- Algorithmic Rape Jokes in the Library of Babel – Tim Maly’s ruminations on the intersections between ethics, art, and algorithms in the aftermath of company selling algorithmically generated t-shirts on Amazon that said “Keep Calm and Rape A Lot.”
- Eight writing manuals that are not a waste of time – the ones of these I’ve already read I liked, so I plan to check out the rest.
- Visceral Apps and You – this is largely a love letter to iOS UX design that the author likes, but I think it’s pointing at some ways that the metaphor of physically manipulating software artifacts with one’s hands is experientially different in ways worth thinking about.
- Saturn’s Rings are Raining Water
- New images of the center of the hexagonal storm over Saturn’s north pole.
- OMNI Magazine – The entire run of OMNI is now free on the internet archive. Some day I am going to take some time out and gorge on this.
- How to Build an Artificial Womb – Lots here I’d never considered before.
- Predictions from 1911 of what 2011 would be like.
- Bizarre NSFW pictures of naked women with fish. (Russian site.)
- Bargain (Ten Thousand Dollars) – Nina Paley made a quilt that is also a thought experiment about art collection and speculation.
- 12 Resolutions for Grad Students – Matt Might’s summer advice to grad students, of interest to me in the summer I’ve stopped being one.
Tag: astronomy
Time to thin out my browser window.
- I keep meaning to find time to watch Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s presentation on OpenLeaks, his proposed Wikileaks offshoot project.
- Franklin Veaux (who writes a lot about polyamory and BDSM at his site) has made a fascinating map of nonmonogamy. I found this via Dr. Marty Klein’s excellent blog, Sexual Intelligence.
- There is a storm on Saturn the size of a planet. And it was discovered by amateur astronomers!
- Matthew Squair on the affect heuristic. I need to think about this more, as I think it may have implications for Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory. (Also interesting is Haidt’s essay Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion and the responses to it. For the record, while I am not knowledgeable enough about evolutionary biology to have an opinion on group selection, my thinking is most in line with the commentary by P. Z. Meyers. Also, after reading Sam Harris’s recent book The Moral Landscape, I think there is some truth to Haidt’s criticism that Harris’s prose is frequently more flash than substance.)
- “Chiasmus” is one of those words whose meaning I can never reliably remember. Maybe if I put it here it will stick.
- Via Jen Volant, the Declutter-365 Project.
- Finally, I don’t want this to become one of those things that so outrageous and hard to believe that I forget that it really did happen: the Pope explained over Christmas that the clerical sex abuse scandal is really a matter of context, and that “[i]n the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children.” It’s comments like these which inspired Tim Minchin to write a song in his honor. (Warning: contains enthusiastic profanity.)
