Most of what I have shared so far has been some variety of full image manipulation with some layering and effects.  Today I have a different type of image to share.  These images were painted using words as brushes.  They are also my first two attempts at doing this (and remember, on my phone!!) so be kind!

This first picture is of one of my friends shooting pool.  Look for the words: Light, Shadow, Rob, Shirt, Cueball, Cue, Table and Background.

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For 20 years, bureaucrats in Brussels have monitored the curvature and shape of more than 40 types of vegetable and fruit. 

Rule-makers claimed that this protected European consumers from poor quality, but it is hard to argue that a lump on the side of a potato alters its flavour or nutritional value in any way.  A welcome respite came on 1 July 2009, when 36 classes of produce were deregulated.

European risk-aversion is built on the complacency that comes with good fortune. Companies have accepted high taxation, used for social entitlements, in exchange for protectionist agreements.

The credit crisis has exposed an interdependency that confounds unemployment targets, raises prices, and leaves state finances mightily exposed to the experiences of a small number of national champions. Full Story »

by Wufnik

In thinking about technological change, and our relative inability to often recognize the transformational technologies at the time they come along, consider the electric guitar. Particularly the solid-body electric guitar invented by Les Paul, who passed away Thursday at the age of 94. The NY Times story does him justice – he was just messing around and came up with this thing because he couldn’t find it anywhere. And I don’t imagine that in his wildest dreams he could have foreseen the impact it would have; certainly no one else did at the time.

But in retrospect, it’s clear that the electric guitar is one of those things that changed everything. First came rock and roll, which led to the sixties, when led to the breakdown of everything…. No, wait, first came rock and roll, which led to drugs, which led to the breakdown of everything…. No, darnit, let’s see, first came rock and roll, then came… I can’t remember. Full Story »

Yesterday over at Future Majority, Kevin Bondelli responded to Jack Hough’s New York Post column “Don’t Get That College Degree!” Bondelli’s take led with one of the more terrifying titles I’ve seen lately: “Has College Become a Bad Investment?” Yow. When you dig the hole so deep that you can even use that kind of question as a rhetorical device, you kthisnow you’re in some deep, deep kim-chee. Seriously. That one ranks right up there with “Is breathing really a good idea?” and “What are the lasting benefits of a howitzer shot to the balls?”

Snark aside, Bondelli does a nice job of addressing Hough, who “argues that the increase in lifetime wages for graduates no longer makes up for the financial burden of university education and the ensuing student loan burden.” He also takes on one of the GOP’s most successful and devastating canards, explaining that Full Story »

Fascinating.

Dear Mr. Buffet, Mr. Gates, Mr. Turner, Mr. Soros, Ms. Winfrey, and any other hyper-rich types with progressive political leanings:

If this essay has, against all odds, somehow made its way to your desk, please, bear with me. It’s longish, but it winds eventually toward an exceedingly important conclusion. If you’ll give me a few minutes, I’ll do my best to reward your patience.
_______________

In the 2008 election, Barack Obama won a landmark political victory on a couple of prominent themes: “hope” and “change.” He has since been afforded ample opportunity to talk about these ideas, having inherited the nastiest economic quagmire in living memory and a Republican minority in Congress that has interpreted November’s results as a mandate to obstruct the public interest even more rabidly than it was doing before. Reactions among those of us who supported Obama have been predictably mixed, but even those who have been critical of his efforts to date are generally united in their hope that his win signaled the end of “movement conservatism” in the US. Full Story »

Don’t call it schadenfreude. That’s the term for taking pleasure in the misfortune of others, and I’m not guilty of that.

What I feel today, as I review the news that former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio’s conviction has been upheld, isn’t about pleasure in his mighty fall from power. In fact, it’s not “pleasure” at all.

Instead, tell me what the word is for “taking satisfaction in justice served,” because that’s what I’m guilty of. Right now I’m feeling powerfully and righteously satisfied that a man who caused so much misfortune is getting at least a small slice of what he deserves. Full Story »

It has been alleged that Scholars & Rogues is not, strictly speaking, a political blog. Sure, we write about overtly political issues and devote our share of time to things like media policy, energy and the environment, business and the economy, and international dynamics. Yes, we were credentialed to cover the DNC, but we don’t really do hard, insider, by god politics. Daily Kos is a political blog. Firedoglake is a political blog. Little Green Footballs, The Agonist, Politico, The Seminal – these are real poliblogs.

S&R, on the other hand, writes about music. About literature and poetry. About art. Education. Sports. Culture and popular culture. The Ramsey case and what it tells us about the state of media. And now that the election is over, S&R is writing about politics less than ever.

So really, what is S&R? Full Story »

About three weeks ago, Jim Moss over at The Seminal laid the 2008 electoral results map over maps of poverty and income inequality. The visual comparison was illuminating, and Jim’s post got me to thinking – what if you did the same thing with a wider range of measures and rankings? What kind of picture would emerge? (Jim has himself expanded on the exercise in a couple follow-up postings here and here.)

So I spent some time digging, looking for data that may tell us something about how America is constructed at our current moment in time. Full Story »

A person consists both of their being and of the works that their being produces. Whether those works are physical or as intangible as the time spent on a particular task.

A traditional Westminster approach to politics, with a typical Left / Right political duopoly, has become the gold standard of democratic representation. It is also conflicted and inherently incapable of resolving its core contradiction. Full Story »

Finally, FINALLY we’re starting to treat the RIAA like an organized crime syndicate. Check the latest on a RICO class-action in Missouri, via Slashdot:

“In Atlantic Recording v. Raleigh, an RIAA case pending in St. Louis, Missouri, the defendant has asserted detailed counterclaims against the RIAA for federal RICO violations, fraud, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, prima facie tort, trespass, and conspiracy. The claims focus on the RIAA’s ‘driftnet’ tactic of suing innocent people, and of demanding extortionate settlements. The RICO ‘predicate acts’ alleged in the 42-page pleading (PDF) are extortion, mail fraud, and wire fraud.

