Peter Ludlow:

However, since 9/11 leaders of both political parties in the United States have sought to consolidate power by leaning not just on the danger of a terrorist attack, but on the fact that the possible perpetrators are frightening individuals who are not like us. As President George W. Bush put it before a joint session of Congress in 2001: “They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” Last year President Obama brought the enemy closer to home, arguing in a speech at the National Defense University that “we face a real threat from radicalized individuals here in the United States” — radicalized individuals who were “deranged or alienated individuals ­- often U.S. citizens or legal residents.”
 
 The Bush fear-peddling is usually considered the more extreme, but is it? The Obama formulation puts the “radicalized individuals” in our midst. They could be American citizens or legal residents. And the subtext is that if we want to catch them we need to start looking within. The other is among us. The pretext for the surveillance state is thus established.

Marc Andreessen:

A third fascinating use case for Bitcoin is micropayments, or ultrasmall payments. Micropayments have never been feasible, despite 20 years of attempts, because it is not cost effective to run small payments (think $1 and below, down to pennies or fractions of a penny) through the existing credit/debit and banking systems. The fee structure of those systems makes that nonviable.
 
 All of a sudden, with Bitcoin, that’s trivially easy. Bitcoins have the nifty property of infinite divisibility: currently down to eight decimal places after the dot, but more in the future. So you can specify an arbitrarily small amount of money, like a thousandth of a penny, and send it to anyone in the world for free or near-free.

Wikipedia on Pomegranates.

It is always interesting to watch the world go by. Tap or click to step inside the panoramic image, then press and pan in any direction.

The Economist:

ON DARK evenings in late 1916, a frail 76-year-old man could often be seen shuffling furtively between The Dove, a pub in west London, and the green and gold turrets of Hammersmith Bridge. Passers-by paid no attention, for there was nothing about Thomas Cobden-Sanderson’s nightly walks to suggest that he was undertaking a peculiar and criminal act of destruction.
 
 Between August 1916 and January 1917 Cobden-Sanderson, a printer and bookbinder, dropped more than a tonne of metal printing type from the west side of the bridge. He made around 170 trips in all from his bindery beside the pub, a distance of about half a mile, and always after dusk. At the start he hurled whole pages of type into the river; later he threw it like bird seed from his pockets. Then he found a small wooden box with a sliding lid, for which he made a handle out of tape—perfect for sprinkling the pieces into the water, and not too suspicious to bystanders.
 
 Those tiny metal slugs belonged to a font of type used exclusively by the Doves Press, a printer of fine books that Cobden-Sanderson had co-founded 16 years earlier. The type was not his to destroy, so he concealed his trips from his friends and family and dropped his packages only when passing traffic would drown out the splash. There were slip-ups, all the same. One evening he nearly struck a boatman, whose vessel shot out unexpectedly from under the bridge. Another night he threw two cases of type short of the water. They landed on the pier below, out of reach but in plain sight. After sleepless nights he determined to retrieve them by boat, but they eventually washed away. After that he was more careful.

And, today: Tobias Frere-Jones Is Suing Jonathan Hoefler, via Daring Fireball

Dominic Rushie:

As the world’s car industry leaders head to the gargantuan Detroit annual motor show this week, many of them will be in the most upbeat mood for years. Sales are back, the car companies are all making profits. But having weathered the worst recession in living memory a big black cloud still hangs above – young people aren’t buying.
 
 Car and youth culture synched gears decisively in 1955. That was when James Dean played chicken in a black Ford Super De Luxe in Rebel Without a Cause. But more recently the love affair between youth and wheels seems to have broken.
 
 New car purchases by those aged 18-34 dropped by 30% in the US between 2007 and 2012, according to the car shopping website Edmunds.com. Many American under-35s are now not even getting their licence. Given that so called “millennials” – those born between 1983 and 2000 – are now the largest generation in the US, the trend is worrying car firms.
 
