November 2009
The 3 Phases of Owning a Computer
Phase 1: The Honeymoon
Your new computer is capable of anything including splitting the atom and producing baked goods.
Phase 2: The Comfortable Phase
Watching someone else use your computer is like watching a drunk orangutan solve a rubix cube.
Phase 3: Behold. The Dinosaur
Nothing works right. So you blame your computer for all life’s problems. Or, blame the person who made the OS!
...
Escaping The Black Hole Of The PhD Program
On social and humanitarian costs of grad school (mostly PhD programs):
Lives are warped because of the length and uncertainty of the doctoral education process. Many people drop in and drop out and then drop in again; a large proportion of students never finish; and some people have to retool at relatively advanced ages. Put in less personal terms, there is a huge social inefficiency in taking...
A Brief History Of Zombies
But there’s one major difference between Godzilla and the attack of the zombies: Godzilla fought scientists and the military (and maybe the occasional band of adorable children), but zombie battles usually are a person-to-ex-person struggle. While Godzilla swatted at planes and crushed tanks underfoot, zombies are done in by weapons such as shotguns, hand grenades and the ever-handy...
October 2009
“In America, A pedestrian is someone who has parked their car.”
– Tom Vandebilt (via ambivalence)
A Head-Shrinker Studies The Zombie Brain : NPR →
“Standards are like toothbrushes, everybody agrees you should have one, but no...”
– Joe Croser | Quotes on Design
What happens to the internet if there’s a viral... →
chrbutler:
The gist:
And what do you do if you’re stuck home from work or school under house quarantine? You fire up your computer and mess around on the internet (unless that’s just me), meaning a severe pandemic will cause a serious uptick in bandwidth demand, potentially slowing down essential infrastructure systems at the same time. [image by matthewjethall]
In a rare display of...
On not assuming students’ technical skills →
infoneernet:
When I started trying to integrate technology into my courses, I made two assumptions:
I have no formal training in the use of computer technology. Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned because it was something I needed or wanted to know, and I was willing to experiment as needed to figure it out. Due to my lack of training, I really don’t know much.
My students have had...
Anti-Swine Flu Propaganda, Or Why Not To Get... →
smackdown of the 300 days swine flu death chart featured around tumblr and chart porn (the black one with the red skull).
will someone please think of the children?
“It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one’s dignity, to...”
– William Somerset Maugham (via reluctantbuddha)
Imagined Communities: Rebecca Solnit’s Disaster...
Solnit’s thesis is that it’s safer to bank on people’s keeping it together in extreme circumstances than on their coming unglued — unless the people in question happen to be the power elite, that is. McKibben makes a special point of highlighting Solnit’s revelation that no disaster is quite so devastating as it is for the great and the good. The spontaneous cooperation which arises in emergency...
Liz: You are a suit. You feed off the creativity and hard work of other people and turn it into commercials, and, and pie charts, and triangle graphs.
Jack: What's a triangle graph?
Liz: ...I don't know, it sounded real.
“A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and...”
– Soren Kierkegaard (via chrbutler) (via notational)
Lewis Carroll’s Paradox of the Complete Map
‘That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr, “map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider thelargest map that would be really useful?”
“About six inches to the mile.”
“Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We...
WatchShareSomeCandy: henning lederer
“Helvetica is like a really good friend. You go off and hang with the other fonts...”
– Andrew Frigo | Quotes on Design
“Well, the computer changes epistemology, it changes the meaning of ‘to...”
– Gregory Chaitin (via chrbutler)
WatchVisualizing the Traffic Count Data for data.gov.uk - information aesthetics
