November 2010
1 tag
In Praise of the Tumblelog
Now that “the tumblelog” has morphed (# of google results being symptomatic) into “the tumblr”, a different beast altogether, I think it’s appropriate to analyze it. Call it a post mortem. When n+1 can do What was the hipster?, I’ll do What was the tumblelog? Potential accusations of navel-gazing acknowledged before moving on undeterred.
The first tumblelog,...
Thanks to everyone who ventured to guess why we express positive feelings in terms of skepticism/surprise. Several people pointed out that this also applies to negative feelings, and I think that’s a good observation. The question then becomes, why do we resort to words like “unbelievable” or “unthinkable” when describing extremes that are, nevertheless, well within...
When we really like something, we tend to express it in terms of skepticism: incredible, unbelievable, fantastic, awesome, amazing, wonderful (and more, I guess) carry or carried connotations of great surprise and uncertainty regarding the existence/veracity of something. It’s as if, confronted with something truly great, we can’t quite bring ourselves to believe it, or at least...
Letters written during a short residence in... →
The distribution of landed property into small farms produces a degree of equality which I have seldom seen elsewhere; and the rich being all merchants, who are obliged to divide their personal fortune amongst their children, the boys always receiving twice as much as the girls, property has met a chance of accumulating till overgrowing wealth destroys the balance of liberty. You will be...
1 tag
1 tag
Letter to the Fortean Society
In my years of research, I have never seen the likes of what I am about to describe to you. Being the skeptic that I am, I had to see it with my own eyes to confirm it, but confirm it I must. It is an unhaunted house. A mansion, in fact, with long dark hallways, creaking stairs, large ornamented mirrors, two broken windows and an interior chilly from lack of isolation. It is, in so many words,...
All the lonely people →
Roger Ebert: When I spent a year in Cape Town, half a world away from everyone and everything I knew, I wasn’t lonely for a moment. I was enveloped in the pleasure of exile. I’ve always enjoyed fiction about exile; give me a novel that starts with someone alone in a room in a strange city, and I perk up. I identify with the meaning given to “nostalgia” by Tarkovsky, which...
Limbo World: Dispatches from Countries That Do Not... →
Jonas Bendiksen’s talk has really piqued my interest in the enclaves around the world that proclaim themselves states but don’t gain recognition from the rest of the world. Official statehood is contagious: you can only gain it by being recognized by a sufficient number of other official states, which became states because they in turn were recognized by numbers of states. This...
A Guide to the Popularity Contest
Let’s make it clear from the beginning: spamming isn’t the right way to win the online popularity game.1 Even if you throw all ethics and self-respect to the wind, it’s still not the most effective way to promote yourself or your website. It’s probably the easiest way to promote yourself, since it requires very little effort, but the payoff will be really small and likely...
Mundane Superpowers I Desire, a Short List
The ability to actually recall more than the refrains of songs.
The ability to instantly and without embarassment admit mistakes when pointed out to me, learn from them, and move on.
The ability to derive emotional nourishment from poetry.
The ability to scratch that spot somewhere in the middle of my back that is completely inaccessible to both hands and therefore guaranteed to be the most...
The Semantic Web hasn’t been making much noise lately. It’s like everyone’s given up on it so thoroughly that no one can be bothered even to criticize it, whereas a few years ago it was common to bash the unrealistic and vague ideas underlying the concept, and a few years before that the Semantic Web was being aggressively promoted and hailed as the next big thing. It is a loose...
1 tag
Grelling–Nelson paradox →
Suppose one interprets the adjectives “autological” and “heterological” as follows:
An adjective is autological (sometimes homological) if and only if it describes itself. For example “short” is autological, since the word “short” is short. “English,” “unhyphenated” and “pentasyllabic” are also autological. An...
Mensen Ernst
Racewalking is even stupider-looking than Muggle Quidditch. It’s such an insult to the eyes that I find it impossible to appreciate the extraordinary athletic feats the sport requires. Its origins, however, lie in the much better-looking 18th and 19th centuries’ pedestrianism, which was basically a spectator’s version of ultramarathons. One of the more famous pedestrians was...
The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang →
Science fiction has always had a reputation for crude prose and one-dimensional characters. This criticism is routinely launched from the camp of literary fiction, where many feel these flaws show SF’s inferiority. But if literary fiction could provide the same ideas as SF, with great prose and great characterization, it would simply be SF, only better than ordinary SF, and SF fans would...
Fuck Abstractions.
Abstractions have no feelings. Abstractions have no personhood. Abstractions have no existence in spacetime, only representation in minds. Abstractions are incorporeal and noncausal. Abstractions are incapable and undeserving of protection, since there’s no way humans can affect them or they can affect us.
Countries are abstractions.
Oops. Shit just got political. As part of my firm...
A self-published ebook advising pedophiles was briefly on sale at Amazon, and, predictably, it caused a big uproar. Some of the responses disturb me, much more than the existence of a book advising pedophiles does. Discussions of pedophilia reveal how many people actually subscribe to the idea of thoughtcrime, and that angers and frightens me.
It should go without saying, but I’m not a...
2 tags
Welcome to the outside. The outside is like the inside, only farther out. You may notice subtle shifts in your personality as you enter the outside. This is to be expected. You may notice a curious feeling located somewhere in the middle of your face. Outsiders call this “smell”, and it is completely normal. If you find yourself overwhelmed with the taste of outside food, try to...
Humanitarian aid and catering conflicts →
The conventional wisdom was that Sierra Leone’s civil war had been pure insanity: tens of thousands dead, many more maimed or wounded, and half the population displaced—all for nothing. But Polman had heard it suggested that the R.U.F.’s rampages had followed from “a rational, calculated strategy.” The idea was that the extreme violence had been “a deliberate attempt to drive up the price of...
1 tag
In case you were wondering, the Polish border town Osinów Dolny has the highest per capita concentration of hair salons in the world. 150 of its 200 citizens are hairdressers.
5 tags
From around 1740 up until the Russian revolution in 1917, people from Northwest Russia, from Arkhangelsk and the Kola peninsula, would come to Northern Norway annually to trade. This trade is known as the Pomor trade. Immediately, a problem presented itself: how were people with languages as different as Russian and Norwegian going to communicate? Either of them could learn the other folks’...
Two Lonely Men
My dad was tricked into buying several CDs worth of drunken monologues once. The guy who sold it had come to my dad’s office for whatever reason and had brought the discs, which he said were recordings of a “peace conference”. My dad, intrigued, paid him what he was asking for, which wasn’t much, but more than you’d knowingly pay for bullshit.
The “peace...
2 tags
October 2010
1 tag
Ad Hominem is a Fallacy of Irrelevance
After thousands of posts it occurred to me that this blog needs a disclaimer. This disclaimer must amount to something like, I have no experience and know very little about anything and this is me trying to figure things out, and please keep that in mind, and it would be lovely if you’d occasionally remind me of that because I keep forgetting. I’m a little too ambitious to put it in...
