Recently in time Category

Richard Florida - whose "creative class" theory I spoke about before - recently wrote a blog entry on the merits of high-speed rail and its place in the economic recovery (crisis/opportunity).

To review, the "creative class," he states, will be an important socioeconomic group if this nation stands a chance going forward. Our nation was ruled, first, by an "agricultural class," then a "working class," and finally a "service class." But Florida says it will be the "creative class" that will drive our ace in the hole: innovation.

His three necessities for a thriving "creative class," or the Three 'T's:

1. Talent, or the need for a highly talented, educated, and/or skilled population

2. Tolerance, or the need for a diverse community and a "live and let live" ethos

3. Technology, or the need for technological infrastructure necessary to fuel an entrepreneurial culture.

Tolerance, as Friedman wrote in The World is Flat, is a cornerstone of every thriving society in the world. (And the United States were built for tolerance.)

Technology, or rather a technological infrastructure, is important. And although you may not think about high-speed rail as a technological advance, it is. But it isn't being employed enough, especially in America.

High-speed rail. It doesn't sound important, interesting, or particularly life-advancing, but it is. This isn't the Monorail to EPCOT that we're talking about.

It is 95.6 miles from New York to Philadelphia. Driving time is roughly 1 hour 49 minutes. Utilizing the current fastest high-speed rail? 36 minutes! And North America only needs 12 rail lines (one per mega-region; see below). It even makes us happier. (Emphasis mine.)

Philadelphia becomes a veritable suburb of NY, its commute time shrinking from nearly two hours to slightly more than a half hour. Washington-NYC and Boston-NYC become hour-and-a-half trips. San Diego becomes a bedroom suburb of Los Angeles. And commute times shrink considerably across Cascadias' main cities: The time to get from Portland to Seattle shrinks to just over an hour, while travel between Seattle and Vancouver is reduced to less than an hour. It would take just slightly longer than an hour and a half to get from Charlotte to Atlanta. And commutes between Dallas and Houston and Dallas and Austin shrink to an hour and a half or less.

Better high-speed rail connections promise considerable economic efficiency gains. And they also promise to relieve the psychological burdens of commuting by car. Research by behavioral economists like Nobel prize-winner Daniel Kahneman finds that long car commutes are among the things that most adversely affect our happiness.

I think often about where we came from, where we are now, where we may advance to, and the decisions, either conscious or subconscious, that guide us along the way. The majority of our day to day life is dictated by our inertia. We compile pieces of ourselves, like a Russian nesting doll growing layer by layer, aggregating components from generations past to what comprises our daily lives. These pieces are typically seen as advancements, so called improvements, in how we live, work, and play. We use science, industry, technology, medicine, and religion – fostered by our inertia – to work toward the greater goal of growth.

That rug really tied the room together

Actually it was Grace Slick that said, "Feed your head." The Dormouse said, "I wasn't asleep, I heard every word you fellows were saying." And What the Dormouse Said is a book by John Markoff. The subtitle of the 2005 non-fiction tome is "How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry." And now the computer is the rug that ties the room together. Are you with me?

A new year at consumption junction

New Year’s Eve has come and gone. Many people used the opportunity to spend time with loved ones and celebrate the new memories this past year has provided and toast those still to be created. The holiday itself though has always seemed a bit strange to me. Not so much for the fact that a year in the Gregorian calendar, by definition is ~365.2425 days, and therefore our celebration is normally untimely (in and of itself an interesting topic) but more so because of the social mindset of the event. Yes folks, I’m talking about resolutions.

New information has come to light.

We are bombarded with data. Living in the Information Age has its drawbacks. A baby is introduced to the world in the form of her family. As a child, she comes to know a neighborhood, as if nothing else existed. She grows to know her town or part of the city and soon becomes a teenager. The teen explores the wonders of her state and country. By and by, her horizons expand and she determines her part in the mix. She, as a twenty-something, whittles out her niche in society and is on her way to becoming an informed citizen. She has now compiled so much local information that she broadens her base, gaining knowledge of the intricacies of her world. By her thirties she has, more or less, found out the context of her life. She now can proceed onward, able to decipher her experiences in this light.

In the newest issue of the New Yorker, Michael Specter leads us on a fascinating journey through the world of evolutionary biology, more specifically how retroviruses, viruses that alter our genetic structure, have played an extremely important role in making us who we are. You can easily get lost among his seemingly sci-fi tales of virus resurrection, traveling genetic instructions, and virus–host relationships.

What I found to be most interesting though, as someone who isn't an evolutionary biologist, was the very simple and clear summary that he provided at the beginning of this report as to what exactly a virus is.

Viruses reproduce rapidly and often with violent results… In order to survive, it must find a cell to infect. Only then can any virus make use of its single talent, which is to take control of a host's cellular machinery and use it to churn out thousands of copies of itself. These viruses then move from one cell to the next, transforming each new host into a factory that makes even more virus. In this way, one infected cell soon becomes billions.