18.744 Zeitgeist metrics from Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty
The very notion of ignorance is rather incompatible with that of distributed knowledge, isn’t it?

18.743 beyond being dubious and gloomy from Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty :

The Onion | Amazing New Hyperbolic Chamber Greatest Invention In The History Of Mankind Ever
There seems to be a pattern on “foul language” in this issue of The Onion. This item lets us think about how neutral science should sound…

WARNING: Very “inappropriate” and non-PC but quite insightful.

The Onion | Report: U.S. Foreign Policy Hurting American Students’ Chances Of Getting Laid Abroad

The Onion | Area Man Well-Versed In First Thirds Of Great Literature
You know, not such a bad idea, actually. I like this idea of going against the notion of a book as a complete form. Multiple readings, voices, interpretations, which run against the canon by using the canon. Nicey!
Yeah, yeah. It’s intended to show that you can’t be well-read if you haven’t read the whole works. But what’s fun with a book is partly that we can do whatever we want with it. If I want to start with the final chapter, so be it. If I want to peruse and browse, catching glimpses of thought-provoking notions, who’s preventing me. Let’s break free of the narrative structure! Let’s go back to excerpts of Greimas, Guattari, Bakhtin, Propp, Genette, Barthes, Gramsci, and Derrida to fight linearity, hegemony, discourse, and dialogue!
😉

SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE VANISHES, REPLACED BY NEW ENTITY CALLED STURCH
And the joke can go much further while still remaining insightful…
I do like the name. Sounds starchy.

The Prior-Art-O-Matic
Not new principle, still fun.

Boing Boing: Ghana nationalizes folklore, threatens jail for folk artists

Ghana nationalizing its traditions, making it unlawful to profit from them.

Macworld: Editors’ Notes: It’s all in the presentation:

Phil Jackson give the SoundTrack demo during the Final Cut Studio announcement last Sunday, and it was amazing.

Same idea here and here.
Now, this sounds really neat. Can’t we get the video of that? I mean, just for inspiration into presentation techniques. After all, it’s a lot of what we need to do as instructors, even in relatively small classes…

ACM Ubiquity – Francis Hsu: “Plato as Software Designer”: “Can we duplicate what is within our skulls in a computer’s address space?”

Much of it is quite naïve but it might still be useful to introduce some computer/engineer types to the basics of philosophy of language, structural analysis, and semiotics.