Month: October 2011

Fallows reports that his wife's Gmail account was hacked. What she found when she was able to finally sign back in:

When she looked at her Inbox, and her Archives, and even the Trash and Spam folders in her account, she found—absolutely nothing. Of her allocated 7 gigabytes of storage, 0.0 gigabytes were in use, versus the 4+ gigabytes shown the day before. Six years’ worth of correspondence and everything that went with it were gone.

All the notes, interviews, recollections, and attached photos from our years of traveling through China. All the correspondence with and about her father in the last years of his life. The planning for our sons’ weddings; the exchanges she’d had with subjects, editors, and readers of her recent book; the accounting information for her projects; the travel arrangements and appointments she had for tomorrow and next week and next month; much of the incidental-expense data for the income-tax return I was about to file—all of this had been erased. It had not just been put in the "Trash" folder but permanently deleted.

Fallows reflects on "the gulf between the way information professionals understand the realities, vulnerabilities, and responsibilities of the cloud era and the way the rest of us do."

A scoop from the Independent. As St Paul's Cathedral tries to rid its front yard of squatters, they withhold a damning report on the morality of bankers.

(Via LikeCool)

The Philosopher's Beard claims religion has been deracinated:

In the enchanted world religion was always felt as much as thought, because it was literally embedded into the social landscape and rituals of everyday life. That gave religion a solid foundation, and helped make defection difficult to even imagine. But now that the enchanted world has shattered, theology can no longer depend on the solid foundations of social practices. Almost the whole of Western Europe, for example, enjoys its quaint Christian culture (history, holidays, recipes, nice old buildings, church weddings) as part of its national identity, but hasn't the faintest interest in Christianity.

The Aurora Borealis as seen from the International Space Station:

In a mega-infographic.

Sy Montgomery contemplates it: 

Half a billion years ago, the brainiest thing on the planet had only a few neurons. Octopus and human intelligence evolved independently. “Octopuses,” writes philosopher Godfrey-Smith, “are a separate experiment in the evolution of the mind.” And that, he feels, is what makes the study of the octopus mind so philosophically interesting. 

Some scientists and scholars are calling today's era the Anthropocene, a unique geological age where human activity, not natural processes, is the principal driver of planetary change. Nate Berg interviewed Felix D. Pharand, about his map exemplifying the Anthropocene, above, featuring population centers, transportation routes and energy transmission lines:

The biosphere is made out of living matter. … It is a world where humans appeared only recently. Now, indeed, our species and its 7 billion people is still growing inside it, converting ever more wilderness areas into human-influenced landscapes. This world is however finite, unique and fragile. Now is a good time to start thinking of it this way. I believe we are still, in our heads, living in a pre-Copernician world. It’s time to upgrade our worldview.

(Video: Anthropocene Mapping from Globaïa on Vimeo.)

Here's a video of clips of a few of the more, shall we say, unplugged moments in a recent Rick Perry speech in New Hampshire. "It was different," Manchester Mayor Ted Gatsas told HuffPost afterwards. Well, you make your own minds up. He seems pretty publicly lit to me (which is, of course no crime, but probably not the best idea if you are running for president):

Last month Justice Antonin Scalia said:

If I thought that Catholic doctrine held the death penalty to be immoral, I would resign. I could not be part of a system that imposes it.

Lisa Miller puts him in his place:

The U.S. bishops oppose capital punishment. So do this pope, the last pope and documents from the Vatican press office. … And so, in the tradition of millions of Catholics for thousands of years, [Scalia] has rejected official teaching in favor of his own view, which he believes (to be presumptuous for a minute) to be more traditional and more moral than the established one. That’s fine with me. I don’t want a justice sitting on the Supreme Court who submits blindly to religious authority or who holds his religion above the laws of the land. So keep your job, Justice Scalia. Just don’t pretend your church approves of the death penalty. Or that you aren’t like most people of faith, cherry-picking the teachings of your church that suit you best.