Battlestar Galactica, which may very well be the best show on TV and is certainly the most philosophical, starts its second season on July 15. To catch people up, the Sci-Fi Channel is running a marathon on Wednesday, starting at 10 a.m. ET/9 a.m. CT. For the uninitiated, this LAT article provides background.
This Independence Day weekend, Steve and I are sending notes and care packages to U.S. troops in the field via AnySoldier.com. Check out the site to see how to send your own thanks and goodies.
She was the only Supreme Court justice in the Cowgirl Hall of Fame. Her Western roots showed in the rare passion she displayed in the Kelo dissent.
The House has passed an amendment prohibiting the use of federal funds to seize private property for private economic development projects. In its report on the bill, the LAT quotes the Runaway-Bride-Eyed minority leader's reason for opposing it. She said she doesn't want to withhold federal dollars "for the enforcement of any decision of the Supreme Court, no matter how opposed I am to that decision."
This is, of course, a complete non sequitur. The Supreme Court's Kelo decision in no way said that cities must take private property or that Congress should encourage takings. It said those takings weren't constitutional prohibited. If anything, the House bill enforces Kelo, which requires legislative, rather than constitutional, protections at the federal level. Either Pelosi is an idiot or this is an ass-covering attempt to justify her support of takings by vaguely associating it with her support for Roe v. Wade.
The LAT report also mentions that "California and at least eight other states have laws on the books that forbid the use of the eminent domain power to condemn private property for economic development, except in 'blighted' areas." Does Pelosi oppose her own state's laws as well?
After a fire destroys the Biblical Arts Center in Dallas, the executive editor of D Magazine tries to explain to a dim TV reporter the difference between "priceless" and "irreplaceable." The exchange is, well, priceless. And, since this is the blogsphere, also free. (Scroll down here for background on the fire and what was destroyed.)
Not surprisingly, cities that were waiting for the Supreme Court's decision have wasted no time in condemning property wanted for private developments. The Institute for Justice is tracking examples, with links to news reports. IJ has also announced a new campaign, backed by at least $3 million, to fight eminent domain abuse through state and local activism. IJ lists the following immediate plans:
I'd suggest another front: shareholder and consumer activism to get businesses to pledge not to use eminent domain for their own private purposes.
In its June design issue, Fast Company put Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley on the cover and ran an interview about the company's design-oriented strategy. (As part of this emphasis, spearheaded by VP Claudia Kotchka, last year P&G hired me to spend a day giving speeches on The Substance of Style, first to designers and then to the company's top 300 executives.) P&G's initiative is an extraordinary turn for a company whose traditional emphasis has been on technology-driven functional improvements, backed by mass marketing and advertising. The emotional response to a product or its packaging didn't figure in the old P&G equation. Even function could be defined fairly narrowly--how well a shampoo cleans, for instance, but not how it makes your hair smell. Lafley aims to change that. As he told Fast Company:
"We have to create a great experience every time you touch the brand, and the design is a really big part of creating the experience and the emotion. We try to make [a customer's experience] better, but better in her terms. If you stay focused on experiences, I think you will have a lower risk of designing something that may measure well in a lab but may not do well with the consumer."
Here's how that resolve plays out in a new product. The bottle for Crest Pro-Health Rinse is so appealing that Steve and I almost bought some, even though we never use mouthwash. It looks especially good compared to the nearby Listerine, which even in its friendly blue form "looks industrial, like Janitor in a Drum," says Professor Postrel.
To supplement the glamour shot, I'm including some on-the-scene photos from Walgreen's. My photos don't capture the full emotional impact of the design, in part because the mind's eye screens out a lot of the ugliness of drugstore shelves. (In the bottom photo, check out the pegboard background and the adult diaper packaging creeping over from the adjacent aisle.) The next frontier for consumer-products designer is doing something about the hideous store environments in which their products appear.
Newsweek's star technology writer co-authors a big cover story on identity theft only to have the Big Boss make it painfully obvious in his editor's letter that neither he nor anyone on the copy desk has a clue what Levy's most famous book was about. Bragging about Levy's widely recognized expertise, Mark Whitaker declares that "Steven Levy has written books on the people who can break into computers ("Hackers") and on the tools to thwart them ("Crypto")."
But, of course, Hackers--a great book, and a touchstone for anyone interested in the history of computers--is not about people who break into computers. Subtitled "Heroes of the Computer Revolution," Hackers is about people, starting at MIT in the 1960s, who played around with computers and whose enthusiasm gave birth to the personal computer revolution. Today's high-tech criminals and identity thieves are a completely different subject. A quick look at the book's Amazon page could have kept Whitaker from insulting Levy and revealing his own ignorance of technological history.
UPDATE: Steven Levy emails:
Mark's point in his letter's editor (which I saw before publication and was OK with) was simply to say that I had reporting background in the kinds of people with the wizardry to potentially frustrate security. The exact language he used was accurate: that "Hackers" was about the people who CAN break into computers, not that I was writing about crooks. As you eloquently acknowledge, the book's focus is on quite a different kind of hacker (although there are few people I wrote about, like John Draper, who pioneered techniques that would later be abused by the dark side.) But for the point that he was making, citing Hackers and Crypto with those very brief descriptions was sufficient. Thanks for the defense, Virginia, though none was needed here.
I'm a bit late with this, but there's a new Carnival of Tomorrow up, featuring future-related items from around the blogosphere.
In the wake of Kelo, the Institute for Justice is planning an anti-eminent domain rally in New London, Connnecticut, next week:
NEW LONDON RALLY: On July 5th, New London will hold a city council meeting and we are coordinating a rally beforehand to ask city council to save the homes of Susette Kelo and the New London residents. If you are anywhere near Connecticut, we hope you'll join us and voice your support for the homeowners and property rights. The rally will be held at 6pm at New London City Hall, 181 State Street, New London, CT. By saving these homes, we can show the country that, regardless of what the Supreme Court says, eminent domain abuse is wrong.