Friday Morning!
* Waste your weekend the Manufactoria way. This is one of the best flash games I’ve ever played, I think—it hits the same sweet spot of manic focus for me as doing discrete math problems did back in college. (Thanks, Neil!)
* xkcd finds an impressive new angle on the ancient killing-Hitler time-travel gag.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has a clever about a cliched political metaphor.
* Photos of People Riding Invisible Bikes.
* Superhero photobombs. (Thanks, Lindsey!)
* Tom Chatfield interviews China Miéville.
Tom: Today, of course, you go online, and you can see that the Wikipedia entries for something like Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes are higher quality, better-referenced, longer and better-researched than many entries about the Second World War. You have this strange inversion in collective belief and emphasis, which ends up generating a lot more material a lot more confidently around the small stuff than the big stuff.
China: This is one of the bad things about the geekocratic moment. Even speaking as someone who loves geek culture at its best, nevertheless I think the sense of priorities is often skewed to the point of being demented.
Tom: Passion is very distorting. If the only reference you have is the strength of your own feeling, and you don’t temper it with something like a sense of social good or importance…
China: Yes, if you don’t contextualize it, it becomes disaggregated from totality—and ultimately it’s totality that one is interested in, social totality.
* And in a rare bit of good news: Justice Department Demands Florida Stop Purging Voter Rolls.
Sorry to spoil your fun, but I think the “quantum leap” metaphor is used to describe a move from one condition to another with no tranistory phase.
abushri
June 1, 2012 at 10:25 am
Right, but on extremely tiny scales!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_electron_transition
gerrycanavan
June 1, 2012 at 10:29 am
I know, but it’s a metaphor, so one can ignore scale. It’s like saying, “We are moving from point a to point b, and there will be no line in the middle that connects them.” (Then I think to myself, Can one use a metaphor without taking into account all obvious aspects of it? Not sure on that one.)
abushri
June 1, 2012 at 10:42 am
And by tranistory, I meant transitory.
abushri
June 1, 2012 at 10:26 am
i’m pretty sure people use metaphors all the time without taking into account all aspects of it…or really any aspects of it. :)
Lindsey
June 1, 2012 at 6:31 pm
*like
abushri
June 1, 2012 at 9:01 pm
i thought they were just referencing the TV show
Vu
June 2, 2012 at 2:00 pm