Latest Tweets:
"When future historians write about the fall of the American Republic, they will of course lay primary blame on the extremists of the right, who set out deliberately to destroy it. But they will also lay heavy blame on all the “centrists” and Serious People who not only refused to admit what was happening, but ostracized and silenced anyone who tried to point it out."
Paul Krugman (via azspot)
(via hautepussy)
How data is Punk
in May 2010, we published this piece on how reporters would soon be flooded with a “tsunami of data”. Two years on and data journalism is part of the fabric of what we, and many other news organisations do. What is it? I would say data journalism is such a wide range now of styles - from visualisation to long form articles. The key thing they have in common is that they’re based on numbers and statistics - and that they should aim to get a ‘story’ from that data. The ultimate display of that story, be it words or graphics, is irrelevant, I think - it’s more about the process.
"…gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself…what they imitate is a phantasmic ideal of heterosexual identity…gay identities work neither to copy nor emulate heterosexuality, but rather, to expose heterosexuality as an incessant and panicked imitation of its own naturalized idealization. That heterosexuality is always in the act of elaborating itself is evidence that it is perpetually at risk, that it, that it ‘knows’ it’s own possibility of becoming undone"
Judith Butler (via embracewithme)
Ray Kurzweil: Will We Still Have Sex After the Singularity?
Apparently virtual reality will be a useful means of expanding human activity. Even sex! Gasp!
Erm, well…Sandra Bullock, Sylvester Stallone, Demolition Man, and the awkward “sex” scene. Be well, Ray Kurzweil.
"The harmony of the universe knows only one musical form - the legato; while the symphony of number knows only its opposite - the staccato. All attempts to reconcile this discrepancy are based on the hope that an accelerated staccato may appear to our senses as a legato."
Tobias Dantzig (allegedly)
"The weight of a petal has changed the face of the world and made it ours."
Loren Eiseley, How Flowers Changed the World (pdf, only 8 pages… worth reading)
Total infoporn. 1000 years of European history in about 11 minutes. Watching The Holy Roman Empire descend into a mass of smallpox-like principalities is interesting. As are the waves of invasion and counterattack in Ireland from the Normans onward. I particularly like it when, c. 1516, you can hear the extended Habsburg dynasty collectively cream themselves with self-congratulation. Smug, inbred oxygen-thieves.
Philosopher as strategist and philosopher as tactician: Hume and Zizek
When I step back from this, however, I have to ask whether this is actually a fair characterization of what goes on in a philosophical work. Is there simply one idea, and everything else flows from this? This seems too narrow and too linear a description, surely, to do justice to the intricacies of philosophical argumentation. Consider then, the notion of the tactic and how it nests into the macro-scale concept of the strategy. A strategy can draw upon many diverse tactics, as well as cohering principles (a form of logistics in terms of supply lines and communications) which link these tactics together.
Applying methods of data science to philosophy
This post is in part a response to Lawrence Krauss’s recent interview in the Atlantic where he shits all over the philosophy of science. I wanted to try see if there were alternative interactions between science and philosophy that are fruitful. Apparently the photo/reference only makes sense to me. Hmmm.
The suffering of others as a Veblen good - Hannah Arendt and a critique of "raising awareness"
I wanted to use Hannah Arendt’s theory of action to critique the marketization (ugh) of charity, and to see if her ideas give us a way to move beyond the banalities of ceaselessly “raising awareness”.
This is how I think of meaning as an ongoing process, rather than a static significance. It makes sense to me at least.
A formal approach to poetry, and... well... all art I guess
This may make it sound grander than it is, but after thinking about poems like an engineer for years (why is that there, what does that connect to, what does all of this actually do?) I got around to putting down a few notes about how it is that I approach literature. I think this might bring us back to aesthetics without wishy-washy words like “essence”, “truth”, or “beauty”. Hey, maybe those things exist, but I’m not buyin’. Ditto if you’re just peddling a trainspotter’s guide to the history of ideas, or whatever introduction to the theorist-of-the-week that just came up on your reading list. 
