Icosian Reflections

…a tendency to systematize and a keen sense

that we live in a broken world.

IN  WHICH Ross Rheingans-Yoo—a sometime quantitative trader, economist, expat, EA, artist, educator, and game developer—writes on topics of int­erest.

February 6 Links: Photographs and a Cactus Doctor
links, photography, books, libraries, givewell
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On Thursday, I wrote a post, the first in a series of "not everyone doing harm is evil", and a reader commented on Facebook with an NPR interview that I hadn't actually read, but which definitely fits right with the main thrust of my post:

You know, David, when my child has a nightmare, I don't come to her in the middle of the night and say, look, you're a moron for believing there's a monster under your bed. I acknowledge that the fear might be real, even if there's no monster under the bed. And we -- I sort of help her deal with the fear. (...)

Anyway, more at Thursday's post, and now back to your regularly-tardy linkwrap...

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I'm a sucker for clean designs, and these re-imagined Harry Potter volumes are awesome:

Book covers -- minmal, laser-cut designs

Same covers, glowing blue in the dark

Illustrations on inside pages

...by Kinsco Nagy, a graphic-design student in Hungary.

Along the same vein, some nonzero percentage of my readers may be interested in the Bibliotheca project, a similarly-beautiful of the most-printed book of all time.

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But of course, books spend a lot more time being stored than being read, and sometimes, that storage ends up being really cool, too:

That's a trailer for Cold Storage, a documentary about the Harvard Depository, which warehouses the bulk of Harvard's second-largest-in-the-nation library collection. Related: UChicago's Mansueto library, where books are retrieved for your reading pleasure by robots:

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Elsewhere in "things being moved by cranes", ever wonder where New York subway cars go to die?

A car hits the water, after being thrown from a ship into the ocean by a crane

More evocative images from Next Stop: Atlantic, by photographer Stephen Mallon. Apparently, the practice is pro-ecological and not pollutative -- the nooks and crannies of the cars (which are stripped down

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January 9 Links: Futures and Pasts of Things
college, science, links, internet, net neutrality, mars, musk, photography, hipsters, observed economics
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The Upshot, when they're not putting out awesome data features, apparently publishes things like Obama's Community-College Plan: A Reading List, which is a useful read on (1) what is actually being proposed (2) how it compares to other similar proposals and programs (3) why any of this matters.

The odds of a Republican Congress passing an Obama proposal on any issue aren't very high... [But i]f nothing else, the Obama proposal seems likely to increase the profile of the universal-college movement. That movement echoes the universal-high-school movement of the early 20th century, as I mentioned in an article Thursday. (...)

And a short bit of opinion on the necessity of "universal college":

Yet we never stop to ask why 13 years of universal education has become the magic number -- and why it should permanently be so, given how much more complex our society and economy have become in the ensuing century. If nine years of free education was the sensible norm for the masses in the 19th century and 13 years was the sensible norm in the early 20th century, what is the right number in the 21st century?

Anyway, after spending a plane flight from SLC to Baltimore discussing universal-community-college with my mother, I've come around to the belief that this is by no means as simple as "just throw money at it" -- there are going to be lots of secondary market effects and unintended consequences -- but I think it's time we're having the conversation, at least. Maybe I'll try to write a thing later.

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Also in politics: If you're familiar with the Net Neutrality debate, this headline will mean

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