Month: July 2003

All the articles I’m reading today… well, most of them

Civil Liberties After 9/11 by Robert H. Bork
The White Man Unburdened By Norman Mailer
Alchemist at large
Saddam ‘alive and well in Iraq’
Talking Points Memo by Josh Micah Marshall
White House admits Bush lied about Iraqi Nukes
Missing Weapons Of Mass Destruction: Is Lying About The Reason For War An Impeachable Offense? By JOHN W. DEAN
The president’s real goal in Iraq by Jay Bookman
A rose is a rose is a rose. Josh Marshall.

This is mostly separating the wheat from the chaff, as per Chaucer’s Summoner’s suggestion… Personally, I like the essay about the molecular physicist the best. Even though I don’t understand the science of it one bit.

This just blows my mind: “Tinkering with the crystal structure of carbon atoms in his head, he thought about ways to arrange them in even closer proximity?a key to what makes diamonds so hard. In the process, he came up with carbon nitride, a new class of superhard solids.” (Emphasis mine)

whoopsyduckydoo!

cornucopiae of duckishtness. yabble. orlean described the woncer like the sacky thing it was, and when those tomatters grind between the teeth,, pulsh! goes that tomarrer jooce. ick. but the taste isn’t so, as it were, so so.

yertru had cukes and tommarters in a solid (fist raised) with vinny and a sour beet green, etc. homever, a groce of turkeys keep……

feeling brane slipping further, gripping..?

(i)

Discourse on social software and group moderation

Clay Shirky’s chat about social software and group dynamics.
The way people behave seems so obvious once people set it down on paper or what have you, but it doesn’t seem like people are aware of it much.

For example:
You are at a party, and you get bored. You say “This isn’t doing it for me anymore. I’d rather be someplace else. I’d rather be home asleep. The people I wanted to talk to aren’t here.” Whatever. The party fails to meet some threshold of interest. And then a really remarkable thing happens: You don’t leave. You make a decision “I don’t like this.” If you were in a bookstore and you said “I’m done,” you’d walk out. If you were in a coffee shop and said “This is boring,” you’d walk out.

You’re sitting at a party, you decide “I don’t like this; I don’t want to be here.” And then you don’t leave. That kind of social stickiness is what Bion is talking about.

And then, another really remarkable thing happens. Twenty minutes later, one person stands up and gets their coat, and what happens? Suddenly everyone is getting their coats on, all at the same time. Which means that everyone had decided that the party was not for them, and no one had done anything about it, until finally this triggering event let the air out of the group, and everyone kind of felt okay about leaving.

Also, some neat stuff about reputation and the effects of group moderation (or lack thereof). Check it out.

all the nails in heaven

this, in spite of calumny (or that spice of life, whatsit?) do all things hinge upon the classified or secretive documents of such and such or so and so. and who knows how many file drawers of drearily tedious materiel hide one sharp nugget of deadly earnest? (?can?t find examples? they?re all hidden away?)

my flesh is sunbaked and flaking(soon?) ? will it all blow away in a puff of dried skin? or will the submerged microscopickals do their duty and patch things all together? just because it?s happened before??

my inner brain?s all like ?gotcha!? and i wake up with only a dim glimmering of what?s just past? or even that anything?s just past. and where?d all that stuff go anyway? i?m remembering that everyone has a story and that everyone has a point of view and i?m thinking that 6,302,681,232 is an awfully big number (and i?m even wondering how they even get that number exactly: i mean, don?t they want to round up or something?) and i?m trying to get my brain folded round the idea that everyone single digit of that number represents a personal subconscious dream-memory narrative that they might (or might not) forget upon awaking and not-to-mention all the errata and detritus roiling around in all those heads (and not to mention all those millions of hairs on all those heads)?.

wow?