- Blog
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If I Had a Dollar
If I had a dollar for every time someone complained about wage discrimination against women, I’d be a millionaire. Unless I were a woman, in which case I’d have $770,000.
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I Need to Listen a Little More Slowly
Stephen Fry, with a hat tip to Kylie Sturgess: A concerto is an argument between an individual and the state. Between an individual and society. It is an individual voice crying out and trying to make a statement of some kind. And it’s often drowned out by the orchestra, and it fights back. And the…
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You Are Your Own Paywall
I am highly wary of anyone who would write a book entitled You Are Not a Gadget; oh here we go, a Luddite screed about how Goog-Face-Pads are making us lonely/stupid/lazy. So it was with trepidation that I delved into a lengthy interview at The Edge from last year with Jaron Lanier on what the…
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This Isn’t What I Wanted, But I’ll Take It
It’s a long story, so I won’t bore you with it, but suffice it to say, I wanted to spread my own bloggy wings and fly out of the nest so generously provided me by Dawnne. I thought Squarespace would be able to handle this simple move from one platform to theirs, but they botched…
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Science Can Be Even More Awesome When Everything is Wrong
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory just figured out that gamma bursts have nothing to do with cosmic rays, and that means no one knows where they come from. Via io9: …the telescope was able to conclusively contradict 15 years worth of previous predictions while still under construction, and now it’s pretty much demolished one of the…
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End the Tweaking
Advice I could stand to take, from Rob Beschizza, editor of BoingBoing: Getting snared by technology-tweaking, especially design, is the fastest and easiest way to waste time to no good end as an indie blogger type. There’s only one thing that brings in readers, and marketing people call it “content”. Writing. Artwork. Games. Whatever it is…
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Formed by Boredom
This worries me a little (by Toby Litt in Granta): A couple of years ago, I spent three months playing World of Warcraft – partly as research for a short story I was writing, mostly because I became addicted to it. This convinced me of one thing: If the computer games which exist now had existed back in…
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Toby Sez
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Don’t Get in a Car with an Atheist!
Spotted on Indeed.com, a “job listing” from a Texas mother looking for someone to help her transport her teenage daughters to school and activities, emphasis mine: I am a mother who is 38 years old, I am a teacher in Tomball ISD, my husband is American and I am Mexican. I need to find a…
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The Veracity and the Vicissitude of Mike Daisey
Listening tonight to the nearly-unbearable “Retraction” edition of “This American Life” in which Mike Daisey is taken to task for his fabrication of details about his experiences in China, I kept waiting for Daisey to more effectively counter the assertion by Ira Glass that people who come to see a monologue expect that every word of it…
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Oh, That’s Why People Like Tablets So Damn Much!
The so-called post-PC revolution came to my house. This has been my first weekend off in a couple of weeks, and though I’ve been browsing the Web, tweeting, and now blogging, I didn’t even turn on my computer yesterday, and if you know me at all, you know that the only reason this could be…
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Suggesting People into Loving Their Servitude
Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.…
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Cutting and Bleeding the Sick
Architecture professor Thomas De Monchaux, in a piece that has almost nothing to do with economic policy, helps to clarify thinking about the concept of austerity: Economically, austerity — which the Germans, among others, are intent on forcing upon their southern brethren — can sound like a good idea, but might actually exacerbate the conditions it ostensibly…
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The Age of Wonder: Science as a Means to Emancipation
Richard Holmes’ 2009 tome is aptly titled. It’s a wonder, and it takes an age to read it. Right. I wanted to get that out of the way, as the fact of its lengthiness weighs on me as I consider penning a reaction to its substance. It feels really long. But, as with many efforts,…
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