- 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: tabclosing
Slimming down my browser again.
- Warren Ellis’s information diet. The contents of his RSS reader.
- An article about the myths might one believe about science from movie representations. Notable for the passage:
Myth #4: Scientists follow the scientific method as it was taught in high school: Observation, Question, Research, Hypothesis, Experiment, Conclusion Truth: In reality, the way scientists work is more like: Fiddle Around, Find Something Weird, Retest It, It Doesn’t Happen a Second Time, Get Distracted Trying to Make It Happen Again, Go to Chipotle, Recall the Original Purpose of Your Research, Start Over, Apply for Funding for a Better Instrument, Publish Some Interim Fluff, Learn That Someone Has Scooped You, Take Your Lab in a New Direction, Apply for Funding for the New Direction, Collaborate With an Icelandic Poet, Eat Chipotle With an Icelandic Poet, Co-Write Scientifically Accurate Ode to Walrus, Get Interested in Something Unrelated, Apply for Funding for Something Unrelated, Notice That 20 Years Have Passed.
- Sculpture: a beached whale in the forest of Argentina.
- Real life: the loneliest whale in the world.
- Is a baby conceived after the father’s death a survivor? NPR article on the relationship between fertility technology and tax law. Potentially relevant for a story I’m writing.
- An infographic of common logical and rhetorical fallacies.
- Matt Might’s thoughts on productivity for academics.
- David Alexander Smith’s checklist for critiquing science fiction. I’m considering writing a critique checklist for my fiction writing students next year. This one is a fairly reasonable list of basic things to consider when reading critically.
- A wonderful interactive demonstration of the scale of things in the universe.
- An article from The Verge on the Altaeros inflatable wind turbine. More story research. Here’s a video clip:
- On Robert Krulwich’s NPR blog, a post about the shape of stories as drawn by Kurt Vonnegut. Includes one of my favorite science cartoons ever.
- The Genderfloomp Reading List. I won a copy of Whipping Girl as my prize for being Best Dressed. I’ve only read the introduction so far, but it looks very good.
- Qik.com. This is ostensibly as service for real-time uploading of video from a cellphone to the internet. I need to look into it more. The potential implications for citizen journalism, esp. in repressive legal cultures, are huge.
- Obituary for Felix Zandman.
- “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant.” Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas reveals that he is in the United States illegally, and what this has meant for his life and career. An excellent example of why the Dream Act would benefit the nation.
- “Michele Bachmann’s Holy War.” Matt Taibbi’s profile of this election’s craziest serious candidate.
- A public art installation consisting of a topographically interesting basketball court. I would like to see this turned into an all-star game event.
- “A Person Paper on Purity in Language.” Douglas Hofstadter skewering people who argue that there is nothing sexist about the English language.
- Finally, a video I liked:
PAC-MAN HIGHWAY – Level 1 (gameplay) from NotWorkingFilms on Vimeo.
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.)
Time to close some tabs.
- Popcorn Fiction — prose fiction written by screenwriters.
- Mosquitoes as a vaccine delivery system.
- Can you eat a mermaid? For some, this depends on their halal status. Islamic scriptural precedents are divided on the subject.
- Terry Pratchett writes a compelling and heartbreaking essay about why assisted suicide should be legal.
- Atomic Rockets — a comprehensive overview of the subject, with a lot of discussion of Bussard ramjets.
- SUSEstudio — a roll-your-own Linux distro interface.
- Table of contents for the upcoming anthology The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF, which seems to exemplify the editorial philosophy that a necessary tool for truly effective mindblowing is a white penis.
Sally Wister’s Journal — M. T. Anderson recommends this Civil War era journal in an interview, saying it was one of the more interesting things he read doing research for Octavian Nothing. He claims that if Wister had ever turned her hand to fiction, she would have been one of the great American novelists.
The Quiet Coup — article in The Atlantic in which Simon Johnson, former economist with the International Monetary Fund, explains exactly how the IMF would be treating the United States if it were any other country.
Fear and the Availability Heuristic — post on Bruce Schneier’s blog about the non-rational basis of most human risk assessment.
360 Degree Character Reviews — John Rogers talks about some interesting exercises a writer can use to get to know his or her characters.
Join or Die — artist Justine Lai’s series of paintings of herself having sex with the presidents of the United States.
BOINC — Open source software to donate unused processor cycles to many scientific projects. I’ve donated mine to the World Community Grid.