Fishrush

To be admonished for acting like a lemming may now imply that we shouldn't be so susceptible to being eaten. ¶ Link

"Up until now I have been trying to gear up for this project and not really sure how it was going to coalesce. I had a rough outline, some scraps of bones, but no meat, nothing visceral was compelling me to tell the story. I was walking home from work, thinking about stuff that had really nothing to do with the story idea or a novel of any sort, when suddenly I had one of those click moments." ~ All Things White and Circular

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"'Having time- and space-bound measures that equate learning with a certain place and a certain time is clearly outmoded. And yet it is the DNA embedded in both the academic and funding system,' said Jane Wellman, coeditor with Thomas Ehrlich of 'How the Student Credit Hour Shapes Higher Education,' a recently released collection of essays on the credit hour. " | Read More...

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Douglas Rushkoff : "I'm organizing a new seminar to teach at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU next semester. Here's where I am, so far.

Right to Play: Theoretical Perspectives on Interactivity"

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Ftrain.com: "This demographic filter was applied for many reasons. As I said, there was no way to convince people to come to a flash mob. They were out of fashion. But this was a group to which the idea of the exclusive, ironic, parodic flash mob -- the egalitarian event suddenly made elite, turned into a situationist event that functioned as a parody of a situationist event -- well, they would love it. As they ran to the statue at the appointed time I could see their cloaks of detachment, their shields of wit and irony, three layers thick, flying out behind them, those young and beautiful souls in motion.

It felt good to seduce them..." ¶ Link

kuro5hin.org: "Whether you call it Mojo, Karma, 'Standing,' or something else, all content rating feedback systems have some sort of currency. While there are many different ways of acquiring and spending such capital, nobody seems to have implemented an economy varied enough to be robust. And this is the key to building a system which can be stable in the long term.

Speaking very broadly, any web rating system is trying to encourage certain behaviors and discourage others..."

via Plasticbag ¶ Link

Yahoo! News: "You don't need to actually see or smell something unpleasant to know it is disgusting -- you only need to look at someone else's expression, according to research published on Wednesday. " ¶ Link

Yahoo! News: "For more than a century and a half, the flying reptiles known as pterosaurs have been victims of a nasty smear, scientists say. These cousins of the dinosaur are typically portrayed as cawing, gawky fliers with all the agility of a World War I biplane. Now, though, computer scanning of fossilized pterosaur skulls has thrown up a radically different picture: of a creature whose highly specialised brain gave it extraordinary control over its wing surfaces, making it so nimble that it could probably outperform modern birds. " ¶ Link

cromulent. you say you're with me. i know you don't care.: "Somedays, you come to the strong, swift, painful realization that you are All Alone in This World. Not in the strapping-young-lad, go-off-and-be-independent way. Not in the I-foresee-spinsterhood-and-many-cats-in-your-future way. But in the very instantly real..." ¶ Link

Wikipedia: "Pinyin literally means 'spelling according to sounds' in Mandarin Chinese and usually refers to Hanyu pinyin (literal meaning: 'Han language pinyin'), which is a system of romanization (phonetic notation and transliteration to roman script) for Mandarin used in the People's Republic of China. Pinyin was approved in 1958 and adopted in 1979 by its government. It superseded older transcriptions like the Wade-Giles system (1859; modified 1912) or Bopomofo. Similar systems have been designed for Chinese dialects and non-Han minority languages in the PRC. Cantonese also has a pinyin-type system called Penkyamp, whose name derives from the same word as pinyin, albeit articulated in the Cantonese dialect. " ¶ Link

The American Enterprise: "Economists worry about Social Security and Medicare. The recent AEI publication by Jagadeesh Gokhale and Kent Smetters, Fiscal and generational imbalances: new budget measures for new budget priorities, is typical. They calculate that the present value of unfunded entitlements is roughly $40 trillion, which is about eight times the outstanding national debt. Social Security accounts for less than 20 percent of the entitlement shortfall. More than 80 percent of the unfunded liabilities are in Medicare.

Economic analysis suggests that sooner or later some combination of tax increases and benefit cutbacks will be required to restore Social Security and Medicare to solvency. There is much debate about which specific combinations of tax and benefit changes are fiscally sound, ethically fair, and politically feasible. However, there is little disagreement that the looming shortfall is better dealt with sooner than later.

There is one important perspective that has not been brought to bear on the issue of the burden of future entitlements. That is the perspective of science, technology, and innovation..."

Many interesting comments on the suggestion that science could bail out social security. ¶ Link

all noise - all the time: "The crane in Tokyo where there are no cranes, flying low through the mist in Rikugien like tears in rain. And the last two years a frame at a time. ¶ Link

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters): "Maradona ornaments swung from a Christmas Tree and soccer studs hung from a cross as fanatical followers of the former Argentina international raucously celebrated his birth. " ¶ Link

"Who could have thought 10 years ago that the a Russian oil company's CFO would be an American and that the COO would also be an American. Today, that is a reality at YukosSibneft. ¶ Link

WSJ.com - Science Journal: "In one of those made-in-heaven marriages, two of the hottest fields in science -- genetics and neurobiology -- are joining forces. It's an auspicious match. In people, an estimated two-thirds of our 30,000 or so genes are active in the brain, estimates neurobiologist Daniel Weinberger of the National Institute of Mental Health, but scientists have little idea which genes play starring roles in which brain structures and neurons.

A new project called Gensat (Gene Expression Nervous System Atlas) is changing that, scientists report this week in the journal Nature. The 'atlas' will map gene activity in the mouse brain, explains project leader Nathaniel Heintz of Rockefeller University in New York, showing how and where genes shared by mice and men -- including those implicated in mental illness, thinking and learning -- go to work." ¶ Link