Much improved! http://elzr.com/reader It’s really getting fun now! Now you can really read the whole magazine in a single page! Plus: columns, much better design (section separators!), and… flags!
It’s still a very early release
(the columning in particular will be much improved soon) so please be gentle and let me know what you think of all the changes. What do you like? What’s helpful? What would you like to see?
Note that there are some weird bugs in Safari, to be fixed later. And all bets are off on what will happen in IE, I don’t have a machine to try it in for the moment.
See the project’s history at
http://elzr.com/posts/reader-economist
The page is pretty heavy, ~250k, but it still loads up in in seconds. It’s still much less than
The Economist’s current front page, which overloaded as it is with flash ads, weighs a whopping 4MB!
An experiment in improving the reading interface of the world’s best news magazine. Very early days. Check it out at elzr.com/reader.
Right now it’s just a glorified table of contents but even that I think helpful. It includes the abstract of every article or it’s first line
—in my experience The Economist’s pithy, playful titles can be under-descriptive. And there are also
backbars behind every title, giving you an ambient, non-verbal hint to the article’s size. Both features are there to fix something that got lost in the transition from print to web.
I’ve read The Economist for many years now, almost since the beginning from the web (I subscribed for a year when it was behind a paywall, the only time I’ve paid for content). And almost as long, I’ve been struggling with it’s interface. I guess it’s not that bad for casual readers, but for longtime junkies it can be much improved. Which is what I’ll try to do in the coming days.
Changelog:
.3 version, 16 June 2009:
BIG changes. See
http://elzr.com/posts/03-release-of-the-economist-reader for full details. Read the
whole magazine in a single page, columns, much better design
(sections separators!), and… flags!
.12 version, 14 June 2009: Fixed
.11 version, 13 June 2009: Prettier version.
.1 version, 8 June 2009: Kicking it off.
As a man, perfume can boost your self-confidence and your way of carrying of yourself so that women, without needing to smell you, will find you more attractive.
Another freaky fact: you’re attracted to smells that hint of a different genetic mix to yours
(and thus more evolutionary advantageous). For yourself, you tend to choose smells that more loudly proclaim your particular genetic mix.
Via
The Economist.
The cover article of this week’s Economist brings the stem-cell cancer hypothesis to the mainstream. This is over 3 years after Eva Vertes talked about it at TED in one of my favorite video pieces ever. And is very, very exciting.
..just occasionally, a finding revolutionises the field and cracks open a whole range of diseases. The discovery in the 19th century that many illnesses are caused by bacteria was one such. The unravelling of Mendelian genetics was another.
It now seems likely that medical science is on the brink of a finding of equal significance. The underlying biology of that scourge of modern humanity, cancer, looks as though it is about to yield its main secret. If it does, it is possible that the headline-writer’s cliché, “a cure for cancer�, will come true over the years, just as the antibiotics that followed from the discovery of bacteria swept away previously lethal infectious diseases.
The discovery—or, rather, the hypothesis that is now being tested—is that cancers grow from stem cells in the way that healthy organs do.
I love the anecdote because it makes the point so well and it rings so true. The statistic surpassed even my dire expectations. And yes, major labels should have acted years ago. May we learn something from their example.
IN 2006 EMI, the world’s fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,â€? says a person who was there.
In America, according to Nielsen SoundScan, the volume of physical albums sold dropped by 19% in 2007 from the year before—faster than anyone had expected.
Tim Renner, a former boss of Universal Music in Germany, says the majors should have acted years ago. “Then they had the money and could have built the competence by buying concert agencies and merchandise companies,� he says. Now it may be too late.
For those armchair observers of the breathtaking world of quants and structured finance, as myself, Technology Review’s current issue carries a wonderfully didactic and gripping introduction, The Blow-Up: (pesky but FREE registration required).
“How many think spreads will widen?” she asked.
The hands of about half the smartest people on Wall Street shot up.
“And how many think they’ll narrow?”
The other half—equally smart—raised their hands.
“Well,” she said. “That’s what makes a market.”
If they didn’t know, nobody could.