This is a wonderful approach. Full Story »

• Green construction does not always mean “natural”
• Skeptic Magazine’s blog debunks Global Warming Petition Project
• UNESCO’s aquifer map a guide to future water conflict?
• New data on charcoal in soil raises carbon questions
• Wave and tidal energy growing pains
• Update on hybrid vehicle technology

The R-value for a 2×4 pine wall stud in a wood frame constructed residence is about 4.38. The R-value for the fiberglass batt insulation that fills the cavity between the wall studs is between 11 and 15 (source). In an exterior wall that’s constructed with studs at 16 inches on center, that means that roughly 9% of the wall has an R value that’s less than half that of the insulation. It also illustrates why green buildings are not necessarily going to be constructed of all-natural, renewable materials. Sometimes the natural materials just aren’t as good. Full Story »

In 1896, Adolph Ochs bought The New York Times and boldly placed on its front-page flag the slogan All The News That’s Fit To Print. Today, its publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., may need to rewrite that slogan to Less News And Less Money To Print It.

That’s because The Times has fallen on hard times (forgive me). The faltering business model that has strapped financial straitjackets onto other newspapers (witness the Christian Science Monitor ending its print edition) may have finally knee-capped the nation’s best newspaper. It has significant debt coming due, and insignificant cash on hand.
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by Michael Tracey

It isn’t just that there is an appetite for scandal, sex, sleaze, death narratives, it is also that feeding such appetites can be very profitable. The fact is that an essential problem with today’s media, one that has been gestating for many years, even decades, lies with the families and trust-funders that own media chains, and with the media moguls that, like great beasts, roam the landscape of a new grim cultural ecology, gobbling up this and that tasty morsel, a television station here, a newspaper there, forever seeking to sate their own insatiable appetite. Full Story »

Scholars & Rogues wants to know: what do you think is the greatest technology in human history?

Before you answer, what do we mean by “technology”? I think we all have sort of an operational idea in our heads of what we mean by the term, but if you’re like most people, odds are pretty good that you’ve never sat down and tried to articulate a real definition. A couple pretty smart thinkers had some thoughts on the subject that you might find helpful. Or challenging. Let’s see.

First, Arnold Pacey, a British scholar whose Culture of Technology helps us understand that technology is a lot more than just the machine itself, which Pacey calls the “restricted” sense of the term. Full Story »

One of the more common arguments you hear from global heating deniers and skeptics is that the urban heat island effect is causing global temperature measurements to look a lot hotter than they actually are. This is such a powerful argument because there is some truth to it – when you plop down a new road or build a town around what used to be a rural National Weather Service temperature monitoring station, there’s going to be a major uptick in the temperature that station measures. Skeptics like Anthony Watts of Wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com have spent a great deal of time documenting situations where new roads, new construction, even the addition of an asphalt walkway to a gas grill could be responsible for spurious temperature readings out of weather stations. However, the argument that global heating is all a misunderstanding of the urban heat island effect took a hit recently with the release of a new study that finds temperatures measured in established cities trend nearly identically to rural temperatures. Full Story »

During the Democratic National Convention, I had the opportunity to interview Bill Becker, the executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Program (PCAP). Over the course of the interview, the topics ranged from PCAP’s recommendations to the next President and Congress to the national security implications of global heating to cap-and-trade carbon emission markets to climate science and fossil fuels. What follows is the first part of the interview where Becker talks about what PCAP does, what its recommendations are, and what the United States needs to do in order to respond to the looming climate crisis.

In the interests of disclosure, I’ve rearranged the order of the questions and answers in order to group them logically by topic instead of chronologically. Full Story »

Due to the large size of this week’s Carboholic, I’ve busted it up into sections for readability.

Science

When you’re talking about Antarctica and global heating, there are some serious problems. The few satellites that are in polar orbits to monitor the poles can’t directly detect how thick the ice shelf is, or what the salinity and temperature of the water beneath the ice shelf is. Floating sensor buoys can’t get beneath the ice shelves and are rather limited in their operational depth. And sending people out to drill deep holes and manually measure temperature and salinity is far too expensive and dangerous. And given that what the water under floating ice shelves is doing may be key to understanding how Antarctica will respond to global heating, the problems represent serious limitations. Which is why the key to understanding what’s happening immediately around and beneath the Antarctic ice shelves may well be elephant seals. Full Story »

While awareness and externalities were memes in the Green Constitutional Congress, they weren’t the only ones. For that matter, neither was the most important one. Bruce Mau made that abundantly clear with his repetition of a single phrase in every question he asked by way of introduction to the panelists’ monologues: “Can we imagine…” Imagination was the defining meme of the Green Constitutional Congress, and it ran through the content of every monologue in some way. Full Story »

Externalities is a term I first heard in my undergraduate economics classes nearly 20 years ago, and its used to describe the parts of a system that are ignored by the users of that system. In the context of electricity generation, the water required for the boilers and for cooling were once considered an externality until water shortages illustrated to utilities that water mattered. Similarly, we’re seeing that the externalities of air pollution in the form of acid rain and now carbon emissions are being pulled into the economic model. We’re increasingly finding that there are no longer any externalities left, that water and land and even air matter and must be included in any complete accounting of the impacts of the our decisions. In many ways, the elimination of all externalities was a key component to Monday night’s Green Constitutional Congress, and panelists Jonathan Greenblatt and Majora Carter all touched on externalities affected the world. Full Story »