Grandinite

I’ve been offline for a few days due to an unfortunate turn of events involving a VISA renewal and a poorly timed billing query by my hosting provider to said VISA account. It sucks to get billed by a company when you’re in VISA limbo. I thought this blog was as good as dead, thinking that the internet gods would send this heap of text into the memory hole of the internet.

Thank you, 1 & 1 internet, for not killing my blog over a simple billing issue.

I’ve been posting stuff over at jfei.org during this Grandinite blackout, as well as on facebook, too.

Here’s some of the awesome stuff I’ve been trawling up from the bowels of the WWW.

Nukes.

What’s a safe place to live in the event that Calgary is hit with a 1.4 megaton nuke, like the one in Dr. Strangelove? Check out the applet from Carlos Labs.

Your Brain.

Why do I have a secret death wish for this city? It might have something to do with Chinooks. Or maybe Calgary just hurts people’s brains, like most cities do. Jonah Lehrer writes about it.

Economics.

I read an amazing piece on the New Age of Anxiety. Tim Adams, writing for The Guardian, discusses the relatively new trend of anxiety, and how the underlying emotional and psychological processes manifest in daily life and the markets.

There was an extraordinary questionnaire carried out last July for the World Social Survey, one which future analysts of the great downturn of 2008 may find instructive. The survey proposed the idea that urban life was shaped by fear and addressed the question of what people in the 10 major cities of the world - from Cairo to Beijing - were most worried about. Londoners, it turned out in the ancient history of July 2008, were the least anxious people, but it was what they were actually anxious about that was most telling. Whereas in New York, where the new sub-prime reality had already taken hold, three of the top five worries listed were “not being able to maintain the same standard of living in the future” (17 per cent of respondents), “becoming jobless” (10 per cent), “fear that my children’s lives will be worse than mine” (10 per cent), in London, these worries did not even register anywhere in the top eight. They were not only eclipsed by the biggest anxiety (”losing loved ones”: 12 per cent), they also were felt less keenly than “being the victim of a natural disaster, tsunami, earthquake etc” (2.5 per cent), “being the victim of mass epidemic or food poisoning” (2.2 per cent) and “remaining alone” (1.8 per cent). Can there have been any other time in modern history when we had been so blithely unconcerned about our financial security than last July?

But that was then: BC, before crunch.

Media: Tilt-Shift Photography.

I love this shit. Now, with Monster Trucks.

Metal Heart from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Politics.

If you’re in Washington D.C. on January 20th, you can head on down to the William R. Singleton-Hope-Lebanon Lodge for the 1st ever Masonic Inaugural Ball. Unfortunately, Barack Obama won’t be attending.