links for 2010-01-27

Humans and computers contemplate the heat death of the universe

Rusbridger described universal paywalls as "a hunch" and said that the newspaper industry would learn valuable lessons from trying different business models, including staying generally free while charging for specialist content or asking readers to pay on different platforms, such as mobile.

It's just in the larger historical context – slavery, lynchings, beat-downs in Birmingham – that the enduring trend seems, uh, tasteless. (There is an online petition calling on B&G Foods, the owner of Cream of Wheat, to remove Rastus from its packaging.) I mean, Sambo's restaurant had to change its logo. And as Kern-Foxworth notes, the terms "Aunt" and "Uncle" are loaded, since Southerners used them to address older slaves who were denied the use of courtesy titles. ("They call me Mister Ben!") And while the model for Uncle Ben was a Chicago maitre d' who the owners of the Uncle Ben's Converted Rice Company considered a friend. But in the sixties, when the use of a lot of racial imagery was called into question, protestors and academics objected to the image of blacks as servants, rather than someone with a place at the table.