Focused only in securitization, When it goes wrong, from The Economist (YubNub’s “eco“), is also a good overview and glimpse:
..it is hard to overstate the effect that securitisation has had on financial markets. Until the early 1980s, finance hewed to an “originate and holdâ€? model. Banks generally held loans on their balance sheets to maturity; some debts were sold on loan-by-loan, but this market was small and lumpy. This began to give way to an “originate and distributeâ€? model after America’s government-sponsored mortgage giants issued the first bonds with payments tied to the cash flows from large pools of loans.
Wall Street built on this innovation, and securitisation took off soon after, then paused before exploding in the 1990s.. It was given a lift by America’s savings-and-loan crisis, which encouraged mortgage lenders to jettison their riskier loans, and by new technologies, such as credit-scoring, that facilitated loan-pooling. Around 56% of America’s outstanding residential mortgages were packaged in this way, including more than two-thirds of the subprime loans issued in 2006. Thanks largely to securitisation, global private-debt securities are now far bigger than stockmarkets.
Answers.com (YubNub’s “a“), btw, is invaluable in navigating jargony fields like finance.
The second course, “shrimp and tarragon macaroons”, sang out loud. Clumsy as it sounds, it was among the most beautiful, thoughtful, well-composed dishes I’ve ever had. Three little white puffs sat on a stark white plate; each puff consisted of two meringue-like halves held together with a smear of reduced and pureed tarragon. The puffs had an etheral texture—with a slight pressure from the tongue, they melted—and a haunting, intense shrimp flavor that the tarragon complemented perfectly. Imagine those Indonesian shrimp puffs made by a classically-trained pastry chef, and you’re halfway there.
Beautiful? Thoughtful? Well-composed? Ratatouille did much to made me remember how much I’ve always enjoyed food, but Kandinsky in the Kitchen, the abovequoted review of the New York restaurant WD-50 floored me. I had never read food described with such words before, nor had I seen dishes more beautiful than most paintings, nor had I been so enthralled with so original a combination of ingredients (how about a dish made of cured hamachi, lemon leather, cilantro sorbet and paprika ?).
Another great review of the restaurant by The Gourmet Pig, made me realize the restaurant is part of a much wider movement: molecular gastronomy, the application of science to culinary practice. Apparently they can now compress watermelon to give it the texture of raw tuna.
The pursuit of beauty and meaning will never end, will it?
If the war against terrorism is a war at all, it is like the cold war—one that will last for decades. Although a real threat exists, to let security trump liberty in every case would corrode the civilised world’s sense of what it is and wants to be..
Locking up suspected terrorists—and why not potential murderers, rapists and paedophiles, too?—before they commit crimes would probably make society safer. Dozens of plots may have been foiled and thousands of lives saved as a result of some of the unsavoury practices now being employed in the name of fighting terrorism. Dropping such practices in order to preserve freedom may cost many lives. So be it.
The deep ethical crisis I’ve been immersed for some weeks now started when I realized that, ultimately, ethics is not a necessity, it’s a stand. You can’t judge without PREjudices. You are never guaranteed to be on the absolute right path, there is no such abstract thing. Your prejudices—your self—determine a range of trajectories, a train of self. And that’s that.
Our values are in practice a deeply enmeshed, deeply correlated network with no one most important end. Every value has its price, is outweighed eventually by some combination of other values. Far from urging us into hasty, thoughtless expediency, this should sober us: we concede when we have more to lose if we not—are we giving our values away at a discount?
That question is what the quote above is about. Liberty is both what civilization is and wants to be, for some of us. Terrorism has recently highlighted for us how dear its cost can be. It is not our nature to bear burdens and so we shall never stop looking for ways around them. But if it comes down to it, we wil bear freedom’s burden.
For my writer friends. From Intelligent Life’s article on On The Road’s anniversary, Fifty years of solitude.
This is why the book has always left a bad taste in my mouth: its most passionate defenders treat it as a sacred text, and seem to think that feeling—depth of feeling, loudness of feeling, existence of feeling—somehow justifies a piece of writing or an opinion, as though art were all about self-expression rather than artifice.
