February 2012
Where There's No I
We live in the age of narcissism. I don’t believe for one second that this generation is substantially worse than the one before, or the five hundred before that. The young were immoral and lazy and unwise when Socrates walked the streets of Athens, and they are no different now. As were the old. But this generation has developed the technology to perfectly express the same narcissism our...
Cyberdérive
No one surfs the web anymore. Increasingly, we get everything we want from an endless stream provided by a small selection of websites: Reddit, Google, Tumblr, Facebook, Wikipedia and Amazon would be my list. Those six sites probably constitute a frightening percentage of my web browsing, and most of the content that originates on other sites can be consumed through them—or will be...
Literature as Freedom
Norwegian author Stig Sæterbakken recently took his own life. Apart from a couple essays, I’ve never read anything he’s written. Judging by the literati’s response to his death, that was probably an oversight on my part. It feels vaguely shameful to discover an author because of their death: the fact that it takes losing someone to appreciate them says that given different...
A Thousand Small Blows
The New York Times recently published an essay about overzealous use of the Asperger’s diagnosis, and the detrimental effects getting the wrong label stuck on you can have.
I was professionally diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome as a child. I do not believe I am anywhere on the autistic spectrum. Many people profess their relief at being given a diagnosis. For me, receiving a...
GIF: A Technical History
From a technical standpoint, the success of the lowly GIF is a mystery. Both as an image format and as a video/animation format, it’s vastly inferior to the alternatives. It only supports 256 colors; its compression is inefficient; it doesn’t support sound; the last specification was published more than twenty years ago. Yet it’s still thriving. The reason, of course, is...
January 2012
Scientists seem prone to a peculiar anger... →
Scott Aaronson on academic publishing:
I have an ingenious idea for a company. My company will be in the business of selling computer games. But, unlike other computer game companies, mine will never have to hire a single programmer, game designer, or graphic artist. Instead I’ll simply find people who know how to make games, and ask them to donate their games to me. Naturally, anyone generous...
WatchAugust, I think.
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“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be...”
– Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.
Look At All These Links
Links that have been sitting in my drafts folder for varying lengths of time, but don’t warrant posts of their own.
Daniel Ellsberg on the effects of getting access to top secret information:
Over a longer period of time — not too long, but a matter of two or three years — you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. (…) In the meantime it will have...
ɧ
While I’m on the topic of language, let my introduce you to my favorite unclassifiable consonant, ɧ. Yes, I have a favorite unclassifiable consonant.
Generally, I’m pretty happy to have been born where I was born. It’s a very comfortable existence. But as a language nerd, I find myself wishing I was born into a more exotic language. Perhaps one with funky morphosyntactic...
Language is irrational. Gloriously so.
This is what comes up if you google “literally”. Note that the second sense, universally loathed by language purists, has started creeping into dictionaries.
At this point, literally is a dead horse that has been beaten one too many times. The purists have pointed out the illogic and descriptive linguists have pointed out that it’s part of the natural evolution of language and...
December 2011
Since I have several domains registered through GoDaddy, including this one, I was naturally interested when I saw this. So says Jason Kottke: “Seeing who still has domains to transfer away from Go Daddy is the internet’s walk of shame.” People naturally asked him why. So here’s his attempt at explaining himself. (Oh, sorry, I meant “passing along information”....
Variations on a Theme
I think variation on a theme is one of the most fundamental creative strategies. It’s at the heart of science: the theme is the independent variable. In literature, “theme” is much broader. It could rightfully be said that all literature consists of variations on a small set of themes. What I have in mind, however, is more restrictive. Something between the rigor of the scientist...
“It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at...”
– After accidentally buying some audiobooks, I’ve started to listen to them in bed at night. Right now I’m listening to Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. It’s true: at the very end of the day, I seem to sink into a dull sort of melancholia. But that can occasionally be, if...
No Copyright Intended →
Andy Baio:
No amount of lawsuits or legal threats will change the fact that this behavior is considered normal — I’d wager the vast majority of people under 25 see nothing wrong with non-commercial sharing and remixing, or think it’s legal already.
Here’s a thought experiment: Everyone over age 12 when YouTube launched in 2005 is now able to vote.
What happens when — and this...
Moral Calculi
It’s high time someone issued a Stay the Fuck Outta My Private Life Directive.
Living in a country unacquainted with terrorism, I’ve enjoyed a government whose approach to surveillance and privacy has been relatively conservative. But Norway can’t stand alone against the tidal wave of paranoia that’s crushing over Europe and North America. Especially after July 22.
The...
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Saints and Seeds
At any point in time, there’s a variety of ideas incubating in my mind. My head is like a botanical garden, a series of different plants growing at different speeds and in different directions. Most of it happens subconsciously. I’m sure you can relate: slowly, over time, you begin to notice ideas that, once you think about it, must have been there a long time, but only recently...
Édouard Levé, Self-portrait
One of the perks of bilingualism is having access to two different literatures. Not only the native literature of the two languages, but also whatever gets translated into each one and not (or before) the other. I was quite taken with this excerpt from Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait, and I was looking forward to the English translation that’s set to be published in 2012. As it happens,...
November 2011
WatchSo, there’s a storm raging outside and I’m sitting here trying to figure out how video works. Since I can’t go outside, pretty much the only thing to point the camera at is myself. I have, apparently, become a video blogger. (Don’t worry: this will not be a regular thing.) For the moment, I’ve rechristened my camera the awkwardness machine. I’ve also learned...
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Disappearances →
(a thing that I wrote)
“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance,...”
– T. S. Eliot on tradition. Some artists embrace tradition; to others, it is a straitjacket. But to Eliot, it’s neither: new works of art must find their place in tradition, but tradition must also find its place around the new. The new must conform to the old, and the old to the new; the future...
Why?
We spend our entire lives trying to figure out how to deal with consciousness. For this reason, the problem of consciousness is one of the most important and most interesting philosophical and scientific problems. The problem is staring us in the face at every moment: it’s simultaneously banal and incredibly profound. Unlike most scientific questions, however, there is a very intuitive sense that...