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Category Archives: philosophy

Save us

I just overheard a cop at the cafe talking about how she reads Garfield every day because it’s ‘hilarious.’ I think that if someone thinks Garfield is hilarious they probably shouldn’t be allowed to have any sort of firearm.

Swoon

Can you wish you had written something even when it’s taking the piss out of you? Yes, apparently: Also, global warming? Total effing letdown. Americans are no longer believing in it. Do you know why? Not because the mountains of scientific proof aren’t there. Not because it’s not happening. But because it’s not yet happening [...]

Another one

Here’s another chunk from that collection of Edge essays that I linked to the other day: It’s less than twenty years since the living presence of networked information has become part of our thinking machinery. What it will mean to us that vastly more people have nearly instantaneous access to vastly greater quantities of information [...]

This makes it all worthwhile

In 2003, apparently, I wrote an Amazon review for an audiobook. I had forgotten both the book and the review until this morning, when I got an update that some random person had commented on it. You can read the original post and the comment here. Seriously, I can’t tell you how much this brightened [...]

Jerks and women

Clay Shirkey wrote a blog post that people are talking about. Succinctly, it’s about how men are generally more assertive, self-promoting, and annoying than women are, and how that disparity might put women at a disadvantage. It’s tempting to imagine that women could be forceful and self-confident without being arrogant or jerky, but that’s a [...]

Contingency

I’m sitting here with my cat Arthur purring on my chest, which he likes to do when I’m laying on the futon, which I like to do because it’s the only working position I can assume for extended periods that does not hurt. The purring is responsible for me loving him; if he didn’t jump [...]

History of communication

There’s a great post on Ars Technica on the history of the noosphere. The ‘noosphere’ is the term people use for the network as an ethereal communications medium – a place of pure thought, in other words, that transcends whatever physical manifestation that instantiates the medium. If you were online in 1996, you remember some [...]

The King

I’ve never kissed a bat I’ve never kissed a goose But I could shake a chicken in the middle of the roost.

Something to look forward to

I’m not sure if I’ve ever told anyone this before, but there are a couple Shane-invented holidays that I celebrate, or used to celebrate. Christmas and Thanksgiving are well and good, but I think it’s important to put your mark on time, and divide it up in some way particular to your own world and [...]

Lifetime Reading Plan

It’s pissing rain this morning, so though I have in the last ten days given up caffeine, the coffee shop calls to me as a waypoint that might eliminate further soaking. One block from the coffee shop lurks what once was the second-best used bookstore I had ever known, The Book House. I say “once [...]