Free (as in speech) beer: "Anyone can use the recipe to brew their own FREE BEER or create a derivative of the recipe. Anyone is free to earn money from FREE BEER, but they must publish the recipe under the same license and credit our work." They even have garish branding materials to share.

Slate is hosting an online edition of The 9-11 Report: A Graphical Adaptation, excerpting a chapter each day. [via badlanguage]

Hugh MacLeod has 10 questions for Seth Godin. Seth on wealth: "Look, there are 8 million millionaires in the USA. Why do these people go to work every day? Why not downsize appropriately and just sit on the beach? Because they're too smart. They realize that the purpose of living isn't to bake in the sun until you die."

Here's an oldie, but a goodie. An article from Outside magazine about America's most dangerous wilderness, Angeles National Forest:

The man in charge at headquarters, Michael J. Rogers, insists that the Angeles is the ultimate proving ground for the theory that nature can be saved from humanity's onslaught. Rogers, who has been forest supervisor since 1990, is an environmental evangelist for whom the glass is always half full — even when it's nearly empty. This forest is not merely a slow-motion apocalypse, he argues (often to members of his own staff), but a laboratory where those who hold the public trust can test themselves against the host of troubles that will eventually confront every park and wilderness area in the country. In the Angeles, however, the future is now.

Maybe this is why, as I linked a while back, L.A. is the best place for writing about nature.

The Mises blog points to another "victory" in patent warfare. Creative has successfully gotten a $100 million settlement from Apple to end a suite of lawsuits, including one patent dispute about "automatic hierarchical categorization of music by metadata".

The Nonist introduces us to Red-Hot and Filthy Library Smut. "Full-frontal objectification of the library itself," featuring some pretty incredible photos. Books, shelving, tables all laid bare. Wish I were there...

Frederic Bastiat was an economist and writer in France in the early 1800s. His short book/ long essay The Law is one of the best pieces of political science writing I've read in a while. I loved this book. The Law is about the purpose and place of law in society, and Bastiat makes his case so clearly it brings me to tears. One of the sections I particularly enjoyed was his critiques of other well-known French political theorists like Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Condillac. He examines the pessimistic worldview that informs their visions of society, in the end saying,

Oh, sublime writers! Please remember sometimes that this clay, this sand, and this manure which you so arbitrarily dispose of, are men! They are your equals! They are intelligent and free human beings like yourselves! As you have, they too have received from God the faculty to observe, to plan ahead, to think, and to judge for themselves!

I also thought Bastiat's critical look at classical education to be pretty perceptive. The case he makes is this: that classical education necessarily focuses on ancient thought, and that "antiquity presents everywhere — in Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome — the spectacle of a few men molding mankind according to their whims, thanks to the prestige of force and of fraud". Learning about these ancient societies is not a problem per se. The problem arises when thinkers and teachers "offered them for the admiration and imitation of future generations... They took for granted the grandeur, dignity, morality, and happiness of the artificial societies of the ancient world."

Some other great moments: the tired, dangerous notion of the "great man"; that "a science of economics must be developed before a science of politics can be logically formulated"; and some relevant, challenging words in light of our misadventures in Iraq and elsewhere:

I defy anyone to say how even the thought of revolution, of insurrection, of the slightest uprising could arise against a government whose organized force was confined only to suppressing injustice.

Read this book.

I'd seen this book pop so often recently I figured it was some sort of sign. I have to say, The Tipping Point was about as disappointing as Malcolm Gladwell's more recent book, Blink. Which doesn't necessarily mean it was bad, just disappointing. The topic is the "tipping point," that mysterious fulcrum where obscure flips to famous, niche products turn to commodities, where just a nudge can cause dramatic changes.

What I was really interested in was the tipping point itself. I wanted Gladwell to really dig in to that moment, that place of change--what I actually read was mostly about popularity and influence in general. I think the book suffers from too few examples explored too deeply--e.g., 40 pages on strategies for children's television production. Perhaps more disappointing is that, like Blink, this is something of a "feel-good" book, even though it still feels journalistic. I didn't perceive much passion or much challenge. The book ended up feeling less like an well-constructed argument than a guided tour.

On the upside, I can appreciate that Gladwell is perceptive enough to come up with this idea, to identify some tipping influences, and show how this arises in everyday life. As in Blink, he does a great job of digging up those obscure little psychology and sociology studies and expanding on them, not to mention some great interviews. Like always, Gladwell's writing is very accessible, and it only takes a couple hours to breeze through. Take it or leave it.

