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This site is maintained by Stewart Butterfield: stewart@sylloge.com

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  Particular Recommendations

I cannot recommend the New Yorker's special Politics Issue enough. It should be on newstands everywhere now and for the next few weeks and you should get it. I read it cover to cover in one day despite some severe over-tiredness and jetlag (staying up a few hours later than I intended in the process). Some highlights:

- An article on the focus group gurus behind the proliferation of modern uniform political linguistic constructions (and the "infinite regress of opinion formation").

- A bunch of Joseph Kennedy's letters wherein his middling intelligence is made plain.

- An article on Midland, Texas (George W. Bush's ol' hometown).

- A survey of politicians reading habits, leading to some humorously contextualized GWB flubs:

Would the survivors of Gettysburg not have nodded their weary heads at Bush's thrilling line "We must all hear the universal call to like your neighbor just like you like to be liked yourself"? Has anyone summed up the blood-filled rift between North and South with more tragic bafflement: "It was us versus them, and it was clear who the them was. Today, we're not so sure who the they are, but we know they're there"? Above all, how could Lincoln not have heeded the despairing, Old Testament cry of 'Is our children learning?" And, if they isn't, then which of we is showing they the way?

- And most of all the mis-subtitled "Eight Years: Bill Clinton looks back on his Presidency" (it should have been "Joe Klein [political reporter and at-the-time-anonymous author of "Primary Colors"] looks back on Bill Clinton's Presidency"). Though my own estimation often differed from Klein's frequently evidenced but clearly distinguished opinions, the article was truly riveting. What I found most interesting was how well the usually overlooked (inter-) personal side of Washington politics was illustrated. It so often escapes our collective notice that the gumm'nt is made up of real people and a lot of them have to cöoperate for anything to happen. Complex system indeed.

• Also recommended, NQPAOFU adjunct Parenting Ahead (I realize I'm a little late on this, but I have plenty excuses).
  
  
• [update] While we're g-packing, let me recommend judith and mitsu's worlds-apart takes on the situation in Israel.

  As might now be obvious, my ADSL service has been restored. The deal? I changed Mastercards (the telco automatically charges my card) and therefore they couldn't exact their payment. Because I've never logged into the included ISP account, I never got their email, and because I only use the landline which ADSL requires for fax, I never got their phone calls. I did, however, get a letter in my mailbox after they had already disconnected me.

Of course, tech support had no idea that my account was shut off and couldn't figure out what was wrong. We tried uninstalling things, removing things, resetting things, changing settings, powering off, and many long pauses for rebooting. Notice that I say "of course" in that first sentence. Of course the people on the second floor had no idea what the people on the third floor were doing, because phone companies seem to be inherently and essentially stupid. It is a generic property of the class of complex systems to which "phone company" belongs.

  Brethen in Absurdity

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Ben Greenman's Fun With Time

On the subway, set your watch one hour behind. Pretend that an hour is 100 million years, and that you are in the Cenomanian Age. Look around for dinosaurs, particularly hadrosaurs.

...

The next time you feel happy, look at a clock and note how long it takes until you are no longer happy.

I then I found this strange juxtaposition when poking around in my misc_bin (in an HTML file last modified June 15, 2000).

Section 107 of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, cut 'n' paste from these excerpts. This became a line in Derek Jarman's so-so 1993 film Wittgenstein and struck me as one of the 10 most important remarks in the investigations (the essentially idea, friction as a requirement, is as important in considering one's life as it is considering philosophy of language).

§ 107 The more narrowly we examine actual language, the sharper becomes the conflict between it and our requirement. (For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation: it was a requirement.) The conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of becoming empty. — We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!

Efforts Of World's 16 Billion Chickens Still Not Adding Up To Much
OMAHA, NE — According to a U.S. Poultry Council report released Monday, the collective efforts of the world's 16 billion chickens have yet to yield any appreciable results. "For thousands of years, chickens worldwide have put a tremendous amount of energy into their various activities, flapping, squawking, and pecking with a great deal of vigor," the report read. "But it remains unclear what has been accomplished as a result of these efforts."

  Found in my referrer logs: lovemarks.com — not what you'd think.The CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi links to the 5k. That's pretty cool. Still looking at the lovemarks concept ...

  DOORSOFPERCEPTION DOORSOFPERCEPTION DOORSOFPERCEPTION DOORSOFPERCEPTION DOORSOFPERCEPTION DOORSOFPERCEPTION DOORSOFPERCEPTION DOORSOFPERCEPTION

Amsterdam, November 11, 12 & 13 2000

I'm making progress on my notes and I'll post them here as soon as I can.




torstai, lokakuu 12

  www.oreilly.com: I Don't Like Your Examples!

BEGIN
       wcpkg.register ('Kissinger', 'Secret Bombing of Cambodia');

  Salon: Reefer madness

"America's surreal hypocrisy about recreational drugs has reached the full-blown Dali stage."

It's is amazing how inconvenient it is for your DSL to go down at the same time as your office fades away ...




tiistai, lokakuu 10

  Congratulations Jason!
(Oh yeah, and me. And Peryl. And Alice. And all our investors. Actually, congratulations everyone!)




maanantai, lokakuu 9

  Sylloge is switching hosts (and finally losing the ":8080" — though reverse port forwarding should prevent linkrot). There is a chance I'll lose some mail and the site might be down for a while. All changes should be done by the end of the week, but by then I'll be in South America with all of your money, suckahs.

  "Grmm. Phhf. Mmmm. *Yawn*" Or something.

Lane wasn't dead, he was just sleeping.

  Interesting thought while reading Malcolm McCullough's excellent Abstracting Craft (of which more soon). He writes:

Continuity depends on the condition that between any two states there exists still another. It also means sensations of states cannot be disjoint: a neighboring state must appear, and feel, nearly like the present state.

Here are some of the other things on this site:

The 5k contest
Someday to get its own home.

Stephen Toulmin's 1979 Ryerson Lecture at the University of Chicago, The Inwardness of Mental Life, reprinted with the kind permission of the Author & the University.

An excerpt from an interview with philosopher Donald Davidson, which I find complements the former.

Some pictures of Illuminares, Vancouver's annual latern festival.

Some pictures of The Symphony of Fire, Vancouver's annual fireworks competition.

A video from my second trip to Vegas in the year 2000. Sad, that.

And more, to be dusted off.