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The Wire - Omars Day. (YouTube)

Obit Magazine, Off-Beat Obit: “A Man’s Gotta Have a Code”:

“BALTIMORE - Omar Little, the veteran stick-up artist who inspired fear and fascination in drug-plagued neighborhoods across the city, was shot and killed in a west-side convenience store yesterday. Police said the assailant remained at large.

Famed for his brazen robberies of area drug dealers, Mr. Little had retired from what he called “the game” a year ago, moving to the Caribbean with a new romantic partner. But he apparently returned to Baltimore this winter to seek revenge following the brutal murder of a beloved business associate.

Mr. Little’s efforts to hunt down Marlo Stanfield, the man he blamed for the killing, were unsuccessful–an unusual stumble in a celebrated career. He injured his leg jumping out a window during what sources said was a firefight with alleged Stanfield associates. As a result, witnesses said, the once intimidating figure was reduced to limping along city streets on an improvised crutch. (…)”

(via)

Nota Bene: “MANY ARE TRAPPED FOR HOURS IN DARKNESS AND CONFUSION.”

“The masseter muscle of mastication reflected back to expose the jawbone (mandible) and the related vessels, nerves and muscles.” (Flickr)

The Bassett Collection:

“The Basset Collection, which now belongs to Stanford University’s School of Medicine, is the definitive dissection collection available to medical students and instructors. These incredibly detailed dissections show and label most every part of the human body, from its tiniest veins, arteries and nerves to serial cross-sections of the spinal cord.”

Zie ook Dazzling dissection images from famed Bassett collection now online. (via)

Peter Schiff, vriendje van Anne Frank in Het Achterhuis.

NRC, Foto Anne Franks vriendje openbaar:

“De ‘Peter’ uit het dagboek van Anne Frank, de jongen in het Achterhuis op wie ze heimelijk verliefd was, heeft eindelijk een gezicht gekregen. Ruim 62 jaar nadat Peter Schiff, net als Anne, in een concentratiekamp vroegtijdig aan zijn einde kwam, heeft een jeugdvriend een foto van hem vrijgegeven.”

The Observer, First picture of the boy who won heart of Anne Frank.

Chris Anderson, Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business:

“Enabled by the miracle of abundance, digital economics has turned traditional economics upside down. Read your college textbook and it’s likely to define economics as “the social science of choice under scarcity.” The entire field is built on studying trade-offs and how they’re made. Milton Friedman himself reminded us time and time again that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

But Friedman was wrong in two ways. First, a free lunch doesn’t necessarily mean the food is being given away or that you’ll pay for it later — it could just mean someone else is picking up the tab. Second, in the digital realm, as we’ve seen, the main feedstocks of the information economy — storage, processing power, and bandwidth — are getting cheaper by the day. Two of the main scarcity functions of traditional economics — the marginal costs of manufacturing and distribution — are rushing headlong to zip. It’s as if the restaurant suddenly didn’t have to pay any food or labor costs for that lunch.

Surely economics has something to say about that?”

David Horvitz, Things for sale that I will mail you:

“If you give me $1,999 I will take a ferry from Spain to Morocco. I will mail you a photograph of the port in Spain looking out at sea from a Spanish mailbox. I will then mail you a photograph of the port in Morocco looking out at sea from a Moroccan mailbox. You can glue the backs together when you get both of them and it will be like a three dimensional view.”

David Horvitz

Trouw, Hoezo sparen? Kasmoni!:

“Aandelen zijn uit. Sparen is weer in. De onrust op de effectenbeurzen en de stijgende rente hebben de op zeker spelende Nederlanders naar hun oude, vertrouwde spaarrekening gedreven. Gezamenlijk hebben Nederlanders nu 246 miljard euro op zo’n rekening weggezet. Dat is 16 miljard meer dan vorig jaar, een stijging van zo’n 1000 euro per inwoner.

Toch zijn er vele groepen, vooral allochtonen, die dit ’sparen op de bank’ te formeel vinden. Je moet allerlei papieren overleggen en contracten sluiten. Toch moeten ook zij af en toe een grote uitgave doen. Daarvoor vallen ze terug op een informeel banksysteem dat in de eigen cultuur vaak al eeuwenlang goed heeft gewerkt. Die systemen zijn bij de deelnemers bekend onder exotisch klinkende namen als sam (Antillianen), susu (Ghanezen) en nouba (Marokkanen). Kasmoni, het systeem van Creoolse Surinamers, is wel het bekendst.”

Chris Jordan - Plastic Bottles, 2007. 60×120″. Depicts two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes. Detail at actual size.

‘Karim Rashid. Industrial Designer. White half the time, pink half the time.’

NY Magazine, One Is the Loveliest Color:

“I was shopping in Europe with a couple friends, and they talked me into trying on a black shirt and black jeans. If you look good in white, you look really good in black.”

