May 2008
Dan of Squashed writes:
There are fewer and fewer spaces where it is safe to say idiotic things.
Which is a good point. This was written in one context, but I think it applies equally well in other contexts. If one is to learn, one must be able to articulate opinions and say stupid things, so that one may be corrected. In a reasoned debate, the participants will change opinions constantly as they...
Stone Age Tasaday →
Who are the Tasaday? Depending on whom you ask, you’ll hear very different answers to this question. You’ll either hear that they’re a group of leaf-wearing, stone-age-tool-using cave dwellers who, when they were discovered in 1971 living in a rain forest on the Philippine island of Mindanao, believed they were the only people in the world. Or you’ll hear that they’re a complete fraud… poor...
“Be a philosopher but, amid all your philosophy be still a man.”
– David Hume (who, in my mind, is the greatest of all the Enlightenment philosophers).
Read at Work →
Amusing idea, but wouldn’t Word work better? (via)
Parchment →
A large collection of interactive fiction games for the Z-machine, playable in your browser. The interpreter is open source, and only uses javascript and html/css; download it here.
Continuity thesis →
The (unfashionable) hypothesis that there was no scientific revolution or other radical shift in intellectual development following the Rennaisance. Rather, according to this thesis, there was just a continuous development with no shifts as radical as the one a “scientific revolution” warrants.
In the history of ideas, the continuity thesis is the hypothesis that there was no radical...
Spoken Languages, Blub, and Convenience →
I think we can suggest that a fairly clear power hierarchy exists between modern Italian and Latin. Italian greatly resembles Latin, except it has lost many of the tenses and complexities of Latin. Just as Lisp’s tragic history of losing to its less powerful successors to its ideas, Latin’s structure and grammatical depth have given way to its less potent children (the Romance...
The Return of Superfly →
The original article on which American Gangster was based. One-time drug lord Frank Lucas recounts his rise to the top. He’s a pretty unreliable narrator (lots of the details of his story are disputed), but the overall narrative is true. Either way, it’s an interesting story.
Teacher lets Morningside students vote out... →
After each classmate was allowed to say what they didn’t like about Barton’s 5-year-old son, Alex, his Morningside Elementary teacher Wendy Portillo said they were going to take a vote, Barton said.
By a 14 to 2 margin, the students voted Alex — who is in the process of being diagnosed with [Asperger’s Syndrome] — out of the class.
What a fucking idiot. Kids aren’t mean...
Once again: dead bodies don't cause disease... →
Contrary to popular belief, dead bodies left from natural disasters such as the China earthquake and Myanmar cyclone are not a source of disease or a health threat to survivors, the World Health Organization said Friday.
The major disease threat after natural disasters is almost always the same: contaminated water, food, famine and poor sanitation. The highest risk period is weeks to a month...
Area Man Makes It Through Day →
Despite an overwhelming, seemingly endless barrage of frustrations, area systems analyst Adam Blume made it through the entire day Tuesday, overcoming the odds against him in a Herculean display of courage, perseverance, and the indomitable human spirit. Experts estimate that, by 10 p.m. Tuesday night, Blume had survived exposure to approximately 1,700 advertising images of epic banality, at...
Missives from Possible Futures #1: Alternate... →
While we’re on the subject:
For your Sample History Search, you asked to see THE DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER on the date of AUGUST 13, 1908 in VIENNA, AUSTRIA. As it happens, THE DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER is one of our most popular requests, and Multiversity™ has developed an impressive pre-cached concordance on the subject, spanning most days of this subject’s entire lifespan.
Scenario #6
Event:...
Ted Chiang
A time-travel story showed up on reddit recently, and that led me to Ted Chiang (helpful interview here). Ted Chiang is awesome.
He’s published something like ten short stories in all, nothing more and nothing less, and they’re consistently well received, a bunch of them winning awards. Several of them are also available free online. That’s the case with The Merchant and the...
Franz Unveils AllegroGraph v3.0 - A Web 3.0... →
Take note, web 2.0 sites: soon you will be obsolete. Prepare for… Web 3.0!
(Web 2.0 as a label is silly. This is stupidity taken to such a level that I can’t even find a metaphor that appropriately expresses it.)
External Delivery the Future →
External Delivery (ED) is a revolutionary new theory of Christmas presents, as presented in a series of comics. It’s not at all a spoof on Intelligent Design (ID).
“The strange thing is that we are not glad when other people like what we like,...”
– Also from “The Hype Cycle”.
