July 2009
Service announcement: I’m on vacation for the next two weeks. I probably won’t be posting much. Things will get back to normal around Friday, August 7. Have a nice summer, everyone.
Radovan Karadzic’s New-Age Adventure →
There’s a lesson here: don’t trust your friendly neighborhood New Age healer.
The reason I still remember Karadzic’s name a year after he was in the news isn’t very noble: it’s not that I regularly follow the justice process after massacres and wars, but just that I happen to associate him with my vacation last year; I’m shamelessly leeching off this story to...
Clinton Deploys Vowels to Bosnia →
Before an emergency joint session of Congress yesterday, President Clinton announced U.S. plans to deploy over 75,000 vowels to the war-torn region of Bosnia. The deployment, the largest of its kind in American history, will provide the region with the critically needed letters A, E, I, O and U, and is hoped to render countless Bosnian names more pronounceable.
Vintage Onion. (via)
“Failed SAT. Lost scholarship. Invented rocket.”
– Six-word story by William Shatner, from here, quoted here, found by way of ◯. (phew!)
“I am a pleasure-seeking reader: I’ve never allowed my sense of duty to have a...”
– Jorge Luis Borges.
Forgive me if I’m stating the obvious, but if certain people would just own up to their fascination with people, and especially people who live wild, transgressive, stupid, uninhibited, exciting, dangerous lives at the edges of the law and social convention, then maybe we wouldn’t have blurry polaroids of drugs, sex and crime, semen-stained collages and vandalized hotel rooms...
Deontology v. Consequentialism
Considering how I would have responded to Mills’s questions about torture reminded me of a few interesting things about moral psychology.
We can divide ethics along these lines: on the one hand, in determining the moral value of an act, consequentialism looks at the consequences of the act, and (in absolute consequentialism) only that. On the other, deontology looks at the act itself as...
One Giant Leap to Nowhere →
What NASA needs is philosophers, Tom Wolfe suggests in his usual enthusiastic prose. (via Snarkmarket)
The American space program, the greatest, grandest, most Promethean — O.K. if I add “godlike”? — quest in the history of the world, died in infancy at 10:56 p.m. New York time on July 20, 1969, the moment the foot of Apollo 11’s Commander Armstrong touched the surface of the Moon.
July 20, 1969,...
Autism as Academic Paradigm →
The sad truth is that dehumanizing ideologies are still with us in the modern university, although they take very different forms. Prime examples include the unacceptable ways we sometimes talk and think about the autism spectrum.
By all means should we talk about the strengths of various conditions as well as enumerating their weaknesses. We must be very careful, however, not to inadvertently...
“When you are looking for a solution to what you have been told is an...”
– Michael Webb.
Get Smarter →
Jamais Cascio imagines life in the Nöocene, a new epoch in human history characterized by all manner of cognitive enhancements, in the form of drugs that make us smarter or better able to focus, artificial intelligence and sophisticated models that, running on the hardware of the future, will actually give us good advice about which decisions to make and where to focus our attention — in...
“Give it time: capitalism will fill your need for an individualized brand. It’s...”
– Meet The New Fetish, Same As The Old Fetish. It’s true: we humans will always have desires both to be a part of a larger group and to set ourselves apart from the group, and capitalism is really good at, um, capitalizing on that fact.
MonaTweeta →
This is Mona Lisa in poem form:
The whip is war
that easily comes
framing a wild mountain.
Hello, you in the closet,
singing—posing carved peaks
of sound understanding.
Upon a kitchen altar
visit a prostitute—
an ugly woman saint—
who decoys.
Particularly
lonesome mountain valley,
your treasury: a dumb corpse and
funeral car, idle choke open.
Reclassification:...
Meta Is Murder →
Generally speaking, I am not a fan of the meta. It’s seductive in a way that is subtly but deeply dangerous. It’s far easier to introspect and write about the process of, say .. blogging .. than it is to think up, research, and write about an interesting new topic on your blog. Meta-work becomes a reflex, a habit, an addiction, and ultimately a replacement for real productive work....
