Funky Like Your Grandpa's Drawers
Merde in France on French Philosophers and the Matrix.#
New credo of French scholars': 'will philosophize for food'
A few French philosophers have gotten together to whip up a book which studies the 'Matrix' movies from the point of view of their philosophical content. That's only normal since even philosophers have the right to eat. I don't know how much philosophers earn these days (no doubt less than a software developer for cellphones does).
What is a date, anyway? I don't think I've ever really "dated" before. I've been out on a few formal dates with people I barely knew and those were mostly not very fun. Usually I just end up hanging out with someone I like, or falling for someone who's already a friend. Mostly I find friendships first, and sometimes if the friendship gets romantic, then that's what happens, and I deal with that then. A "date" usually carries too many expectations. Pressure to perform, or abstain from performing; feeling on display, or feeling the need to constantly evaluate what's being said, what's being implied, and what's being conveyed oh so subtly through body language. What a lot of work!
But then again, I am warming up to the idea. It has the charm of the novel to me, novice dater that I am. I think I like being able to say, "Oh, I've got a date." I like thinking about what I'll wear and where we'll go and whether there will be a kiss at the end of the evening. Mmm, yes, I think I could get into this whole "dating" thing. I think I'm still figuring out how it works.
Jessica writes about journals... scholarly journals not LIVE journals.#
Many libraries are also facing this same challenge regarding Elsevier journals. What would happen if enough libraries cancel their subscriptions? Is there a movement among academic librarians to coordinate what journals to cancel? If enough libraries cancel subscriptions to the most expensive journal or the journal with the highest cost increase, would Elsevier get the message? (Surely Cornell's librarians aren't the only ones who are complaining to Elsevier about rising costs.)
Find yourself asking "What's the big deal?" Well, here are some of the complications. When a library system, such as Cornell's, unsubscribes from a scientific journal, that journal isn't as available to users. In many scientific and medical fields, those journals are essential to learn about the latest in research. "Well, aren't there books?" In many cases, groundbreaking research is published in journals long before it would appear in a book. Journals are vital to scholarly communication. I've heard that some fields require the libraries to subscribe to certain journals in order for academic programs to be certified.
Wouldn't a researcher just not publish in journals that are expensive or that aren't going to get read/bought/whatever.
Ryan Overbey on bullshit in the blogosphere.#
Burton links to Clay Shirky's article on the Semantic Web. Burton doesn't like Clay's article. So Burton obfuscates the url by hiding it in a tinyurl link. Burton's reasoning? so it wouldn't be included in pagerank, daypop, etc. I'm going to start doing this to articles I find suboptimal. Consider it a negative cert (or lack of approval).
Does anyone else think this is a spectacularly terrible idea? Burton wants to play in the conversation. He's adding to the buzz around this article. But he wants to hinder the ability of services like Daypop to actually measure the buzz- he wants to prevent Daypop from knowing that he ever talked about this article in the first place. If you're reacting to Shirky, it means Shirky has influenced your post. The spiders and crawlers are measuring webs of influence- they don't give a fuck about whether you like Shirky or not. And they shouldn't. The fact remains that Shirky had an impact on your writing- and hiding that fact from the web is remarkably childish. If you're going to play on the web, play. Link to your enemies. Acknowledge that while they may not be right, they have contributed to your day, to your writing, to your thinking.
Lisa Williams on confusion over the name of her blog, "Learning the Lessons of Nixon"...#
I suspect that many people reading the title may have a number of mistaken impressions about my blog. For instance, they may think it's a politics blog. They may go further and think that I'm a political observer of the type who wants to rehabilitate the non-Watergate legacy of President Nixon, when in fact I am slightly to the left of Mao Zedong and think the best thing that Nixon did was to revivify health services and tribal self-governance for Native Americans. They may infer, furthermore, that I care a lot about President Nixon, who, in fact, I'm too young to really remember (the first President I have conscious memories of is President Carter). This last is probably the biggest "mistake" embedded in my blog's name, because I think there are plenty of people for whom the mere word "Nixon" is a provocative one that brings up a host of references to history, politics, and culture that my blog simply isn't about.
