I tried to find a link to Friedman’s post in the NYT from several years ago in response to Matt’s question. I found this snippet from his book instead:

President Kennedy understood that the competition with the Soviet Union was not a space race but a science race, which was really an education race. Yet the way he chose to get Americans excited about sacrificing and buckling down to do what it took to win the Cold War – which required a large-scale push in science and engineering – was by laying out the vision of putting a man on the moon, not a missile into Moscow.

“If President Bush made energy independence his moon shot, in one fell swoop he would dry up revenue for terrorism, force Iran Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia onto the path of reform – which they will never do with $50-a-barrel oil – strengthen the dollar, and improve his own standing in Europe by doing something huge to reduce global warming. He would also create a real magnet to inspire young people to contribute to both the war on terrorism and America’s future by again becoming scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.”

Note how he quotes $50 a barrel as expensive.

Much to my dismay, he keeps writing good articles.

That’s how I learned a new language here: “Climate-Speak.”

It’s easy to learn. There are only three phrases. The first is: “Just a few years ago …” Just a few years ago you could dogsled in winter from Greenland, across a 40-mile ice bank, to Disko Island. But for the past few years, the rising winter temperatures in Greenland have melted that link. Now Disko is cut off. Put away the dogsled.

There has been a 30 percent increase in the melting of the Greenland ice sheet between 1979 and 2007, and in 2007, the melt was 10 percent bigger than in any previous year, said Konrad Steffen, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, which monitors the ice. Greenland is now losing 200 cubic kilometers of ice per year — from melt and ice sliding into the ocean from outlet glaciers along its edges — which far exceeds the volume of all the ice in the European Alps, he added. “Everything is happening faster than anticipated.”

The second phrase is: “I’ve never seen that before…” It rained in December and January in Ilulissat. This is well above the Arctic Circle! It’s not supposed to rain here in winter. Said Steffen: “Twenty years ago, if I had told the people of Ilulissat that it would rain at Christmas 2007, they would have just laughed at me. Today it is a reality.”

The third phrase is: “Well usually …but now I don’t know anymore.” Traditional climate patterns that Greenland elders have known their whole lives have changed so quickly in some places that “the accumulated experience of older people is not as valuable as before,” said Rosing. The river that was always there is now dry. The glacier that always covered that hill has disappeared. The reindeer that were always there when the hunting season opened on Aug. 1 didn’t show up.

No wonder everyone here speaks climate now — your kids will, too, and sooner than they think.

He wrote a fantastic one a few years ago drawing an analogy between Kennedy’s “we’ll put a man on the moon in ten years” vision with a future president’s vision of being energy independence in ten years. The idea is that we can make it cool to invent a solution that way it was cool, 40 years ago, to want to be an astronaut.

If one of the current candidates for president were to pull all their weight behind that idea, I think it would carry them home.

Because she is totally hot.

The Washington Post says

Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.

Fishbowl says

It’s a very timely move by the DHS. You never know when someone might invent a global, unregulated data network that could allow evildoers to entirely bypass such checkpoints, making them nothing more than a sham way for border police to rake through people’s private data and copy their mp3 collections.

Sidezoomers versus Lineuppers

I supposed there were not all that many drivers gritting their teeth behind their steering wheels, practicing what Jerry Seinfeld once called the stare-ahead, while declining to let the sidezoomers in and musing at the same time that this is the problem with modern American capitalism, really, this anti-aristocratic all-men-are-created-equal narrative we pretend to cherish while simultaneously celebrating the individual’s right to do whatever advances his own interests without technically breaking the law, Gordon Gekko triumphant over Cesar Chavez, and that is an exit-only lane, you rodent, so no, you are not cutting in front of me unless you look as if you might have a gun in your car, in which case, O.K., but you’re still a rodent.

The ideal solution - according to traffic experts - seems flawed to me.

FIRST, EVERYBODY REMAINS UNRUFFLED, without abrupt changes of lane or speed, as the lane-drop comes into view. Everybody takes three deep, cleansing breaths — all right, the experts didn’t say that, but they meant to — and considers both the imminent needs of everybody else and the system as a smoothly functioning whole.

Then everybody begins to slow, not too much, all in concert. All cars remain in their lanes, using all the real estate. (On the question of frontage roads and exit-only lanes, the experts waffled; those are arguably part of the real estate, they agreed, but they are meant for a different purpose, and this scenario relies upon everybody buying into the same rules. So no frontage-roading or fake-exit-laning, unless there’s a sign specifically instructing otherwise.) People in the narrowing left lanes refrain from shooting ahead, while people in the right through lanes — this is hard to swallow, for those of us inclined toward vigilantism, but crucial — leave big spaces in front of their cars for the merging that is about to commence. We resist the freeze-out-the-sidezoomer urge. We prepare to invite them in.

Graceful merging is all well and good but, in the scenario described by the author, the lineuppers are already sitting still and sidezoomers are already zooming by them. If the lineuppers (or, more acurately, the Good Thing Society Has People Like Me people) let in the sizezoomers in the prescribed one-two-one-two fashion described by the so-called experts, the lineuppers would proceed at only half the ideal rate and sidezoomers (more accurately,the I Beat Out the Stupid Sheep Just Now, Ha Ha people) would have their sheep and eat them too.

The traffic cop sums the whole situation up nicely.

“It’s not a matter of fairness or unfairness,” Morgan said. “It’s a matter of there’s no violation, no one is being injured.”

But that’s capitalism for you.

Finished. What a delight!

This one is a lot less prescriptive than The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and what one learns, one learns by osmosis.

The book skips around a lot of different ideas and it reaches deep into the toolbox of the design artist. Sometimes too deep, I thought - but perhaps I am not the target reader.

The pictures are nice though.

Some free airtime for McCain:

“We are proud of that commercial.”
– John McCain

Is this what he is trying to say?

Some of the comments are interesting at the site where that came from.