Chris Peterson

If this means there is one less death in the future, then I’m glad for that,” said Mr. Waizer, who was in an elevator riding to work in the north tower when the plane struck the building. He made it down the stairs, but suffered third-degree burns.

“But I just can’t find it in me to be glad one more person is dead, even if it is Osama Bin Laden.”

– NYT

Now that’s a helluva quote.

The WordPress iOS app is amazing.

That is all.

On Wednesday, I was happy to attend a conversation with Assistant SecState PJ Crowley at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media. On Saturday, I was saddened to learn that as a result of that conversation – specifically after characterizing the inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning’s detention as “ridiculous, counterproductive, and stupid” – Mr Crowley resigned his office.

The C4 meeting was intended to be an informal conversation between top-flight academics and a leading government official about social media and state policy. Mr Crowley was candid and forthright in his remarks. He provided wonderful insights about his challenges at State. And, when he agreed at the end of the talk that his informal comments could be on record, he did so presumably so that those not fortunate enough to physically attend could still profit from his wisdom and experience.

Mr Crowley’s job is was to represent the opinions of the Obama administration. And he did not do so accurately in this discussion. Some have argued that this discrepancy justifies his allegedly encouraged resignation.

However, Mr Crowley also stated clearly that these were his personal, not professional, beliefs. Candid, forthright discussions between policymakers and their constituents are a necessary condition for a functioning republic. All law may be politics, but not all policy need be positioning. And if a public official can’t speak honestly in a conversation with leading academics at MIT’s center for civic media, then there is no safe space left for honesty in governance.

Accordingly, I have added my name to an open letter issued by attendees in support of Mr Crowley. Will it accomplish anything? Probably not. But the least I can do to support someone who as candid as Crowley is to be just as forthright on his behalf. Because, under the circumstances, the resignation of PJ Crowley is ridiculous, counterproductive, and stupid.

(tldr: read this)

If you’re visiting this page it’s probably because you’ve come here to read my post about the impact of commodity speculation on oil prices.

This post is gone now (although much of it has been mirrored in many places around the Internet, including here). I decided to take it down from my blog because I was no longer satisfied with it. What I thought would be the ending point of a polemic became the starting point of a very helpful discussion in the comments of my site, reddit, different messageboards, etc.

While I am still convinced that the primary reason for the volatility and height of oil prices is speculative, manipulative behavior on Wall Street and not the freedom fighters in the Middle East, I also realized that my post was conceptually incomplete and analytically insufficient.

Fundamentally the point I was trying to make required much more information than I could contain in a blog post. And though the discussion, as I said, has continued in many disparate places, in a way that I find satisfying, all of that information was not contained here, in this space, and I didn’t want to maintain the illusion of completeness here any longer. Put another way, I was very happy with the conversation that had continued, but it had continued in so many disparate places that my post had essentially become only a single outpost of a much larger enterprise.

However, most of my post was simply excerpts from the following articles, so if you read them, you will understand what I was talking about.

• How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis by Frederick Kaufman in Foreign Policy. This is a short article that came out after my post but is functionally very similar; if you came here to read my post, read this one instead.
• The food bubble: How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it by Frederick Kaufman in Harper’s Magazine.
• Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi, specifically chapter 4, which dealt squarely with the commodities bubble in oil and gas.
• JPMorgan Hires Supertanker for Storage, Brokers Say from Bloomberg News.

If you read these articles then I believe you will come to the same conclusions that I did – again, in part because much of my post was simply excerpting and synthesizing the information contained within these works.

I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you – but hopefully, it will encourage you to go read the same things I read and found so helpful and illuminating.

Edit 6/13/2011: Also, this revelation from Wikileaks that the Saudis warned of speculative behavior as well.

Punchy quote, from the Internet:

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

I love hamburgers.

But sometimes, when I’m burgin’, I don’t know where the nearest, best burger place is.

Decisions like this are too important to be left to chance.

So I made a thing.

That thing is BurgerMap.

BurgerMap runs off of the Ushahidi platform. Ushahidi has been deployed in dozens, perhaps hundreds, of conflict areas all over the world. In its history it has documented violence in the aftermath of the disputed 2007 Kenyan elections, anti-immigrant violence in South Africa, eyewitness reports from Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, and cholera outbreaks in post-earthquake Haiti.

Thus, it was a natural choice to deploy in the most pressing crisis first worlders often find themselves in, namely where to find a good burger.

BurgerMap is very easy to use. Simply click on the “Submit A Report” link and fill out the form. Include the name of the burger joint, a description of its merits, and its location. You should be able to use the integrated Google Local search in the “Find A Location” section; if that fails, just drop a pointer as close as you can and enter in the street address.

