Hyde Park Blvd

How do we perceive art?  How do we value art? In case you missed the original, Pulitizer-prize winning article, it’s all here in the Washington Post’s piece by Gene Weingarten.

In case you missed it, Amity Shlaes in the Washington Post uses Obama’s Team and Perfect Mark Buehrle (courtesy of Steve Kaplan) to ’splain why pay caps for CEOs are a non starter:

After all, people hire for the long term, not just for one recession or recovery. And talent is rarer than we tend to think. “In a world where skill is in great demand and markets are large — when a lot of money is at stake, whether it’s baseball or finance — market forces insure that those skilled people get paid a lot,” says Kaplan. Pay caps, or even too much harassment from regulators, will drive the talent to jobs where there aren’t such obstacles. The result will be fewer perfect games in the corporate world: “You pay peanuts, you get monkeys,” says Kaplan.

Gaudi and his financial backer Guell dreamed of a village atop a Barcelona hill built from shards of forgotten dreams.  Parc Guell is better for being unfinished, a place that memorializes longing and unfulfillment.

In case you missed the original piece in the May 11, New Yorker, Gladwell weaves his usual thoughtful red thread across the ages, linking contrarian approaches to battlefields and basketball.

In the course of his wandering, Gladwell lights on Vivek Ranadive and the implications of his real-time processing work (most visible in the successful business he created, TIBCO):

The world runs in real time, but government runs in batch. Every few months, it adjusts. Its mission is to keep the temperature comfortable in the economy, and, if you were to do things the government’s way in your house, then every few months you’d turn the heater either on or off, overheating or underheating your house.” Ranadivé argued that we ought to put the economic data that the Fed uses into a big stream, and write a computer program that sifts through those data, the moment they are collected, and make immediate, incremental adjustments to interest rates and the money supply. “It can all be automated,” he said. “Look, we’ve had only one soft landing since the Second World War. Basically, we’ve got it wrong every single time.”

You can imagine what someone like Alan Greenspan or Ben Bernanke might say about that idea. Such people are powerfully invested in the notion of the Fed as a Solomonic body: that pause of five or eight weeks between economic adjustments seems central to the process of deliberation. To Ranadivé, though, “deliberation” just prettifies the difficulties created by lag. The Fed has to deliberate because it’s several weeks behind, the same way the airline has to bow and scrape and apologize because it waited forty-five minutes to tell you something that it could have told you the instant you stepped off the plane.

Seth Godin, or at least his cranium
Diego Rodriguez at metacool pushes thinking in all the right directions. He features Seth Godin’s recent TED talk for all the right reasons.

Noisebridge, a hacker space in San Francisco
Wired Magazine reports on the emergence of hacker spaces and notion of hacker collectives. With international locationsapproaching three digits, the collectives already have a network replete with weekly telephone conferences and exchange programs.

Richard Florida, he of the Rise of the Creative Class and other theories of the virtues of networks as rich and dense as devil’s food cake, analyzed economic data for the states in the light of Gallup data characterizing relative ‘happiness’ of same.

His conclusions, available on his blog Creative Class: happy states are creative states.

Psychologist Barbara Fredricksons suggests that “positive” people are more open-minded, less racially biased, more likely to see the bigger picture, and ultimately more creative….’Happy’ states are also apparently those with greater concentrations of bohemians (.43), immigrants (.36 ), and gays (.32), as well as states with higher levels of high-tech industry (.22) or those with more innovative potential.

Florida warns that it’s early days and the data is not completely cooked, and one should be careful of jumping to conclusions about causation, etc. That said, I’ve long been a fan of this kind of chocolate cake.

Via Daily Dish.

This post is one of the reasons I love BoingBoing.

Despite the downturn and dreck, the entrepreneurial spirit lives in our great land:

A retired barber named Joe Godlewski wasn’t happy with all that ‘Kosher salt’ TV chefs use, so he’s selling sea salt, blessed by an Episcopalian priest and marketing it as ‘Christian Salt’. Of course, most chefs use Kosher salt because of its properties, and not because of any blessing which may have been given by a rabbi.