the faceblog
You are currently browsing articles tagged Speculation.
Chicken of the Sea – New York Times:
“Why take any risk?†they ask. The medical establishment and the culture at large have twisted logic around to the point where any risk, no matter how infinitesimal, is too much. So powerful is this Puritanical impulse that, once a health objection is raised, however irrational the recommended behavior, it’s considered irresponsible to behave any other way.
This is what I’m talking about:
The most inspiring thing I saw all day. This is why I do what I do:
Captivating and provocative.
(Via The Long Tail.)
The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is the most widely read of the five Chinese Classics. The book was traditionally written by the legendary Chinese Emperor Fu Hsi (2953-2838 B.C.). It is possible that the the I Ching originated from a prehistoric divination technique which dates back as far as 5000 B.C. Thus it may be the oldest text at this site. Futher commentaries were added by King Wen and the Duke of Chou in the eleventh century B.C.
Being well-respected within one’s area of specialist concern is not quite the same as being able to hold one’s own in what the maverick American cultural theorist Kenneth Burke called “the parlor.â€
Here’s how Burke explained the image, back in 1941:
“Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.â€
The ability to orient oneself in that sort of free-for-all requires a kind of discursive finesse that probably cannot be certified (let alone quantified). For that matter, there is no particular reason to equate success in this endeavor with reaching a vast audience. For some topics, 15 people is a lot. Just this morning, for example, I saw a blog post that started by asking, “What is the future of phenomenological geography, and why is this question even important?â€
Well, it’s a big parlor. It contains multitudes. And even if some administrators fail to grasp the fact, the existence of such a space provides a necessary — if at wildly unregulated — supplement to the standard venues of publication and formal scholarly gathering. Whenever the phenomenological geographers do get together face-to-face, for example, it has to make some difference that they have already had a chance to talk in a forum that is also potentially open to objections from structuralist geographers who don’t wish them well. (Please consider that a hypothetical: I don’t actually know if there is such a rumble now underway.)
I saw a reference to this over at Dave’s Scripting News
Make sure that you scroll down beyond the camera lists to see the charts.
These graphs show the number of Flickr members who have uploaded at least one photo with a particular camera on a given day over the last year.
What a wonderful example of doing something interesting with unintended data. They mine the images and use it to create useful information for consumers, and probably producers as well.
I wonder if they sell custom intelligence to the camera makers?
An Avatar Is Born – Electronic House Magazine
What can you expect from an Electronic House Home of the Year grand prize winner? For starters, it has to be a great house—one whose occupants don’t like leaving and always look forward to returning. It must have innovative home technology.
Forward Looking Statements: More on Haystack
Haystack powers allyoucanupload and will soon power all of Webshots (Webshots is a photo sharing community with 19,000,000 members who have uploaded over 375,000,000 photos). Allyoucanupload is an image hosting service that we built to run alongside Webshots.
by way of Scripting News
I went to look at both allyoucanupload and Webshots.
So how far does my picture actually travel?
Click here to actually see some detail ;-)
When would I decide to “throw” my picture into the cloud? The only reference that I have is the URL I get back. I already “lost” a couple of GIF files into the object store.
Interesting.
Dealing_with_Darwin: Top Ten Truths About the Digital Ecosystem
8. There is no place to hide.
A Relational Database as the File System?
In the immortal words of nobody I know, “Give me a large enough database, and I can store the world.”
- Chris’s Post-Game Analysis
- None dare call it: Empire. I was biting my tongue through most of that gab, but I can’t go home without saying that most of it — till Josh Marshall showed up — missed the obvious points (like the Iraq fiasco) as I think most thinking Americans understand them. We have staggered into our own version of Late Rome: absurdly expensive bullying adventures abroad, cruel social division and decadence at home.
…
Pat Buchanan knows what’s happening. Susan Sontag knew, too. And their common-sense analyses from right and left agreed quite precisely, as I blogged last year during Little Caesar’s convention. See: The Issue is Empire.
(Via Open Source.)
daily wisdom