quote out of context
This is the best:
“If Jedi walk around our stores with their hoods on, they’ll miss lots of special offers.”
(via jim ray)
What Glenn Beck and Rick Perry are reading
“Leap,” first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology.
I also like this:
Next time someone tells you the Tea Party movement is composed of average Americans who are simply worried at the terrible things Barack Obama’s trying to do to their country, keep in mind they are being influenced by the works of someone who thought America was being plunged into socialist tyranny by the Eisenhower administration.
computing as a liberal art
Ian Bogost suggests that computer science isn’t, in fact, a science:
But I think one of the greatest challenges comes from within the discipline itself: overall, computing simply doesn’t care about the development of its ideas. It fantasizes itself as a scientific or an engineering discipline, but throws the baby out with the bathwater (even the purest of sciences acknowledges that its ideas arise from the complex flows of history).
When Guzdial asks how we might bootstrap better computing education policy and practice, his question is tactical: how can we get funding agencies to allocate a portion of their budgets to the process of teaching computing as a valuable investment. This is a fine question, and an understandable one.
But what we really need is a new strategy. A wholesale shift in the way we think about computing (among other disciplines) that would underwrite a new way to do it let alone teach it. I think the frame shift we want is one that considers computing a liberal art rather than a science.
four out of five ain’t bad
FYI
But.
Bidermen has run into road blocks promoting his website in North Texas. Last month a truck carrying the website logo and slogan was forced to move from a spot in downtown Dallas. Private billboard companies have declined to put his message up for display.
Enter Mark Cuban.
But Bidermen says he’s been in contact with the Dallas Mavericks about advertising with the team. Mark Cuban tells CBS 11 that he’s not opposed to the idea, but would require “a boat load of money to make it worth the hassle.”
Ethical Robots
Luís Moniz Pereira and Ari Saptawijaya studied the underlying logic humans use when making moral decisions in order to apply that logic to programming machines.
Pereira and Saptawijaya believe that they have been successful both in modeling the moral dilemmas inherent in a specific problem called “the trolley problem” and in creating a computer system that delivers moral judgments that conform to human results.
This makes me want to go to Seattle
The Clinton Conversations
Civil rights historian and longtime FOB Taylor Branch conducted hours of interviews with Bill Clinton during his presidency and has written a book about the conversations.
On Boris Yeltsin’s late night drinking.
The Russian president was staying at Blair House, the government guest quarters. Late at night, Clinton told Branch, Secret Service agents found Yeltsin clad only in his underwear, standing alone on Pennsylvania Avenue and trying to hail a cab. He wanted a pizza, he told them, his words slurring.
On President Clinton’s impressive ability to multi-task.
One interview in 1995 was interrupted by then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher calling about air strikes in Bosnia; Clinton had been filling in a crossword puzzle and then began to deal a game of solitaire while continuing both conversations.
More multi-tasking.
On the night of the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, the topics between Clinton and Branch included not only that catastrophe but also then-Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s appeal to win delivery of more F-16 fighter jets and the legislative strategy of the new GOP House speaker, Newt Gingrich.
Then Chelsea, the Clintons’ daughter, hovered at the door. She was writing a paper for her sophomore English class to describe the best and worst qualities of Dr. Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s famous novel, but she couldn’t make her points fit on a single page, as assigned.
“He’s reading it, and then he asked me to read it and what did I think? And where could it be shortened?” Branch recalls. “I’ve got the tapes going and I’m wondering, ‘Am I going to be able to get back to the stuff I’m supposed to be doing? And will historians of the future think I’m an idiot for getting sidetracked off of these things with the president of the United States to be critiquing this homework assignment on … Dr. Frankenstein?’ “
something, 31
They were assholes so we picked up their car and they left.
Obama discussing healthcare reform with Stephanopoulos
For Cindy, if she wants it
“Young Cranch was not exactly the balancing point between the wit and the idiot,–verging slightly towards the latter type, and squinting so as to leave everything in doubt about his sentiments except that they were not of a forcible character.”
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Overheard
“Do you guys sell wall-mounted bottle openers?”
The University Café
the purpose of eyebrows
Volunteers were asked to identify fifty famous faces, including that of former U.S. president Richard Nixon and actor Winona Ryder. The photos were digitally altered and shown either without eyebrows or without eyes. When celebrities lacked eyes, subjects could recognize them nearly 60 percent of the time. However, when celebrities lacked eyebrows, subjects recognized them only 46 percent of time.
(via sullivan via marginal revolution)
Tom Waits – Chocolate Jesus
“I’ve discovered something that’s a candy item, it’s actually a kind of immaculate confection. There’s a cross on one side and there’s a bible inscription on the other, you put it in your mouth and when it’s gone you can get up and leave.”
Sam Whittingham tops 80mph – on a push-bike
On any other day, you could expect a hefty fine for breaking the 70mph speed limit on Nevada’s state route 305. But this was a special occasion and the local traffic cops watched in awe as Sam Whittingham topped 80mph — on a push-bike.
Yellow Sketch/Esqueche amarillo
on exhibit at the Upper Valley Arts League in Mission, Texas.
Amy said
Where can I get a bacon-filled doughnut in this town?
quote out of context
The funny thing, I think, is that they consider this a study of children rather than of human beings.
Amy said
In honor of the sun I’ll be wearing polka dot panties today.
Deterritorializing Deleuze & Guattari Across the Schizophrenic States of America
My latest dispatch from our X-country trip whilst reading Anti-Oedipus…
Construction workers run in fear from naked blond woman
Burly builders fled when a naked blonde rushed at them on a construction site in the Austrian capital Vienna shouting: “Who wants me?”
The hard-hat hunks ran for cover when the woman turned the tables on them on the building site beside the city’s main railway station.
“We like to chat up girls as they walk past – it’s a tradition,” said one builder.
“But this woman was too much to handle and we just ran and hid until the police got here. No-one liked to think what would happen if she caught one of us,” he added.
Police spokesman Mario Hejl said: “It turned out no-one wanted her. The woman was detained and was put under a doctor’s care.”
Donkey Time
Not to be confused with Time Donkey.
A Life Well Wasted
I almost universally hate podcasts since they mostly suck, but what Robert Ashley does by manipulating voice and sound in contextually appropriate ways does not.
The Lord has so much of a bigger crown waiting for me in Heaven
It’s in the shape of a cone.
