April 30, 2011

Unmitigated genius

Sidney Padua is simply marvelous: Author! Author!

(just a bit, to whet the appetite):

Posted by oook at 01:41 PM | Comments (0)

Otiose Maggie

At Daniel Heikalo's suggestion I've set up a Soundcloud page (which he'll populate with some of our duet material) and started it off with Otiose Maggie, a tune I created in 2005 to memorialize an encounter with a goat (the eponymous Maggie).

Posted by oook at 08:43 AM | Comments (0)

April 29, 2011

looking for more stuff to read?

UPenn Library's Online Books Page New Listings is forever pushing new stuff in our collective directions. Today's harvest includes links to materials that I think of as fundamental to my own development and views of the world (imperfect and contradictory as they prove to be): CoEvolution Quarterly (1974-1984) and Whole Earth Review (1985-2003)

or you could go directly to Back Issues
and, since I'm rooting around in stuff from the past, a look at Whole Earth Software Review (1984) is interesting too.

Posted by oook at 03:06 PM | Comments (0)

April 24, 2011

Kerry cooking

We're at Miranda pretty much every Monday night...

mmmmmmmm

Posted by oook at 08:12 AM | Comments (0)

April 20, 2011

A conjunction that should be better known

Hartlepool Museum on Flickr

Hartlepool Monkey and mooooore Hartlepool Monkey

Posted by oook at 10:06 PM | Comments (0)

links for 2011-04-20

Posted by oook at 07:00 AM

April 19, 2011

Looking around at Marshall Point

Posted by oook at 05:05 PM | Comments (0)

Lunch at Home Kitchen

One of the treats that comes with being in Rockland midday:

Posted by oook at 02:20 PM | Comments (0)

wonder if this will work

I've been working on the mountains of STUFF in the barn, and here's the current state of the Museum of Obsolescent Technologies:

(using Photosynth and the iPhone --a bit lacking in acuity/resolution, but hyper-cool as an idea and sure to develop in interesting directions via updates. Click on the third icon to see FULL SCREEN version)

Posted by oook at 09:42 AM | Comments (0)

links for 2011-04-19

Posted by oook at 07:00 AM

April 18, 2011

links for 2011-04-18

Posted by oook at 07:00 AM

April 17, 2011

links for 2011-04-17

  • via Bruce Sterling, a gem of the obvious but unuttered: "...a vast trade in illicit goods and services: black markets run by 'deviant entrepreneurs' who see the world's prohibitions as opportunities for extracting windfall profits... Narcotics trafficking; sex tourism; computer hacking; money laundering; stolen artworks and antiquities; illegally harvested timber, oil, and diamonds; counterfeit medicine, software, and luxury brands; and a globally networked market for human organs..."
Posted by oook at 07:00 AM

April 16, 2011

insufferably cute

via Jenn Lena:

(and BoingBoing too, so EVERYbody's already seen it. Still...)

Posted by oook at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)

April 14, 2011

Apocalypso

I dunno how healthy it is to read a lot of 'dystopian' fiction (or non-fiction, for that matter), though I guess I'm pretty much guilty of participation in that schadenfreudian excess. Stefan Raets' review of Will McIntosh's Soft Apocalypse catches the poignancy very well:

The real sadness of Soft Apocalypse is seeing normal people operating under the illusion that life will still go back to what it used to be. They try to hold down a job or complete a post-grad degree, and even though the world falls apart around them, the changes are too gradual for them to lose hope completely. It’s like watching rats in a maze, unaware that their paths are slowly being closed off around them and the maze is starting to catch fire at the edges. A soft apocalypse, indeed.

Posted by oook at 06:52 AM | Comments (0)

April 12, 2011

links for 2011-04-12

Posted by oook at 07:01 AM

April 10, 2011

On flappers

I remember vividly the umbrage my mother (born 1899) gathered up, expressed and projected in my direction when I [quite innocently] asked if she'd been "a flapper" back in the day. "Certainly NOT!" I think she said, but the withering tone was beyond any I think I'd ever encountered. A few minutes spent with The Flapper's Dictionary is probably as close as one can get to understanding her animus. She was a person of considerable rectitude, inclined to take moral turpitudes Seriously: with eloquent fluttering of the eyelids she declared Sophie Tucker's songs "suggestive" (and so they were, deliciously). Very early on, I learned which of my own realities to protect her from...

Posted by oook at 02:04 PM | Comments (0)

links for 2011-04-10

Posted by oook at 07:00 AM

April 08, 2011

links for 2011-04-08

Posted by oook at 07:00 AM

April 07, 2011

what hath babbage wrought

Surely everyone wants a personal Difference Engine, right? Thing-O-Matic is what you need to get into the game.

Posted by oook at 12:15 PM | Comments (0)

April 06, 2011

For-Profit college scam

Several times a day I encounter yet another exemplar of the decline of, well gosh, pretty much everything in civic life: Nazgul politicians, vapidity of mass media, venalities great and small, eduscams, etc. Here's a masterful summary of the higher ed side of the malaise, via E.D. Kain's Forbes blog. But WHAT is to be done?

Posted by oook at 03:32 PM | Comments (0)

Absolutely essential

I've been imagining this sort of presentation, like, forEVER. Here it is as a history of wars, but one can imagine other possible contents. Very nicely done! (via the ever-fascinating Gizmodo)

Posted by oook at 10:10 AM | Comments (0)

Bingo

Jim Stogdill chez O'Reilly Radar:

Here's what you need to know: Your mind is advanced enough to experience a self, a self that you think has intrinsic value. But that's just a construction in your head. Your actual extrinsic value, I'm sorry to say, is just the sum of your known behaviors and the predictive model they make possible. The stuff you think of as "your data" and the web thinks of as "our data about you — read the ToS," is the grist for that mill. And Facebook's shiny front room is just a place for you to behave promiscuously and observably.
Amen.

Posted by oook at 09:34 AM | Comments (0)

April 05, 2011

A reminder

that I should make more space and time for reading Dorothy Parker: Doc Searls' questions about the provenance of a couple of quotes (which she may not have written, but who cares? Still a brilliantly sharp-tongued person, and perhaps it would be interesting to look into how she's been misquoted).

Posted by oook at 09:09 PM | Comments (0)

April 04, 2011

impossible

and yet here it is:

Posted by oook at 09:52 PM | Comments (0)