’t come to grips with its demographic insignificance.

D-Squared expects Syriza to play chicken with the ECB — “present them with a fait accompli on the debt default, and gamble that they will not have the nerve to take measures which might have the effect of forcing Greece out of the Euro“. But Europe has had several years to get used to the threat of a Greek default, so will be able to contain it relatively easily. So Syriza either wins concessions or gets booted out of the Euro, but neither approach hurts the rest of Europe that deeply.

Britain’s relationship with Saudi Arabia has long shown that, with enough money floating around, the British establishment can be coaxed into the most unpleasant behaviour. The multi-million-dollar corruption around BAE’s Al-Yamamah arms deal is only the most extreme case.

Last week Union flags were flying at half-mast, in a government-mandated show of sympathy on the death of the king of Saudi Arabia.
But David Hencke has unearthed, and David Allen Green has explained, something more than symbolic. The English Ministry of Justice is taking money to work with the Saudi punishment system. Yep, they are taking some £6 million to work with the world leaders in flogging and beheading. As Green says:

There are many responses to the horrific brutality of the legal system of our ally Saudi Arabia. One is to ignore it; another is to seek to improve it. But on the face of it, it takes a peculiar callousness to use UK civil service resources to try to make money for the UK government out of it.

I’ve been reading Kansai Cool, Christal Whelan’s book on culture in the region around Kyoto, Japan. It has a short but entirely fascinating chapter on the Lolita subculture.

What’s striking to me is just how closely the explanations given by Lolita adherents resonate with those I’ve heard from ostensibly quite different subcultures elsewhere in the world.

There’s a sense that the orderly aestheticism of the scene is a reaction to the confusion of the world, creating a structure of your own to sidestep the one forced on you. There’s the choice of clothing with the explicit intention of rejecting sexual attention:

“If I didn’t dress in this totally conspicuous and bizarre way,
I’d make friends and be popular with boys.”

The ornate dress then is clearly not worn to be sweet and demure, or become the object of someone else’s desire, but instead is an act of defiance. The hyper-feminine clothing creates a boundary around those who wear it. Empowered by an aesthetic that allows an imaginary flight from Japan, Lolitas seek sanctuary in a foreign time and place largely of their own invention.

And in the end Lolita emerges as — almost — the pursuit of feminism by the unlikeliest of means:

The outlandish costume challenged prosaic futures as office ladies (OLs) who prepare tea and make endless photocopies. Lolitas criticized the norm by standing outside it in bold visual contrast. They may have been merely stalling for time, but in that interim Lolitas created a space in which to dream of a possible self within an imaginable Japan.

Sady Doyle on internet bullying of celebrities. Amanda Palmer in particular. Having been a (small-f) fan since quite early on, I hadn’t realised just how much more fame she has achieved as a hate figure than as a musician. I’d vaguely assumed that the people reading diatribes were simply Amanda Palmer fans, disillusioned to find that their idol had feet of clay.

But in Doyle’s telling — and I think she’s right — the Amanda Palmer hate industry mushroomed far beyond that.

It’s hard to see how [attacking Palmer] was a victory for feminism. Or for music. Or for media: The fact of the matter is, a woman in her mid-thirties wrote, performed and released an album that was musically relevant and probably her best work to date; we responded by talking about her body, her personality and who she was sleeping with. We called her too loud, too self-assured, too ambitious. We wondered why she couldn’t simply live off her rich husband’s income, as if that isn’t a question that feminism has been in the process of answering for the past five decades. We affirmed that the artist’s persona mattered more than the quality of their work, and we affirmed that female ambition or self-confidence was a crime: That if you were a loud or aging or difficult woman, and you wouldn’t let us ignore you, we would turn our attention on you full-force, in order to burn your life down to its foundation.

I have an entirely clichéd adoration of Ginsberg’s Howl. I remember spending the winter of 2009 in a state of undirected euphoria. Somehow whenever I stepped out into the Berlin snow — unusually long-lasting that year, giving the streets a kind of crisp unreality — it was this poem rattling around in my head. It was the perfect reflection of a certain mood in me, in the city, in the communities I was ricocheting between. Tangled, manic, anguished, hopeful, terrified, frustrated and frustrating, and above all energetically, forcefully intense.

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in 
              Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their 
              torsos night after night 
       with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al- 
              cohol and cock and endless balls, 
       incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and 
              lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of 
              Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo- 
              tionless world of Time between, 
       Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery 
              dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, 
              storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon 
              blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree 
              vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook- 
              lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind, 

Here’s the full thing.

My filter bubble can sometimes be rather too effective at removing pop from my life, driving me to youtube binges to work out what on earth an Iggy Azalea is, or why people are talking about a Lorde who isn’t Audre. And, of course, to stay enough in touch to party with the High Court Judges — a clique which, inexplicably, still hasn’t lent its name to a psychobilly outfit.

Tove Lo, Habits. I like this a lot. It’s your standard despair-driven hedonism (“You’re gone, and I got to stay / high all the time / to keep you off my mind”). But this incarnation, unusually, makes the griminess feel real — “I eat dinner in my bathtub”.

Sia, Chandelier. And here’s another take on the Self-hating party girl, one that somehow didn’t connect with me. Perhaps it’s that the suicidal despair of the chorus (“I’m gonna swing from the chandelier”) isn’t echoed in the deflated-sounding presentation. Then there’s a video that’s clever and interesting, but not affecting — Lady Gaga meets Home Alone, a mime-artist ballerina bouncing off the walls.

OneRepublic, counting stars. I like it — country-infused pop at 120bpm, christianity with a touch of rebellion, a video of cheering up the old folks at a prayer meeting. It feels like a toned-down take on Kipling’s If (“Old, but I’m not that old / Young, but I’m not that bold”). I can’t quite believe “Make that money, watch it burn” is a shout-out to the KLF. Wouldn’t be wonderful, though, to see these crooners triumphantly self-obliterate themselves in the footsteps of the Justified Ancients?

Ylvis, What does the fox say? This is such gloriously silly fun that I can’t quite believe it isn’t from the 80s. To be paired with Chinese star Rollin Wang’s even more bonkers zoological offering, Chick Chick

LSD has gone the way of space exploration. The psychonaut is now an object of retrofuturism just as much as the astronaut. They’re relics of a time when we could believe in progress and exploration, whether of inner or of outer space.

I’ve never been able to work out why that is. So many aspects of the counterculture have made their way into a mainstream which has become inclusive to a fault. You can blame it on drug busts, on the rise of alternatives from MDMA to cocaine.

But I can’t quite believe that explanation. I think that somehow the acid culture was too modernist, too rational. The appropriation of the Dow slogan “better living through chemistry” shows as much — this was the continuing pharmaceutical research into areas where others feared to tread. Huxley and Leary were believers in progress, in infinite possibilities which could be revealed by crossing the frontier of the mind.

It’s that optimism which seems so out of joint today. Even the people who do drop acid treat it more as hedonism than shamanism. Few people consider the drug as a means to self-discovery — and those who do will find themselves looking back to 40-year-old texts for guidance, since there are so few people writing similar tracts today.

Because it’s never a bad day for some William Blake: