August 2011
2 posts
“The debt crisis confronting the Obama administration is the product of war and...”
– Corey Robin · The War on Tax: Downgrading Obama · LRB 25 August 2011
1 tag
July 2011
1 post
June 2011
1 post
This column will change your life: The final...
The mapmaker in our neurons favours the category over actual proximity. via readability.com Posted via email from Amy’s posterous | Comment »
April 2011
1 post
March 2011
7 posts
Watson vs. Humans: Score One for Congress
Still, Mr. Holt scored a minor triumph for the often-castigated political class. “I think more of Congress just hearing about it,” said Tom M. Mitchell, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and an artificial intelligence expert. via bits.blogs.nytimes.com Posted via email from Amy’s posterous | Comment »
February 2011
5 posts
"Confessions of a Juggler" by Tina Fey
I have a suspicion - and hear me out, because this is a rough one - that the definition of “crazy” in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore. via readability.com Posted via email from Amy’s posterous | Comment »
A Literary Beer Run | Readability Blog
What we need is some guy willing to say “everyone gimme five bucks and I’ll get lots of beer and it’ll all work out for everyone.” That guy is Readability. via blog.readability.com Posted via email from Amy’s posterous | Comment »
December 2010
2 posts
Why I like vicious, anonymous online comments
And yet anonymous comments — all of them, even the written equivalent of high-speed drive-by shootings — serve a useful function. They show us what the species is really like: the full spectrum of human behavior, not just the part that we find reassuring and enlightening. It’s impossible for anyone who reads unmoderated comments threads on large websites to argue that...
“What are the differences between Mark Zuckerberg and me? I give private...”
– Julian Assange on SNL (via kateoplis)
November 2010
4 posts
“I’m glad I did it, partly because it was worth it, but mostly because I shall...”
– Mark Twain (via bitchville)
Cindy's Take on Tech» Blog Archive » An Open...
Come to think of it, the last time that a woman was featured on your cover, because she was being featured in the magazine for an actual accomplishment, was way back in 1996 via tech.cindyroyal.net Posted via email from Amy’s posterous | Comment »
October 2010
1 post
“The most important step in dealing with our energy crisis is to realize just how...”
– Robert Jensen (via abcsoupdot)
August 2010
2 posts
The Atlantic :: Magazine :: Host
…stony Mesoamerican features, and the placid, grandmotherly eyes common to giant mammals everywhere.via theatlantic.com Posted via email from Amy’s posterous | Comment »
#itisyoureally
I suspect I’m not alone in having been through break-ups that took place entirely on Facebook. It’s probably only a matter of time till I’m dumped via Twitter (“@tommeltzer It’s over #itsnotyouitsme #itisyoureally”).via guardian.co.uk Posted via email from Amy’s posterous | Comment »
July 2010
3 posts
Tree
“Tree” by Jane Hirshfield It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime you will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books- Already the branch-tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life. Posted via email from Amy’s posterous | Comment »
June 2010
3 posts
Power of the geek trope →
bobulate:
A ten-year old study shows how seventh graders view scientists:
In the study, 31 seventh graders were asked to describe and sketch a typical scientist. Then they visited Fermilab, the applied-physics facility in Batavia, Illinois. After a tour and meetings with actual lab employees, they repeated the exercise.
The study testifies to the power of the geek trope: The “before” sketches...
The word “agoraphobia” is an English adoption of the Greek words agora (αγορά) and phobos (φόβος), literally translated as “a fear of the marketplace”. This translation is the reason for the common misconception that agoraphobia is a fear of open spaces, and is not clinically accurate.
“Who now defends alcohol prohibition? Is there a single person left? This echoing...”
– Daniel Okrent’s Last Call revisits Prohibition. - By Johann Hari - Slate Magazine (via indefensible)
May 2010
4 posts
on curated computing
Our museums are not football-field sized warehouses where art objects are indiscriminately dumped and our magazines and blogs are not amorphous containers of randomly selected articles. Our classrooms, restaurants, hospitals and indeed all our civilized institutions are firmly reliant on curation of one kind or another. via counternotions.com Posted via web from Amy’s...
haute stoner cuisine
There has been an entire strata of restaurants created by chefs to feed other chefs,” Mr. Bourdain said. “These are restaurants created specially for the tastes of the slightly stoned, slightly drunk chef after work. via nytimes.com Posted via web from Amy’s posterous | Comment »
little bobby tables
The answers to your Security Questions are case sensitive and cannot contain special characters like an apostrophe, or the words “insert,” “delete,” “drop,” “update,” “null,” or “select.”— Sacramento Credit Union via simonwillison.net Posted via web from Amy’s posterous | Comment »
Through oil-fouled water, big government looks...
There is something exquisite about the moment when a conservative decides he needs more government in his life. About 10:30 Monday morning, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), an ardent foe of big government, posted a blog item on his campaign Web site about the huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. “I strongly believe BP is spread too thin,” he wrote. The poor dears. He thinks it...
April 2010
5 posts
on competition
“I’m not afraid to compete. It’s just the opposite. Don’t you see that? I’m afraid I will compete-that’s what scares me. That’s why I quit the Theater Department. Just because I’m so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else’s values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn’t make it right. I’m...
Honk history
In the early 1800’s, steam carriages were becoming popular in Britain. For the safety of pedestrians and animals, a law was passed stating that “…self-propelled vehicles on public roads must be preceded by a man on foot waving a red flag and blowing a horn.”. via bobulate.com Posted via web from Amy’s posterous | Comment »
one long story
“All history is one long story to this effect: men have struggled for power over their fellow men in order that they might win the joys of earth at the expense of others, and might shift the burdens of life from their own shoulders upon those of others.” - William Graham Sumner (1840-1910) Posted via email from Amy’s posterous | Comment »
one fewer god
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. - Stephen F. Roberts Posted via email from Amy’s posterous | Comment »
on religion
I talk to religious people and almost everyone I talked to said it wasn’t about proof or disproof in the belief in God. It wasn’t about dogma at all. I took them at their word, I thought that was right. What it was about was, as I call it, belief-in-belief. And that is what it is about: the behaviours, the professing, the going through the motions – that’s what’s interesting, that people still...
March 2010
4 posts
that thunk
Hey everybody. I don’t usually like to talk politics, but that thunk you just heard on the news was President Obama laying his dick on the table. That’s right, insurance companies. Start sucking. via coketalk.tumblr.com Posted via web from Amy’s posterous | Comment »
on journalism
“The very notion that on any given story all you have to do is report what both sides say and you’ve done a fine job of objective journalism debilitates the press. There is no such thing as objectivity, and the truth, that slippery little bugger, has the oddest habit of being way to hell off on one side or the other: it seldom nestles neatly halfway between any two opposing points of...
1 tag
Hacker Disables More Than 100 Cars Remotely |...
“Omar was pretty good with computers”via wired.com Posted via web from Amy’s posterous | Comment »
See no evil?
If the Roman Catholic Church is so firm in its commitment to protect innocent fetuses from harm, how come it’s not quite so firm in its commitments to protect innocent children from the predations of its priests? Pope Benedict is famous for his stern lectures on morality and his disdain for homosexuality - plus, of course, his absolute refusal to consider women for the priesthood. How would...
January 2010
2 posts
December 2009
1 post
“What was interesting was that some groups of people, both men and women, got it...”
– Men, Women and IQ | Newsweek To Your Health | Newsweek.com (via indefensible)
November 2009
9 posts
Young guns
In most other parts of the world, it would be no extraordinary mental leap to correlate such killings with America’s relaxed approach to gun control. After all, many eight-year-old boys get cross with their fathers, but they can’t turn that anger into a bloodbath unless they have access to a gun. Thanks to the exalted position that the gun inhabits in the American psyche, however,...
book invasion
via dropular.net Posted via web from Amy’s posterous | Comment »