From Steve Paulson’s interview with Robert Wright, “God, He’s moody” (Salon: 24 June 2009):
Do you think religions share certain core principles?
Not many. People in the modern world, certainly in America, think of religion as being largely about prescribing moral behavior. But religion wasn’t originally about that at all. To judge by hunter-gatherer religions, religion was [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, history, language & literature, religion, science | No Comments »
From Larry McCaffery’s “Conversation with David Foster Wallace” (Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois: Summer 1993):
Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of [...]
Posted on May 23rd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, language & literature, on writing | No Comments »
From David Foster Wallace’s “David Lynch Keeps His Head” (Premier: September 1996):
AN ACADEMIC DEFINITION of Lynchian might be that the term “refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.” But like postmodern or [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, language & literature, weird | No Comments »
From danah boyd’s “Social Media is Here to Stay… Now What?” at the Microsoft Research Tech Fest, Redmond, Washington (danah: 26 February 2009):
Social media is the latest buzzword in a long line of buzzwords. It is often used to describe the collection of software that enables individuals and communities to gather, communicate, share, and in [...]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, social software, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From Mark Danner’s “Words in a Time of War: Taking the Measure of the First Rhetoric-Major President” (Tomgram: 10 May 2007):
[Note: This commencement address was given to graduates of the Department of Rhetoric at Zellerbach Hall, University of California, Berkeley, on May 10, 2007]
…
I give you my favorite quotation from the Bush administration, put [...]
Posted on February 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, language & literature, politics | No Comments »
From Darryl K. Taft’s “Predictions for the Cloud in 2009” (eWeek: 29 December 2008):
[Peter] Coffee, who is now director of platform research at Salesforce.com, said, “I’m currently using a simple reference model for what a ‘cloud computing’ initiative should try to provide. I’m borrowing from the famous Zero-One-Infinity rule, canonically defined in The Jargon File…”
He [...]
Posted on January 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, technology | No Comments »
From Jeffrey Goldberg’s “The Things He Carried” (The Atlantic: November 2008):
Because the TSA’s security regimen seems to be mainly thing-based—most of its 44,500 airport officers are assigned to truffle through carry-on bags for things like guns, bombs, three-ounce tubes of anthrax, Crest toothpaste, nail clippers, Snapple, and so on—I focused my efforts on bringing bad [...]
Posted on December 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, law, security, tech in changing society | No Comments »
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Posted on November 30th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: education, history, language & literature, religion | Enter your password to view comments
From Richard Stallman’s “Transcript of Richard Stallman at the 4th international GPLv3 conference; 23rd August 2006” (FSF Europe: 23 August 2006):
Specifically, this refers to four essential freedoms, which are the definition of Free Software.
Freedom zero is the freedom to run the program, as you wish, for any purpose.
Freedom one is the freedom to study the [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, education, politics, science, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From Bruce Sterling’s “Viridian Note 00459: Emerging Technology 2006” (The Viridian Design Movement: March 2006):
Here’s another contender from Julian Bleecker …
“Blogjects” – objects which emit data about their use.
Related posts
Word of the day: lucubration
Word of the day: cunctative
Word of the day: creative destruction
Word of the day: aposiopesis
Wikipedia, freedom, & changes in production
Posted on August 20th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, social software, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From Bruce Sterling’s “Viridian Note 00459: Emerging Technology 2006” (The Viridian Design Movement: March 2006):
Here we’ve got the canonical Tim O’Reilly definition of Web 2.0:
“Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a [...]
Posted on August 20th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, social software, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From Wikipedia’s “Creative destruction” (13 July 2006):
Creative destruction, introduced by the economist Joseph Schumpeter, describes the process of industrial transformation that accompanies radical innovation. In Schumpeter’s vision of capitalism, innovative entry by entrepreneurs was the force that sustained long-term economic growth, even as it destroyed the value of established companies that enjoyed some degree of [...]
Posted on August 2nd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, language & literature, word of the day | Comments Off
From Tim Bray’s “On Search: Squirmy Words” (29 June 2003):
First of all, the words that have the most variation in meaning and the most collisions with other words are the common ones. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the three words with the longest entries (i.e. largest number of meanings) are “set,†“run,†and “get.â€Â
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Word [...]
Posted on July 31st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, language & literature | Comments Off
From Cait Murphy’s “Secrets of greatness: How I work” (Fortune: 16 March 2006):
Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Renault (France) and Nissan (Japan):
Stress builds up when you know there is a problem but you do not clearly see it, and you do not have a solution.
Related posts
Word of the day: lucubration
Word of the day: cunctative
Word of the [...]
Posted on July 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, language & literature | Comments Off
From Tim Bray’s “On the Goodness of Unicode” (6 April 2003):
Unicode proper is a consortium of technology vendors that, many years ago in a flash of intelligence and public-spiritedness, decided to unify their work with that going on at the ISO. Thus, while there are officially two standards you should care about, Unicode and ISO [...]
Posted on July 6th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: tech help, technology | Comments Off
From Wikipedia’s “Fascism” (5 July 2006):
Fascism is a radical totalitarian political philosophy that combines elements of corporatism, authoritarianism, extreme nationalism, militarism, anti-rationalism, anti-anarchism, anti-communism and anti-liberalism. …
A recent definition that has attracted much favorable comment is that by Robert O. Paxton:
“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics | Comments Off
From Ann Harrison’s Onion Routing Averts Prying Eyes (Wired News: 5 August 2004):
Computer programmers are modifying a communications system, originally developed by the U.S. Naval Research Lab, to help Internet users surf the Web anonymously and shield their online activities from corporate or government eyes.
The system is based on a concept called onion routing. It [...]
Posted on June 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: security, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From Samuel T. King, Peter M. Chen, Yi-Min Wang, Chad Verbowski, Helen J. Wang, & Jacob R. Lorch’s “SubVirt: Implementing malware with virtual machines
” [PDF] (: ):
A virtual-machine monitor (VMM) manages the resources of the underlying hardware and provides an abstraction of one or more virtual machines [20]. Each virtual machine can run a complete [...]
Posted on June 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: science, security, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From Andrés Duany’s “Classic Urbanism“:
From time to time there appears a concept of exceptional longevity. In architecture, the pre-eminent instance is the Vitruvian triad of Comoditas, Utilitas, e Venustas. This Roman epigram was propelled into immortality by Lord Burlington’s felicitous translation as Commodity, Firmness and Delight.
It has thus passed down the centuries and remains authoritative, [...]
Posted on June 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, commonplace book, history, science | Comments Off
From “Good Architecture“:
This has a similarity to the ISO 9126 definition of software quality:
Portability
Efficiency
Reliability
Functionality
Usability
Maintainability
Related posts
When to use XML
What is Web 2.0?
Vitruvian Triad terminology
The Vitruvian Triad & the Urban Triad
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Posted on June 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
