Links for 2005-09-14
Posted September 14, 2005 1:17 AM.
- Top 8 Reasons HCI is in its Stone Age This piece really reminds me of my old boss Stefan Magdalinski, except without the slightly crazed look, bead of sweat and slathering...
- Xenu - "In Scientology doctrine, Xenu is a galactic ruler who, 75 million years ago, brought billions of people to Earth, stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs." It's no wonder I'm an atheist - the faith of my forefathers is so dull. I want aliens and lasers. Now there's something to believe in...
- 'Proof' our brains are evolving - a really interesting BBC News piece on genes associated with acculturation.. "The microcephalin variant appeared along with the emergence of traits such as art and music, religious practices and sophisticated tool-making techniques, which date back to about 50,000 years ago."
- Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain takes top prize at Venice I'm kind of obsessed by this film, because it's been a long time since I saw a compelling mainstream drama with gay people in it. Plus they're cowboys. Hot cowboys.
- Shelley Powers takes Our Social World apart for being too dominated by males and not having enough minorities. (1) I am gay, (2) I spent three post-grad years working around identity politics, feminism and queer theory, (3) There are iniquities that need to be rectfied, (4) I think this argument is illogical, insular, self-defeating and insulting.
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
Re Shelley's comments on OSW:
(3) There are iniquities that need to be rectified, (4) I think this argument is illogical, insular, self-defeating and insulting.
I don't understand any of those charges, and I've really got a problem with 'insulting' - taking criticisms as insults is a great way to avoid learning something new.
As far as I can see, Shelley's argument was precisely that There are iniquities that need to be rectified - and that the speaker list for OSW reproduced those inequities. And this isn't because the OSW organisers are evil sexists, but simply because those inequities tend to reproduce themselves if people don't make a positive effort to derail them. It doesn't have to be much of an effort - you just need to say, for example, "does the gender balance of the list we've got really reflect the gender balance of people working in the field?" - but the effort does have to be made.
→ Posted by: Phil at September 14, 2005 10:25 AM
re brains evolving: it's an interesting complement to the recent discovery that a lot of what previously had been considered "Junk" DNA is actually quite active when cells are in the environment of the brain and the nervous system.
we have as a species only a very weak grasp of how our lowlevel machinery works.
→ Posted by: Saltation at September 14, 2005 9:15 PM
Having read through the post and comments at Shelley's site I'm now slightly nervous of the blogmeet I've got organised.
Thankfully I don't mention anything to do with social software, networking or any other big words. No no, it's just a, um, gathering in a pub for people who blog...
I hope there are enough women coming... and I'm sure we're short on Asians, definitely short on squirrels...
→ Posted by: Gordon at September 14, 2005 11:18 PM