• fastfoodmaps.com
  empirical answers to long-running questions
  (tags: food mashup geospatial)

The ancient roots of passive avoidance over at Language Log has either everything or nothing to do with the tragedical unwindings in the Levant. For a moment I thought that lexis eiromeneand lexis katestrammene were on a different plane altogether from the bombast and dissembling, (akin to “Here’s to pure mathematics, may it never be any use to anybody.”), but there’s something Hemingwayish and unforesightful about the various actors in the current drama.

Don’t miss the diagram at the end, and it’s worth meditating upon the statement “Hemingway gives a physical description of a journey through a specific landscape, while Johnson offers an abstract discussion of the reasons for valuing older works over newer ones.”

I’ve decided to try to follow the horrors of the news stream via a conventional Web page, mostly for my own purposes in sorting it (and what I think about it) all out later. Each item is too fragmentary for me to blog sensibly, and there’s already too much ill-informed blogventing out there.

• The Overton window
  not sure I wanted to know about this, but via William Gibson’s blog 21 July. Excerpt: “The mission of a think tank is to introduce ideas into public discourse and normalize them within the public discourse.”
  (tags: metastuff)

• The Mandolin Archive
  music, tablature, midi files
  (tags: musics)
• Tulpa creation
  “…any entity that attains reality solely by the act of imagination…”
  (tags: metastuff)

• Andy Carvin’s exercise in apprehending scale
  “I decided to take a screenshot of the war zone from Google Maps and overlay it with a map of part of the northeast US, using the same scale for both images…” (QuickTime)
  (tags: geospatial visualization)

• Automate Your Favorite Photoshop Routines
  from O’Reilly
  (tags: photography)

• Dandelife.com
  personal timeline toolkit, with links and tags
  (tags: chronology)

• GmapWiki
  still alpha, but promising
  (tags: geospatial wiki)

WFMU’s Beware of the Blog links to a performance of the Finnish Complaints Choir: “Finnish artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen collected the pet peeves and angst-ridden pleas of people in Helsinki and then composed this choral work around the list of complaints…”, a 24MB download and I swear, worth every minute of the wait.