Without going into a lot of detail about it (no time!) I wanted to quote from this article discussing the ideas of Jonathan Haidt. It’s actually supposed to be a review of George Lakoff’s writing on political language, but it gets further into Haidt’s ideas and research as a better alternative. He’s not so kind […]

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I’m a huge fan of Jonathan Lethem. And I hadn’t gotten round to reading all of his essay in Harper’s until just lately. Here’s a slice. And yes, the writing is this sharp and elegant all the way through:
“The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism” by Jonathan Lethem (Harper’s Magazine)
For substantially all ideas are secondhand, […]

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Theobromine, often confused with caffeine, is the molecule responsible for the mild mood-elevating effects of fine, high-concentration (dark) chocolate.
Theo = “god” & Broma = “food” — truly the food of the gods.

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I’m not much of a joiner. I’m not saying I’m too good for it. I just don’t take to it naturally.
So I tend to be a little Johnny-come-lately to the fresh stuff the cool kids are doing.
For example, when I kept seeing “Web 2.0″ mentioned a while back, I didn’t really think about […]

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In my ever-expanding obsession with coining terms*, I’ve come up with another one: Ustiquity.
It’s the property of being both “ubiquitous” and “sticky” that describes information on the Internet and the increasingly available manner in which we access that information.
See, we’re all creating information, having conversations, making thoughts explicit with language. We’ve always done […]

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Cool article (via bloug) for a number of reasons. But the one thing that really popped out for me was the fact that missionaries, in order to convert other cultures to Christianity, are first converting other cultures into written-language cultures.
It’s like “terraforming” (converting a planet into one hospitable to earth life forms), but for […]

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I’m still giddy, even in my jaded state, whenever I hear about yet another yummy infospace architecture element that creates emergent structures.
I’m not even sure if I just said anything that makes sense … what’s the official terminology?
Anyway, now Flickr is using some fun math to track the ‘interestingness’ of photos on the […]

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I’m doing some research on old technology and how people talked about it when it was new to them, and ran across this terrific site with an article about Murry Mercier and TV in 1929
My favorite part of this page is the scan of the news article from April 29, 1929, The Ohio State Journal […]

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I hereby coin the term “gurule” — and announce that I’m tired of gurules.
By “gurule” I mean overly simplistic rules made up by design gurus, mostly for the purpose of sounding smart and making a name for themselves.
“The Back Button is Always Bad”
“Redundancy is Bad”
“Frames are Bad”
Hm, usually they seem to be about […]

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