Posts Tagged ‘iPad’
Weekend Links
* CFP: My friend Alexis Lothian is planning a special issue of Ada on feminist science fiction.
* Sunday map-reading: an index of maps from fantasy novels.
* Study: The U.S. has had one mass shooting per month since 2009.
* reclaimUC vs. administrative bloat.
The UC administration constitutes a parasitic bureaucracy that grows and expands by consuming those elements of the university that remain outside of it. It can only survive by extracting tuition from students and wages from university workers. In return, it does not grow the university—it grows only itself.
* Relatedly: MOOCs and university management troubles.
* So basically every college is lying to U.S. News, I guess?
* Proponents of the current craze ought to think carefully about the human costs of technology before enthusiastically proclaiming the end of a system that could leave hundreds of thousands of people without work, students cheated out of a quality education, and that would further contribute to the creation of a world where virtualization is always and everywhere, without qualification or questioning, heralded as an unequivocal good.
* Ban double majors! That’ll solve it.
* Year-by-Year Comparison of College and University Endowments, 2007-12. Results of the 2012 Faculty Salary Survey.
* Obama administration vs. fair use? My god, why?
* When they almost domed Winooski, Vermont.
* Film and television news! Is Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood the greatest television show ever made? Imagining Sisyphus Happy: A Groundhog Day Retrospective. The “gentleman’s F” and the scourge of deliberate mediocrity.
* Animal news! How owls swivel their heads. Depressed Groundhog Sees Shadow Of Rodent He Once Was. Burger King admits it has been selling beef burgers and Whoppers containing horsemeat.
* All about the North Dakota energy boom. Via Kottke, here it is visible from space.
* Oregon Is The Only State Left That Hasn’t Imposed Any Restrictions On Abortion.
* Michael Chabon on Wes Anderson’s Worlds.
The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research “childhood.”
There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher’s heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises “adolescence.” The feeling haunts people all their lives.
Of course, on the Cornell box angle, Jaimee was there first.
* Great animated short from Disney: Paperman.
* U.S. carbon emissions drop to lowest level since 1994. In part because at this pace the U.S. won’t get back to full employment until 2022.
* Some iPad and iPhone puzzle game recommendations. I’ve been obsessed with Flow and Hundreds lately myself.
* And tempered glass can just randomly explode for no reason. The more you know!
Please Stow All Portable Electronic Devices
“The power coming off a Kindle is completely minuscule and can’t do anything to interfere with a plane,” said Jay Gandhi, chief executive of EMT Labs, after going over the results of the test. “It’s so low that it just isn’t sending out any real interference.”
Friday Night Links
* The absolute craziest thing I’ve ever seen: Berkeley Researchers Turn Brain Waves Into YouTube Videos.
* Even news that the laws of physics have been overturned pales in comparison. I know, I know: Bad Astronomer, xkcd.
* Louis talks to the A.V. Club about Louie: 1, 2, 3, 4.
* Paul Campos: “The law’s absurd formalism was part of its strength as ideology.” Precisely. This insight applies to many more aspects of the legal system than the revolting spectacle of our contemporary system of capital punishment, which in a case such as Davis’s — which is not in this respect was not unusual — psychologically tortures the defendant, the defendant’s family, the victim’s family, and others connected to the case for literally decades before producing what the system then has the temerity to call “justice.” (The climax of this spectacle last night involved Davis being strapped to a gurney with a needle in his arm for nearly four hours, waiting for various legal personages to respond to the question of whether, all things considered, it was finally time to stop his heart with state-administered poison).
That we tolerate this kind of thing so readily helps explain, in its own way, why it sometimes seems impossible to do much of anything about the absurdities and dysfunctions of the system of legal education that legitimates it in the first instance. Or perhaps it’s the other way around: perhaps we tolerate the absurdity of something like the 22-year “process” that resulted in the horror of Davis’s final hours because we ‘re socialized from the beginning of our careers in this system to accept all kinds of absurdity and injustice as natural, inevitable, and therefore legitimate.
