August 2008
A job for the anthropologist
Reading The Big Picture — as opposed to just looking at the pretty pictures — is tedious. The reason is the mechanistic prose in the image captions. They’re apparently whatever caption the news agency that produced the image saw fit. By nature, photographers and editors of news agency photos don’t know what context their images will appear in, or even whether they will...
I wish people would stop using economy as just a... →
Making “the attention economy” more than rhetorical smoke. (via)
“Linux is a pair of pants with no hem. You have to taylor it. Windows is a...”
– Reddit.
Why do crack dealers still live with their moms? →
Talk by Steven Levitt. (This topic is also a chapter in Freakonomics, which I haven’t read.)
I just remembered that Daily Meh was a year old yesterday (the first few days were on Soup.io — see my very first post on Tumblr). It’s been mostly fun, so here’s to hoping it’ll last some time more, in whatever form it will take in the future. In the meantime, thanks to everyone who cared during this first year. And now, no more meta.
Ubiquity In Depth →
Aza Raskin describes Ubiquity.
I got to highlight this stupidity from the comments section:
Aza - while this is a great idea and one that seems to perfectly blend with your other theories perfectly, I’m worried that the Fx team still isn’t doing much towards addressing things like better Mac integration. (…)
When you announced that you’d be working for Mozilla, I’d hoped that these would...
Some functional programming and OCaml koans →
A novice came to Jacques Garrigue and spoke nervously: “I don’t get rank-2 polymorphism. What is it good for? When to use it? How can I understand it?”. Jacques asked: “Do you want an answer to each question, or the answer to all your questions?.” The novice was enlightened.
Pepys' Diary →
Ok, so Orwell’s diaries aren’t very eventful. But Samuel Pepys’s diaries are also being serialized on a blog, and they have enough personal and political drama for ten blogs, at least. Wikipedia:
The detailed private diary he kept during 1660-9 was first published in the nineteenth century, and is one of the most important primary sources for the English Restoration period. It...
“[Semicolons] are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.”
– Kurt Vonnegut, as quoted in Sex and the semicolon. Possibly the least sexy headline I’ve ever read.
As for the semicolon, I use it and I like it. Semicolons and em dashes are underappreciated.
Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy? →
So asks Scientific American. But first, a little story, which I can tell knowing you will only connect it to my first name and my blog, not my flesh and soul. I used to be bullied. A lot. Systematically. For years. What happens then is two things: you get paranoid. Every bat of an eye, every word, every whisper, every body movement, you start suspecting they’re laughing behind your back any...
Confusing Words →
Confusing Words is a collection of 3210 words that are troublesome to readers and writers. Words are grouped according to the way they are most often confused or misused.
Some disputed definitions, such as atheist, but the fundamentals are there. See also d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y, an url you won’t ever enter if you don’t know the correct spelling in the first place.
Semi-sweep: Misty, Kerri to play for gold →
Just as she did four years ago, May-Treanor sprinkled some of her mom’s ashes on the sand after the semifinal, saving another half-portion for a similar ceremony at the gold medal game.
Really? Nothing quite says GOLD like your dead mother, am I right?
The Devil and The Monk →
Beautiful.
The Secret Thoughts of Harold Lawrence Windcrampe →
Plus points for realism (not in drawing style, though). Also, I just discovered that side-scrolling on the web can actually work. (Here’s the trick: vertical or horizontal, but never both — also, it helps when it’s images, not text.) By Phil McAndrew.
“DNA is basically a scientific phenomenon which proves each one of us is his/her...”
– Jeez, I knew I had genes but genetic genes? And I had my doubts that I was really unique, but DNA really sealed the deal!
Maybe this person ought to stick to art.
Panpsychism →
Panpsychism, in philosophy, is either the view that all parts of matter involve mind, or the more holistic view that the whole universe is an organism that possesses a mind.
Crazy idea of the day: the whole universe is actually a conscious entity, with thoughts, maybe even feelings.
Why it could work: imagine you sat outside the universe, observing it (bear with me here). Zooming out and...
How many atoms of Jesus you eat every day →
Lovely. (via Anarchaia)
Bloggers On Blogging →
I’ve been thinking about blogging lately, both on a personal level and in the grander scheme of things, etc. I realize blogging about blogging is mostly boring (blogging about your blog is dull for anyone but you, like talking about your dog, a wise man once said), but if you want to read some good thoughts about blogging for some reason, you could do considerably worse than reading through...
How to Look Like a Computer Cracker →
While we’re stating the obvious (via inky):
There is no “look” that all crackers share. (…) A cracker breaks things; a hacker makes things. Hackers solve problems, including problems with computer systems, and including problems with security systems, but they don’t break the law and are focused not on malicious intent but on elegant solutions. And of course:Getting...
Piracy, Theft, Plagiarism
Last week Slate ran an article by Jody Rosen called Dude, You Stole My Article. It did not detail the exploits of a young man in his early teens sneaking into Rosen’s house, picking the lock on his cupboard and running off with his manuscript, nor did it involve an armed assault in which the titular dude, tall and masked, pointed a gun to Rosen’s head and demanded his hard drive,...
“Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober,...”
– Tom Robbins.
(I’d like to add: when humanity takes a step backwards, it’s also because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.)
2008 Hugo Award Results →
These results are a few days old, but that’s only old in internet time. Like usual, I haven’t read most of the finalists. I’m pleased to see some winners I have read, though. Ted Chiang’s excellent The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate won the category for best novelette. I wrote about Chiang in May; at that time, his winning story was available online, although now...
Shake it Like a Metaphorical Picture →
As you probably know, production of Polaroid instant film will cease sometime soon, and the internet wants to stop it. What is it with polaroids, exactly? “The fucking thing was begging to be held, passed around, shared, pinned up, torn, and written on”, writes Jason Santa Maria, and recommends you buy a Polaroid camera “while it’s still a semi-affordable hobby.” There is...
A Collection of Olympic Torches →
NY Times has a design history of the Olympic torches, from 1936 to the present day. Few of them look like torches at all, if you ask me. The modern torch relay, incidentally, was introduced before the Berlin 1936 Olympics, as a means of propaganda for the Nazi regime. (link via Anarchaia)
South Ossetia, The War of My Dreams →
The War Nerd comments, and asks questions such as: there’s essentially one road from South Ossetia to Russia, and it goes through a tunnel; why didn’t the Georgian army attack it? (Answer: they didn’t think Russia would react.) On the international significance:
The fretting and fussing and sky-is-falling crap about this war is going to die down fast, and the bottom line will be...
Game Design Rant 2006 →
At the 2006 Game Developers Conference, Jonathan Blow, the game designer behind Braid, the game everyone is busy praising (since I don’t have an xbox, I’ll have to hold out for the pc version — argh!), gave this, which is, in his own words, “a 6-minute rant about the role of innovation in game design, and how to make games important to people.”
Game developer wants to learn from pirates, asks... →
Cliff Harris, an independent game developer with Positech Games, has put out a call to pirates asking for an explanation. Not seeking to turn around and refute the pirates’ reasons or to simply oust the pirates and turn them over to the authorities, Harris is earnestly sincere about learning what drives pirates to steal his games. Harris is asking for pirates to send him e-mails detailing...
"The War Prayer" →
Speaking of war, here’s what Mark Twain had to say, in a posthumously published story.
War in South Ossetia (2008) →
Holy shit. There’s a war going on around the border between Asia and Europe. Georgia, population 4,6 million, aspiring NATO member, is taking on Russia over provocations from a Russia-backed breakaway region, South Ossetia. Russia v. the West in open war. Now that’s news.
Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization →
Adbusters is making fun of hipsters. Lol.
Why do we capitalize the word “I”? →
“Graphically, single letters are a problem,” says Charles Bigelow, a type historian and a designer of the Lucida and Wingdings font families. “They look like they broke off from a word or got lost or had some other accident.” When “I” shrunk to a single letter, Bigelow explains, “one little letter had to represent an important word, but it was too wimpy, graphically speaking, to carry the semantic...
Daniel Dennett: Autobiography (Part 1) →
Dennett’s first academic years, in his own words. The following note on teaching is interesting:Gilbert Ryle himself was the other pillar of support I needed. (…) He disliked and disapproved of the reigning Oxford fashion of clever, supercilious philosophical one-upmanship, and disrupted it when he could. He never ‘fought back’. In fact, I tried to provoke him, with...
It's time to stop killing meat and start growing... →
Animals are smart, so they deserve the right to live, so we ought to grow meat instead of killing animals for it, or so recommends this Slate piece. And unlike other meat-eaters who feel the need to go by ad hominems and simple dismissals, I don’t think the idea is so stupid. I’m not, nor do I have any plans of becoming a vegetarian, but that doesn’t mean I can’t see the...
Magical negro →
The magical negro (sometimes called the mystical negro or magic negro) is a term generally used to describe a supporting, often mystical stock character in fiction who, by use of special insight or powers, helps the white protagonist get out of trouble.
The magical negro is typically “in some way outwardly or inwardly disabled, either by discrimination, disability or social...
Coilhouse on Best of Craigslist: ‘Want it from... →
(Via inky.)
When you reach the end of level one, make sure to trigger the fireworks. This is vital to the entire experience. I must hear the fireworks. When level 2 begins and Mario walks into the pipe, I will penetrate you.
I Am, Therefore I Pollute →
Stanley Fish on how hypocritical he is when it comes to eco-friendliness.
Now don’t get me wrong. I am wholly persuaded by the arguments in support of the practices I resist. I believe that recycling is good and that disposable paper products are bad. I believe in global warming. I believe in Al Gore. But it is possible to believe something and still resist taking the actions your belief seems to...
And Friday the Beijing Olympics Start
I watched a Norwegian tv documentary today about the Chinese training regimes that bring up its young athletes. It centered on a gymnastics school for children and on what became known as “Ma’s army”, a group of runners led by the coach Ma Junren who swept the world in the early- to mid-1990s. The stuff that’s going on is heart-breaking, but unfortunately, there isn’t...
