Every subculture has its code-words and pass-phrases. One that I particularly revile is “blood and treasure,” a favorite of warrior-politics neocons. It’s handy, actually, because anytime anybody says something like “You cannot expect Americans to spend blood and treasure blah blah blah” with a straight face, you automatically know they are not credible.

I’m not even going to link to the place where I just saw it because it’s so vile. Anybody know the etymology of the phrase, though? I just did some quick Googling but didn’t find any leads.

Another angle: What are some other classic subcultural code-phrases?

“I’m familiar with the argument” is one I hear a lot in academic and quasi-academic circles, and always seems to be sending a meta-message. Any others spring to mind?

Three years ago, in a spectacular issue of The Atlantic Monthly (“The Real State of the Union,” done in partnership with the New America Foundation), Ray Boshara wrote a fascinating proposal. What if we gave $6,000 to every American citizen at birth, and invested that money in a safe portfolio until the citizen grew old enough to use it?

Wealth inequality in the US, Boshara pointed out, is much greater even than income inequality:

By the close of the 1990s the United States had become more unequal than at any other time since the dawn of the New Deal

Why haven’t I seen the Web 2.0 Mashup Matrix before? It’s great! You can just go through and instantly see what two Web-2.0-y things haven’t been mashed up yet, and have at it. E.g. noone’s put together Del.icio.us and EVDB yet! Here’s your chance to get angel funding!

There is nothing socially redeeming about the game Dad ‘n’ Me. It is violent, pointless, endless, and addictive. There’s not even the ironic, hipster sheen that normally comes with playing video games past the age of 17. Why would you want to throw your life away at such a young age? Do not click here and play this game, because it will actually rot your mind. I link to it merely to warn you away.

Clearly you, too, are wondering when the movie trailer mashup meme is going to die. But I still have to link to this one. Partly because it’s well-done, but mostly because there’s a shout-out to my favorite critic, “Chester Munro.”

If you enjoy the articles below, I imagine you’ll consider subscribing to the periodicals that published them, or at least buying The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2005, where they’re all assembled. Enjoy.

• The American Scholar: My God Problem, by Natalie Angier
• The New Yorker: Hollywood Science, Connie Bruck
• The New York Review of Books: Out, Damned Blot!, Frederick Crews
• The New York Review of Books: Twilight at Easter, Jared Diamond
• Popular Science: My Little Brother on Drugs, Jenny Everett
• The New York Review of Books: Stumbling Into Space, Timothy Ferris
• The New Yorker: Getting Over It, Malcolm Gladwell
• The New Yorker: Personality Plus, Malcolm Gladwell
• The New Yorker: The Grief Industry, Jerome Groopman
• The New York Times: Keeping the Faith in My Doubt, John Horgan
• Wired: The Homeless Hacker vs. The New York Times, Jennifer Kahn
• Discover: 20,000 Microbes Under the Sea, Robert Kunzig ($)

The Atlantic Monthly: A Two-Planet Species?, Wililam Langewiesche ($)

• The New York Review of Books: Crossing the Red Line, Bill McKibben
• Esquire: Please Stand By While the Age of Miracles Is Briefly Suspended, James McManus
• The New York Review of Books: Getting in Nature’s Way, Sherwin B. Nuland
• Wired: To Hell and Back, Jeffrey M. O’Brien
• The New Yorker: The X Prize, Ian Parker ($)
• The New York Review of Books: In the River of Consciousness, Oliver Sacks
• The New Yorker: Miracle in a Bottle, Michael Specter
• Scientific American: The Curious History of the First Pocket Calculator, Cliff Stoll ($)
• The American Scholar: Dining with Robots, Ellen Ullman ($)
• Popular Science: 106 Science Claims and a Truckful of Baloney, William Speed
• Discover: Whose Life Would You Save?, Carl Zimmer

$ = subscriber-only. Here’s 2004.

Via Unmediated, the GPS-enabled TrackStick has a very limited, but possibly very interesting function: “It tracks where it goes, and it remembers where it’s been.” Although Telespial Systems, the company behind TrackStick, seems to be most excited about its snooping potential — Spy on your kids! Watch your employees! — I love the idea that I could keep it in my pocket for a few months and produce an incredibly detailed map of my life.

Anytime this Greasemonkey script sees a price written in U.S. dollars on a Web site, it adds the current equivalent value in barrels of crude oil. I’m going to enable it for a while and see if it heightens my awareness of what “the price of oil rose $4 a barrel” means in everyday terms, or if it just annoys me. (Greasemonkey? Infosthetic.)

Amorphia Apparel. I especially like this. (Projects.mefi.)

A post on MicroPersuasion this morning reminded me of something I ran across a few months ago I thought was amusing and revealing. It’s the definition of “journalism,” from the 2000 American Heritage Dictionary:

1. The collecting, writing, editing, and presenting of news or news articles in newspapers and magazines and in radio and television broadcasts.

2. Material written for publication in a newspaper or magazine or for broadcast.

3. The style of writing characteristic of material in newspapers and magazines, consisting of direct presentation of facts or occurrences with little attempt at analysis or interpretation.

4. Newspapers and magazines.

5. An academic course training students in journalism.

6. Written material of current interest or wide popular appeal.