The Way The Music Died is a good hour long documentary in four parts about how the music industry changed from being about music to being about money and marketing. It is based heavily on the few points of a few artists: David Crosby, the band Velvet Revolver, and Sarah Hudson. Produced by PBS/WGBH/Frontline.
This article nicely describes some of the more annoying aspects of American life: Peace at the beach elusive for New Yorkers
This site uses poll results to show a prediction of electoral college votes for the presidential election. It categorizes states as strongly or weakly for the candidates, and is updated frequently. www.electoral-vote.com
It has become all the more apparent in the past couple years that energy policy is a large intersection between foreign and domestic policy. It would be nice if the current administration (and future administrations) focused much more on conservation and renewable energy sources to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources. The Apollo Project is a coalition pushing for this; their focus on the idea that conservation technologies and renewable energy technologies are and can be designed and built by American industries, generating jobs and business right here is something that can bear repeating.
Interesting article from this Sunday's New York Times on what elements of urban design and layout and what businesses exist and don't exist on a block/blocks greatly influence the feel of the area: The Forces That Fuel a Squall of a Block
a cool new blog of New York photography: overshadowed
If you are at all interested in security topics, especially where national security and electronic security issues intersect, than I highly recommend the once-monthly Crypto-Gram newsletter written by Bruce Schneier, the CTO of Counter Pane Internet Security. Even if you are not so much into the computer and technology side of security, his views on the larger picture of National Security are quite interesting.
An opinion piece on news.com last month on how we are all security consumers is a good example of his views.
It is a good thing when animated bunnies do thirty second condensed versions of movies: www.angryalien.com
Senator Hatch and the recording companies have gone further off the deep end with this latest anti-copyright bill. The name is an acronym so ridiculous I'm not even going to spell it out here. From the article:
"At a minimum (the Induce Act) invites a re-examination of Betamax," said Jeff Joseph, vice president for communications at the Consumer Electronics Association. "It's designed to have this fuzzy feel around protecting children from pornography, but it's pretty clearly a backdoor way to eliminate and make illegal peer-to-peer services. Our concern is that you're attacking the technology."
New York City Transit wants to ban the taking of pictures in the subways and on subway platforms. Chalk one up in the overzealous security measure column.
California builds a large amount of transit, but transit projects do not exist in a vacuum. Land use decisions must be made to maximize use of the transit investment. Cheers to the governor for reducing the hurdles that localities must jump in implementing smart land use decisions around transit stations: Gov. Schwarzenegger signs bill to spur more transit villages (Registration required)