Please, take a moment to contribute your favorite burger place to our burgeoning burger community. And post any suggestions for how to make BurgerMap better.

Just coming up for air to say that if you haven’t read Ben McGrath’s piece Does Football Have A Future in last week’s New Yorker, you must. It is the most informative, insightful, and chilling look at the history of the game, its culture, its injuries, and practices that I have ever read. McGrath blows me away with every article he writes, but this was in another realm.

I’m not a hipster, but one of my favorite bands is a little indie outfit called Beirut. They play Balkan folk – what I affectionally refer to as ‘horncore’ – with lots of beautiful, anthematic melodies and harmonies.

For example, here’s one of my favorite songs off of their album The Flying Cup Club:

In 2007, Beirut teamed up with La Blogotheque to film a series of “Take Away Shows”, where the band walked around cities in France playing their music live for people, like this:

These were such a success that Beirut and Blogotheque decided to make a feature-length music video movie, where the band wandered from hipster hovel to hipster hovel playing their horns all over the place.

I’ve been looking for this DVD for some time now. Some of the individual songs can be found on YouTube, Vimeo, etc, but I wanted high quality and the real thing. But emails to Beirut’s merch address went unanswered, and nothing was on eBay, Amazon, etc.

Finally, I emailed Beirut’s record label, BaDaBing Records, only to find out that they had ‘sold out years ago.’

In that case, I hazarded, is there any chance you’d make the files available for download? Since you’re not selling the DVD anymore?

I received two emails in quick succession:

Good suggestion…. Will look into that. Thanks!

and

Hey Chris, we just heard from La Blogotheque, and they’re fine with you sharing the video files wherever… since there aren’t any more dvd’s, I’m guessing you’ll need us to rip the files for you? Let us know if you have any expertise on how to go about that, but I’m sure we can figure it out. Sweet!

A week later, BaDaBing had mailed me one of two remaining copies of the DVD, with an express mandate to make them as widely available as possible.

So I did.

If you would like to have a copy of the no-longer-available musical movie masterpiece that is Beirut/Blogotheque’s Cheap Magic Inside, you have two options.

• Download the torrent from ThePirateBay, which, once it gets picked up, will probably be much faster.
• Download it from my server, which I plan to keep up and running indefinitely.

In either case, you can download the videos in one of two formats: 1) full-quality 720p H264 m4v files, or 2) iPhone/iPod Touch optimized m4v files.

If you want to replicate the DVD or prefer to rip the movie files in a different format yourself, you can also download a raw disc master in ISO, DMG, or CDR.

Please download / link / rehost / mirror these as you will to ensure the widest exposure and availability.

And, if you are so inclined, you might go throw some change at Beirut, BaDaBing, or Blogotheque to support them. While in some ways this move isn’t logically surprising – they’re not selling the DVDs anymore, so they haven’t lost any sales, and they’re making new fans – in the broader context of the music industry it’s stunning.

Merry Christmas, indie kids.

Last summer I posted “In Praise of [Some] DDoSs?”, a quick essay documenting the response gap between DDoS attacks and sit-ins. My argument didn’t equate the two so much as it pointed out that there are some conceptual similarities (in terms of denying access as a form of protest) and vastly different criminal responses.

Thanks to 4chan (first time I have ever uttered that particular phrase) the debate is renewed anew as intellectuals attempt to piece together a coherent theoretical framework for thinking about the Wikileaks Revenge DDoSs.

A few thoughtful posts out there include:

• Nancy Scola’s 10 Ways To Think ABout DDoS Attacks is a good rundown of the various positions.
• Deanna Zandt’s take on the power dynamics of the DDoS
• Ethan Zuckerman’s gentle pushback on the power dynamics argument, noting that what the weak can effectively use against the powerful the powerful can even more effectively use against the weak

Will edit in more as they come to my attention.

One of my oldest, dearest friends, Timothy Harvey, now has a website.

Tim is an industrial design student at UIUC, focusing on sustainability. His portfolio includes BioGrow:

As part of the 2010 International E-Waste Competition sponsored by the University of Illinois, four classmates and I sought to address the issues of e-waste and the continued dependence on fossil fuel. The product we ended up designing, known as Bio-Grow, is a photobioreactor used to cultivate algae for eventual processing into biofuel. As per the rules of the competition, it was created using electronic waste that would otherwise be thrown away.

Bio-Grow went on to win second place in the technical/”geek” category of the competition. As pleasing as result as this was for our team, Bio-Grow would then go on to exceed our highest expectations. It ended up being featured on numerous websites, a list of which can be seen here.

Tim is a talented designer, a smart man, and a good friend.

So, Internet, if you need a talented designer, drop him a line!