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July 12th, 2009
03:10 pm - New Tumblr feature
Introducing: Submissions There’s an interesting genre of blog that is more about the community than the author. At some point you’ve probably seen Eat Sleep Draw, This is why you’re fat, or Cute Overload. The author starts posting about a topic they care about, the readers start contributing, and before you know it, the author has become a curator. Tumblr has always been uniquely suited for this type of blog. In fact, 6 of them have gone from Tumblr blog to book deal in the last year. So today we’re very excited to release Submissions, a feature to streamline community-driven blogs. You can enable it from your blog’s Customize screen to let your readers submit posts via web or email.
I'm committed to Posterous and LiveJournal, but Tumblr is a pretty interesting place these days. Now everyone can set up their own LOLCats-like community blog without much fuss. Posted via web from K.'s posterous
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02:58 pm - A Manifesto for Scholarly Publishing
Books — specifically scholarly titles published by university presses and other professional publishers — retain two distinct comparative advantages over other forms of communication in the idea bazaar: First, books remain the most effective technology for organizing and presenting sustained arguments at a relatively general level of discourse and in familiar rhetorical forms — narrative, thematic, philosophical, and polemical — thereby helping to enrich and unify otherwise disparate intellectual conversations. Second, university presses specialize in publishing books containing hard ideas. Hard ideas — whether cliometrics, hermeneutics, deconstruction, or symbolic interactionism — when they are also good ideas, carry powerful residual value in their originality and authority.
Peter Dougherty defends scholarly books and the university press as crucial to a modern democracy. Posted via web from K.'s posterous
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07:58 am - Rhodia Drive
 Like Moleskinerie, except more orange. Posted via web from K.'s posterous
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07:48 am - Paper is the Only Way to Go
Stepcase Lifehack's Dustin Wax writes about his 10 favorite paper notebooks. The five I've use and enjoyed:
- Moleskine : The classic. I’ve said more than enough about Moleskines already! (But for someone else’s perspective, check out the fan blog Moleskinerie .)
- Picadilly: A lower-priced knock-off of Moleskine’s notebooks that many claim are just as good as Moleskines. All the reasons you’d buy a Moleskine apply here, with some leeway for differences in paper or binding.
- Rhodia : Rhodia notebooks come in several styles (including a hard-cover Moleskine-like journal) but the classic is the soft-covered, stiff-backed pad bound with staples at the top. Known for their orange covers (though they also come in black) and loved for their high-quality paper, Rhodia notebooks are available in a variety of sizes andfor as low as a couple dollars each. (For a taste of why Rhodia notebooks have such a cult following, check out the blog Rhodia Drive .)
- Field Notes: Simple notebooks with a retro flair and a whiff of adventure about them, Field Notes are soft-covered, saddle-stitched notebooks with a straightforward, no-nonsense attitude. Field Notes are $10 for a pack of three pocket-size notebooks, and each shipment includes a fistful of goodies including matching pencils and click-pens.
- The cheapo spiral: The basic, no-nonsense cheapo notebook with spiral binding across the top or down the side. I hate them with a passion, but other people love them — they’re cheap, simple, unpretentious, and most importantly they get the job done. Plus, they’re available practically everywhere — supermarkets, drugstores, convenience stores, and of course office supply outlets.
Posted via email from K.'s posterous
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07:45 am - Fox News on American race mixing
Fox "News" talking head Brian Kilmeade on the the "mongrelization" of America:
According to a Fox News talking head, Americans aren't ethnically pure like Scandinavians: "Kilmeade and two colleagues were discussing a study that, based on research done in Finland and Sweden, showed people who stay married are less likely to suffer from Alzheimer's. Kilmeade questioned the results, though, saying, "We are -- we keep marrying other species and other ethnics and other ...""
via War Room Posted via email from K.'s posterous
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July 1st, 2009
01:44 pm - Can We Blame Our Bad Behavior on Stone-Age Genes?
