Link: What Isn’t for Sale?

Bill — Tue, 01 May 2012 19:10:05 +0000

Market thinking so permeates our lives that we barely notice it anymore. A philosopher sums up the hidden costs of a price-tag society.

A debate about the moral limits of markets would enable us to decide, as a society, where markets serve the public good and where they do not belong. Thinking through the appropriate place of markets requires that we reason together, in public, about the right way to value the social goods we prize.

Link: The Social Graph is Neither

Bill — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 19:41:59 +0000

An interesting essay about the fundamental flaws with the idea of a “social graph,” which is the basis for sites like Facebook. “The social graph wants to turn us back into third graders, laboriously spelling out just who is our fifth-best-friend. But there’s a reason we stopped doing that kind of thing in third grade!”

Link: Up in ur internets, shortening all the words

Bill — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 20:03:32 +0000

A humorously serious look at Ralph Fiennes’s claim that Twitter is eroding our language. It’s the sort of post that makes me want to be a linguist.

Link: Who Left A Tree, Then A Coffin In The Library?

Bill — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 19:27:24 +0000

An anonymous artist has been leaving book-based sculptures around Edinburgh.

Link: Europe vs. Facebook

Bill — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 03:39:53 +0000

A look at the information Facebook is collecting about you and at an Austrian law student who’s fighting back. Of course, a) Facebook isn’t the only company quietly accumulating piles of information about you and b) at least with Facebook there’s an easy answer: if you don’t like the consequences, don’t use the service.

Link: Occupy Wall Street protesters should pay more attention to the ballot box

Bill — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 21:11:52 +0000

Recent Lexington column in The Economist on the problem of getting from “protest” to “movement,” and why the current protests are not likely to succeed at that. Lexington notes that “to bring about real change in a real democracy you also have to do real politics. It just takes work—and enough people who think like you.” Also at The Economist, The Democracy in America blog makes some similar points and includes this:

It is likely that few of the protesters have actually taken part in the more mundane aspects of the system they’d like to take down—for example, only 24% of 18- to 29-year-olds voted in the 2010 mid-term elections.

Link: Word of the Week: Scofflaw

Bill — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 17:53:21 +0000

I’ve been meaning to write about scofflaw myself ever since I overheard the story of its origin on an episode of Ken Burns’s Prohibition that I wasn’t actually watching, but now I don’t have to, because Nancy Friedman beat me to it. In case you didn’t see/hear the same show, the word was invented for a contest to create a new word to shame drinkers during Prohibition.

Link: Social networking in its oldest form

Bill — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 14:56:23 +0000

This is awesome. I want to move to PEI and do this. “Over the last two decades, Harold Hackett has sent out over 4,800 messages in a bottle from Prince Edward Island, Canada’s smallest province along the Atlantic coastline. Every message asks for the finder to send a response back to Hackett, and since 1996 he has received over 3,100 responses from all over the world.”

Link: Wanna Live Forever? Become A Noun

Bill — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:52:58 +0000

Amusing song (and animation) from NPR’s Adam Cole and Robert Krulwich about people who have become nouns.

You’ve heard of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin but did you know there was an Étienne de Silhouette? Be sure to follow through to the Time/Life photo gallery of people who became nouns (though they don’t dance like the ones in the NPR animation).

Link: I want a glow-in-the-dark kitten!

Bill — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 15:18:45 +0000

Cats that can glow in the dark from a new genetic engineering technique are helping scientists study molecules that could stop AIDS. I totally want one.

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