 Meanwhile the number of miles driven by Americans each year has also started to drop –they now drive fewer miles per capita than at the end of Bill Clinton’s first term, according to a report released last year by US PIRG Education Fund. And the age group showing the biggest decline? Those aged 16 to 34, who drove 23% fewer miles on average in 2009 than in 2001.

David Russell Schilling:

There are now over one billion cars traveling roads around the world directly and indirectly costing trillions of dollars in material resources, time and noxious emissions. Imagine all these cars running cleanly for 100 years on just 8 grams of fuel each.
 
 Laser Power Systems (LPS) from Connecticut, USA, is developing a new method of automotive propulsion with one of the most dense materials known in nature: thorium. Because thorium is so dense it has the potential to produce tremendous amounts of heat. The company has been experimenting with small bits of thorium, creating a laser that heats water, produces steam and powers a mini turbine.
 
 Current models of the engine weigh 500 pounds, easily fitting into the engine area of a conventionally-designed vehicle. According to CEO Charles Stevens, just one gram of the substance yields more energy than 7,396 gallons (28,000 L) of gasoline and 8 grams would power the typical car for a century.

Derek Thompson:

In 1865, Horace Greeley said “go west, young man,” and, for a century and a half, men and women, young and old, were keen to listen. Even into the early 2000s, the sunbelt stretching into the suburban southwest fattened with new housing developments—ultimately, to disastrous effect. But in the last decade, the ambition to go west has been replaced with a lazier notion—to “stay put.”
 
 “Americans are moving far less often than in the past, and when they do migrate it is typically no longer from places with low wages to places with higher wages,” Tim Noah wrote in Washington Monthly. “Rather, it’s the reverse.” Why America lost her wanderlust is not entirely clear—perhaps dual-earner households make long moves less likely; perhaps the Great Recession pinned underwater homeowners on their plots—but those still wandering aren’t going to the right cities.
 
 When Greeley suggested a westward move, he wasn’t making an argument for sun and gold. He was, above all, suggesting that young people escape from areas with expensive housing:

Cecilie Gamst Berg:

Driving from New York to Kansas City with Harvey has not only been fun and a visual feast, it’s also been an education in his family’s illustrious history, in which the El Tovar Hotel featured prominently. Situated a few steps from the edge of the Grand Canyon, it is probably the shiniest and most famous jewel in the crown, or rather string, of hotels, restaurants and shops established by Fred Harvey, Steve’s great-great grandfather.

Frederick Henry Harvey was born in England in 1835 and became a naturalised American soon after landing on Ellis Island at the age of 17. Intelligent, capable and possessing a furious work ethic, he started out as a simple “pot walloper” (dishwasher) in a New York restaurant and grew to preside over a mighty hospitality empire, revolutionising the way Americans travelled, ate and went sightseeing. He became known as the “civiliser” of an, at the time, extremely uncivilised and very wild west. Harvey developed the first restaurant chain, the first “fast food” outlets (although he used only the freshest, choicest ingredients – as opposed to the highly processed cuisine we associate with the phrase today), the first tourism industry in the American southwest, the first all-female workforce and the first company merchandise and postcards. He also organised the first guided tours into “ethnic” (native American) territories in the southwest.

His empire stretched over 80 cities and towns in 17 states and, by 1948, 47 years after his death, the name Fred Harvey (his signature was the company logo) was attached to some 200 establishments, 29 of which were hotels. He drove a wedge of starched tablecloths, folded napkins and polished silverware into the rough-andready world in which cowboys and Indians were shooting it up and in which baked beans and rock-hard bread were considered a gourmet meal.

Today, however, Fred Harvey is no longer a household name, except among the people who live along the railroad routes he was instrumental in transforming, Hollywood musical buffs and the group of Harveyana enthusiasts who call themselves Fredheads.

It is the latter, as well as assorted members of the Harvey clan itself, that Steve and I are dashing to meet.