Monthly Archives: September 2011

Items of some interest…

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These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

  • The Valve — A Lit­er­ary Organ | Dis­ney Ago­nistes: Night on Bald Mountain

    Make no mis­take, that’s what Dis­ney was deal­ing with in that car­ni­val of ani­mal dancers, appear­ance and real­ity. That’s one of the major themes in car­toons. It is cen­tral, for exam­ple, in that most aus­tere of car­toon premises, the Road­run­ner and Coy­ote car­toons of Chuck Jones. To deny it of Dis­ney in the film he planned as a show­case for this new medium, a film in which, among other things, he showed the ori­gins of life on earth and the death of the dinosaurs, to deny a cen­tral inter­est in the play of appear­ance and real­ity is to be deeply and per­haps will­fully mis­taken about the nature of the medium in which Dis­ney so delib­er­ately and bril­liantly worked.

    literary-​​criticism Walt-​​Disney Fan­ta­sia film-​​criticism sym­bol­ism doesn’t-anybody-else-remember-the-symbolists?

  • Nathan Allan, Mas­ters of Glass — Core77

    Col­lec­tively, Nathan Allan Glass Stu­dios Inc. is an artist, and glass is their can­vas. The Canada-​​based com­pany pro­duces glass in dozens of unique tex­tures, and the company’s focus on R&D aims to retain an inno­v­a­tive and com­pet­i­tive edge by com­ing up with sur­faces that oth­ers cannot.

    interior-​​design industrial-​​design fin­ishes tes­se­la­tions

  • Clever Dol­phins Use Shells to Catch Fish | Wired Sci­ence | Wired​.com

    Also unknown is how conch­ing emerged: as a lucky dis­cov­ery, per­haps, or in flashes of insight from crea­tures whose intel­li­gence may rival our own but hap­pen to lack fin­gers and hands. Because Shark Bay’s dol­phins are very ter­ri­to­r­ial, how­ever, and conch­ing has been wit­nessed in dis­parate loca­tions on its east and west sides, the researchers believe conch­ing was dis­cov­ered sev­eral times inde­pen­dently. If, as with spong­ing, conch­ing is taught pri­mar­ily by females to other females, then conch­ing could have been an inven­tion of sin­gle moth­ers try­ing to feed their fam­i­lies. That it’s being wit­nessed with more fre­quency sug­gests Shark Bay’s dol­phins are learn­ing about it. Per­haps those four who watched Con were tak­ing a lesson.

    nature biol­ogy human-​​equals-​​hubris

Items of some interest…

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  • Odlyzko

    “Gulli­bil­ity is the prin­ci­pal cause of bub­bles. Investors and the gen­eral pub­lic get snared by a “beau­ti­ful illu­sion” and throw cau­tion to the wind. Attempts to iden­tify and con­trol bub­bles are com­pli­cated by the fact that the author­i­ties who might nat­u­rally be expected to take action have often (espe­cially in recent years) been among the most gullible, and were cheer­lead­ers for the exu­ber­ant behav­ior. Hence what is needed is an objec­tive mea­sure of gullibility.”

    bub­ble economic-​​crisis eco­nom­ics social-​​dynamics pragmatism-it-ain’t

Items of some interest…

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These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

  • Every­thing We Think Can in Prin­ci­ple Be Thought By Some­one Else: A Plea for Open Scholarship

    “This is just to say that if we think keep­ing our schol­arly work pri­mar­ily out of pub­lic sight [except for the occa­sional con­fer­ence pre­sen­ta­tion] until its penul­ti­mate moment of pub­li­ca­tion in a con­ven­tional venue such as the aca­d­e­mic jour­nal or book, at which point quite a few years of our lives [mainly spent in the soli­tude of stud­ies and libraries or other semi-​​private spaces where we could man­age a foothold] may have been devoted to that work whose “arrival” in print may even occur long after we have moved on to other projects, then we risk work­ing too much in the dark, apart from the world which has bequeathed to us our objects and meth­ods of study and reflec­tion [I might also add here that this tra­di­tional way of doing things also keeps our work sequestered within the acad­emy, and does not allow us to reach a more broadly pub­lic audi­ence, which, in my mind, is a real per­ver­sion of the term “human­i­ties”]. We also do our work largely apart from the very peers whom we hope will wel­come and even love it when it is “fin­ished.” Yes, for the kind of work we do, quiet is required, even long stretches of soli­tude [because this is when ideas often arrive to us that could never have arrived any other way and also because it’s hard to trans­late medieval Latin when peo­ple are milling all around you], but you’ve got to get out­side every now then. And maybe also reflect on the fact that even the sup­posed inside/​outside divide is pri­mar­ily an illusion.”

    academic-​​culture open­ness pub­lish­ing gate­keep­ing coscience

Items of some interest…

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  • Wel­come to Middle-​​Class Poverty— Does Any­body Know the Way Out? — Sara Horowitz — Busi­ness — The Atlantic

    “The short-​​term way to level the play­ing field is to update the New Deal so it includes and addresses the cur­rent work­force. We need to accept that many peo­ple don’t work full-​​time for an employer and that “jobs” no longer mean just W-​​2 employ­ees, as Dou­glas Rushkoff explained. Richard Cass, a self-​​employed tech­ni­cal and busi­ness con­sul­tant and Free­lancers Union mem­ber, also puts it well: “Gov­ern­ment pro­grams that pro­mote small busi­ness gen­er­ally focus on com­pa­nies with scores of employ­ees and mil­lions of dol­lars in annual rev­enue, which is short-​​sighted.” That has imme­di­ate impli­ca­tions for our eco­nomic and job poli­cies. But to really bring a thriv­ing mid­dle class back to life, we need a dra­matic shift in think­ing, insti­tu­tions, and assump­tions. The role of pol­icy should be to fos­ter newer, more self-​​sustaining sys­tems that fol­low this new mutu­al­ist par­a­digm. In the long run, our insti­tu­tions need to move away from regard­ing the office as the cen­ter of a person’s eco­nomic life, from busi­ness as the provider of ben­e­fits, and from gov­ern­ment as the provider of social sup­ports. The mid­dle class does not have to be built by focus­ing on indi­vid­ual wealth. Instead, we can build sta­ble mar­kets and soci­eties where peo­ple make a liv­ing, com­mu­ni­ties flour­ish, and busi­nesses sur­vive — and not at the expense of oth­ers. It’s not utopian — it’s a neces­sity if we want a suc­cess­ful mid­dle class again.”

    cowork­ing free­lancers economic-​​crisis public-​​policy gov­ern­ment rev­o­lu­tion