Nieuwe Media, Biologisch winkelen bij MarQt:

“Vandaag opent MarQt zijn deuren aan de Amsterdamse Overtoom. Dit ‘vernieuwende winkelconcept’ (een hippe biologische supermarkt, zeg maar) pakt het viraal aan, met een mailtje van oprichter Quirijn Bolle aan zijn netwerk, inclusief een link naar een winkelreportage op YouTube.”

Michael Specter in The New Yorker, Big Foot. In measuring carbon emissions, it’s easy to confuse morality and science:

“Possessing an excessive carbon footprint is rapidly becoming the modern equivalent of wearing a scarlet letter. Because neither the goals nor acceptable emissions limits are clear, however, morality is often mistaken for science. A recent article in New Scientist suggested that the biggest problem arising from the epidemic of obesity is the additional carbon burden that fat people—who tend to eat a lot of meat and travel mostly in cars—place on the environment. Australia briefly debated imposing a carbon tax on families with more than two children; the environmental benefits of abortion have been discussed widely (and simplistically). Bishops of the Church of England have just launched a “carbon fast,” suggesting that during Lent parishioners, rather than giving up chocolate, forgo carbon. (Britons generate an average of a little less than ten tons of carbon per person each year; in the United States, the number is about twice that.)”

iBand (YouTube). Website: www.iband.at.vu. Piano: Iano.

Michael Gorra, The Quiet Italian:

“The early morning is a wonderful time in any town, but in Venice it is the hour at which you can best see all the contrivances that allow this city to function as though it were any other; contrivances that in doing so remind you that it is indeed like nowhere else on earth.”

Hans Teeuwen en Pieter Bouwman in De Grebbeberg (YouTube)

PopSci, The Anonymity Experiment:

“(…) Pay for everything in cash. Don’t use my regular cellphone, landline or e-mail account. Use an anonymizing service to mask my Web surfing. Stay away from government buildings and airports (too many surveillance cameras), and wear a hat and sunglasses to foil cameras I can’t avoid. Don’t use automatic toll lanes. Get a confetti-cut paper shredder for sensitive documents and junk mail. Sign up for the national do-not-call registry (ignoring, if you can, the irony of revealing your phone number and e-mail address to prevent people from contacting you), and opt out of prescreened credit offers. Don’t buy a plane ticket, rent a car, get married, have a baby, purchase land, start a business, go to a casino, use a supermarket loyalty card, or buy nasal decongestant.”

‘Jon Favreau (26), chief speechwriter to Senator Barack Obama’

NY Times, What Would Obama Say?

“Mr. Favreau, or Favs, as everyone calls him, looks every bit his age, with a baby face and closely shorn stubble. And he leads a team of two other young speechwriters: 26-year-old Adam Frankel, who worked with John F. Kennedy’s adviser and speechwriter Theodore C. Sorensen on his memoirs, and Ben Rhodes, who, at 30, calls himself the “elder statesman” of the group and who helped write the Iraq Study Group report as an assistant to Lee H. Hamilton.

Together they are working for a politician who not only is known for his speaking ability but also wrote two best-selling books and gave the much-lauded keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.”

Zie ook: Newsweek, In His Candidate’s Voice.

Adam Gopnik to Hendrik Hertzberg:

“Interesting thing, to me at least. If you Google Obama’s wonderful line “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” it’s credited right and left, and going back to the nineties, as a bit of Hopi Indian wisdom. I haven’t (a) read this anywhere or (b) seen anything made of the silent borrowing from the Eldest Peoples, etc. Also, frankly, I doubt that it can be a true Hopi aphorism, unless in some very different form, since I suspect the grammar works only in English. (You couldn’t say it in French, for instance, so far as I can figure.) I wonder who really did invent it, and where B.O. (ah! a difference! You can’t initialize him à la a Kennedy!) found it?”

NY Times, I Love You, but You Love Meat:

““I went out with one guy who said I seemed really great but he liked bread too much to date me,” said Ms. James, 41, a writer in Seattle who cannot eat gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye.

Sharing meals has always been an important courtship ritual and a metaphor for love. But in an age when many people define themselves by what they will eat and what they won’t, dietary differences can put a strain on a romantic relationship. The culinary camps have become so balkanized that some factions consider interdietary dating taboo.”

Peggy Noonan, Can Mrs. Clinton Lose?

“If Hillary Clinton loses, does she know how to lose? What will that be, if she loses? Will she just say, “I concede” and go on vacation at a friend’s house on an island, and then go back to the Senate and wait?

Is it possible she could be so normal? Politicians lose battles, it’s part of what they do, win and lose. But she does not know how to lose. Can she lose with grace? But she does grace the way George W. Bush does nuance.

She often talks about how tough she is. She has fought “the Republican attack machine” that has tried to “stop” her, “end” her, and she knows “how to fight them.” She is preoccupied to an unusual degree with toughness. A man so preoccupied would seem weak. But a woman obsessed with how tough she is just may be lethal.”