Miscellaneous

Weekend Reading, 9/23/11

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

Happy first day of fall, particularly for those of you who live in parts of the country where that is not merely a calendrical fact, but an existential one as well.

“Facebook Boldly Annexes the Web” by Ben Elowitz at All Things D: There are occasionally rumbling about Facebooks fall from grace, for example around the release of Google+ and whenever Facebook changes its layout, as it did a few days ago, or stumbles on privacy. Elowitz, however, believes Facebook is just getting started on the path to redefining the Web. (Beware, there is a good deal of hype to cut through.)

“Rethinking Chesterton” by Jay Parini in the The Chronicle of Higher Education: Nice piece on Chesterton, his wonder at life, good cheer, adroit mind, and enduring significance. As you may have noticed if you’ve been dropping in for awhile, you’ll have noticed that I think rather highly of Chesterton, and I keep good company in doing so.

“Tempest in an Inkpot” by Graham T. Beck in The Morning News: Another take on the (ir)relevance of cursive script. Good on the recent history of handwriting and its entanglement with technology all along the way. Seems to suggest that this entanglement means we ought not care too much about the eclipse of cursive, I tend to think the contrary is true. May write more about this at some point.

“The Unsung Sense: How Smell Rules Your Life” by Catherine de Lange at New Scientist: Interesting piece on our sense of smell, including its relation to memory. “Our sense of smell may even help us to pick up on the emotional state of those around us. This idea has been highly controversial …”

This isn’t exactly recent, but check out this older post on the 1939 World’s Fair for two video clips of General Motor’s Futurama exhibit complete with narration. The exhibit depicted the “wonder-world of 1960” as a grand, utopian vision of the future. Fascinating. “Man continually strives to replace the old with the new.”

Update: The World’s Fair videos linked above appear no longer to be available. Take a look at this Wired story from last year for the videos along with a number of color photographs from the event.

Welcome!

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

So it’s always fun to get Freshly Pressed on WordPress. It means a bunch of new visitors and often lively interaction.

So if you’re here because you saw my recent post on the WordPress home page, welcome! Glad to have you. Make yourself at home and take a look around. You can read about this blog and a little about me in the pages linked above.

Mostly what you’ll find here is my “thinking out loud” about technology and its impact on society, along with an assortment of reflections on other sundry topics as suggested by the categories to the right and the tag cloud.

If you like what you come across, right above the tag cloud to the right you can subscribe to the RSS feed or to receive new posts via email. And if you are on Twitter, you can find a link to follow @FrailestThing right below the Twitter Feed.

Once again, thanks for dropping in.

Cheers!

Additions to the Blogroll

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

Along with the updated look comes an updated blogroll. In no particular order, here are the additions:

Snarkmarket: Commentary on technology, culture, media, design, and more from (primarily) three very sharp guys: Tim Carmody, Robin Sloan, and Matt Thompson.

Aca/Fan: Henry Jenkins’ blog. Jenkins is a leading scholar of new media and popular culture.

Brainpickings: Curated by Maria Popova. I’m not sure how she has time for anything else, like eating and breathing for example, given the time she must spend finding all of the fascinating stuff that makes it onto the site each day.

Rod Dreher’s Blog: Dreher, the author of Crunchy-Cons, is a thoughtful voice on the Right. He speaks for a brand of conservatism that sits uneasily, if at all, within the Republican Party — a Wendell Berry style conservatism.

How to Be A Retronaut: Always interesting and sometimes fascinating assortment of objects from the past. Those with a nostalgic bent beware, you may get stuck on the site for longer than you would want to admit.

The Technium: Kevin Kelly’s blog. I’m not always on board with Kelly, one of the founding editors of Wired Magazine, but he is always stimulating and is worth reading on technology and culture.

The Immanent Frame: A scholarly site devoted to the sociology of religion and the public sphere.

The Chronicle of Higher Education: News about higher education with articles and essays from academics in a wide array of fields and disciplines.

Cyborgology: Site created by sociologists exploring the intersections of digital media and material culture. Frequently thought provoking.

The New Atlantis: Journal exploring technology and society, often, but not exclusively, from ethical and philosophical perspectives.

Also, note that Alan Jacobs is no longer posting on Text Patterns, but I’ll leave the link up there for now since one can still peruse the archive.

The “About This Blog” page has been updated as well.

Finally, feel free to leave feedback on the new look. It’s growing on me, but not set in stone yet.

Some Changes Coming to the Blog

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

I’ve not messed with the layout of this blog since its inception except for adding some widgets, such as the Twitter feed, to the sidebar. Perhaps against my better judgment, I’m planning on giving the blog an aesthetic overhaul in the coming days, mostly because I’ve gotten a bit bored with the template. So if you come to the site and things look quite different, do not be alarmed (not that you would’ve been, of course). I am planning on keeping the header photo, which, by the way, is a picture I took while walking around Cambridge, England a few years back. Once I settle on a new look, feel free to let me know what you think.

I’ll also be updating the blogroll and possibly reworking the Categories. Changes to the Categories, when last I made them a year or so ago, seemed to also cause some  weirdness with the RSS feed. Some posts appeared to have re-published for some reason when I recategorized them. So apologies in advance if anything of the sort happens this time around.

Cheers!

Weekend Reading, 9/16/2011

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

A little bit of politics, religion, parenting, plagiarism … you know, all the stuff you’re not supposed to talk about at the dinner table.  Plus one surprise for you at the end. Hope you have a lovely weekend.

“Pew’s Must See Picture of US Politics” by Rod Dreher at The American Conservative: Dreher provides an overview of the recently released Pew Center Political Typology Report, its first since 2005. Some interesting, counter-intuitive findings. Follow his link to the Pew page and you can take the survey to find out where you are in the Pew Typology.

“Varieties of irreligious experience” by Jonathan Rée in New Humanist: “The dividing lines between religiosity and secularism, or between belief and disenchantment, are not getting any clearer as time goes by, and if there has been a lot of traffic travelling from the camp of religion to the camp of disbelief in the past couple of centuries, it has followed many different paths, and is bound for many different destinations.” Well written piece in a Jamesian key on the subtleties of dis-belief in traditional religion.

“The Evolution of Data Products” by Mike Loukides at O’Reilly Radar: Helpful piece on the evolution and future trajectory of data and data products. “Data products are striving for the same goal: consumers don’t want to, or need to, be aware that they are using data. When we achieve that, when data products have the richness of data without calling attention to themselves as data, we’ll be ready for the next revolution.”

“What if the Secret to Success is Failure” by Paul Tough at the NY Times Magazine: Longish piece on efforts to instill character education in schools. “This push on tests is missing out on some serious parts of what it means to be a successful human.” “Our kids don’t put up with a lot of suffering. They don’t have a threshold for it. They’re protected against it quite a bit. And when they do get uncomfortable, we hear from their parents.”

“Uncreative Writing” by Kenneth Goldsmith at the The Chronicle of Higher Ed: Be warned, this piece may make you angry. Author argues the virtues of plagiarism claiming that writing must adjust to the conditions brought about by the computer, although there is a trajectory leading to this moment that pre-dates the computer. Some interesting points — it’s not a “crazy” piece — but my response is mixed.

And, last but not least, an impressive and surprising rendition of the national anthem from someone you wouldn’t have guessed could pull it off: watch it here.