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“Scholars, teachers, students, journalists, clergy, musicians and intellectually curious U2 fans: for more than 30 years, U2 has asked us to look at the world, wrestle with ourselves and then dream out loud.”
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“Software is unique in the fact that it has an oral tradition. A lot of the time when people learn how to write software, they learn it from their peers. They didn’t necessarily learn it from books or written reports; a lot of the most fundamental parts of software were passed down from person to person, sort of in the sense that Eric Raymond’s brief, the Jargon File, captures some of that oral history. It’s finally being put down in the Jargon File result of the Internet. Now all of that oral history is valuable, and it existed before, so those things shouldn’t be eligible to be patented. But, because it was oral history and not written down, it was invisible. A lot of people will say, I was doing this back in the eighties, but it’s very difficult to prove that.”
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Sheidlower says slang’s existence is dependent upon that of a standard language: because slang arises in opposition to formal speech, there must be a norm for it to violate. “People have a choice of what kind of language they use,” he says. “It’s not so much that people don’t know the standard usages. There are situations that require standard discourse, but those represent a small part of everyday discourse.”
“The standard is important because it gives us a set of expectations,” Lighter says. For slang to stick there has to be a society that thinks about words as words: a mostly literate, modern, industrial society with permeable social boundaries.
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“Watch the step-by-step process as acclaimed digital agency Big Spaceship produces an animated logo. To create the logo, Big Spaceship draws on historical broadcast design styles as well as traditional and digital animation techniques. Handmade paper models are shot with a stop-motion technique using a digital SLR camera. Smoke effects are used to add atmosphere, clouds, and the smoke trail for a paper rocket ship shot with a still camera and moved through the scene with digital effects. It’s a perfect blend of spontaneous organic play and digital discipline. The end result is a rich eruption of visual fun–and a great animated logo.”
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Pitchfork.tv documentary in three segments on the making of the classic album, including performance footage from this year’s Pitchfork Festival. (Thanks to Jason G for the heads-up!)
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“Indeed, a year or two after the Bugle’s demise left a seemingly enormous hole in the city’s media landscape, that hole will essentially be gone. It will be filled by thriving, competitive media that already exist and a few new outlets that spring up in the wake of the newspaper’s closing. The Whoville media ecosystem will prove to be self-repairing, much more quickly than a lot of people would expect. The residents of Whoville and its suburbs will get their news and information from these old and new replacements, and advertisers will use those substitutes for the Bugle to reach those customers. “
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“…the execution of its cardboardish cheesiness is absolutely perfect.”
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“The All Saved Freak Band is a different kettle of fish—at once more powerful and more disturbing, and a reminder of how apocalyptic convictions, Christian or otherwise, can go sour. The band began when a drugged-out Chicago guitarist named Joe Markko moved to Ohio, where he met a fiery street pastor named Larry Hill. Convinced that the Chinese and/or Russians were coming, Hill set himself up as patriarch of an isolated survivalist Christian commune, replete with guns and goats. When he performed, Hill wore a wide Amish hat and a priest’s habit, and he sang to hector and convert.”
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McAfee is a leader in his academic field, a featured speaker at the Yahoo Big Thinkers India conference in March. Tall and genial, he dresses in khakis, a polo shirt and geeky river sandals. A coauthor of the best-selling book “Freakonomics,” Steven D. Levitt, has described him as brilliant. What McAfee is not is anti-capitalist.
“I’m a right-wing economist, so they can’t call me a communist,” McAfee said.
Yet he turned down $100,000 to turn over his open-source textbook “Introduction to Economic Analysis” to a commercial publisher.
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“In late May, 2008, a group of database researchers, architects, users and pundits met at the Claremont Resort in Berkeley, California to discuss the state of the research field and its impacts on practice. This meeting was distinguished by a broad consensus that we are at a turning point in the history of the field, due both to an explosion of data and usage scenarios, and to major shifts in computing hardware and platforms. Given these forces, we are at a time of opportunity for research impact, with an unusually large potential for influential results across computing, the sciences and society. This report details that discussion, and highlights the group’s consensus view of new focus areas…”
links for 2008-08-21
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