in the spirit of ross’s o’so krispie post, i’ve been digging hard on everything but the girl’s brief full-on adult contemporary phase. here’s “one place” from the album “worldwide.” i defy anyone to find a tighter start to a song. side-of-drum clack, bass line, 5 note piano intro, straight to super understated late-80s-early-90s guitar line.

An incredible and scathing review of Chris Anderson’s “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” a new book about how Information Wants to be Free. I guess I’m always psyched to read scathing reviews of anything, but this one really struck me as being spot-on. The article is too pithy to really be excerpted, so I’ll just quote my favorite part and you’ll have to click the link to really get the full effect:

The biotechnology company Genzyme spent five hundred million dollars developing the drug Myozyme, which is intended for a condition, Pompe disease, that afflicts fewer than ten thousand people worldwide. That’s the quintessential modern drug: a high-tech, targeted remedy that took a very long and costly path to market. Myozyme is priced at three hundred thousand dollars a year. Genzyme isn’t a mining company: its real assets are intellectual property—information, not stuff. But, in this case, information does not want to be free. It wants to be really, really expensive.

i’ve seen you guys refer to the wsj opinion page as the darkness of dumbness (i, of course, disagree), but this showed up today:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124597314928257169.html

not exactly in line with what you might expect from the journal editors, so i think you have to give them some credit for publishing it.  anyway, couple of thoughts on this.  what i don’t get is how humanists elevate the ability to reason as some almighty power, but then when it comes to behavioral traits the fallback seems to be comparing humans to the rest of the animal kingdom like we’re no better (e.g., the old whip tailed lizard argument we had).  that seems to me contradictory at best, no?  second, why does Christianity always seem to be the primary target?  sure, the author makes mention of Iran, but don’t any mullahs get invited to these science vs. religion panels?  guys get murdered for drawing cartoons of muhammed…are scientists scared of what might happen in a science vs. religion debate with a muslim?  third, isn’t faith the belief in that which we don’t understand?  i agree that our ability to reason is what helps make us special, but i also think we’re way too egotistical in regard to what we think we know.  a professor i had (behavioral scientist/economist) had a list of rules that i think are pretty profound.  two of them read something like this:   rule 1) you don’t know as much as you think you do; rule 2) rule 1 is true even if you are aware of rule 1.