Alan Jacobs

Avian carriers can provide high delay, low throughput, and low altitude service. The connection topology is limited to a single point-to-point path for each carrier, used with standard carriers, but many carriers can be used without significant interference with each other, outside of early spring. This is because of the 3D ether space available to the carriers, in contrast to the 1D ether used by IEEE802.3. The carriers have an intrinsic collision avoidance system, which increases availability. Unlike some network technologies, such as packet radio, communication is not limited to line-of-sight distance. Connection oriented service is available in some cities, usually based upon a central hub topology.

ransomcenter:

Read the full article “In the Galleries: Norman Bel Geddes’s diagram for ‘Highways and Horizons’” on the Harry Ransom Center’s blog Cultural Compass.

Norman Bel Geddes’s firm’s “diagram in relief of city-traffic plan for 1960 showing features of boulevards and location of Highways & Horizons exhibit,” c. 1938. Image courtesy of the Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation.

ransomcenter:

Are authors still writing letters? The Daily Beast shares “Letter Writing in the Digital Age: Emails and Correspondence of Russell Banks & Others,” penned by the Ransom Center’s Megan Barnard.

I grant that the president has significant influence over international affairs, although less than [David] Goldman seems to be believe. The president also has some control over benefits and the budget. The size of the debt, however, depends substantially on the condition of the economy, over which the president’s influence is far more limited that either candidate lets on.

But does Goldman really think that significant numbers of Americans are going to go back to church, have more kids, or recover their belief in the superiority of our culture if Mitt Romney is president? If so, Spengler’s pessimism conceals a truly extreme optimism about the consequences of politics.

I wouldn’t bother responding to Goldman’s overestimation of politics if it did not exemplify the annexation of American conservatism by the Republican Party. According to the defenders of this annexation, the fate of the country depends on the fortunes of Republican candidates, especially for president. But the truth is, the occupant of the White House doesn’t matter very much to many of the problems that conservatives care about. Politicians are rightly held responsible for specific policies. But the nation’s cultural health depends on us.

As I type this, I am looking out my window at the flying buttresses of a church, admiring their beauty, and thinking of the unknown medieval craftsmen who built them to the glory of God. Paris provokes those kinds of contemplations, at least in me, in a way that other places do not. Some men are moved to think deep and wide thoughts by the mountains, or the forests, or the ocean. I am moved to think them by flying buttresses, and bookstores, and the loving care with which a dignified wine vendor with good manners and bad teeth explains to me why this inexpensive bottle of red wine from the Loire Valley is a thing to be cherished.

This is why I’m happy in Paris in a way that I’m not happy in Altoona: Because most of the things that matter most to me in life — faith, food, beauty, contemplation, conversation — exist here in a degree of harmony and intensity that they do not anywhere else. Put another way, I am most myself here, or so it seems to me.

Except that I’m not, not really. I could never live here permanently; I am an American, and will never be anything other than that. Travel is wonderful because it tells you who you are, but also who you are not. My feet haven’t yet touched the ground in Paris, my delight is such here, but I am comforted by the thought that in a month, I will be back home in St. Francisville, which is my place, and where I understand, and am understood, in ways not possible here in Paris. It sounds paradoxical, and I guess it is, but I am confident in the accuracy of James Baldwin’s insight about how all the things he loved dearly about Paris were an illusion concealing from himself his fundamental Americanness.

This is one of the most fundamental differences between an individualist and a personalist perspective. Human dignity, the unconditional requirement that we attend with reverence to one another, rests firmly on that conviction that the other is already related to something that is not me. Without that conviction, we are in serious ethical trouble. That is why some people, like Robert Spaemann, insist that there is a connection between the notion of human dignity and the notion of the sacred - not only the specific ways in which this or that religion talks about the sacred, but in the sense that there is in the other something utterly demanding of my reverence, something which I cannot simply master or own or treat as an object like other objects. For the Christian, and for most religious believers, that is firmly rooted in the notion that the other, the human other, is already related - and so outside of my power and my control.

I think we can push this further and say that when we claim the right to be respected - when we claim our “human rights,” in fact - we are not just asserting that somewhere in us there is something making imperative demands. We are trying to affirm a proper place in relation with others. We are trying to affirm that we are embedded in relationship. I am and have value because I am seen by and engaged with love - ideally, the love we experience humanly and socially, but beyond and behind that always and unconditionally the love of God. And the service of others’ rights or dignity is simply the search to echo this permanent attitude of love, attention, respect, which the creator gives to what is made.

The Web’s Elusive Promise of a DIY Career in the Arts - Alan Jacobs - The Atlantic

I find myself lately pretty continually dismayed by the frequency with which I have to acknowledge that I’ve lost my good habits. I’ve gotten out of the habit of writing every morning; I’ve gotten out of the habit of leaving work on time in order to make it to my yoga class. I’ve gotten out of the habit of eating well. I’ve gotten out of the habit of making slow but steady progress on a big project. And then there are the less than great habits that I’ve gotten myself in of late (which I won’t delve into here).

Part of the problem, I’m realizing this morning, is that the habits that I want to cultivate aren’t mobile friendly. They require a life in which one reliably wakes up at the same time, in the same place, pretty much every day, or at least for consistently long enough periods that changes can be managed and settled down into new routines.

But the life I’ve chosen isn’t at all consistent. It has periods of consistency that fool me into believing that I have established some good habits that can sustain me through whatever little disruptions I encounter. This, I am realizing today, is a fundamental miscalculation. My life is mobile at heart; if I go three weeks without traveling, it begins to feel a bit like a staycation, a long, luxurious lie-in at home. Every time I leave, every time things get somehow disrupted, I lose my hold on all of my good habits, and I have a miserably hard time picking them back up again.

What I need to develop is a set of habits that are as mobile as I am, habits that are disruption-tolerant. Can there be such a thing?

I suspect — I can only guess — that Price’s environment is one in which the narrow-minded anti-intellectualism of Christianity is just part of the epistemic furniture, one of those things that Everyone Knows, in precisely the same way that the white people I grew up among simply knew that Negroes were shiftless and lazy. I find two things especially noteworthy about these things that Everyone Knows: first, they tend to be really nasty-minded; and second, they tend to be equally tidy-minded — that is, they make the world a neat, simple place in which there are ever so many people one needn’t take seriously, or treat with anything other than immediately reflexive contempt, because one knows in advance of any particular encounter exactly what they’re like.

Meet the Beatles (Again) | The American Conservative