Monthly Archives: April 2007

Why Popular Music Sucks (or something like that)

Popu­lar music is often hor­ri­ble. There­fore, clearly, most peo­ple have hor­ri­ble taste. This arti­cle argues, though, that it’s not that most peo­ple have hor­ri­ble taste in music–it’s that they’re so influ­enced by what other peo­ple think, that über-hits are pos­si­ble and are even caused by very small vari­a­tions in what peo­ple think is popular. They did [...]
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Joe and the Volcano vs. Kierkegaard

Here’s an inter­est­ing paper about how Joe vs. the Vol­cano is an image of Kierkegaard’s flat­ten­ing the­ory. It’s actu­ally really good (and short). And just in case you need/want it, here a link to the script.
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From the Horse’s Mouth: CSS Makes No Sense

From an arti­cle on A List Apart: “Floats can be equally frus­trat­ing. Their seem­ingly incon­sis­tent behav­ior cir­cum­vents all nat­ural logic.” It’s good to hear an author­i­ta­tive source say what I’ve been think­ing the whole freakin’ time.
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Newspapers and Wikis

The wikipedia has changed the way I read web pages. Because you can edit any­thing on there, when I read a page and some­thing jumps out at me as wrong, more often than not, I fix it. And now, when I read any other page and I see an error (usu­ally in gram­mar or spelling–it’s [...]
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The Way Smart People See The Web

Here’s a really inter­est­ing arti­cle from the Lan­guage Log, which is really just an excerpt from a paper by some pro­fes­sors (in lin­guis­tics or some­thing? clearly not com­puter sci­ence) talk­ing about how the web ought to work, namely as “a win­dow into the uni­verse of knowledge.” I don’t know what that means (the fact that [...]
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The Funniest Thing I’ve Read

Here’s a funny quote from an arti­cle I’m read­ing at work about search­ing and mar­ket­ing on the internet: “But when you look at local and mobile work­ing together, with GPS-enabled devices, you have this per­fect storm: a con­ver­gence of usabil­ity, adver­tis­ing oppor­tu­nity and tech­nol­ogy that makes sense because it makes our lives better.” I don’t [...]
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Why Athiests Bore Me

It seems like I’ve seen a lot of this Sam Har­ris char­ac­ter crop­ping up recently. Here’s a Newsweek arti­cle about him and Rick War­ren in dia­logue. War­ren makes some dumb points as peo­ple unac­cus­tomed to talk­ing with athi­ests do (he opens the door for the ‘if you were born in Saudi Ara­bia, do you think [...]
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Another Article

Here’s another arti­cle by that same guy. He hints at the same things here: [We should] oppose indus­trial cap­i­tal­ism, not with pab­u­lum about “val­ues,” “com­pas­sion,” and “con­sumerism,” but with for­mi­da­ble eco­nomic and his­tor­i­cal eru­di­tion. Tak­ing the imago Dei as a real­ity and not as an ideal, [we] pro­pose that work honor our human dig­nity, not dimin­ish [...]
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Alternative to Capitalism?

Jonathan posted an arti­cle about the false link of work and virtue within Amer­i­can Cap­i­tal­is­tic cul­ture. The orig­i­nal arti­cle he linked to (and which I just linked to), is a Books and Cul­ture arti­cle about how we’ve bap­tized the Amer­i­can Work Ethic which has lit­tle to noth­ing to do with the Gospel. Assum­ing that it [...]
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The Way The Medium Works

Most of the writ­ing I’ve been doing recently has been in one of those mini com­po­si­tion books, the ones that are 4.5×3.5. Sadly, I wrote “Feb ’06″ on the cover of it, and I’m barely halfway through its 80 pages. The inter­est­ing thing is to notice how the medium I write in affects my poem structure. [...]
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