Sometimes I feel like I’m walking in a wide corridor, filled with other people, except they’re all heading in the other direction, and I can’t figure out why. Example: this slashdotted piece on DrunkenBlog, which touches on various Digital Rights Management issues, but especially the idea of the ...
I read a piece a while ago, but can’t remember where (hey, I’m super-informative, aren’t I?), which bemoaned the fact that most web-browser users actually use them in ways that the designers scarcely intended, and also make use of very very few of the features that would help them to get results that are ...
It’s only a couple of years since Attack of the Clones pushed digital film projection into the mainstream, but I don’t think it’ll be too much longer before it starts to take over, and it can’t come too fast for me. A. and I have been used recently to seeing films at The Arclight in ...
Don’t tell me that science can’t be moving, and beautiful. Don’t tell me that truly understanding something is any less inspiring than marvelling ignorantly at its prettiness, never mind any less than the wishful myths that humans use as security blankets against the darkness of not knowing. Francis Crick ...
One day in French class at school, I was given a sentence to translate that entirely baffled me. Unlike one of my Latin teachers, who would choose translators pseudo-randomly, which allowed him the freedom to give me the thorniest sentence in the piece (which he typically did, the bastard), the French teacher would simply ...
Jumpsuit G. Oversells’s hero is the great Richard Simmons — he’d at least love to be as butch as Richard — but for the moment his domain is middle-of-the-night infomercials, in which he impresses the Botox off of his co-host, Cindy Ex-Actress, while working up a sweat to KC and the Sunshine Band. He’s a ...
Via Gloria Brame, who gives good blog, this bit of silliness from (of all things) The Sun, reheated by Ananova. It’s probably nonsense, but it has a small whiff of plausibility about it. Are You Being Served isn’t remembered all that fondly in Britain – it was dated long before it ended, and operated on ...
I’ve been having fun watching the videos from the 2004 ACLU Membership Conference, which are available here. The Gala Dinner, ‘America at a Crossroads’, in particular has some great stuff. After Sandra Tsing Loh [Sweet Chariot] and John Sayles, Seymour Hersh wanders on and, in his low-key, self-effacing ...
I found lots of good crunchy fibre in this piece by Tom Coates, What you should know before starting a doctorate. Having given up a PhD myself too, I empathised with a lot of the feelings of conflict, depression, failure, burning-out. I can’t speak too much for the argument that doctoral students consider their path ...
If it has to be endured, the least one should expect from spam is that it be entertaining. I’m kinda tickled by the recent rush of spam appearing to come from people with names apparently dragged from some random generator, yet which capture something. It’s probably just me seeing pattern where there is none, ...