Lately, I've stumbled across a couple articles on Freeganism, which is a new word for me. Freegan.info describes freegans--"people who employ alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources,"--and their common tenets:

Waste Reclamation Waste Minimization Eco-Friendly Transportation Rent-Free Housing Going Green Working Less/ Voluntary Joblessness

Here's a piece in the BBC from a while back, and in the New York Press, and a recent feature in the Washington Post.

DejaVu.org offers a brief history of the internet, as well as a tool to emulate old-school web browsers like Lynx, Mosaic, and former versions of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. You can see what the internet looked like before it was in color. We really have come a long way.

An interview with Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm and a new book about the Boston Strangler, A Death in Belmont.

What I wanted to do in the book—I said, “Look, everyone in it is dead. It doesn’t really matter. But this can be a way of talking about some important things that do endure.” How do we reach a decision on some things that can’t be known with absolute certainty?

Orwell's 11 essentials for A Nice Cup of Tea. I love this bit:

"Eighthly, one should drink out of a good breakfast cup — that is, the cylindrical type of cup, not the flat, shallow type. The breakfast cup holds more, and with the other kind one's tea is always half cold before one has well started on it."

Absolutely. I hate it when restaurants serve in these giant dishes that are more closely related to pans than cups. Thank you, George.

Nick Hornby writes about How to Read.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who harrumphs his way through a highly praised novel, astonished but actually rather pleased that so many people have got it so wrong.

As a consequence, the first thing to be cut from my reading diet was contemporary literary fiction. This seems to me to be the highest-risk category - or the highest risk for me, at any rate, given my tastes.

I am not particularly interested in language. Or rather, I am interested in what language can do for me, and I spend many hours each day trying to ensure that my prose is as simple as it can possibly be.

But I do not wish to produce prose that draws attention to itself, rather than the world it describes, and I certainly don't have the patience to read it.

I'm trying to think of writers who hit a certain balance: sharp, luminous writing that also catches you off-guard with its everyday readability. Literary MacGyvers, if you will. The ones that come to mind right now are Tim O'Brien and William Gibson.

No longer allowed to romp around in refreshing Edenic bliss, the Kool-Aid Man wears pants now. [via ptdr]

Some great news in my inbox this morning: "Farecast is happy to announce that airfare predictions for flights out of Atlanta (ATL) are now available at Farecast.com." Farecast predicts ticket prices and indicates fare history for the routes you're interested in. They claim 75% accuracy in their predictions, and they also have some cool visual tools that will make the ticket shopping less complicated. Hopefully this will add some little transparency to a fairly shrouded market.

I feel like the Wikipedia thing has been beaten to death (almost as badly as the blogging v. journalism discussion), but I persist... Jaron Lanier writes about the rise of wiki, meta, and the Hazards of the New Online Collectivism:"it's important to not lose sight of values just because the question of whether a collective can be smart is so fascinating. Accuracy in a text is not enough. A desirable text is more than a collection of accurate references. It is also an expression of personality." [via iftfotb]

In 2004 Scott Williamson became the first person to "yo-yo" the Pacific Crest Trail in one year. That is, 2650 miles hiking from the the southern tip of California through Oregon and Washington to Canada, and 2650 miles back. Last spring, Steve Friedman wrote "The Unbearable Lightness of Being Scott Williamson". It's not so much about the nuts and bolts of hiking, but the emptiness and obsession. Good stuff. From what I hear, Williamson is one of the most humble people out in the hiking world. I believe he's also attempting a repeat this year.

The GigaPxl Project produces super-detailed, ultra-high resolution panorama photography, which "adds a humanizing touch to subject material which otherwise tends to be dominated by its monumental scale." See the image gallery, San Diego for example. As they mention on the site, I like the preservation and archival potential of this technology. If they care to, future generations could scrutinize these for years.

In 1919 in the city of Boston, 21 people were killed in a flood of molasses. A reprint from an older Smithsonian article summarizes the day that "a wet, brown hell broke loose," and why parts of Boston have yet to lose that heavy, sweet smell.

I remember being fascinated with stacking things when I was younger. Dominoes, rocks, cans, playing cards, you name it. If I had had the cash, I could have learned the basics of cantilever engineering by building structures made out of coins. Be sure to see some of the the insane reader submissions on beginning on page 4. I never cease to be amazed with all the time we have on our hands.