random quotes ... to amuse, inspire, enrage:
Statism is the claim that institutionalized proactive coercion is justified.
in the middle of a blogging break (for good reasons! welcome ada marie) i bring you this article from salon.com which is scary as fuck and makes me fear for little ada’s future:
Apocalypse Now by Mike Davis.
Davis does not buy any of the Gore-style cheerleading that we might avert a climatically disastrous future through [...]
My father-in-law (in Massachusetts) was in town for his fiftieth MIT reunion — class of 1958! He took my partner and me to a couple of events, and we noticed among the red-jacketed men a few red-jacketed women. By various accounts, there were nine to fifteen women (out of a thousand students) in [...]
I had been seeing “ftw” in internet chit chat for a while, and I just finally got around to looking it up and seeing what it actually means: “for the win”.
In the meantime, I had just sort of assumed it was an inversion of “wtf” — sort of taking the aghastness of “wtf” [...]
I just got a call from someone claiming to be a “domain notification server”. They had pulled our contact information off our domain record, and had a highly deceptive pitch, something like:
We are calling you to alert you that you will be receiving a notification regarding your domain, blah blah blah information from our [...]
Yesterday I excitedly pointed to this io9 blog entry about vat-grown meat: “You see!” I told my partner. “You see! I was right. We are going to have vat-grown meat, in our lifetime !!!”
The “I was right” or “you were right” is the gold ring of our relationship. The ch-ching [...]
I hadn’t previously heard the word “googlegängers”, which the American Dialect Society deemed “most creative” word last year. But I love the concept, which Stephanie Rosenbloom explored in the NYT today. Apparently lots of people follow the lives and careers of people with the same names as themselves.
I missed, last night, what promised to be a great event at Iona College: JOYWAR: Intellectual Property and the Myth of Originality an Evening with Joy Garnett. The evening lecture followed a day-long symposium on Authors, Inventors, Imposters and Thieves: Perspectives on Intellectual Property, with a number of interesting talks, and it kicked off [...]
From my travels earlier this year:
I’m a fan of shadows and shadow photography.
what my cats want to blog about, apparently:
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it’s a long and sometimes cold winter.
this blog is taking a little break for real-world stuff
Last week, I was told that I have a “god-shaped hole in my heart.” … I think I’d prefer to phrase it as he has a god-shaped figment jammed crosswise in his brain.
P.Z. Myers, Pharyngula, 2006/10/27, “A godless ramble against the ditherings of theologians“
The last couple of years I’ve been pleased to see an outbreak [...]
So, tonight I was in a NYC restaurant with a dear friend, when I got a call from an unknown number in Boston. The unknown number turned out to be a library science professor at Simmons College, whom I have never met, and he wanted to know if I’ve lost my wallet. I found this [...]
questionable authority reviews a pro-’intelligent design theory’ entry that describes a future history of the fabulous medical and scientific breakthroughs generated by ‘intelligent design theory’ and the abandonment of ‘Darwinism’. While the whole post is highly recommended, it was one of the commentors who really tickled my fancy. Responding to the future history’s [...]
Up early for my spouse who caught a red-eye. Now she’s resting peacefully and I of course can’t get back to sleep. But that’s okay, because there’s the Internet!
Positive outcomes of BlogHer: Mary Hodder at Napsterization is establishing a Speakers’ Wiki.
In response to publisher anxieties & thinly-veiled threats of litigation, Google is [...]
Warning: Offensive generalizations follow. If you can’t handle anti-religious comment, or hyperbole, then please stop reading now.
I’d like to make an argument, only semi-playfully:
Devout religious faith renders one’s analytical and observational skills slightly suspect if not outright dubious.
People who are devoutly religious are accustomed to lying to themselves. They lie about reality, [...]
it’s the small things in life which we love - the small coincidences which create seemingly non-random structures.
for instance yesterday i was talking by IM to my sister c.h. - she casually referred to the fact that she drinks. i said, c.h., do you drink alcohol? i’m shocked, shocked. she didn’t know the reference, [...]
