Category: Current Events

Outside Lands, Muse

Posted on by in Current Events, Music

I went to Outside Lands this past weekend, and was lucky to catch a very impressive lineup: Ok Go, The Black Keys, Sia, The Roots, Vetiver, the Old 97’s, and Muse. The whole festival was run surprisingly well – there were next to no lines for anything (beer, food, bathrooms), it was crowded but didn’t feel claustrophobic, the food was great, parking was easy, and it took no time to get between the four stages. The highlight was definitely Muse. They didn’t have a light show. They had a laser show. This is 2011. Here’s a short clip from the iPhone:

Something’s Craft Brewing

Posted on by in Beer, Current Events

The Brewer’s Association, one of the best sources for news and statistics on the craft brewing industry and related trends, just released the 2011 mid-year report on the state of U.S. Craft Brewers. To briefly summarize the report: Things are good, very good. Here are some of the key stats for the first six months of the year: Dollar growth up 15% Volume up 14%, a 50% increase over the same period last year 5.1 million barrels of beer were sold (that’s about 1.6 billion 12oz beers) The industry employs about 100,000 people The US now has 1,790 breweries — a 10% increase since June of 2010. 1,740 of them are craft breweries. And judging by this “chart”, this trend should

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AA+ What?

Posted on by in Current Events, Economics

Kid Dynamite: “In case you’ve been living under a rock:  Standard and Poors downgraded the credit rating for the United States of America last night, from AAA to AA+.” It seems that at this point S&P is generally viewed as incompetent, and the decision to downgrade the US may not be as consequential as many initially predicted. But who really knows? We’ll get a hint tomorrow morning. In the meantime, I found the following posts and articles to be thoughtful and/or interesting: James Kwak: Still, I think the whole thing is preposterous. S&P downgrading the United States is like Consumer Reports downgrading Coca-Cola. Consumer Reports is a great institution. For example, if you want to know how reliable a 2007

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Some Thoughts on Debt

Posted on by in Current Events, Economics

The debt debacle has obviously been well covered in the news and on the blogosphere. James Fallows puts the impact of policies into perspective: The point is that governments can respond to but not control external shocks. That’s why we call them “shocks.” Governments can control their policies. And the policy that did the most to magnify future deficits is the Bush-era tax cuts. You could argue that the stimulative effect of those cuts is worth it (“deficits don’t matter” etc). But you cannot logically argue that we absolutely must reduce deficits, but that we absolutely must also preserve every penny of those tax cuts. Which I believe precisely describes the House Republican position. He also includes “the chart that

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The New Standard?

Posted on by in Current Events, Technology

Could Twitter become irrelevant? Ezra wouldn’t lose any sleep: Farhad Manjoo thinks that Twitter should allow 280-character tweets rather than 140-character tweets. I think everyone should just move to Google+. The 140-character limit is Twitter’s most obvious feature, and so it’s understandably assumed to be a major part of its success. And maybe it has been. But I think it’s at least as likely that Twitter improved on Facebook by realizing that the circle of people you want to follow and the circle of people who want to follow you are not necessarily the same but has been hindered by the 140-character limit, which makes most tweets uninteresting and renders it impossible to have real conversations. I was optimistic about Google+ from the

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Into the Sky

Posted on by in Current Events

With the shuttle mission era officially over, there’s been lots to read about flying. Here are a few articles and posts I enjoyed: 1. Google’s race to the moon: a bigger X prize 2. I love this picture of the shuttle over the Bahamas 3. Popular Science on the future of flying, circa 1926 And this picture of the shuttle’s plasma trail during its final re-entry, taken from the International Space Station, is just plain crazy:  

James Fallows on Google+

Posted on by in Current Events, Technology

I’ve been a bit caught up with Google+ lately. Mostly because I know a number of people working at Google at the moment, and I’m curious to see where this goes. James Fallows has some thoughts: One of the immediate appeals is how quick, ergonomically easy, and aesthetically nice it is to set up “circles” that match the natural patterns of your real life. One for immediate family, one for “friends you actually know,” another for “professional acquaintances who are sort of friends,” etc. Or by interest. In my case: airplane people, beer people, China people, tech people, Atlantic people, NPR people, etc. This is technically possible with Facebook “lists” but more of a chore. And, just like in life,

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Things That Don’t Work

Posted on by in Current Events

Via Creative Review: For his new project, Err, artist Jeremy Hutchison contacted various factories around the world, and asked if one of their workers would produce an ‘incorrect’ version of the product they make every day: in doing so, the functional objects became artworks. “I asked them to make me one of their products, but to make it with an error,” Hutchison explains. “I specified that this error should render the object dysfunctional. And rather than my choosing the error, I wanted the factory worker who made it to choose what error to make. Whatever this worker chose to do, I would accept and pay for.” Here are some of the results: