Why is there no intersection between libraries and bookstores?

I mean, if the metaphorical essence of a library is the gentle rubbing of one’s soul against primarily textual bundles of information, doesn’t a bookstore also achieve the same essence?

Couldn’t there be, like, a Barnes & Noble & Hoi Polloi Too But Only In LIP* Areas?

Is the next thing I am going to ask related to me starting a charter library slash bibliodiscotheque?

Run by prisoners? 

* Less important person

I read an article in one of the Daily Newses that keeps appearing on the tile in front of my door each morning.

Some guy named Edwin Austin, 32, ran out of a house he was trying to burglarize and ran into an elementary school “while wildly waving a loaded .380 handgun.”

Everything was fine, no one was hurt, but later in the article, they grab a line from his mother, who is 46.

Okay, so that makes her 14 when she had him.

Police said Austin had been paroled in February after serving eight years for robbery [meaning he went in at age 24] and previously did four years for attempted robbery [so the oldest in for that would have been 20].

This guy has spent 12 years of his life behind bars. 12/32 = 38%. (A .380 handgun!)

So now I am going to think too much for a moment (indulge me, Ari):

• Let j sub n = set of people who have been incarcerated n times
• Let k sub m = set of people who were born to a mother age m
• Let l sub p = set of people who have spent p% of their life behind bars

I wonder:

1. What is the correlation between j sub n and k sub m?
2. Does m decrease as n increases?
3. As p increases, does the likelihood of an n+1th event increase?
4. What is the correlation between l sub p and k sub m?
5. Does m decrease as p increases?
6. What can we as a society do once we have answers to these questions?
7. How much of my tax dollars have already funded his 12 years in prison?
8. Can we use predictive modeling to determine how many of my future tax dollars are likely to continue paying for his jail time?
9. Why can’t our prisons be more effective and be incented to not churn out career criminals?
10. How many of you noticed the assumptions bundled into the previous question?
11. Why can’t we have free-market prisons?
12. What’s up with Edwin?
13. How much of question eleven is really related to my desire to want to get paid with gubmint cheese to fix people?
14. What’s up with my Jesus complex?

To address the URLs-only posts that have arrived as a function of my hobnobbing with mid-tier-wigs at Y98’s ten year reunion this past weekend, here’s something I thought of between the restroom and my desk, which is currently overlooking the Goodyear blimp and a cloud chasing one another over Midtown Manhattan:

I’m inclined to believe that unions are a big pain:

• They create market inefficiencies which equals overhead which generally gets passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.  So, as a consumer, I’m pissed off!  I’m subsidizing this crap.
• They force workers with ambition, talent, and drive — workers who are able to otherwise move freely within the employment markets — to pay a surcharge and essentially subsidize their fellow co-workers who lack an equal amount of ambition, talent, and drive.  So, as a potential employee at a unionized shop, I’m pissed off!  I’m subsidizing employment security for slackers who can’t otherwise attain employment as easily as I can. Related: union membership is a motivational disincentive; if your ambition is not aligned with the mini-state of the union, you can eat it.
• They act as lobbyists and prevent bills that protect individuals from passing into law.  They are more interested in their own interests than in the individual rights and interests of actual real live individual humans.  Union > human.  Example 1 (of n):  unionized workers at nursing homes are vehemently opposed to vouchers for those with disabilities who actually want to live in their own home with home health aides.

I remember working custodial at Yale for just north of eight bucks an hour back in the day.  The unionized workers made nearly twenty and spent vast swaths of their day chilling and looking for empty dorm rooms in which to nap.  Meanwhile I attached giant straws directly to my nostrils and sucked up dust out of many a stairwell all day long.

How, exactly, does the welfare mini-state of a unionized labor force align with American ideals?

How, exactly, are unions good for the America of today?

How, exactly, are unions good for individual Americans?

Are my thinking ways errored?  If so, help me to see why.

• 3.7 million of all NYC adults cannot read beyond a 5th grade reading level
• 25% of parents in NYC do not read well enough to read a bedtime story to their children
• 43% of people with the lowest literacy skills in NYC also live in poverty
• Poverty, lined to illiteracy, is intergenerational and remains an easily curable social illness

Click here to donate to Literacy Partners.

Self-transformation must accompany efforts to change the world.  The need for a “change of heart” is difficult to quantify, and so is typically left out of most public policy manifestos.  But without it, we only pretend to be at the controls of our intellectualized culture, forever moving around the external pieces — whether of the market economy or the political process or the academic orientation — without ever having to make real changes in the ways we actually live our lives.  This inner obligation to transform our own lives need not be at the expense of our efforts to change societal systems.  Quite the contrary.  But in my experience this obligation does call forth some dimension of — for lack of a better phrase — spiritual discipline and practice.  As the Dalai Lama has put it, “Spiritual practice involves, on the one hand, acting out of concern for others’ well being.  On the other hand, it entails transforming ourselves so that we become more readily disposed to do so.”

– Kurt Hoelting, Clinton WA

It just occurred to me while jamming my Saturday morning sunny-side-ups down my gullet that just as the way in which cities are built and designed reflects the philosophical underpinnings of said urban architects –

Moses wanted to keep the people who couldn’t afford their own private cars off of parkways like the Hutch; those scenic views were the provenance of the wealthy (read: white) hence bridges with low overpasses

– so too is the way in which databases and online communities are built a reflection of the philosophies of said DBAs.

• Which nuggets of information are valuable?
• How will we determine who qualifies to see what?
• How do we measure and evaluate our fellow humans?

I am wondering if there are any academic explorations of these themes.  (Relationship between the philosophy of built communities and the philosophy of database structure, notions of the worldviews information database design, etc.)

Has anyone seen anything that pushes this further?  I’d like to know what the prevailing theories are.

Information becomes knowledge becomes understanding becomes wisdom.

(NB:  each of those “becomes” is actually a “becomes subscript n, becomes subscript n+1″ etc.; note that the fxn “becomes” will not be defined at this time.)

Okay, back to my protein.  Anyone up for a swim at the NYSC on 49th and Broadway later?

Meet my big sister, an outraged woman!

Words don’t capture my pride.

Um, why come they don’t just print a subway map on the front and back of our metro cards?

Shout-out and thank you to New York magazine for their recent direct mail solicitation.  I needed to update my furry, pulp-y wallet subway line map card.

• I have been thinking about letting strangers stay in my apartment when I’m away on bidness in exchange for them doing my laundry and my dishes.
• But when I go to the grocery store, I only like to buy as much as I can carry with my own two hands.  Not even a gramma cart.  (This is the kind of radicalism I embraced post-automobile!)
• And, I am happiest when traversing landmass that I can traverse with my own two legs.
  • I recognize that this post is “ability”-centric but for the sake of argument allow me to press on like a Lee nail.
• I feel strongly that the atomization and rationalization and systematization and productionalization of our society has resulted in
  • (a) man’s alienation from self as warned by Marxenfelden
  • (b) one dimensionality as warned by Marcusowitz
  • (c) Byzantinio 2.0 as warned by Kafkafkaf
• I’m not saying it’s going to be Zamyatin-land but should society continue to march triumphantly on as it has, then the post-technology era might very well be WE, oui?
• Okay, so, like, we are all a bunch of productivity units in this post-agrarian age
• And maximizing productivity instead of joy results in, uh,  A LACK OF MAXIMUM JOY
• Okay, so, rather than outsourcing activities that I cannot do myself …
• Shouldn’t I just pare down my life to only include activities that I can do myself?
• But what about the core competency stuff?!?
• And what about being social and working with others?  Doesn’t that involve an exchange of some sort?
• But why can’t I simply exchange joy?
• Why do I have to be so good at process engineering in my professional life?
• Does my desire to process engineer my personal life mean that I am forever destined to NOT MAXIMIZE JOY but instead MAXIMIZE LOADS OF LAUNDRY WASHED?
• Should I take the fact that I keep losing stuff as a sign from the universe?
  • A sign that reads, maybe with a few lights out but enough on to keep things legible, SLOW DOWN ANP.  DO LESS.  IS MORE.  IS MAXIMIZE JOY.
• When did that sign become an Eastern European immigrant?
• Does this mean I need to get rid of my Polish lady?
• And didn’t I already blog about this?!?

ANP’s admissions of political confusion couched as political certainty have resulted in a few longtime listeners, first time commenters to come out of the woodwork!

Too bad I forgot to apply Aruban deodorant sensation Odorono in scent Fresh Bamboo this morning.  All this excitement is making me sweaty.