I Have a Dream - Speechwriter Clarance Jones

Much progress has indeed been made. As a participant in the civil rights movement, I'm proud of that progress. But as long as there is necessity for such a legal category as hate crime, the "Dream" remains unfulfilled. As long as DWB ("Driving While Black") in the presence of police remains a perilous activity for many African Americans throughout our nation, the Dream remains diluted. As long as unemployment among African Americans keeps repeating the historic ratio of double the rate of unemployment among white people, the Dream remains unfulfilled. As long as polarisation of wealth and absence of equal access to economic opportunity continue to escalate and disproportionately affect African Americans, the Dream remains unfulfilled.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jan/14/martin-luther-king-race

Caroyln Cassady lives in ... Bracknell

When you think of the Beats, you think of free sex and flaming sunsets, of bulbous '49 Hudsons easing towards the horizon on dusty highways that seem to go on for ever. You don't think about roundabouts, recycling centres and Rover estates. But that's what you get in Bracknell and it's in Bracknell, near Windsor, that one of the last surviving members of the Beat generation lives.

Carolyn Cassady opens the door to her pretty green cottage with a lipsticked grin and a shy handshake. She's 87, but looks a decade younger, dressed neatly in a lavender fleece with matching moccasins. The second wife of Beat muse Neal Cassady – the man immortalised as Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's 1957 classic On the Road – Carolyn moved to London in 1983, and relocated here 10 years later. "I was brought up English," she says. "My parents were anglophiles and we had a whole lot of English customs at home. I made the break and I much prefer it."

Her knick-knack-filled Berkshire home has now become a regular, if unlikely, stop on the Beat trail. Walter Salles, the Brazilian director behind the new movie version of On the Road, is her most recent high-profile visitor. "He came four, five times," says Carolyn, with a twang that betrays her Tennessee childhood. "We're good friends."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/16/beat-poets-cassidy-kerouac-ginsberg

Lumumba

It was 50 years ago today: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/17/patrice-lumumba-50th-anniversary-assassination

 

Guardian:

 

Patrice Lumumba: the most important assassination of the 20th century

The US-sponsored plot to kill Patrice Lumumba, the hero of Congolese independence, took place 50 years ago today

Sally Ann

Superlinear Scaling

With urban population increasing dramatically worldwide, cities are playing an increasingly critical role in human societies and the sustainability of the planet. An obstacle to effective policy is the lack of meaningful urban metrics based on a quantitative understanding of cities. Typically, linear per capita indicators are used to characterize and rank cities. However, these implicitly ignore the fundamental role of nonlinear agglomeration integral to the life history of cities. As such, per capita indicators conflate general nonlinear effects, common to all cities, with local dynamics, specific to each city, failing to provide direct measures of the impact of local events and policy. Agglomeration nonlinearities are explicitly manifested by the superlinear power law scaling of most urban socioeconomic indicators with population size, all with similar exponents (1.15). As a result larger cities are disproportionally the centers of innovation, wealth and crime, all to approximately the same degree. We use these general urban laws to develop new urban metrics that disentangle dynamics at different scales and provide true measures of local urban performance. New rankings of cities and a novel and simpler perspective on urban systems emerge. We find that local urban dynamics display long-term memory, so cities under or outperforming their size expectation maintain such (dis)advantage for decades. Spatiotemporal correlation analyses reveal a novel functional taxonomy of U.S. metropolitan areas that is generally not organized geographically but based instead on common local economic models, innovation strategies and patterns of crime.

 

Source: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0013541 (via kottke)

FUCK THOSE ZODIAC MORONS - I AM THE RAM

Wittgenstein - das Nichts nichtet

We would like to begin ph(ilosophy) with something which should be the foundation of everything to follow, of all the sciences, and yet at the same time it is not supposed to be a ‘foundation’ simply in the sense of the bottom course of bricks in a house. […] This dilemma gives rise to the need to begin philosophy with, so to speak, an inarticulate sound. And a proposition such as ‘The nothing noths’ is in a certain sense a substitute for this sort of inarticulate sound.

 

http://web.archive.org/web/20071118020737/http://academics.vmi.edu/psy_dr/Wittgenstein+and+Heidegger+%28final+draft%29.htm