I'm pretty sure a quick read of my site will dispel most of those ideas, and in my blog I don't feel compelled to smooth off the rough edges or confusing bits for the reader, because I feel that if they wanted pre-packaged stuff that's been checked for consistency, well, they'd go to the professional media for whom it's a point of professionalism to try to ensure that the products they produce are logically consistent and clear. Part of the allure of blogs are the unanswered questions you find on encountering a new blog, which on their first pass are often quite mysterious. What is this thing? Who is this person and why are they talking to us? That's not what you think when you pick up a newspaper, where there's a widely shared consensus on what the paper is and what it's purpose is.
Real Live Preacher writes about really helping people and bureaucracy.#
A group of church people decides they want to do good things in the name of Jesus. A few churches join forces, and they get some good things done. They do. Then someone asks the question. If doing ten good things in Christ's name is wonderful, how much better would a hundred good things be? How about a thousand?
Of course, if you mean to do a thousand good things for Jesus, you better get organized. You're going to need a lot of people and a lot of money.
The organization of people who want to do good things for Jesus grows until it can only be run by professionals and insiders who operate in a very tight, "good old boy" network. A person could make a career just learning how to negotiate this network, learning which hands to shake and which votes really matter. Soon, regular church people cannot comprehend the complexity of the organization, but they foot the bill for it. In an effort to keep the money coming, the insiders turn more and more of their efforts toward marketing the organization to their own people.
Adam Gessamen describes what he learned from the Matrix Revolutions.#
It is possible to spend 15 minutes of a movie trying to determine whether a character's voice was over-dubbed.
You can leave your seat, go to the bathroom, flip through a magazine, and be back in your seat by the time Trinity and Neo finish their mutual love-fest.
His girlfriend (?) adds:
Time spent watching Matrix Revolutions could have been better spent with girlfriend who was very lonely.
Jorrit Wiersma comments on Einstein and his wife, whom he cheated on constantly.#
Is it just me, or are famous men more often bastards? I have to say my esteem of men in general isn't very high anyway and I have my own faults undoubtedly, but at least I would never hit my wife or abuse her or our kids in any way. Of course, another question is whether all of this is true and not the kind of gossip and slander that all celebrities attract. I don't know if there were any gossip magazines in those days, but famous people probably suffered gossip no less.
Anyway, this was the first time I heard these stories about Einstein and it's a change from the usual tongue-sticking out and wacky hairdo photographs.
The Yeti writes about pre-planned intimacy.#
I was dating a girl last year who always ended every date with the most passionate kiss I've ever experienced. Literally, my head would be swimming, and I'd have problems walking out to my car.
She said she did that to always leave me thinking about her and wanting more.
Guess what. I hated that. Hated it. She had these prearranged steps to take towards intimacy. First some kissing, then some petting on the couch. Then my shirt, then her shirt, then upstairs in the bed with both of our pants on. Each date was a new step.
Look. I understand what you're doing. It's crap. She thought she was following some rule to be decent, or to convince me, and I just wanted to spend time with her. I got to the point where the last two times, I tried to not go in. Once, she had me by the hand, and opened the garage door. I would have been left standing outside if I had. The second time, she said just for a minute.
He later continues...
Dates have to be guided, and not controlled. Dates when they go well are like ballroom dancing. The man leads, but the grace and beauty of the dance is dependent on the skill of both dancers.
Of course, men hate dancing and today all we try to do is freak our dates to misogynistic music and then wonder why courtship is dead.
Hmm, maybe I am a little cynical. That's okay. I dance divinely.
I hope the Pretty Girl in the Corner gets an RSS feed.#
Anne writes about le Matrix, but there's some spoilers so watch out.#
many of us remember the spectacular debut of the original matrix with barely controlled excitment. its revolutionary graphics, its stunning visual feast of artistry and movement made us almost pee in our pants.
we knew nothing could be as good as the first matrix. nevertheless, we could not resist seeing matrix:reloaded- and who could blame us? we were compelled to, like desert beasts drawn to water. we figured we would be dissappointed. i, for one, was devastated.
Matt Stoller at the Clark Sphere on Flag burning.#
Just days after getting it right on the Confederate flag, Clark gets it wrong on amending the Constitution to prohibit flag burning. For a lot of liberals, this is non-negotiable. You do not abridge freedom of speech. Period. While this is largely symbolic and irrelevant to the substance of our lives, retricting any type of speech explicitly in the Constitution is antithetical to freedom of expression. Indeed, fights over copyright happen because of this reason, though the cost of having no ability to copyright dissuade invention and creative expression would be prohibitive without some government protection. Yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater is another example of an abridgement of freedom of speech, but explicit harm comes from yelling 'fire'.
