It doesn’t exactly look comfortable, and it’s not exactly pretty. But it’s a chair-barrow with a lamp attached to it. It’s even apparently got little shelves hidden beneath the armrests. I want one! Alas, all the text is in German, and I don’t see anything that resembles an “add-to-cart” button.

(Via my bookstore. See also: Bibliochaise.)

Firing an employee is a messy business. No small business likes to do it. There are the headaches

Apropos of a few email threads lately, here’s a passage from Charles Mann (who wrote the book “1491”) quoted by Matt Yglesias (emphasis mine):

David Aviles, Ian Ebert and Lauren Tombari all ask (to quote Mr Aviles), “If [Indians] had such a large population, why hadn’t they developed as much as other countries?” The answer to this very important question is complicated, but part of it surely is that evaluating relative levels of technological development is not so easy, and that it isn’t at all clear that native peoples were less developed in this area than Europeans or Asians. As the historian Alfred Crosby has repeatedly observed, societies tend to measure “progress” in terms of things that they are good at. Europeans were good at making metal tools and devices, so we tend to look for them — Indians didn’t have steel axes and geared machines, so they must be inferior. But many Indian societies were extremely deft about agriculture. Looking at a Europe afflicted by recurrent famine, one can imagine them viewing these societies as so undeveloped that they were unable to feed themselves. It’s hard to say which view is correct.

This is a really good point, and I am guilty as charged re: judging development in terms of the things we’re good at.

But seriously, I am really guilty, and I can’t even think of kinds of technology other than ours (computers, hybrid cars, plasma TVs, DNA sequencers, etc.) worth having or developing in the world today. The best I can muster is something about the ingenuity of the billion-or-so slum dwellers the world over — e.g. they can make water purification systems out of rusty buckets and plastic tarps! — but I don’t really believe it deeply. Or rather, that stuff is cool, but I think they ought to (and do) ultimately aspire to computers and DNA sequencers too!

So whatcha got for me, Snarkmatrix?

Is the internet today’s punk rock? So asks Wieden + Kennedy’s global director of digital strategies.

Actually I totally agree with his opening sentiment —

Frankly, I don’t know what Punk Rock is

— but even so, there’s something about the comparison that’s appealing. His post is a good read, and not only because it’s insanely optimistic about democracy and includes some hefty quotes from The Chairman.

Also: How can you not print-to-read-later an essay called The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head?

Dani Rodrik, in the closing of a post on historical determinism and development:

This may seem discouraging if you are interested not only in understanding the world, but also in changing it. On closer look, though, [Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson]’s historical determinism leaves plenty of room for human agency and policy choices to make a difference, as I have argued here. Statistically, plenty is left unexplained by historical factors.

Ha. Neat. I sort of like that: We get to be the error term.

Related: My train reading these days is Virtual History, a collection of counterfactuals edited by Niall Ferguson. Fun discovery: To spin an even mildly convincing counterfactual, you have to make sure the fundamental facts leading up to your branch-point are really solid. So oddly it’s in the fake-history book that I’m learning about all these real events (a lot of World War II stuff, etc.) in more detail than I ever have before. I think Ferguson and other fans of counterfactual would say yes, that’s the point.

Just discovered: Philip Tetlock, the terrific Berkeley researcher I saw give a Long Now talk on experts and forecasting earlier this year, also has a book of counterfactuals! Why was I not told of this earlier??

Psst: Any favorite what-if scenarios?

Henry B. diagrams the Beijing left. You really need to see this. Excerpt:

[B] proceeds to swerve right, cutting off [C], a tiny red Peugeot with a gold plastic dragon hood ornament, spoiler and assorted knobs glued on. Since [B] is just accelerating, and [C] is now decelerating, this has created a low-density ‘dead space’ in the intersection. [D], a strange blue tricycle dumptruck carrying what appear to be 40 of the world’s oldest propane tanks, sees this and makes a move.

But it’s nothing without the visuals.

Via Tim Johnson.

It’s a powerful observation if you can make your way through the context (which is computer programming):

In fact, if you look at the way software gets written in most organizations, it’s almost as if they were deliberately trying to do things wrong. In a sense, they are. One of the defining qualities of organizations since there have been such a thing is to treat individuals as interchangeable parts. This works well for more parallelizable tasks, like fighting wars. For most of history a well-drilled army of professional soldiers could be counted on to beat an army of individual warriors, no matter how valorous. But having ideas is not very parallelizable. And that’s what programs are: ideas.

Stop reading this post right now and go read Mark Lilla’s stunning NYT Mag article adapted from his forthcoming book. The past year has seen a horde of devout atheists — Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris — gathering arms against religion and its place in the civic sphere. But no matter how they title their books, Harris et al aren’t speaking to a Christian nation, but to a small subset of fellow thinkers. Lilla’s scholarship as summarized in this article feels like the scaffold for a bridge between the staunch secularists and the political theologists. Put him in a room with Reza Aslan, and you have the makings of a serious conversation, one that might begin to answer the question, “How do we live together?” Much better than this beautiful-but-doomed dialogue, at least.

Are you really still reading my rambling? GO READ LILLA. Then read No god but God. (Then read Rousseau’s “Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar,” which I’d never heard of until reading Lilla’s piece. It’s fantastic.) Then get into a conversation with an open-minded person on the opposite side of the secularist/theologist divide.

Edgar Allen Poe’s masked fanatic has allegedly unmasked himself. A 92-year-old Poe-head named Sam Porpora claims to be the originator of the annual tradition of celebrating Poe’s birthday with roses and cognac. But he says he’s not sure who’s continued the toast each year since 1976. The mystery remains …

This tie-tying tutorial works pretty darn well. I’ve always been a good tier of ties, but I just tried this, and it totally ups my game. (Via.)