Ramblings & ephemera
From Nicholas Carr’s “Sivilized” (Rough Type: 27 June 2009):
Michael Chabon, in an elegiac essay in the new edition of the New York Review of Books, rues the loss of the “Wilderness of Childhood” – the unparented, unfenced, only partially mapped territory that was once the scene of youth.
…
Huck Finn, now fully under the thumb [...]
Posted on July 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Larry McCaffery’s “Conversation with David Foster Wallace” (Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois: Summer 1993):
Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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photo credit: State Library of New South Wales collection
From Peter Stark’s “As Freezing Persons Recollect the Snow–First Chill–Then Stupor–Then the Letting Go” (Outside: January 1997):
There is no precise core temperature at which the human body perishes from cold. At Dachau’s cold-water immersion baths, Nazi doctors calculated death to arrive at around 77 degrees Fahrenheit. [...]
Posted on June 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Larry McCaffery’s “Conversation with David Foster Wallace” (Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois: Summer 1993):
Rock music itself bores me, usually. The phenomenon of rock interests me, though, because its birth was part of the rise of popular media, which completely changed the ways the U.S. was unified and split. The mass media [...]
Posted on May 23rd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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photo credit: 917press
From Christopher Fahey’s “Who Watches the Watchman?” (GraphPaper: 2 May 2009):
The Detex Newman watchclock was first introduced in 1927 and is still in wide use today.
&hellip What could you possibly do in 1900 to be absolutely sure a night watchman was making his full patrol?
An elegant solution, designed and patented in 1901 [...]
Posted on May 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Roger Ebert’s “Go gentle into that good night” (Roger Ebert’s Journal: 2 May 2009):
What I expect will most probably happen [when I die] is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function, and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. Perhaps I [...]
Posted on May 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Roger Ebert’s “Go gentle into that good night” (Roger Ebert’s Journal: 2 May 2009):
And there is Shakespeare, who came as close as any man to immortality. In my plans for life after death, I say, again with Whitman:
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again [...]
Posted on May 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Errol Morris’ “Whose Father Was He? (Part Five)” (The New York Times: 2 April 2009):
I had an opportunity to visit the fossil collections at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana. It was part of a dinosaur fossil-hunting trip with Jack Horner, the premier hunter of T-Rex skeletons. Downstairs in the lab, there [...]
Posted on April 26th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Philip Larkin’s “Aubade“:
I work all day, and get half drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Steven Weinberg’s “Without God” (The New York Review of Books: 25 September 2008):
But if the direct conflict between scientific knowledge and specific religious beliefs has not been so important in itself, there are at least four sources of tension between science and religion that have been important.
The first source of tension arises from the [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From danah boyd’s “Social Media is Here to Stay… Now What?” at the Microsoft Research Tech Fest, Redmond, Washington (danah: 26 February 2009):
Certain properties are core to social media in a combination that alters how people engage with one another. I want to discuss five properties of social media and three dynamics. These are the [...]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “Security in Ten Years” (Crypto-Gram: 15 December 2007):
Bruce Schneier: … The nature of the attacks will be different: the targets, tactics and results. Security is both a trade-off and an arms race, a balance between attacker and defender, and changes in technology upset that balance. Technology might make one particular tactic more [...]
Posted on February 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, law, security, technology | No Comments »
Image by rsgranne via Flickr
Image by rsgranne via Flickr
Image by rsgranne via Flickr
From Dave Alan’s “Interview with Alex Christopher” (Leading Edge Research Group: 1 June 1996):
Legend: DA [Dave Alan, Host] AC: [Alex Christopher] C: [Caller]
…
(Note: according to former British Intelligence agent Dr. John Coleman, the London-based Wicca Mason lodges are one-third of the overall global [...]
Posted on December 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Jonah Lehrer’s “Hell is a Perfect Memory” (The Frontal Cortex: 2 December 2008):
This isn’t the first case report of a person with perfect memory. In the masterful The Mind of A Mnemonist, the Soviet neurologist A.R. Luria documented the story of a Russian newspaper reporter, D.C. Shereshevskii, who was incapable of forgetting. For example, [...]
Posted on December 4th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Samiha Shafy’s “An Infinite Loop in the Brain” (Der Spiegel: 21 November 2008):
Price can rattle off, without hesitation, what she saw and heard on almost any given date. She remembers many early childhood experiences and most of the days between the ages of 9 and 15. After that, there are virtually no gaps in [...]
Posted on December 4th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Clay Shirky’s “The Siren Song of Luddism” (Britannica Blog: 19 June 2007):
…any technology that fixes a problem … threatens the people who profit from the previous inefficiency. However, Gorman omits mentioning the Luddite response: an attempt to halt the spread of mechanical looms which, though beneficial to the general populace, threatened the livelihoods of [...]
Posted on November 27th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Declan McCullagh’s “E-voting predicament: Not-so-secret ballots” (CNET News: 20 August 2007):
Two Ohio activists have discovered that e-voting machines made by Election Systems and Software and used across the country produce time-stamped paper trails that permit the reconstruction of an election’s results — including allowing voter names to be matched to their actual votes.
…
Ohio [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Malcolm Gladwell’s “A gift or hard graft?” (The Guardian: 15 November 2008):
This idea – that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice – surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: [...]
Posted on November 15th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Sterling’s “Viridian Note 00459: Emerging Technology 2006” (The Viridian Design Movement: March 2006):
When it comes to remote technical eventualities, you don’t want to freeze the language too early. Instead, you need some empirical evidence on the ground, some working prototypes, something commercial, governmental, academic or military…. Otherwise you are trying to freeze an [...]
Posted on December 10th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Peter Norvig’s “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years” (2001):
Researchers ([John R. Hayes, Complete Problem Solver (Lawrence Erlbaum) 1989.], [Benjamin Bloom (ed.), Developing Talent in Young People (Ballantine) 1985.]) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, painting, piano playing, [...]
Posted on September 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, commonplace book, education, teaching, technology | Comments Off