Internet Infrastructure
The IP address space and DNS are some of the most fundamental parts of the infrastructure of the internet. Until today, I hadn’t thought about who controls them. I was browsing the early archives of Suck.com when I stumbled over an article dated September 14, 1995, which criticizes the introduction of a fee for domain names. Wait, what? Paying for domain names has always seemed like part of...
Things that are common some places, but seem... →
Ask mefi question:I’m curious to know about other … occurances that, to an outsider, seem completely crazy but are common in daily life in certain places in the world.
Many interesting answers, such as:
More than once in the middle of downtown Mexico City (a 10-million person, high-tech metropolis) I’ve walked out of a glass-and-steel skyscraper and almost collided with a...
“You seem the same as always, and being you hate every minute of it. Don’t!...”
– In the vein of inspirational quotes, Sol Lewitt, in a private letter, as quoted here and here and probably elsewhere.
The Rhetoric of the Hyperlink →
The people who theorized about hypertext before the web would probably be scratching their heads now — and might be if any of them are still alive — about the fact that now, when hypertext is everywhere, almost no one is talking about it or consciously exploring its unique properties.
Maybe it was easier to explore this stuff back before it was ubiquitous. When you start studying...
Little Man — The way girls are →
A shot of cute: Danish short film.
“Cranks are, as a rule, narrow-minded and uncultivated. The visionaries, on the...”
– Elias Molee, Pure Saxon English (1890).
Webster’s Third: The Most Controversial Dictionary... →
An article on the controversy surrounding the third edition of Webster’s dictionary, published in 1961. The dictionary was quite possibly the quirkiest in the history of the English language, but it’s also gotten a lot of undeserved criticism. Aside from clearing up a bunch of misunderstandings about the book, this article also delights in detailing the idiosyncracies of the...
A (long) exploration of a flight of fancy.
I was in doubt about whether I should publish this post, detailing an idea that I’ve unsuccessfully tried to turn into a short story. It’s very much a flight of fancy. I got permission from Aristotle, though, so it’s ok. In the introduction to the Poetics, he writes: “The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse—you might put the work of Herodotus...
Here, Now: Eckhart Tolle Takes the Stage →
Adam M. Bright:We should begin with a confession: by most metrics, I’m a New Age nut. I have a life coach. I begin my day with an hour of yoga, then proceed to my morning journal, my meditation, my visualizations and my spoken affirmations. On Sunday mornings, I wake at dawn and walk to my local Zen temple in order to sit motionless, in absolute agony, for three hours with other like-minded nuts....
Re: implicitly declaring yourself King of the...
I can’t help it: I always bite on this stuff. This is just fantastic (via):
There’s such a distinct lack of text content on Tumblr that breaks even 100 words in a post, it’s pretty sad… Tumblr, support your writers. Help add a text element to this picture-heavy platform that we have here.
Cue dozens of people going back and forth about how to use Tumblr, what it’s for,...
Kavka's toxin puzzle →
An eccentric billionaire offers you a million dollars if at midnight tonight you intend to drink a vial of poison tomorrow afternoon. You are free to change your mind after midnight and not take the poison; you will receive the money whether you take the poison or not, so long as you at midnight sincerely intend to take it. Knowing all this, can you get the money, yet also avoid the poison?
This...
June 2009
The Rumpus Interview With Zak Smith →
Zak Smith qualifies as an Interesting Person in my book. He’s a talented painter/drawer. His magnum opus, at least so far, is called Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow and tempts seven-year-olds away from video games, according to Amazon. He also stars in porn movies. He likes to draw girls and monsters fighting. He has a new...
“Why not impose a moral statute of limitations on historical wrongs? If world...”
– H. W. Brands. (via)
Yes, yes, yes. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s original sin. And passing blame down generations is exactly that.