Alan Rickman's Tea

I've been an Alan Rickman fan for a while now, though not as long as I probably should have been considering I first realized who he was after watching Galaxy Quest. Still...



And if you haven't seen Galaxy Quest, for shame.

(via kottke, as always you should really just be subscribed to his stuff)

MCA Tribute Wins The Internet

These guys take the cake, seriously...



Also if you didn't see SFJ's quick piece on MCA it's worth a read.

(via kottke)

Defining Hipsters

For most people defining a hipster is a tricky task but they know them when they see them.  That wasn't a good enough answer for Lorena Galliot so she set out to try to find a better one...



Turns out everyone is probably right.

(via kottke)

Liberated Carbon Makes The World Go Round

It's also killing us though...



I'm not quite sure what to make of Andy Revkin's work these days, although that's due at least in part to the fact that the NYT doesn't push posts to feed readers just titles which means I don't see all that much of his stuff.

The point is largely that we need to find ways to make the world go round without (or at least with less) carbon which is why it's good to hear about the continued growth in the alternative energy generation sector and to see more hybrid and electric cars on our roads. 

The answer is pretty clearly not to just keep pumping out the CO2 wily nilly and then try for some last second desperation geoengineering solution.  That's not innovative, it's nonsense and it was very disappointing to see the NYer (where Elizabeth Kolbert has been doing such good work on climate change and the environment and human's effects on the rest of the natural world) address it as a serious idea (and no I'm not going to link to it).

Read This Now - Ending The Depression

The economy still stinks, and there are few signs of improvement these days.  The challenges appear to be largely political in nature at this point since, as Paul Krugman has been pointing out for some time we know how to fix things we just seem to lack the will.

Krugman has a new book out summing up his arguments on how to end the current depression and gave a good talk at Politics & Prose on the issue.  He also wrote this summation of the book for the NY Review of Books which serves as a cliffs notes of sorts...

The truth is that recovery would be almost ridiculously easy to achieve: all we need is to reverse the austerity policies of the past couple of years and temporarily boost spending. Never mind all the talk of how we have a long-run problem that can’t have a short-run solution—this may sound sophisticated, but it isn’t. With a boost in spending, we could be back to more or less full employment faster than anyone imagines.

But don’t we have to worry about long-run budget deficits? Keynes wrote that “the boom, not the slump, is the time for austerity.” Now, as I argue in my forthcoming book^*—and show later in the data discussed in this article—is the time for the government to spend more until the private sector is ready to carry the economy forward again. At that point, the US would be in a far better position to deal with deficits, entitlements, and the costs of financing them.

Read the whole thing, if you have time give the book a look as well, and if you aren't into reading P&P is nice enough to provide recordings of most of their author talks.