Flag burning, however, is a form of dissent.
I hope this is a misunderstanding. I do not like gimmick politics.
He later explains why he cares so much about flag burning.
The flag amendment is a symbol, not of free speech and not of oppression, but of a damaging culture war which puts relatively meaningless symbolism that appeals to prejudice above substantive and productive solution seeking. Clark had the ability to rise above the litmus test-ization of politics, and not take sides in the culture war by taking a principled side in the actual war over the soul of this country. Instead, he chose to side with the culture warriors. I don't differentiate between symbol-mongers like Kucinich or Bush; the use of divisive symbols to turn the political discourse murky with mistrust is the problem. Taking a side in this war is taking the wrong side, because moving beyond the culture war implies a willingness to deflate the idea that the Confederate flag itself is worth debating, instead of the culture of hate it implies.
Michael Feldman reports on something amazing about human life.#
Dr. Irwin Goldstein has identified an important new syndrome - Persistent Sexual Arousal Syndrome - and is trying to develop treatments for it, so far with patchy success.
The syndrome is the opposite of the usual female sexual complaint -- difficulty getting aroused. Instead, patients sustain unrelenting physical arousal, no matter how many orgasms they have.
"It's just a horror," said Lila, a 71-year-old woman who has had the syndrome since brain and bladder surgery in 1999, and said she often has 200 small orgasms a day. "It bothers me more than the breast cancer," an advanced case that was diagnosed two years ago.
Michael Feldman writes about Halley's comment (hah) that the idea that not a lot of people read blogs is incorrect. He also points out that Richard's logic is flawed.#
I discovered that the top news site in America (CNN) got about 650,000 unique hits a day. Yahoo got about 550,000 (figures for September). The New York Times, meanwhile, has an in-print circulation of nearly a million papers a day (via the Newspaper Association of America), and a web pull of about 300,000 per day.
Now of course that dwarfs Dave or Glen, standing alone. But the New York Times (and the CNN website) is put together by hundreds of reporters, editors, photographers, stringers, columnists and fact-checkers. If you combined the top 100 news blogs, I bet their total readership WOULD BEAT EVEN THE TOP MASS MEDIA SITES!
Now you may argue that no one (except maybe Jay McCarthy) reads all of the 100 top blogs. But then, who reads every story in the New York Times, first page to last, other than a few desperate news-deprived ex-pats haunting the international arrival terminals of the capital-city airports in their countries-of-exile, looking to cadge a two day old New York Times but willing to settle for last weekend's USA Today?
I really like what Dave Winer has been doing with Scripting News and I think this note says so much about the greatness...#
Got a couple of emails overnight saying that the new picture is either too big, or not work-safe. I want to acknowledge that, because there must be other people thinking that but not saying it. I appreciate that people are being so respectful. Here's what I think. Things are going to change here. It's gotten too static. I did something bold and unmistakably different from the past to set expectations. Look at it this way. Scripting News first popped up when there were no other weblogs. It was like a little outpost on the prairie, nothing but Big Sky and you could see light between the slats in the roof. No one would have complained about it being work-safe back then because (almost) no one was reading it. Now the prairie is a bustling metropolis, and my little house is on a block with shopping centers, schools, porn shops, you name it. Who cares about one little house with a leaky roof. I want to build a new city!
Lance Arthur Just Writes about online dating and mass marketing yourself.#
The reasons for this [this is that it is very unlikely you will find someone online] are as numerous as they are obvious. Number One, if you're looking online than all those other opportunities I mentioned previously have been tapped. You're scraping the barrel's... middle. So you're already feeling kind of bad about yourself. You couldn't pick up a guy "in real life" and have to do this, take poorly focused pictures of yourself in the bathroom mirror and lie about your interests in the hopes that someone else will nibble the hook. Suck in your gut perpetually and fluff your porn shots and Photoshop the hell out of your pockmarked, bloaty, weirdly sunburned face so someone, anyone, will notice you from the hundreds of other guys.
I mean, the whole thing is horrible, isn't it? The looking and the dating and the turning down and being turned down over and over and over. Even when you realize that everyone goes through this and everyone hates it and everyone does it, it still feels like hell. You want to detach yourself from it until it's over, but if you detach than you're not giving away the "real you" so you may have found an actual catch but you're detached so he doesn't know it and thinks you're some freak and then it's too late, the first impression you left is stuck in his head and he's moved on to bachelor number 43 while you're sitting in a puddle of self-loathing wondering "why didn't he like me?"
