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I haven’t posted for a while, but that’s because I’ve moved somewhere completely new in the last week or so and I’m still settling in. So good to be out of Ann Arbor.
So, the new town? Well, it’s a college town that got its name from a woman called Ann. It features kitschy restaurants and a cute nickname (”Naptown”).
Here’s a look at one of its historic districts:
All right, I’m exaggerating a bit. Her name was actually Anne.
Funniest grammar-related witticism I’ve seen in a while, from a comment thread on Megan McArdle’s blog about cyclists:
One day I was riding the bus to work and ahead of us was a bicyclist with a placard on the back of her bike with the vehicle code section saying bicyclists have the right to a full lane.
And of course–do I even need to say it?–she blew through every single stop sign.
It’s one of the very few instances I’ve ever seen where someone was simultaneously flaunting and flouting the law.
If only the cyclist had also had a bright light attached to her bike — then she’d have both a flare and a flair for annoying drivers.
This is what happens when academic non-scientists attempt to write about “geeks.” Here Scott McLemee describes the thesis of the new book Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, written by an anthropologist:
[T]he whole process of creating and distributing free software is itself, to borrow a programming term, recursive.
Per the OED, recursivity involves “a repeated procedure such that the required result at each step except the last is given in terms of the result(s) of the next step, until … a terminus is reached with an outright evaluation of the result.”
Something like that dynamic – the combination of forward motion, regressive processing, and cumulative feedback – is found in geekdom’s approach to collaboration and evaluation.
What’s recursive about a development process that involves a “combination of forward motion, regressive processing, and cumulative feedback”? Why isn’t it just iterative? The book is described as “an effort to analyze the source code, so to speak, of geekdom itself”; it’s enough to make you wish that “geekdom” were proprietary.
(Back from out of town; sorry about the light posting.)
Another rant from a disgruntled waiter, this time with a book deal in the works. What is it about food service jobs that provokes such vociferous tirades on hipster blogs, all the sanctimonious posturing about how the way one treats waitresses is an infallible guide to one’s character, how customers who send food back deserve to get their entree with a healthy side of saliva? Sure, waitstaff are overworked and underpaid, but that hardly makes them unique, especially in an era where worker protections are being eroded across the board, and somehow I have yet to be warned that I’d better tip hotel cleaning staff or they’ll spit in my bed. All I can think is that a lot of upper-middle-class hipsters worked some kind of food service job at some point in their college careers and see their fellow servers as more worthy of consideration than those far less cool minimum-wage workers.
Why doesn’t experimental fiction involve handing out packets of different kinds of fiction to different groups in a double-blind study? You could have a control group that gets some nonfiction too.
One of those unfocused multi-link posts I usually dislike so much:
The ‘of color’ folks think I’m the wrong sort of ‘of color’ person. The white folks think I’m the wrong sort of feminist (I don’t like head-scarves, you see). All the leftists think I’m the wrong sort of immigrant (successful, fluent in English and ‘documented’) … Liberals lost their edge on the intellectual front and the activist front with the rise of postmodernism. The conservatives managed to hold on to their sanity and are still able to talk about the real world, while liberals are busy debating if there IS a real world.