September 2009
56 posts
“Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.”
– Deleuze, “Postscript on the societies of control” (1990).
no you don't
amomenttothink:
“You know what I’m craving? A little perspective. That’s it. I’d like some fresh, clear, well seasoned perspective. Can you suggest a good wine to go with that?”
Yeah? You want some cake with that too?
“I don’t know. It’s all an accident. I thought I’d go work for a law firm.”
– University of California president Mark Yudof, when asked how he got into education.
“Governments should also decrease the role of economists – they’re no more...”
– Nassim Taleb.
Foucault, still relevant and awesome
What can an internal limitation of governmental rationality be? In the first place, it will be a de facto regulation, a de facto limitation. That is to say, it will not be a legal limitation, although at some point the law will have to transcribe it in the form of rules which must not be infringed. At any rate, to say that it is a de facto limitation means that if the government happens to push...
Vice-chancellor: female students are 'a perk' →
amomenttothink:
Dr Kealey’s piece – on “lust” – said: “Most male lecturers know that, most years, there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration and who asks for advice on her essays. What to do? Enjoy her! She’s a perk.”
A perk?
He compared the experience to Stringfellows, the infamous London lap-dancing club, and warned academics to “look but not touch”.
A lap-dance...
noosphere:
particularapparatus:
raymondpirouz:
I had the most fantastically futuristic and fundamentally transformative customer experience at my local Apple retail store today.
I went in to purchase the latest version of OS X, Snow Leopard, along with a few accessories for my MacBook Pro.
[snip OMG NO REGISTER story]
I had the most fantastically futuristic and fundamentally...
but to be fair...
tristn:
I’m not above a little pedantry with respect to semantic language change. I dislike the use of “random” as in “that’s so random”—i.e. unexpected. Is this a battle worth fighting though? No. Everyone knows what random means when you talk about rolling dice. [*insert joke about the human mind being inherently bad at statistics*]
This is where cross-platform taxonomies would come in handy. I...
raymondpirouz:
I had the most fantastically futuristic and fundamentally transformative customer experience at my local Apple retail store today.
I went in to purchase the latest version of OS X, Snow Leopard, along with a few accessories for my MacBook Pro.
[snip OMG NO REGISTER story]
I had the most fantastically futuristic and fundamentally transformative customer experience at my local...
Bogodynamics and its applications
I didn’t add bogodynamics, but the Jargon File definition is worth…’surfacing’:
A theory that characterizes the universe in terms of bogon sources (such as politicians, used-car salesmen, TV evangelists, and suits in general), bogon sinks (such as taxpayers and computers), and bogosity potential fields. Bogon absorption, of course, causes human beings to behave mindlessly...
noosphere:
smarterplanet:
“Moving our public sector to a culture, set of practices and technologies that actively embraces Government 2.0 is high on the agenda of the current government with the Taskforce due to report on its findings at the end of December, the Prime Minister expressing his desire to see these types of changes and Minister Lindsay Tanner strong in his...
via amomenttothink:
[from Life of Pi:]
The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity—it’s envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.
What? That doesn’t...
Notes on "DON’T!" →
via nonparametric:
The secret of self-control
by Jonah Lehrer
“Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.”
[…]
Once Mischel began analyzing the results [of the experiment in which four-year-olds could ring a bell to eat a marshmallow they were given, or wait fifteen minutes and receive a...
“A man is standing in a subway cart, his face dirty with soot. In his right hand...”
– Songs from the Second Floor (Andersson).
OMG update time
Stuff I did since last Saturday:
Read/skimmed many CHI/related papers in/around ‘sustainability’ space
Wrote draft of ‘ecology and interaction’ paper for CHI (~7500 words); probably not suitable for submission (but phone call in an hour w/ Bill to discuss!)
Wrote ~800-word abstract for my advancement paper, I think (well, actually for ‘the paper I really want to...
Scheiber (New Republic), "The Right and Wrong Way... →
Hmm.
