Science Map. (by Endless Forms Most Beautiful, via Marginal Revolution)

T+ 00:09:04 Falcon 9 has achieved Earth Orbit!

Even at a rate of 100 person days per body, that would use up 1% of the population per day. An initial population of 100 million, killed off at this rate, would have only one person left after five years. In the novel there were many corpses around that clearly hadn’t been eaten; if only half the bodies were eaten, the population would last half as long. No way a kid lives to be seven when born into a world where the main food is cannibalism.

—Overcoming Bias : Cannibals Die Fast

That seems like an awful lot of Grinderman.

The most important thing to understand about Facebook is that you are not Facebook’s customer, you are its inventory. You are the product Facebook is selling. Facebook’s real customers are advertisers. You, as a Facebook member, are useful only because you can be packaged up and sold to advertisers. The more information Facebook can get from you, the more you are worth.

—

Lyons, on Facebook (via newsweek)

See also newspapers and television and magazines and radio.

(via scz)

We went to a housing area [in Berlin], where two types of Seidlungen or housing were to be found together: Bauhaus housings and a competing housing project by National Socialist architects. It was interesting to me, that the Bauhaus architects had figured out exactly how many square meters people needed, how much water they needed, how much sunlight, playground space… They had planned for an abstract human being; and the architecture could have been executed anywhere in the world. Whereas the Nazi architects had build genuine homes, with little chimneys, small front steps in brick—all these references to vernacular architecture that was part of the German cultural tradition. I realized that in a sense, the international aspiration of the Bauhaus school was to be placeless and universal, as IKEA does now. I found myself a little embarrassed that I would rather have lived in a dwelling designed by the Nazis than a Bauhaus home…

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(via @willwilkinson)

And The Winner of The Everybody Draw Mohammad Contest is… - Reason Magazine

From the best magazine in America comes the best defense of free speech in recent memory.

In railing against the passing of SoHo’s exhilarating, creative days—characterized by “the mix of artists, crafts-people, small manufacturers, researchers [!], as well as of commerce oriented to their needs,” Sorkin joins in the lamentation for “the rapid decline of the city’s industrial economy.” He doesn’t recognize that the SoHo he yearns for was precisely the product of that rapid industrial decline, which made economically available to artists and their hangers-on all those cool industrial spaces that in more industrially vibrant times would have been used by, well, industry.

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Gentrification and Its Discontents - Magazine - The Atlantic

The Rebel Sell, a book with which I am utterly obsessed right now, has a similar, but more scorched earth, nuked from orbit, take-down of Naomi Klein’s identical laments over the gentrification of Toronto.