May 2010
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So, I got my first mac. I’m getting distracted by all the shiny things. I know enough about unices — I did use Ubuntu for several years — to open a Terminal and write top and look like I’m a hacker monitoring Very Important Networks. Other than that, I’m coming from Windows. What should I know?
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Crack open a philosophical text on ethics. I predict it’s not going to be very enjoyable. There’s a reason why most people who claim to have their lives changed by certain books — and I’m not sure we should take their word for it, but at the very least the sentiment is evidence that the book left them with a feeling of having been affected deeply — are rarely...
I’m slightly nostalgic for the days when curator didn’t simply mean “someone who makes choices about collections.” I wonder if “the curated web” would sound as buzzy and innovative if we called it “the web where people make choices about which things to put into various collections” or if “curated computing” would fly if it was called...
Fanboy! →
The etymology of everyone’s favorite tech insult.
Plantinga Retires →
Via metafilter, Alvin Plantinga, philosophical apologist superstar, is retiring. The man is responsible for some of the cleverest pieces of sophistry ever invented. Chief among them, perhaps, is his modal ontological argument. It “works” by confusing you, since it applies complex modal logic, and most people aren’t very comfortable with modal logic. The way it works is by...
Another novel I’m too lazy to write: the folk cosmology of luck, taken literally. Let’s posit that luck really is a fundamental force of the universe, distinct from natural phenomena like chance or religious concepts like karma. It is, like folk beliefs about it, literally a force of the universe that sways events one way or the other; it is possessed by people and objects, and certain...
Dictatorship by cartography, geometry →
Vast and empty, Burma’s new capital will not fall to an urban upheaval easily. It has no city centre, no confined public space where even a crowd of several thousand people could make a visual – let alone political – impression.
Naypyitaw, then, is the ultimate insurance against regime change, a masterpiece of urban planning designed to defeat any putative ‘colour revolution’ – not by tanks and...
The New York Review of Magazines →
The fact that this exists makes me happy.
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Inspired by Mills’s post about, among other things, the accidental nature of history, here’s a thing that’s been bothering me about the way we view history.
As children, we first learn of it as a series of discrete, disconnected events, or, if we’re lucky, as a series of tales. (When I was little I was particularly fond of the tales of Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus,...
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More on what I was getting at last night, with fewer expletives and hopefully more lucidity: the great dilemma for us analytic types, certainly for me, is that thinking more than your peers is going to bring you success in every area except those that rely on intuition, and those areas are often the ones we’d most like to conquer. (The most important and obvious example being social...
I’ve been trying to live “in the moment” for a long time. I’m now pretty sure alcohol is not the answer. I’ve no idea what I’m thinking right now, except that it makes no fucking sense at all. What a fucking stupid idea!
Sci-Fi Writer Attributes Everything Mysterious To... →
The Onion on everyone’s favorite narrative technique, quantum ex machina. Grandfather paradox? Quantum! Character inconsistency? Quantum! Impossible-to-resolve cliffhanger? Quantum!
“We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and...”
– The Whole Earth Catalog (1968).
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In the early 1900s, while Einstein was busy upending two centuries of physics, a few other men were equally busy redirecting two thousand years of Western philosophy. One of them was Bertrand Russell, who together with Alfred Whitehead tried (and failed) to found all of mathematics on logic. Another was G. E. Moore, who is largely responsible for why so many moral philosophers have moved from...
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The All-Russian Exhibition Center is a permanent fairground in Moscow. It used to be called the Exhibition of Economic Achievement, “a grand showcase for Soviet accomplishments.” All the more surprising, then, that they put this show on in 1989: the Exhibition of Poor Quality Goods, featuring “oblong volleyballs, cross-eyed teddy bears, rusted samovars, chipped stew-pots, putrid...