[...]
Someone take me out of this, please? Someone come up with a pill or something, an inflatable boyfriend who can carry on a conversation and has a sense of humor about himself and looks good in jeans or a suit and understands the vital need of $200 dinner bills and really dark glasses of Cabernet and movies in foreign languages and sitting at tables outside in the cold night air for hours making fun of everyone who walks by. That's all I ask. Sex is purely optional.
I like reading Lance's writing SO much. So Much.
Tony Pierce explains lip appeal. She's all lip baby.#
David Hyatt writes about bug filling tactics.#
Here are some of my favorite phrases (for your enjoyment). Let X = the browser of your choice. Let Y = any other browser.
(1) The Promise - "The lack of this feature is the one thing that keeps me from switching to X."
(2) "I can't work under these conditions. I'll be in my trailer." - "I can't believe you broke this! That's it! I'm going back to Y!"
(3) Playing the EOMB Card - "How can this be broken? Every other modern browser gets this right."
(4) Impatience - "Months have passed, and this bug still hasn't been fixed! What's the holdup?"
(5) Overeagerness - "Still broken." (2 days later.) "Still broken." (2 days later.) "Feature still doesn't work. (2 days later.) "Broken in build from mm/dd/yy."
Kristin looks fantastic and I'm going to go to hair styling school.#
i had to end a very important relationship recently.
my relationship with my hair girl.
honestly, it was partly my fault. i had been seeing someone else back home, and when i called her to schedule an appointment, she had some difficulty remembering who i was. you see, we'd had a bit of a problem with communication in the past - i would say "trim" and she would hear "cut off 3 inches and put my layers in an authentic 1950s sandra dee flip, please." but between her haircutting disasters and my wandering eye, i was ready to put the past behind us.
Peter Lindberg about what makes art beautiful and how you could constrain the space but still get beauty.#
Oh, and another thing I've been thinking about: the peculiar harmony, balance, or whatever, that distinguishes the great works of art from the others.
For a picture, it's the colors, the composition, etc. But that's only the aspects which are expressible in words. When everything is right, the work clicks into greatness. For photography, there are some angles which can cause a given object or scene to click, where others would merely result in snapshots.
What's interesting is that many of these qualities are entirely fluid, and depend on the history of that particular medium, school, or genre. What wouldn't click in the past can click in the future because some aspect of a work is the inverse of, an attack upon, a parody of, etc., the rendition of that aspect in previous works.
And of course, some things turn into clichés, and the artworks can't click with an experienced audience.
This would be interesting to study in an extremely constrained art form. Somebody should invent a form of art where the possibilities of expression are very limited, but not too limited to attract artists—there's a balance here as well, and I feel there's a sweet spot where the art form would boom the most.
Landover Baptist is sooo funny.#
Vanessa Tiegs does some amazing art work. My favourite: Ruby Red.#
The Longest Now links to Peter Boyer in the New Yorker on Wesley Clark. Great stuff.#
Clark seemed to recognize that the central message of his candidacy is Wesley Clark, and the uniform he wore for thirty-four years as an officer in the United States Army. For many Democrats today, the uniform is a kind of talisman, a tool for neutralizing George Bush's perceived strength on national defense. When Clark entered the race, the cartoonist Garry Trudeau devoted a full week of "Doonesbury" to a Clark homage. In one installment, the character Jeff Redfern reads an article about Clark: "'A brilliant, telegenic, Southern Rhodes Scholar, decorated Vietnam hero and ex-Supreme Commander of nato.' Whew! I wonder if Bush has the slightest clue what he may be up against."
Mitch Ratcliffe moved his blog to: http://www.ratcliffeblog.com/ (RSS)#
Kaye Trammell writes about Internet Research.#
Without boring you, I'll go through the basics. To successfully deploy an online survey one should send a pre-invitation several days before the survey is ready. Then, send the link to the survey. Provide users with unique username/passcodes so that you know the data set is not being spammed with wrong-doers. Then, send a follow-up invite to those who hadn't filled it out after about a week. You should expect a 25 - 30% acceptance rate.
Even so, it is nice to check this all against this new world of bloggers.
I suspect that bloggers are going to react a bit different to this "traditional" online survey deployment method. As I go in to to talk to my dissertation committee about the best way to do this, I wanted a little anecdotal information from my friends & fellow bloggers.