I’ve been living and working in Berkeley for almost 20 years, and I still don’t feel Berkeley enough.  That said, this song had me dancing around our Downtown Berkeley office!

Catchiest song of December.

I haven’t been able to get this paragraph out of my head all week.

I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

Christopher Hitchens Takes on Nietzsche: Am I Really Stronger?

I generally hate it when newspapers and magazines make sweeping technology projections (like this one), but I got goosebumps reading about what network-enabled sensor technology is going to be able to do, and soon.

Across many industries, products and practices are being transformed by communicating sensors and computing intelligence. The smart industrial gear includes jet engines, bridges and oil rigs that alert their human minders when they need repairs, before equipment failures occur. Computers track sensor data on operating performance of a jet engine, or slight structural changes in an oil rig, looking for telltale patterns that signal coming trouble.

SENSORS on fruit and vegetable cartons can track location and sniff the produce, warning in advance of spoilage, so shipments can be rerouted or rescheduled. Computers pull GPS data from railway locomotives, taking into account the weight and length of trains, the terrain and turns, to reduce unnecessary braking and curb fuel consumption by up to 10 percent.

The Internet Gets Physical – NYTimes.com.

Kurt Andersen writes in Vanity Fair about the lack of any significant movement in culture during the past 20 years.  While technology has moved more quickly  over than any two decade period in recorded history, art has remained relatively stagnant.

While I don’t fully agree with the main point, I love the way he paints a contrast between one of the most significant changes in our everyday lives (mobile devices from Apple) and the desire of hipsters for all-vintage everything:

People flock by the millions to Apple Stores (1 in 2001, 245 today) not just to buy high-quality devices but to bask and breathe and linger, pilgrims to a grand, hermetic, impeccable temple to style—an uncluttered, glassy, super-sleek style that feels “contemporary” in the sense that Apple stores are like back-on-earth sets for 2001: A Space Odyssey, the early 21st century as it was envisioned in the mid-20th. And many of those young and young-at-heart Apple cultists-cum-customers, having popped in for their regular glimpse and whiff of the high-production-value future, return to their make-believe-old-fashioned lives—brick and brownstone town houses, beer gardens, greenmarkets, local agriculture, flea markets, steampunk, lace-up boots, suspenders, beards, mustaches, artisanal everything, all the neo-19th-century signifiers of state-of-the-art Brooklyn-esque and Portlandish American hipsterism.

Are We in a Decades-Long Design Rut? | Style | Vanity Fair.