Will Rinehart

“An athlete of steel and iron with not a superfluous ounce of metal on it” exclaimed William Dean Howells when he recalled the gigantic 700-ton Corliss steam engine that towered over Machinery Hall at the Philadelphia International Exhibition.

No society has ever existed without some kind of property, the vision of an ideal propertyless world must be grounded not in collective memory but in a collective longing. p 5 Politics for those in The Republic were largely a matter of custom, not law.

It seems intuitive that the rise of the Internet and social networking sites has made us all more lonely.

A public network interconnecting computers must be licensed and, according to present interpretations of the 1934 Communications Act, may be denied a license if the government does not believe that it serves “the public convenience, interest, or necessity”

When more histories of technology that take the critical stance of the best histories of politics are written, American will realize that not only their remarkable achievements but many of their deep and persistent problems arise, in the name of order, sy…

What is surprising is that the bloated super-tribes have survived at all and, what is more, survived so well.

Economic growth can happen in one of four ways: 1) Solovian growth where capital accumulation occurs at a faster rate than growth of the labor force so each worker has more capital to work with, 2) Smithian growth where there is increase in trade, 3) Scale

SOPA and PIPA overshadowed a number of newsworthy releases at the end of January, and in the scuffle, a study dissecting Facebook’s information networks seemed to have been lost.

This article, and the book that it is based on, seem hugely provocative: In our imaginations, we offhandedly associate the term “inquisition” with the term “Dark Ages”.

The opening to “The End of Sociological Theory” by Steven Seidman begins: Postmodernism carries no promise of liberation-of a society free of domination.

The classical definition of competitive price are those where price equal cost.

Richard Rorty describing ironists and thus the entire hipster culture, [Ironists] realize that anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed … [They] are always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change,…

When there are calls for regulation on the net, remember the good ol days, Most people have already forgotten how dark and unsignposted the Internet once was.

Some will argue that the changes we are experiencing are detrimental.

Marc Andreesen: Too much of the debate is still around financial valuation, as opposed to the underlying intrinsic value of the best of Silicon Valley’s new companies.

In the last couple of weeks, I have been become fascinated with the the history of policing.

I use Schopenhauer’s term in a looser manner.

Public choice applies to policing, In the police world, there are good arrests and better arrests, but there is no such thing as a bad arrest.

Two things.

An oldie but a goodie: Competition for profits goes beyond established industry rivals to include four other competitive forces as well: customers, suppliers, potential entrants, and substitute products.

Culture tends to refer to the artifact.

Google’s in-house philosopher explains his conversion from technologist to humanist, In learning the limits of my technologist worldview, I didn’t just get a few handy ideas about how to build better AI systems.

Anil Dash doesn’t mince words, How many times have you seen a website say “We’re not responsible for the content of our comments.”?

Frans de Waal, I think the sense of fairness in humans is very strongly developed and that’s why we react so strongly to all the bonuses received by Wall Street executives.

In an old chemist’s attic, so dreary and so mean, Oh smell the fearful odors of nitroglycerine They’re busy building bombs, and filling cans with nails And little starving kiddies set up this tearful wail: Oh, it’s sister Ginny’s turn to throw the bomb The

Via Metafilter, a look inside Research in Motion: Let’s rewind a few years.

Even though I am decidedly against his economic views, I find Slavoj Zizek, like other Marxist philosophers, endlessly interesting.

Adolescence came into general use around the turn of the 20th century as the time between adulthood and childhood became protracted enough to require a name.

What follows is by no means new, but I just wanted to try to apply critiques central to literary theory to a new set of circumstances to better illuminate them for myself.

Google is developing a data exchange: Wall Street-like exchanges have revolutionized online advertising, but Google is taking the concept further, quietly building one for buying and selling data, the lifeblood of online advertising.

Some interesting points from this American Interest article: There is no ‘Iraqi People’.

One of the most fundamental distinctions in human thought is between the profane (profanum) and sacred (sacrum).

From Marginal Revolution: Take the case of the Netherlands.

Via Eli Dourado, this deserves to be quoted in full: Why does Google give out so much cool stuff for free?

From the Colbert Report, If I were only fact based, the book of books in literature would be the Manhattan phone directory – 4 million entries everything correct, but it dusts out of my ears and I do not know, do they dream at night?

From Eureka The Birth of Science by Andrew Gregory: The philosopher Empedocles of Acragas introduced the four elements of earth, water, air and fire, which were to become standard in Greek thought.

Framing theory is one of the bulwarks of communication scholarship.

Aristotelians used motion to describe a whole range of actions, from peaches ripening and a stone falling to a child growing and a body decaying. p. 7 “Economics is reorganizing itself as an information science” p. 9 The Gospel of Mark begins, “In the beg…

Claude Shannon in A Mathematical Theory of Communication: The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproduction at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.

An oldie but a goodie: The first surprise, says Pinker, is that books contain “a huge amount of lexical dark matter.”

From Ben Atlas: People think knowledge is an addition rather than a subtraction.

The Blessed Adam Smith: Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.

Who Says What to Whom on Twitter: “We study several longstanding questions in media communications research, in the context of the microblogging service Twitter, regarding the production, flow, and consumption of information.

As I put this list together, this post will be populated.

Paul Starr again: Throughout the century, the absence of regulatory obstacles to newspapers contributed to their growth.

April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.

In reading Ostrom on game theory, a curious thing popped up.

From FL Lucas’ book aptly titled Tragedy There, face to face, stand arrayed the opposite ideals – Apollo and Dionysus, the god of Dorian discipline and the god of the license of the wild.

I was recently reading about information and stumbled upon an OED entry on the subject.