Reading this I was reminded of Duncan Kennedy’s excellent article “Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy,” which Corinne linked the other day on Twitter.
* Ground Zero Mosque opens without controversy. It’s almost as if the objections to this were complete bullshit.
* I’m steadfastly not paying attention to the GOP primary, but this is pretty astounding, even by Republican standards.
* DOJ: Rick Perry’s Texas Redistricting Plan Purposefully Discriminated Against Minorities.
* Why Is TV Suddenly Overstuffed With Buxom Bunnies, Sexy Stewardesses, and Charlie’s Angels?
* How long—how long must we sing this song? Forty years, give or take.
* Speaking at a Climate Week NYC event hosted by the Maldives, the TckTckTck campaign, and the U.N., Greenpeace International President Kumi Naidoo argued that the path to a sustainable future will involve peaceful, popular civil disobedience. “The struggle for climate justice is not a popularity contest,” he argued. He said the lesson of the Arab Spring, and the history of struggles from suffrage to civil rights to the end of apartheid, is that change only comes when decent men and women are willing to risk their lives and go to jail in peaceful protest.
* The world’s rudest hand gestures.
* Great Lost Pop Culture Treasures.
* And Chris Ware on your iPad. Have a good weekend.
Friday Links
* Istvan Csiscery-Ronay talks to Kim Stanley Robinson about the Three Californias trilogy.
* The state of national emergency declared after 9/11 has now entered its 11th year.
* CFP: Technology as Cure – Representations of Disability in Science Fiction.
* I was childishly ragging on Obama boosters proclaiming “Obamacare is already working” the other day on the strength of a very slight decline in uninsured 18-24 year olds, so it’s worth noting/conceding that for a lot of people it is in fact actually already working.
* You clamored for it, now here it is: Source Code: The Television Series.
* And now it’s really time to buy an iPad: Reading Rainbow‘s coming back on it.
Up Too Early Central Timezone Blues
* The paper on ecological debt I’m giving at the Debt conference at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee’s Center for 21st Century Studies today is pretty indebted to Naomi Klein’s recent work on the subject, which can be found at YouTube, Democracy Now, The Nation, and Rolling Stone. I may try to put this talk up as a podcast at some point.
* The oil spill disaster in the Louisiana has turned out to be much, much worse than originally thought: “a river of oil flowing from the bottom of the Gulf at the rate of 210,000 gallons a day that officials say could be running for two months or more.” The final devastation will likely be worse than the Exxon Valdez disaster. The White House says BP will pay the costs of cleanup. Related: Obama Administration Learns That Oil Leads to Oil Spills. At least they’ve quietly reinstated the federal moratorium on offshore drilling as a result of all this. Hope it stays that way.
* Can reconciliation work for climate like it worked for health care? Ezra Klein says not really.
* Ten states, including my beloved North Carolina!, are now considering Arizona-style document laws.
* Speaking of North Carolina, here’s the Independent Weekly voting guide for Durham County. The primary is Tuesday, May 4.
* It turns out the measurement fallacy Cory Doctorow was speaking about in my class’s interview with him has a name: Goodhart’s Law.
* Grad School Necessary To Maintain U.S.’s Global Position. Take that, The Simpsons.
* Republican consultant on Republican 2012 presidential field: “We Have Real [Expletive] Problems.”
* Calling out the real judicial activists.
* Socialphobes of the world unite! Against the telephone.
The telephone was an aberation in human development. It was a 70 year or so period where for some reason humans decided it was socially acceptable to ring a loud bell in someone else’s life and they were expected to come running, like dogs. This was the equivalent of thinking it was okay to walk into someone’s living room and start shouting.
* Books: still greener than e-readers.
* I can’t believe I forgot to celebrate Explicit Legal Pants Day. The rest of the post, on heterosexual privilege in Mississippi, is good too.
* Inevitable District 9 sequel coming in two years.
* I’m so old I can remember when the GOP was against involuntary microchip implantation. It was like a week ago.
* And YouTube has the trailer for the feel-good movie of the year.
Gerry Canavan 