“‘Iconatomy’: Celebrities and Reification”
Interesting article, but I especially love the “Mormon porn” at the bottom. (Don’t worry, Ploni, if it’s safe for Mormons, it’s safe for you too.)
Archive of posts filed under the Systems category.
Includes stuff about anything where feedback causes the system to adapt, including the systems of nature, those that are man-made or cultural, and those of the human mind.
“Why Is It So Hard to Find a Suicide Bomber These Days?”
A very long article, but the basic gist of it can be summed up by this paragraph from the middle: […] To put this in context: Out of more than 150,000 murders in the United States since 9/11 — currently more than 14,000 each year — Islamist terrorists accounted for fewer than three dozen deaths …
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“Value, Emotions, and Survival”
I ran across an article the other day that baldly stated that the survival instinct is not the strongest and most universal instinct. Creating value is. Surprising on the face of it, but the more I thought of it, the more I had to admit that there’s something to it. Conventional wisdom (which may actually …
“The Effects of Social Media on Undercover Policing”
When we tell kids that they have to be careful what they share on FaceBook, that it can affect them in the future, it seems that even we don’t realize all the possible implications.
“Terrorism in the U.S. Since 9/11”
Bruce Schneier points out a newly-published analysis on recent terrorism in the US, and provides his own comments (which I fully agree with). From one of the final paragraphs: The risk of dying in the U.S. from terrorism is substantially less than the risk of drowning in your bathtub, the risk of a home appliance …
“NASA to work on approved sci-fi books”
A primary theme of this blog is that science fiction drives science. Apparently science is now directly feeding back into science fiction too. 🙂 I don’t expect this to really go anywhere. The motivation for it is pretty transparent: keeping NASA in the public eye now that there are no shuttle launches, so that Congress …
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“Financial Conspiracy Theories”
I generally ignore conspiracy theories. The more you know about history, probability, and human nature, the harder it is to seriously attribute malicious intent to things that happen by random chance, or as a result of public and well-known systems. The assassination of John F. Kennedy was (probably) a legitimate conspiracy. The claim that Kentucky …
“Increase Your Brain Power by Doing Things the Hard Way”
It’s true. The modern conveniences are great, once you know how to do things the old-fashioned, by-hand way. But if you’ve always used the conveniences, and never bothered to learn the hard way of doing something, you’re cheating yourself. I see it all the time in programming. People who started out with a high-level language …
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“Are Some Evangelicals Beginning to Question the Existence of Adam and Eve?”
This week, on the Colbert Report, I heard something that shocked me: some evangelical Christian scientists were beginning to publicly doubt that humanity could be descended from one man and one woman, as described in the book of Genesis. The reason it shocked me is that I couldn’t believe that someone who identified himself as …
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“And a Barista Will Lead Them”
Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, points out a Bloomberg article about the CEO of Starbucks Corp. urging other business leaders to suspend donations to political campaigns “until the Congress and the President return to Washington and deliver a fiscally disciplined long-term debt and deficit plan to the American people.” Other than armed revolt, that’s likely …