The Hype Cycle →
The problem with hype is that it transforms the use value of a would-be work of art into its exchange value. For in the middle (there’s no end) of the hype cycle, the important thing is no longer what a song, movie, or book does to you. The big question is its relationship to its reputation. So instead of abandoning yourself to the artifact, you try to exploit inefficiencies in the...
The Orgasmic Mind: The Neurological Roots of... →
Scientific American article on the science of orgasms. In it, we learn such interesting facts as:
Men are mainly aroused by their preferred type of partner (e.g., females for heterosexual men) while heterosexual women are less discriminating: they were generally aroused regardless of actors — men, women or bonobo chimps (!)
The intensity of response in one of the brain’s main...
WHEREWEDOWHATWEDO →
This idea has potential (it’s not for nothing that it has been tried so many times before), but apparently, “we” means “computer people” and “what we do” means “working/entertaining ourselves on the computer”. While I love doing stuff on computers, it takes a lot to make the work environment interesting to look at.
I was hoping to see...
BlimLimb, the Travelling Bot Troupe →
One of _why’s old hacks: a travelling irc bot troupe. Could also be titled “Automated Troll Troupe”.
Well, the idea was: what if you had a dozen bots that you could feed dramatic scripts to and they would perform the show in synchronization on IRC? And, furthermore, what if you could stop the bots and issue ad-hoc improvisational scripting to really spook the guests? To give the...
“We, the public, are easily, lethally offended. We have come to think of taking...”
– Salman Rushdie, “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers”.
Honk If You Love Brijit! →
Brijit, the tl;dr service for busy/lazy readers, apparently ran out of money. (via)
More artificial Finnish →
Vowel harmony is an interesting feature of some languages, such as Finnish and Turkish: some vowels are said to harmonize with each other, so vowels from incompatible vowel groups can’t be in the same word. In Finnish, which has a bunch of suffixes, the vowel of a suffix depends on what vowel group the word it attaches to has. (More on vowel harmony, exemplified by Turkish, here.)
Mark...
Einstein writes of 'childish superstition' →
Einstein penned the letter on January 3 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind who had sent him a copy of his book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt. The letter went on public sale a year later and has remained in private hands ever since.
In the letter, he states: “The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of...
“With no more than six levels of quotation, any statement can be made to say...”
– John McCarthy (that was one level).
Clip/Stamp/Fold →
A collection of little magazines about architecture from the 1960s and 70s. Did I ever mention that I like little magazines? This one’s even got some commentary.
Empathy
So, I see that Simon Baron-Cohen’s empathy test is making the rounds on Tumblr. That provides me with an opportunity to talk about a common misunderstanding about empathy.
The test, like most people’s thinking, is confusing at least two different phenomena that fall under the umbrella of “empathy”. Consider this: it has been said about both autists (high- and...
Seriously, people. Grow up. Who would want to buy anything from someone who doesn’t display any emotional maturity?
“If you are asking what license this software is released under, you are asking...”
– I must say, the Mu License, reproduced above, is quite awesome. The reason it is awesome is here. (via)
Thought:
There is an Alcoholics Anonymous, but what the world really needs is Celebrities Anonymous. Of course, it wouldn’t work because it’s essentially contradictory: celebrities are people who simply can’t show up to a meeting and expect not to be recognized. But the problem is real: the world is full of celebrities and wannabe celebrities who are addicted to a drug that is not...
“So what will you do if string theory is wrong?” →
Some string theorists are so reluctant to give up their pet theory that proving it to be completely wrong as a description of the universe isn’t enough for them to abandon it — they’re not even prepared to make the theory a part of mathematics:
So even if someone shows that the universe cannot be based on string theory, I suspect that people will continue to work on it. It might...
Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn’t Better →
Apparently, learning isn’t always such a good idea, evolutionarily speaking.
The day the music died →
The one you purchased from MSN Music, that is. And if you were smart, you didn’t. I’m guessing you didn’t. This only affects the clueless, which is kind of sad.
… frankly I’m tired of being right all the time. It was fun for a while, but now it’s just depressing.
why's unholy →
Why made a Ruby-bytecode-to-Python-bytecode translator, and a Python-bytecode-to-Python-disassembler. That’s pretty cool. (Thanks strelau)
The Devil's Dictionary →
Ambrose Bierce’s satirical redefinitions of English words are as relevant as ever, in that they nail illusions and political double-speak better than most of their imitators. They are also often funny. The dictionary contains definitions such as:
REALLY, adv.
Apparently.
CYNIC, n.
A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom...