My days at work and home consist of quests and side-quests leading to more quests and side-quests. I have lost the main narrative.

Via Tyler.

As the great poet Antonio Machado once wrote: “walker, there is no path; the path is made by walking.” Never was this truer than in an era of abject institutional failure, social fracture, and economic meltdown. We know where yesterday’s paths lead — not to a shining city we once called prosperity, but to here; dying metropolises, battered exurbs, mass unemployment, nail-biting fear of the future, plutocracy and protest, the crumbling ruins of empire. So map the horizons of your own journey, and, when the status quo tells you it can’t be done, tell the status quo to go to hell.

Here’s a great quote from the article (I added the emphasis):

After this accident, the million-dollar question is whether training, instrumentation, and cockpit procedures can be modified all around the world so that no one will ever make this mistake again—or whether the inclusion of the human element will always entail the possibility of a catastrophic outcome.

Via Genie.

I think this is the core:

The ability of institutions to adapt slowly while preserving continuity of mission and process is exactly what lets them last longer than a single leader or lifespan. When change in the outside world outstrips an institution’s adaptive capabilities, though, the ability to defend the internal organization from outside pressures can become a liability. Stability can tun into rigidity and even institutional blindness.

I love this:

Saying newspapers will provide a stable home for reporters, just as soon as we figure out how to make newspapers stable, is like saying that if we had some ham, we could have a ham sandwich, if we had some bread.

I literally LOL’d:

No medium has ever survived the indifference of 25 year olds.

You’re speaking my language:

Plan B follows Jonathan Stray’s observations about the digital public sphere: in a world where Wikipedia is a more popular source of information than any newspaper, maybe we won’t have a clear center anymore. Maybe we’ll just have lots of overlapping, partial, competitive, cooperative attempts to arm the public to deal with the world we live in.

Via McNeely.

Suppose we set a small circle rolling around the interior of a large circle of twice its diameter. If we follow a point on the small circle, what pattern will it draw?

Clickthrough (the title, see that arrow?) for the answer. Pretty neat.