Laughing with Kafka
It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get — the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke — that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
From a speech given by David Foster Wallace in 1998 at a symposium to celebrate the publication of a translation of The Castle by Schocken Books.
taking the strap to Ockham’s razor
The obvious question to ask about Ockham’s razor is: why? On what basis are we justified to think that, as a matter of general practice, the simplest hypothesis is the most likely one to be true? Setting aside the surprisingly difficult task of operationally defining “simpler” in the context of scientific hypotheses (it can be done, but only in certain domains, and it ain’t straightforward), there doesn’t seem to be any particular logical or metaphysical reason to believe that the universe is a simple as it could be.
Indeed, we know it’s not.
(via the browser)
ZeroTouch, a touchscreen monitor without the screen
The design seems so simple that it’s almost surprising we haven’t seen something like this until now. ZeroTouch is basically an empty window pane, and the LEDs and IR sensors mounted around its edges detect anything that crosses the plane of that frame (it can recognize up to 20 independent touch points at a time). It doesn’t just register that something is there, but also the size of the object — whether it’s a finger, an entire hand, a tiny stylus, etc. — and whether it is rotating or twisting.
I’ve got something to post that shows a brainwave and thought controlled computer interface, but one thing at a time, right?
(via @mlgalemore)
from the comments
Post to Twitter
A quick thank you to Andrew for the new Post to Twitter feature you will see at the bottom of each post.
Overheard
In line today at the Fiesta Mexican grocery store, a woman behind me answered her phone:
Hello?
…..
Buying charcoal.
…..
Charcoal.
…..
The brick shit you cook with!
………………………………………………………………..
Also, the man in front of me was wearing a white lab coat and a tie. and he looked exactly like Burt Lancaster when he was playing Elmer Gantry. His purchase? Two cans of vienna sausage and two Cup-Noodle soups. He paid with a credit card.
Junkyard Donkeys (I)
Jo Daviess County, Illinois.
Bunny (L) and Baby (R) recently moved to Alice’s junkyard. Likely they will move over by the Stabbin’ Cabin later in the summer. I’ll keep you posted.
The McGurk Effect
The dude only says ba, but when you see footage of him saying fa . . . fuck it, just watch it.
Favorite YouTube comment:
i liked the part where he said ba
Here is more on the McGurk effect.
(thanks, Patrick)
The Flea Marketing of New York
“I’m always amazed by these groups of cool young people, wandering around, looking for stuff, and I think, ‘If you didn’t have this venue, your performance of yourself wouldn’t be as complete,’ ” Professor Prokopow said. He described the phenomenon as “I have something that no one else has. I was different before I got this fantastic blank, but now my differentness is borne on my shoulders.”
The New York Times looks at nostalgia, self-curation, and the city’s flea market moment.
going into sleep
Culturally, holiness is a phallometric.
Letterpress: An Instructional Video
The River Hades “Likes” This
Annals of Americus has a brief and interesting profile on Envoy, a new social media start-up that specializes in reanimating the Facebook profiles of the deceased:
“Two certainties in life exist: You are born and you die,” says Envoy’s Max Doughherty. “We know this is fact, yet when a loved one passes it’s still very distressing. Loss disrupts life. Envoy uses new technologies to assist in these moments, and it starts with a very unlikely source: Facebook.”
According to Dougherty, that very unlikely source is then manipulated by an application that uses social algorithms and “patented language tools” to mimic the speech and online personality of the deceased user, down to the slang he or she used when still alive. And in some cases (see: sad guy dining alone at end of video), the service can continue a relationship beyond death.
The jury is still out on whether it’s all an elaborate hoax, but here’s hoping.
headline of the day
Mummified Playboy Playmate died of heart failure
tweet of the day
from the comments
I was at peace for a moment. In love forever.
Teacher Teacher // Rockpile (Live) // 1980
Singing, chewing, strumming. What more do you need to know (or teach)?
A friendly, goofy salute to Luke.
Flannery’s beer finds
You would think it would be an old guy like me giving my daughter tips about good beers–but for a while now it has been the other way around. She says, “Try one of these.” I take a sip and think damn, and I’ve been drinking that other shit.
Writers At Their Typewriters
So you know, The Guardian has a fantastic slideshow of prolific authors with their trusty sidearms.
One’s Teaching Philosophy
I suspect he might be too modest to share it here himself, so you should all take a moment and read through Luke Neff‘s teaching philosophy, which I found to be a wonderful collection of thoughts, ideas and hopes for educating a future generation of students (and non-students).
Not all remakes are bad, but . . .
what were they thinking?
This remake of The Thin Man?
Honestly, I don’t believe that remakes are by definition bad. I’ll take the 1954 “A Star Is Born” over the 1937 original. (We won’t even speak of the 1976 version.)
But William Powell? And Myrna Loy? Asta? You just know the champagne will be flat this time around.
I hate to be an old spoilsport, but it feels like bad aesthetic judgment to me.
“Right now, we have over 250 clients,” said Centre, 62, who is retired and pens anti-religion books under the name Dromedary Hump.
In 2009, he launched Eternal Earth-Bound Pets USA. Centre guarantees that if or when the Rapture comes he or one of his 44 contractors in 26 states, including Washington, will drive to your home within 24 hours, collect your dog, cat, bird, rabbit or small caged mammal, and adopt it. (Rapture rescue services for horses, camels, llamas and donkeys are limited to New Hampshire, Vermont, Idaho and Montana.)
The cost is $135, plus $20 per additional animal. Payable upfront, of course, and good for 10 years.
Is it really that easy?
“I want to form Colbert Super PAC for all the PAC-less Americans, to give you a voice in the form of my voice,” Colbert said.
As we stand here on this historic site, where 250 years ago today George Washington filed his papers to form his independent expenditures non-connected political action committee, we are also standing at an American crossroads — not to be confused with American Crossroads, the name of Karl Rove’s ‘Super PAC’. I mean a metaphorical crossroads, because the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United has proved that unlimited corporate money equals free speech. But by the transitive property of elections, does it not also follow that no corporate money equals silence?
Sex on the brain
“Orgasm is a special case of consciousness,” says Barry Komisaruk at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. “If we can look at different ways of inducing orgasm, we may better understand how we can use top-down processing to control what we physically feel.”
spam name
Florinda Erinn.
dear clusterflock
_________ is the best technology I have owned.