Long and thoughtful Newsweek article summarizing the criticisms of Evolutionary Psychology. The claims of the field do not hold up to empirical scrutiny, and the model of the brain, which sees the organ as a modular collection of traits, is far too simplistic Posted via email from K.'s posterous
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01:14 pm - The Finnish Great Depression: From Russia with Love
During the period 1991-93, Finland experienced the deepest economic downturn in an industrialized country since the 1930s. We argue that the culprit behind this Great Depression was the collapse of Finnish trade with the Soviet Union, because it induced a costly restructuring of the manufacturing sector and a sudden, large increase in the cost of energy. Posted via web from K.'s posterous
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01:10 pm - Should linking be illegal?
Those who wish to keep the internet free and open had best dust off their legal arguments. One of America's most influential conservative judges, Richard Posner, has proposed a ban on linking to online content without permission. The idea, he said in a blog post last week, is to prevent aggregators and bloggers from linking to newspaper websites without paying: Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.
The article is actually pessimistic about stopping this sort of thing. Posted via web from K.'s posterous
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June 29th, 2009
02:38 pm - Antisocial production
Roughtype
summarizes an Israeli study of Wikipedians, who tend to be a
sour, disagreeable bunch that are "closed to new ideas". What is
apparently prosocial behavior--editing and posting publicly-available
content--is actually has an egocentric motive. Money quote:
None of this is particularly surprising. But the findings
do lend a darker tint to the rose-colored rhetoric that surrounds
online communities. A wag might suggest that "social production" would
be more accurately termed "antisocial production."
The Israeli study is available here
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June 24th, 2009
02:23 pm - Gmail Ninja
I just now turned on the Gmail keyboard shortcuts and I'm feeling stupid
that I didn't do it before this. It actually remind me a little of old
command-line clients like Mutt, which I used to like a lot and still use on
Freeshell.
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12:35 pm - More real world thinking on Twitter
Kottke on Twitter aggregation sites:
So unless you're into brief but outrageous Twitter news from Mashable that you heard about from Robert Scoble -- and it is incredible the number of people who are -- these services just aren't that useful. Posted via email from K.'s posterous
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June 23rd, 2009
06:09 pm - Hot
It must be 90 degrees at least right now. I worked up quite a sweat just
walking three blocks to get a mug of coffee. Instead of walking right
back I sat in the A/C for a while, writing in a Moleskine.
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04:13 pm - Could have been Twittered, wasn't
Long Newsweek take-down of evolutionary psychology: (thanks to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) supergee )
Maybe You Shouldn't Buy That: Things you shouldn't buy, like $450 Louis Vuitton USB drives.
After spending some time over noon toying with identi.ca and Jaiku, it came to me for the nth time that LJ is just an easier way to go.
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01:01 pm - Offensive
The reason I find swastikas and Confederate flags more offensive than the hammer and sickle is that there are more dirty racists and neo-Nazis than there are dirty neo-Communists.
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June 21st, 2009
08:30 pm - Twitter
Looking at what I said a month and a half ago about Twitter, shows me how unimaginative I can be sometimes.
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June 15th, 2009
08:28 pm - Early
I came in especially early this morning (7.00 am) because I need to leave at 4.00 pm to take my son to the Webelos shooting camp at Token Creek. We're carpooling with some other scouts.
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May 11th, 2009
01:48 pm - I hate Twitter
I'm sorry, but its unsalvageable.
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May 7th, 2009
06:30 pm - Opensource
I also installed Open Office on the Wintel laptop. I like the idea of it, but its such a slow behemoth.
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06:18 pm - Chess
I renewed a lapsed membership at Chessworld.net this afternoon. Its one of the cheapest of the major chess servers and I've enjoyed playing there in the past. My problem with chess is that I get an itch to play it periodically, and so it kind of takes over for awhile until I overextend myself with too many games, quit, forfeit a bunch of games. I always come crawling back a year later, with a lower rating and a flaky looking game record. That's pretty much what I do for fun.
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10:14 am - Boox
Christopher Tolkien on his father's new posthumous work, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, which is a 500-stanza epic poem modeled on the Elder Edda. It sounds formidable, but then again, the Silmarrilion was tough sledding in parts too.
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