Sidney Padua is simply marvelous: Author! Author!
(just a bit, to whet the appetite):
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).
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 Issuesand, since I'm rooting around in stuff from the past, a look at Whole Earth Software Review (1984) is interesting too.
We're at Miranda pretty much every Monday night...
mmmmmmmmHartlepool Museum on Flickr
Hartlepool Monkey and mooooore Hartlepool Monkey
One of the treats that comes with being in Rockland midday:
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)
via Jenn Lena:
(and BoingBoing too, so EVERYbody's already seen it. Still...)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.
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...
Surely everyone wants a personal Difference Engine, right? Thing-O-Matic is what you need to get into the game.
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?
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)
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.
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).