“I believe that in our culture of simulation, the notion of authenticity is for us what sex was for the Victorians—threat and obsession, taboo and fascination.”
Sherry Turkle, Alone Together
via caitlinwinner
“To draw moral wisdom from a serious fiction, you have to relive it as if the possibilities were still open and the tragedy still preventable.”
(Source: scottfriday, via librarysciences)
If there was any doubt that Craigslist has become a ghetto, I present to you the twelve most recent postings for Event Gigs in NYC.
“Men who ache allover for tidiness and compactness in their lives often find relief for their pain in the cabin of a thirty-foot sailboat at anchor in a sheltered cove. Here the sprawling panoply of The Home is compressed in orderly miniature and liquid delirium, suspended between the bottom of the sea and the top of the sky, ready to move on in the morning by the miracle of canvas and the witchcraft of rope.”
E.B. White, The Sea and the Wind that Blows
via jacecooke
“To put this as crisply as I can, the study of the classics is the study of what happens in the gap between antiquity and ourselves. It is not only the dialogue that we have with the culture of the classical world; it is also the dialogue that we have with those who have gone before us who were themselves in dialogue with the classical world (whether Dante, Raphael, William Shakespeare, Edward Gibbon, Pablo Picasso, Eugene O’Neill, or Terence Rattigan). The classics (as writers of the second century AD had already spotted) are a series of “Dialogues with the Dead.” But the dead do not include only those who went to their graves two thousand years ago. This is an idea nicely captured in another article in The Fortnightly Review, this time a skit that appeared in 1888, a sketch set in the underworld, in which a trio of notable classical scholars (the long-dead Bentley and Porson, plus their recently deceased Danish colleague Madvig) have a free and frank discussion with Euripides and Shakespeare. This little satire also reminds us that the only actual speakers in this dialogue are us; it is we who ventriloquize, who animate what the ancients have to say: in fact, here the classical scholars complain what a terrible time they are having in Hades, because they are constantly being told off by the ancient shades who complain that the classicists have got them wrong.”
“American schools in which fewer than 10% of the students were poor outperformed the schools of Finland, Japan and Korea. Even when as many as 25% of the students were poor, American schools performed as well as the top-scoring nations. As the proportion of poor students rises, the scores of U.S. schools drop.”
BERG’s Little Printer is one of many new pieces of hardware that I’m very excited about. A while ago, I met Matt Jones (a BERG designer) and we talked a bit about the internet of things*—it’s a wide open playing field.
While I love the design of the Little Printer, I’m not that excited about printing out social streams—I’m much more excited about trying to hack the software to have a personal telegraph machine where friends can send real correspondence. I have a fantasy of waking up to letters and reading them over coffee and that would be better than Christmas.
* I’m also working on a piece of a smart hardware.
Serious brogramming going on at the Muppet Office.
“Kahneman never grapples philosophically with the nature of rationality. He does, however, supply a fascinating account of what might be taken to be its goal: happiness. What does it mean to be happy? When Kahneman first took up this question, in the mid 1990s, most happiness research relied on asking people how satisfied they were with their life on the whole. But such retrospective assessments depend on memory, which is notoriously unreliable. What if, instead, a person’s actual experience of pleasure or pain could be sampled from moment to moment, and then summed up over time? Kahneman calls this “experienced” well-being, as opposed to the “remembered” well-being that researchers had relied upon. And he found that these two measures of happiness diverge in surprising ways. What makes the “experiencing self” happy is not the same as what makes the “remembering self” happy. In particular, the remembering self does not care about duration — how long a pleasant or unpleasant experience lasts. Rather, it retrospectively rates an experience by the peak level of pain or pleasure in the course of the experience, and by the way the experience ends.”
“The legal “puzzle” raised by modern blackmail is that although it is lawful to disseminate harmful information about another person, just so long as the information is true, it is unlawful to extort money by making threats to do so. Roman law took a different approach. It was unlawful to reveal harmful information unless the speaker could show a privilege to speak, usually that the public interest would be served by the revelation. For this reason, it was unlawful to threaten to do unless such a privilege existed.”
“It appears that Tumblr built in a day or two what no D.C.-based technology supplier could come up with in the last five years.”
The statement above is false. I’m one of the co-founders of Mobile Commons, though I no longer work there. The Mobile Commons technology that Tumblr used to build a very nice graphical interface has been available to any organization for going on five years. In fact, it’s been used by many organizations to lobby for the change that is important to them.
What Tumblr was able to do was remarkable because of the size and scale of it’s userbase and the ability of the Tumblr team to articulate to that userbase why SOPA is a horrible idea. The size and scale of that userbase is the result of years of work by David and the Tumblr team.
One of the issues with online advocacy and politics is to get things happening at web scale—and it’s often disappointing that the web really only rallies around causes that happen to concern the web. At the same time, it’s important. The Internet is a historical anomaly—allowed to grow and flourish because it grew too fast to ever be brought under the auspices of the FCC or anyone else (imagine if launching a site on Wi-Fi was like submitting to the Apple AppStore).
Sean Parker’s been talking quite a bit about how the web should allow us to divorce influence from money in politics. That’s a grand ambition and an important one because when it comes to SOPA, legislators are weighing the perception of votes vs. the pressure exerted on them by lobbyists. While it’s good to get apolitical people motivated en masse, there’s a lot more work that needs to be done for legislators to understand how that fits into voting profiles and their self-interest in being re-elected.
I hope that the success of Tumblr’s call-in campaign was a wake-up call to many web companies that have the technical and design wherewithal to start taking on some of these issues and working together to apply more precise and sustained pressure in Washington.
MediaShift Idea Lab . #DontBreakTheInternet: How The Web Became a Political Force vs. SOPA | PBS (via matthew)
(via matthew)
