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

• Ecol­ogy with­out Nature: OOO (Start Here)

  
  phi­los­o­phy ontol­ogy pragmatism-it-ain’t which-​​is-​​weird

• The Valve — A Lit­er­ary Organ | Talk to the Wood: Ani­mism is Natural

  “…Yet we should be wary of get­ting wrapped up in the prac­ti­cal­ity of it all. For that hardly explains the mythol­ogy, the fact that this or that fea­ture of the land­scape is a sacred place, that the Song­lines were traced by cul­ture heroes of ani­mal nature. None of that is nec­es­sary for the merely prac­ti­cal end of accu­rate time-​​keeping, though it might be use­ful to have a story to give some con­tent to the nar­ra­tive stream. To mea­sure a long stretch of time, and thus a long dis­tance, one could sim­ply count to some suf­fi­ciently high num­ber while walk­ing and singing at a steady pace. Count­ing to an arbi­trarly high value, how­ever, is a rel­a­tively recent human accom­plish­ment, one not present in pre­lit­er­ate cul­tures. One could also use very long strings of non­sense syl­la­bles, but they are very dif­fi­cult to mem­o­rize accu­rately, as thou­sands of under­grad­u­ates in decades of psy­cho­log­i­cal exper­i­ments know all too well; such things sim­ply don’t have much pur­chase in the human brain. So one sings the song of a cul­ture hero’s jour­ney, while trac­ing that jour­ney one­self, and in the process, one becomes that hero. We are in the world Val Geist hypoth­e­sized, in which our ances­tors imi­tated the calls of ani­mals in order to manip­u­late ani­mal behav­ior. In the process of imag­in­ing the wilder­ness though the per­sona of an ani­mal one assim­i­lates that wilder­ness to the cat­e­gories and needs of human culture.”
  
  social-​​dynamics ani­mism big-​​T-​​theory Bruno-​​Latour anthro­pol­ogy cultural-​​dynamics

• Open states: Trans­parency for state gov­ern­ments using open data | open​source​.com

  What is the biggest impact Open States has had to date? I sup­pose it depends on what kind of impact we’re talk­ing about. Gov­ern­ments are slowly com­ing to terms with this and we’ve seen states like Min­nesota and Kansas start to move towards machine-​​readable access of their data—and I think we can take some of the credit for that. A big part of it is that they just have smart peo­ple work­ing there that get the impor­tance of mak­ing this data avail­able in as many ways as pos­si­ble. I’m par­tic­u­larly par­tial to the impact that the project has had on indi­vid­u­als. Sun­light open sources every­thing we do, and as a result, we have over 130 projects on GitHub. Most of these projects aren’t things that the aver­age devel­oper uses, so they don’t see a ton of atten­tion from out­side devel­op­ers. Open States has been a real suc­cess in a unique way—it has got­ten devel­op­ers that were oth­er­wise unaware of open gov­ern­ment involved. We’ve had con­tri­bu­tions from approx­i­mately 50 devel­op­ers, rang­ing from minor tweaks to a parser to fix an error that a user noticed to entire states con­tributed. I think it has made a real impact in pro­vid­ing a gen­tle intro­duc­tion for devel­op­ers look­ing for a way to contribute.
  
  open-​​access open­ness government2.0 trans­parency com­mons