These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

• Recount­ing the Dead — NYTimes​.com

  “So what? Above a cer­tain count, do the num­bers even mat­ter? Well, yes. The dif­fer­ence between the two esti­mates is large enough to change the way we look at the war. The new esti­mate sug­gests that more men died as a result of the Civil War than from all other Amer­i­can wars com­bined. Approx­i­mately 1 in 10 white men of mil­i­tary age in 1860 died from the con­flict, a sub­stan­tial increase from the 1 in 13 implied by the tra­di­tional esti­mate. The death toll is also one of our most impor­tant mea­sures of the war’s social and eco­nomic costs. A higher death toll, for exam­ple, implies that more women were wid­owed and more chil­dren were orphaned as a result of the war than has long been sus­pected. In other words, the war touched more lives and com­mu­ni­ties more deeply than we thought, and thus shaped the course of the ensu­ing decades of Amer­i­can his­tory in ways we have not yet fully grasped. True, the war was ter­ri­ble in either case. But just how ter­ri­ble, and just how exten­sive its con­se­quences, can only be known when we have a bet­ter count of the Civil War dead.”
  
  his­tory Civil-​​War morbidity-​​and-​​mortality count­ing

• Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can Blog Network

  ‘While Adam Smith may be known as the philoso­pher who first pro­moted the idea that “greed is good,” his ear­lier work sug­gests we are not con­demned to exploit oth­ers for the ben­e­fit of a few. In his book The The­ory of Moral Sen­ti­ments, writ­ten in 1759, Smith pro­posed that sym­pa­thy for the plight of those who suf­fer is an inher­ent part of human nature. “When we see one man oppressed or injured by another,” he wrote, “the sym­pa­thy which we feel with the dis­tress of the suf­ferer seems to serve only to ani­mate our fellow-​​feeling with his resent­ment against the offender.” With the cur­rent occu­pa­tion of Wall Street and the inter­na­tional con­dem­na­tion of an eco­nomic model that would take advan­tage of those most in need, we are wit­ness­ing Smith’s pre­dic­tion in action. It is only when the real­ity of people’s suf­fer­ing is hid­den that greed is allowed to dic­tate pol­icy. While our cur­rent sys­tem has cho­sen the greed of the few over the needs of the many, the intel­lec­tual founder of mod­ern cap­i­tal­ism sug­gests it doesn’t need to be this way. “When we think of the anguish of the suf­fer­ers, we take part with them more earnestly against their oppressors.”’
  
  eco­nom­ics economic-​​crisis com­plex­ol­ogy cultural-​​dynamics

• Guyot’s spec­i­man sheet | The Collation

  “So who was respon­si­ble and when is it from? Since the sheet is nei­ther signed nor dated, we can only make this asser­tion thanks to the sleuthing done by ear­lier schol­ars, most impor­tantly by John Drey­fus for his col­lec­tion of type spec­i­men fac­sim­i­les, and the source of much of the infor­ma­tion I give here.1 This sheet can be con­nected to its type caster thanks to the detailed records kept by the Dutch printer Christophe Plan­tin and the remark­able longevity of his press, now the home of the Plantin-​​Moretus Museum. Plantin’s 1575 inven­tory of fonts includes the dou­ble pica italic type­face shown on this sheet (it’s the largest size of the italic face, on the right-​​hand col­umn), with a note on the fac­ing page iden­ti­fy­ing it as “Ascen­don­ica Cur­sive de Guiot.” François Guyot was a type caster in Antwerp who worked from the 1540s until his death in 1570, and who was the main caster for Plan­tin from 1555 onwards; he also seems to have worked briefly for John Day in London.”
  
  nanohis­tory typog­ra­phy type-​​design early-​​modern

• Thought You Should See This — Dis­rupt­ing the Con­fer­ence Business

  In other words, a stan­dard Open Space: “Essen­tially, it’ll be Wur­man and 100 of his pals (and as he so elo­quently put it, “I know fuck­ing every­body”) talk­ing about a par­tic­u­lar topic for a cer­tain amount of time. The “intel­lec­tual jazz” will be filmed in black and white, and then later released as an inter­ac­tive app. ”I’m ter­ri­fied,” said a coy Wur­man, look­ing absolutely noth­ing of the sort. ”I don’t know if I can pull it off.” And while a gath­er­ing of 100 big­wigs in some ways sounds like the worst kind of elit­ist hor­ror show, I actu­ally found myself root­ing for him. I mean, the world needs con­trar­i­ans, and Wur­man sure is one of them.”
  
  con­fer­ence non-​​fake-​​Wurman TED meet­ing ideas

• nth­most » Blog Archive » Why The Inter­state Bat­tery War­ranty is Worthless

  “We Can’t Afford to Just Be Con­sumers Any­more In the clas­si­cal model of eco­nom­ics, a self-​​interested con­sumer like Josh would read­ily accept Interstate’s offer, see­ing no down­side. But Josh is part of a new class of con­sumers who under­stand the idea of “vot­ing with your dol­lar”, and it goes well beyond which brand of toi­let paper you bring to the check­out line. There are sev­eral imme­di­ate down­sides to the “res­o­lu­tion” Inter­state brought to the table: Fire­stone would be rewarded for their ridicu­lous 2-​​hour-​​minimum pol­icy to change the bat­tery. Inter­state would con­tinue to be unable to enforce their war­ranty. The cus­tomer (Josh) would have no rea­son to believe he’d be able to get a new bat­tery in the future with­out all of the non­sense implied by the res­o­lu­tion — namely, pay­ing for the 2 hours of labor him­self and then secur­ing reim­burse­ment from Inter­state. Josh looked at the options and decided not to enable the ven­dors in their bul­ly­ing of Inter­state, and not to encour­age Inter­state to bend over for them. And he real­ized his time in chas­ing down his due was worth more than the value of the prod­uct in question.”
  
  eco­nom­ics consumer-​​activism lawyers war­ranty object-​​lessons-​​in-​​contract-​​law