Recently updated blogs

“Committees are an infrastructure designed to race you to the bottom of opportunity!” – Futurist Jim Carroll Committees kill ideas. Committees kill all initiative. Committees kill the idea of innovation. Committees are the destroyer of all things. Did I mention I think committees are a bad idea? “Let me check with the committee.” “We’ve got a committee looking into that.” “There’s a committee involved with the decision.” “We’ll send that …

In searching for a prototype modern hermit, one is confronted by the reality that after the Middle Ages, hermits in modernity were destined by authorities to disappear. In order to survive, eremitism transformed into solitude, and hermits transformed into solitaries. Unlike historical hermits, however, who seem so similar regardless of geography, culture, or era, solitaries present more variable phenomena. Life styles of modern solitaries depend more on circumstance and personality. …

In this blog, I offer an autoethnographical account of what it means for TV scholars to take part in the conference continuum, which I argue is both familiar and strange in every iteration. Whether you are an ardent follower of certain large-scale conferences, or a serial “dipper in” to a plethora of small-scale events, you might not realise how to “find your fit” – when you turn up… Source

The Galileo Project's Papua New Guinea expedition "has culminated in the publication of a major new paper by Professor Avi Loeb and his team in the prestigious Elsevier journal Chemical Geology. Thus Harvard's announcement, which also details some "key findings" from the 1.5M dollar effort. The announcement retains the claim the meteor was "interstellar," with admission that some spherules were "potentially of terrestrial origin," and, while stressing the "BeLaU" subset …

Modern computing is just trying to keep up with all of the places where people have changed things for bullshit reasons, and fixing the resulting broken processes, until you die.

Tracey Emin, quoted in Dylan Jones’s newish oral history of the Velvet Underground:When I was at school, I used to imagine that I would go to New York by boat and when I walked down the gangplank Andy Warhol would be there waiting for me.The thing is, I still believe that...

I’ve already mentioned Tom Harrison’s “Headline of the Day” email list, which is always entertaining and often good source material for Lowering the Bar items. I highly recommend signing up (email: tomharrison711 at gmail.com). I have an email distribution list too, of course, but HOTD can offer you similar entertainment in far fewer words. The cost is the same. A recent link led to the headline, “A World Naked Bike …

No posts about sport, hardly ever, then two in a week. But the NRL football (rugby league) grand final (Penrith Panthers versus Melbourne Storm) is on this long weekend, and since I wrote about the AFL the other day, this seems right. More a personality/psychology post though: a profile of Nathan Cleary, the Panthers halfback, and veritable introvert: Nathan Cleary could have the time of his life, “just the most …

The Persian tar is a cousin of the lute, the saz and the oud, a long-necked instrument with three double courses of strings — sort of like half a 12-string guitar, another relative — and an unusual double bowl made of mulberry wood with a membrane of stretched lambskin. Perhaps you already knew that, but I didn’t until I encountered the playing of the Iranian-born tar virtuoso Hamed Sadeghi in …

By Joseph Nechvatal. Suzaan Boettger, Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) The 440 pages of the heavily illustrated book Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson are Suzaan Boettger’s deep dive into the incongruous religious and raunchy roots of American artist, art theorist and literary essayist Robert Smithson — famous as the creator of the minimalist abstract earthwork masterpiece, Spiral Jetty, that …

Hope you’ve had a great week. Eva just rolled away and we had a good ol’ time chatting it up for this week’s In The Shed episode. Check (mostly) all the fun stuff we mentioned in the links below. Cool solo art exhibition Eva saw at Director Park: Orquidia Violeta – Chalecos Protector Exhibition Our popular How’d She Get There?! segment: Eva’s route from North Portland to Director Park How …

EFF, along with the ACLU and the ACLU of Mississippi, filed an amicus brief on Thursday asking a federal appellate court to continue to block Mississippi’s HB 1126—a bill that imposes age verification mandates on social media services across the internet. Our friend-of-the-court brief, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, argues that HB 1126 is “an extraordinary censorship law that violates all internet users’ First …

Angela Milne, Theodora Benson, and reading deeply – welcome to episode 131 of Tea or Books?! https://www.stuckinabook.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/tea-or-books-131.mp3 In the first half of the episode, we discuss a topic suggestion by Heidi – do we read deeply or shallowly? Do we like critical editions? Or do we just ‘switch off’ and enjoy? In the second half, we pit two British Library Women Writers titles against each other – Which Way? by …

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Happy October!For some reason this month has a plethora of daily blogging or other creativity prompts. Here’s a list of the ones I found so far:* #Blogtober (consider this post my first for this, retroactively day 1)* Inktober — https://inktober.com/* LOLtober - https://weblog.anniegreens.lol/2024/10/loltober-2024* Looptober — https://looptober.com/* Mathober - https://mathober.com/* Viztober — https://www.instagram.com/evalottchen/p/DAiNm3ZtuTj/Having found so many for the month I created an “October” page on the #IndieWeb wiki to document them …