I’ve been listening to Uptime/Downtime a lot again. Uptime is the half of it that I prefer, and I urge you to listen to it if you haven’t already. At the end of “Deeper Sand” and the start of “MKY Da HVN” is a sample of what sounds like a Christian evangelist. He mentions the line “the music is reversible, but time is not. Turn back”—which is a backmasked line from Electric Light Orchestra’s “Fire on High”.
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This is one of the better discussions on prejudice in geek culture that I’ve come across: “Courtney Stoker on Feminist Geek”. I like where Stoker is coming from—perhaps unsurprisingly, for like me she has an academic background in English literature and is also a science fiction fan. But she is far more community-oriented than I am; despite the fact that my geekery goes back decades and despite my involvement in something like Fantasy Bedtime Hour, my engagement with science fiction is primarily either private, or shared through meatspace discussion, or expressed on this blog. None of those things are involvement with large-scale communities such as those Stoker is discussing.
One of the reasons this particular interview with Stoker is important is that she sensibly addresses the influence of anti-geek prejudice on male geeks.
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I’m posting a link to this article primarily because the article agrees with me: “Male and female ability differences down to socialisation, not genetics”—I’ve believed for years that behavioral differences between genders (or between other sets of people, really) are due to cultural and social factors, not differences that are somehow “innate”. That article is a good summary of scientific findings that back up my belief.
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Sliding down a chute, beer in hand.
I don’t like that he’s facing felony charges. His actions are misdemeanors at worst. I hope he doesn’t get fines or jail time.
This article on manipulation of Digg stories doesn’t surprise me, but it’s definitely sad, and demonstrates the fragility of online forums (and, perhaps, democratic systems in general). I’m also interested by the dedication of those involved, and their determination to suppress opposing viewpoints—while, naturally, maintaining a sense of persecution.
Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that the ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional yesterday in San Francisco. The decision has been stayed pending appeal, so no same-sex marriages can go ahead for the moment, but it’s still a step forward.
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As a geek of my generation, I cannot help but find an eight-bit map of San Francisco (there are maps of other cities too) a wonderful thing. It became even cooler when I found out it was programmed in Python.
Apparently the recent Hollywood trend is to shade everything teal and orange. I hope it doesn’t now drive me nuts whenever I watch a movie.
These are arguably the most famous lines from Conan the Barbarian:
Khitan General: What is best in life?Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!
Random browsing recently led me to learn that this was inspired by the words of Genghis Khan.
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My friends Will Moffat and James Home, and their friend Peter Burns, created a site to highlight just how exposed your Facebook updates are: Openbook. It’s an interface to Facebook’s public search API, and the first thing you should probably do with it is search for a phrase from one of your recent status updates. If it shows up, change your privacy settings!
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I got an iPad for work on Friday, and have been playing around with it. I would not have bought one for myself, and have grave misgivings about the device, primarily due to its highly proprietary, locked-down, walled-garden approach.
That being said, I think it’s an extremely slick, well-designed device, and may represent the first steps towards a new phase in accessing computer and/or internet artifacts.
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I’m impressed and fascinated by this interview with Vincent Ocasla, who essentially “beat” Sim City 3000 as an art piece commenting on modern life, economics, and social engineering.
(I do think this counts as an art piece. While I think that video games can be art, no matter what Roger Ebert says, I also wonder about whether it means anything that they can be used to create art in this manner.)
This animated excerpt from a lecture by Dan Pink on the nature of motivation is absolutely worth watching:
A dating site for Apple fans only. I don’t think we need much more evidence that buying Apple products is status signalling much of the time. Maybe not always, but clearly it’s a big part of it. And I say this as someone who likes, and has, Apple laptops.
The thought of basing dating pools on brand allegiance makes me queasy. If it doesn’t make you queasy, I suspect that either you’re already way more cynical than I am, or you’re unaware of the degree to which you’ve been manipulated by advertising.
Slate has put together a tool that gives a very rough indication of a user’s political tendencies by checking which sites on a list the user has visited; each of the sites has a score based on readership by people with declared political affiliations.
It doesn’t actually read your browser history per se, instead just checking to see if you’ve visited the home pages of the sites on its list.
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I really hope that Ridley Scott does a good job on the prequel he’s making. Answering the questions about the background of Alien could be absolutely fantastic.
The problem with answering questions like that, though, is that plenty of viewers have created their own backstories, not in the fan-fiction sense but less consciously, assembling a structure that for them makes sense around the plot presented. Any prequel (or other expansion) runs into the issue of creating a larger milieu that fits around not just the original but also some reasonable number of the viewers’ imagined extrapolations.
Here’s hoping that Scott can do better than a certain other influential 1970s science fiction director…
“A Heavy’s 2fort Adventure”: Choose Your Own Adventure crossed with Team Fortress 2 crossed with YouTube.
I haven’t watched much of either the British or American versions of the show, but am nevertheless going to recommend three posts by Venkatesh Rao which use the American version to illuminate interesting aspects of office life:
Long, but definitely worth it.
While I don’t really believe in stupidity as an intrinsic characteristic, and while I’m skeptical of analyses of the world that place blame for ills on non-systemic causes, I still found Carlo M. Cipolla’s “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity” amusing and worth reading.
In summary, the five laws are:
While not a scientific study, this list of geek behaviors present during conversations strikes me as fairly useful both for “geeks” and “non-geeks”.
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Articles bewailing “these kids today” (or especially “these girls today”) seem disturbingly frequent at the moment, and it’s not clear to me whether there’s a real problem of some kind or it’s just pundits waxing wroth about the next generation Doing It All Wrong. I suspect it’s both: the sexual culture out there is problematic, although not necessarily for the reasons you hear about, and most of the pundits are really talking not to the next generation but to the next generation’s parents. This article by Rachel Simmons is an earnest but fairly typical example; this response by Kate Harding is worth reading. I don’t think Harding says anything revolutionary—she just says a lot of things that seem like common sense to me but which often get lost in the noise.
While reading over some of my morning pages from about ten years ago, I encountered a reference to Evan Mather’s short films, and had no idea who he was, what the films were, or why I might have liked them. It turns out that I was referring to his Kenner action figure Star Wars shorts, which he has up, along with other interesting things, on www.evanmather.com. Godzilla Versus Disco Lando is still just as bizarre as it was back then…