Keiran posts a nice essay about a speciality of his: the world of human organs exchange. Since I know that Keiran is a fine humorist I’m confident that he has wandered into this line of research because it is so rich in outrageous amusing edge cases. Examples where the symbolic structure of the situation crosses [...]
Many years ago I had the fun of working in a basement in Cambridge on some products for Lotus. This was for their Macintosh group and that group had built a truely amazing product called Jazz, and then a more amazing follow on called Modern Jazz. By the time I showed up the original project [...]
Friday, February 27, 2004
This is an amazing photograph. That group is formed by the photographer’s role as outsider. Try putting a name to each of those expressions; the variety is amazing. I’ve been reading Tilly’s book about collective violence in tandem with Kotter’s book on Leading Change; they make for a volitile mixture in one’s head. Tilly’s books [...]
Thursday, February 19, 2004
Having spent the last two days trying various combinations of install mechanisms to set up a freebsd server with all the trimmings I’m extremely jealous of the fun that Mr. Rhodes is having. … (iter (for i in ‘(1 2 3)) (+ i 50)) => NIL ; on x86 and sparc => ERROR “2 is [...]
I want to highly recommend Josh Marshall’s excellent article printed in the New Yorker. It’s a very sophisticated look at the issue of how the United States has managed it’s emerging power on the planet. I found particularly facinating by one story he tells. Josh’s story expands on one of the classic cartoons that people [...]
Saturday, January 24, 2004
I’m a little concerned that after reading this two sentence paragraph: Again, and not to overstate the case, what characterizes this reading of society is the existence of principles of justice, of the idea of legitimate (and by implication of illegitimate) action and so, of necessity, of rules governing market, or better exchange behavior, that [...]
The user gives commands by pointing the cursor at graphic symbols on the screen, such as a paint brush and an eraser to enable the user to draw a picture, or a trash can to destroy a document. … Because the machine now has one drive and 128K of RAM, several sources said users might [...]
I’m almost done reading Quicksilver and it has certainly delighted me. There are any number of very delightful passages. I particularly liked a passage that appears early in the book were a price negotitation in a marketplace is intermediated by negotiating the value of each coin that will be used in the transaction. Each coin [...]
Monday, September 29, 2003
I’m in Sydney. It takes 20 hours on planes to get here from Boston, many more if you fold in the waits and to and fro from airports. If that doesn’t make it perfectly clear that this is almost another planet a visit to the botanical garden will. White parrots with yellow horns pick at [...]
Thursday, September 25, 2003
This reports that dumb flies out perform smart flies (from New Scientist 24/Sept/03). The quick summary. Breed up a population of smart fruit flies. Insert smart flies into general population. Make food scarce. Smart flies don’t do so well. What’s smart? Smart was defined as 1) the skill to taste a poison, and 2) the [...]
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