The honest faith of insiders that their bureaucratic mission is true and critical is no substitute for credible evidence. A dozen years of experience has produced many public overstatements and much hype from insiders, but nothing to support the proposition that the program works at all, much less that its marginal contribution is significant enough to justify its enormous costs in money, freedom, and destabilization of internet security. No rational cost-benefit analysis could justify such a leap of faith.

via Fact: the NSA gets negligible intel from Americans’ metadata. So end collection | Yochai Benkler | Comment is free | theguardian.com.

Deadpan Comedy: Surreal Drawing of a Dystopian Future by Samuel Gomez | Colossal.

Hand-Cut Paper Microorganisms by Charles Clary | Colossal.

While the 40-year-old Danish sculptor hasn’t had an exhibition since last spring, his work is so odd that we couldn’t help but point it out.  Menné takes the very broad ideas of process and change and incorporates them into his installations. He pairs single materials–wax, stone, plastic–with machines that undergo repetive motions so that the objects get warped and molded over time. For example, he had one machine slowly poor acid onto a piece of stone, so that it eventually whithered into a fragmented pebble. Sort of like watching erosion happen in real-time.

via Sculptures By Henrik Menné Aren’t Finished Until They Get Destroyed | The Creators Project.

http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/why-americans-love-guns/

“The Hollywood version of the Wild West had a huge impact,” Bell says. “One of the most shocking things in the Vietnam War, which was all run by Baby Boomers, is we had an actual Army edict that we wouldn’t fire unless we were fired upon. Well, that came straight out of a diet of Westerns that came out after mothers got upset about all the violence on TV. All of a sudden we get into a war, and they’re saying we can’t fire unless we’re fired upon? That’s straight out of the myth of the Old West, but it never happened in the Old West. It’s a dangerous belief.”

Still, our frontier roots mean that Americans may never give up the idea that we’re all gun-wielding cowboys who can make it on our own in the wild.

“Other cultures didn’t have the resources of land that the United States did,” Richardson says. “That’s one of the many things that set apart the American experience from, say, Europe or Asia. Of course, ‘open land’ is a huge misnomer, as if the land was not in use, as if there were not people here. But still this notion of the availability or the supposed availability of land certainly determined America’s arc. It determined American history.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519581/how-google-converted-language-translation-into-a-problem-of-vector-space-mathematics/

The new trick is to represent an entire language using the relationship between its words. The set of all the relationships, the so-called “language space”, can be thought of as a set of vectors that each point from one word to another. And in recent years, linguists have discovered that it is possible to handle these vectors mathematically. For example, the operation ‘king’ – ‘man’ + ‘woman’ results in a vector that is similar to ‘queen’.

It turns out that different languages share many similarities in this vector space. That means the process of converting one language into another is equivalent to finding the transformation that converts one vector space into the other.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/fashion/twitter-bios-and-what-they-really-say.html

The Twitter bio is a postmodern art form, an opportunity in 160 characters or fewer to cleverly synopsize one’s professional and personal accomplishments, along with a carefully edited non sequitur or two. It lets the famous and the anonymous, athletes and accountants, surreal Dadaists and suburban dads alike demonstrate that they are special snowflakes with Wes Anderson-worthy quirks.

Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcDmloG3tXU

The foundation responsible for the construction of the famous Sagrada Família church in Barcelona recently released a video depicting what the final stages of construction will look like as nearly 150 years of building (and delays) finally wraps up in 2026. The breathtaking clip combines footage shot from a helicopter with computer-animated renderings to show what the basilica, designed by Antoni Gaudí, will look like. The structure is said to be “the most extraordinary personal interpretation of Gothic architecture since the Middle Ages.” Read more over on Co.Design. (via Design TAXI)

via New Video Depicts the Amazing Final Stages of Construction of the Sagrada Família in Barcelona | Colossal.

[John Hodgman has an excellent article on Obamacare. -egg]

Once the stories started rolling in, it really brought home to me how many young people’s lives have been profoundly altered and affected by sudden illness/accidents. Some didn’t have insurance for one reason or another and are still digging themselves out of the hole. Some DID have insurance, and in every case, no one said, I AM SO SAD I WASTED THAT MONEY ON INSURANCE.

via John Hodgman, The Ultimate (Frisbee) Argument for Visiting Healthcare.gov.

…Lake Natron in northern Tanzania does a pretty good job of illustrating Dante’s vision.

Unless you are an alkaline tilapia (Alcolapia alcalica) – an extremophile fish adapted to the harsh conditions – it is not the best place to live. Temperatures in the lake can reach 60 °C, and its alkalinity is between pH 9 and pH 10.5.

The lake takes its name from natron, a naturally occurring compound made mainly of sodium carbonate, with a bit of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) thrown in. Here, this has come from volcanic ash, accumulated from the Great Rift valley. Animals that become immersed in the water die and are calcified.

via Deadly lake turns animals into statues – environment – 01 October 2013 – New Scientist.