scrap pad

Joey Comeau's latest short story

gender snippet

wrote this down when Adam and I were reading some weird article (which I wish I had the link to) about the evolution of gender: "the ideas of race and sex were created to maintain inequality after the ideas of the enlightenment proscribed equality among all men (men was a genderless term)"

it's been sitting on my desktop for a few weeks so is pretty out of context at this point, but reminds me of the idea that homosexuality only really became a concept in the victorian period.

found the link: Sexuality & Modernity. the most interesting part was about the enlightenment, but truthfully I could not sit through more than a paragraph of any of it that night.

Cory Doctorow: I, Robot

enjoyed this scifi novella by Cory Doctrow at The Infinite Matrix: I, Robot. It reads like classic scifi, but is somehow more modern ("natty checked suit and pink tie," and the ending). from the bottom of the page:

About this story, Cory says, "Last spring, in the wake of Ray Bradbury pitching a tantrum over Michael Moore appropriating the title of 'Fahrenheit 451' to make Fahrenheit 9/11, I conceived of a plan to write a series of stories with the same titles as famous sf shorts, which would pick apart the totalitarian assumptions underpinning some of sf's classic narratives."

mp3 blog mix tape

Normal Life - comic

Malcom Gladwell has a blog

enough with Blink (his book) and the whole decision-making, "life-hacking," self-improvement through business practices applied to personal life fad... but Malcom Gladwell just started a blog, and it's full of information chunks like ben and jerry's peanut butter cup ice cream with peanut butter cups. Anyways, it's good: at this point not super-linky, instead it is full of opinions and solid references to books and stuff. (granted, references to a certain kind of book... the kind I am not interested in ever actually reading).

a review of Gladwell's book, The Tipping Point, at Amazon refers to it as "pop sociology," which covers the kinds of books I am not interested in ever actually reading. The books he writes and also the books he reads, I guess.

abortion howto, kindof

The West End News is now online

April is Mathematics Awareness Month

mathematica erotica

rainbow chard

the IT Crowd

Slate on the Olympics

olympic opening ceremony

on defining things

my roommate is taking philosophy this semester, and is working on a paper with something about Plato's assertion that everything in a certain category shares a common set of characteristics. Our basic discussion is, "define a chair."

a chair is an object. can an object have an intent? a chair is an object that has the intent of being sat on. or, that we intend to sit on. obviously there's more to a chair than that.

"define art"—this one I had a pat answer to: I've been using this as my definition of art for a while, and I'm pretty satisfied with it, though it doesn't encompass everyone's approach to art, it describes what I treat as art: art has to have intent of meaning, and some element of craftsmanship.

afro-punk: documentary

pictures - tiny people

mac os x trojan?

good music

bullshit and truth

DOM Elements Reference

mass vs. weight

You measure mass when you shake or heft something, like some people do in the produce section. You measure weight when you use the produce scale... Mass measures inertia. When you shake something, you are testing to see how it reacts... Weight is a force, the force of gravity... The scale balances the force of gravity against the force of a spring inside the scale.

a comment on ideas to make basic physics concepts clearer

php 4 with mac os 10.4

PDF making software

kingdom of loathing guides

books

touch screen

speaking of battlestar galactica

ski movie trailers

low-power radio in Kittery

cunt

Postmodern Courtesan takes a pro-"cunt" stand, or at least anti-"beaver": A Glaring Lack of Good Words

There's no question what you want done with the thing when you use the word cunt. Cunts are a bit more demanding... Cunts are ready to party, pussies haven't fully made up their minds yet.

rides for seniors

breaking hometown news

A half-dozen people called police last Thursday to report their cars had been rifled through. ... nothing of value was taken from the vehicles and all were unlocked.

...

These types of incidents can be avoided, French said, if people would simply lock their car doors.

Anil Dash on alt-weeklies

alt-weeklies vs. craigslist, blogs, and where is the community? Anil Dash: Alt Weeklies, San Francisco, Curiosity, and Bullshit

My advice? If you have a newspaper, publish something that's unique to your community; Write something that nobody running a website on the other side of the country would have enough knowledge or information to create.

physics text unrealism

retro photographs

cartoons of Muhammed scandal

flavored vodka

Flavored Vodka: "CHESNOCHNAYA (Garlic Vodka) One clove of garlic, slightly crushed, and one sprig of fresh dill with three white peppercorns."

That site was referred to as "alarmingly authentic" by this post on flavored vodka at The Spirit World, which lists some old-fashioned flavored vodkas: "The late 18th century saw a boom in flavored vodkas, including absinthe, acorn, anisette, birch, calamus root, calendula, cherry, chicory, dill, ginger, hazelnut, horseradish, juniper, lemon, mastic, mint, mountain ash, oak, pepper, peppermint, raspberry, sage, sorrel, wort and water melon."

more potatoes

potatoes

The British have a ton more potato varieties than us Americans do. Also, apparently describing potatoes as "floury" is a British thing (Aussies use it too). "Floury" describes a drier, starchier potato that is likely to fall apart when boiled. They're best for baking and mashed potatoes. For the record, Russets are a floury potato.

If I ever end up in Peru, I will try lots of different potatoes. As the cradle of potato history, there are something like 4200 varieties there (versus about 5 here, including the shrinkwrapped variety).

NPR : Podcast Directory

jen recommends

kittery point postmaster retires

Is Language Infinite?

notes from a memo at work

• be on time
• clean/keep busy, even though it's slow this time of year
• pay attention to guests
• be responsible for your own aprons

70s stuff

Might be going to a 70s/disco party on Saturday night. Research: Clothes of the 70s. A long list of random clothes that were popular in the 70s. example:

• Shellsuit

  Like the racing car drivers suits. Shiny and lightweight in material usually pastel shades and very flattering. A zip had the full length at the front. More seductive if the zip came down to cleavage level.

04101

The Weather Underground - documentary

This morning I watched this documentary on the Weather Underground. It's now a day late due back to the library. I almost didn't pick it up because it has the 4 stars in quotes on the front, which for some reason in my head triggers an association with comedy. enjoyed it though. random notes from the film:

• "those who make peaceful revolution impossible only make violent revolution inevitable" -- JFK, quoted by Martin Luther King
• repeatedly compared the Weather Underground to Bonnie and Clyde
• one leader (I think of the Black Panthers), in distancing his group from the Weathermen, called them "custeristic" - leaders taking people into situations where they're going to be massacred (lose badly.)
• "there are no innocent in this war of aggression"
• two of the women talk about cutting themselves off from their families. it strikes me that a revolution that will stick and be meaningful should include the parents/families/etc. maybe I just think that because I share a lot of politics with my parents.
• "it was seen as impossible to defy the fbi. everybody on the left said, this is only going to last a few months"
• "violence didn't work"
• "I think that there's a history of resistance, and a history of white peoples' involvement in that resistance, that makes a difference in the ability of that kind of resistance to emerge again" - not to draw color lines, but it seems like radical groups of white kids "align" themselves with the Black Panthers without paying much attention to the Panthers' intrests and direction.
• when you get a list of what they did, the Weather Underground's accomplishments were pretty spectacular. the radicalism of using bombs to make a point is scary, and puts a lot of distance between most people and them: these people were terrorists. But the american (vietnamese, chilean, ...) people were more than equally terrorized by the american government, and had no other recourse.

Apple's installer

cell phone cooking

registrar recommendations