We suggested in February of this year that [Commercial Real Estate] would be an important issue before the current year had run its course. The numbers, analysis and industry commentary tidbits suggest the down cycle is far from complete. The ultimate impact on the financial sector remains an open question mark at this point. Will banks simply ignore the issue, as they continue to do with many...
Consilience happens
W. H. K. Chun, The enduring ephemeral, or the future is a memory (Critical Inquiry, 2008)
A. Klein, Extinction of contact and percolation processes in a random environment (Annals of Probability, 1994)
(Thanks, Rajinder!)
“If you want to see how much catfish in a certain pond weigh, you can’t...”
– Bill Tomlinson.
“Two years ago I was golfing in Bangalore with a friend, the head of a large...”
– Brett Doar.
Oil price shock notes
Exhibit 1.
Oil shock simulation shows US losing 2m jobs, the largest drop since 1945 Aug 5, 2005, 06:28 The spike in oil prices following the death of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia illustrates how sensitive the oil markets are in a period of high oil demand and very little spare production capacity. A simulation of an oil shock, engineered by the National Commission on Energy Policy and the...
"Hot, flat, and confused" →
Notes on Tom Friedman: the view from peak oil-land
CHI madness idea
[just in case our paper on ‘ecological interactions’ actually gets accepted…not that I think there’s necessarily a great risk of that occurring]
Hi, I’m Six Silberman from UC Irvine. We have some thoughts about Sustainable Interaction Design. [slide:]
Come see our talk if you think ecologically-oriented interaction design should have some grounding in, you know,...
Maths Cheatsheets →
tristn:
I’ve shared it here before, but this is the greatest math cheatsheet ever.
tug.org’s kung fu is good. Here is one I made for a random processes class I took last year…’cause OH YEAH EVERYBODY NEEDS A RANDOM PROCESSES CHEAT SHEET ON A TUESDAY MORNING
(We were only given two sides of a single 8.5”x11” sheet, so it looks not half as pretty as tug.org’s,...
kerr:
Economics is ruining my life.
I wouldn’t worry. It’s just economics, it’s not your life. On second thought, maybe it is after all…
All of my professors thus far look like cartoon characters.
Well, if they are economists, this is to be expected; they live in a cartoon world! (See above.) If not, well…accounting for the social construction of sociologists...
Record-making food stamp usage →
Chinese gov't backs SOE option to default on... →
Hawaii: Peak Oil Canary in a Coal Mine Revisited →
Interesting fossil fuel vulnerability analysis for Hawaii.
(I don’t keep enemies; like other beasts, their care and feeding is costly and tiresome and diverts attention from other, more interesting pursuits.)
http://www.brettonwoodsii.org/ →
What in the world is going on over here? (See also Project Oekonux and Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives.)
Krugman, "How did economists get it so wrong?" →
“We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control...”
– Keynes, “The Great Slump of 1930” (via Krugman).
“Courses in the humanities, in particular, often seem impractical, but they are...”
– The New York Times gets it. (via unicornology) (via kerr)
Well, not to be snarky, but not necessarily (see e.g., Fish’s 2008 column, in which he writes, ”To the question ‘of what use are the humanities?’, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer...
Saturday
Read Ch. 3, 5, 7 of Getting Down to Earth
Read Ulanowicz et al., “Quantifying sustainability: resilience, efficiency, and the return of information theory” (Ecological Complexity 6 [2009]: 27-36)
Read wiki entries on “Différance”, “Difference and Repitition”, and bits of “Jacques Derrida”, “Gilles Deleuze”, and “Gregory Bateson”
...
Between Deleuze and Shannon
I haven’t read Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, nor do I have any real intention to (for now), but after reading Ulanowicz et al.’s reprise of information theory in the first two pages of “Quantifying sustainability: resilience, efficiency, and the return of information theory”, it seems like it might be interesting for *somebody* to trace the links between...
