The Taxi Driver
I called for a taxi, looking to get to an airport. The driver was a youngish Hispanic guy. He turned down the radio volume as I entered, but I have a long relationship with talk radio- even the crazier flavors- and I recognized the gravelly voice immediately. “Was that Alex Jones?” “Yeah- you know Alex more »
“Game Change”
Yesterday I posted this: “People’s life stories tend to be told as a series of big, “seminal events” and accomplishments that appear to have a direct logic between them. There is a sense of movement and distinct decision points. (I’ve made arguments about this view being fallacious and un-useful, so I had to kind of more »
“Escape Velocity”
In college, my roommates and I developed this idea of an event’s “escape velocity” in a life story. The idea is a simple one: People’s life stories tend to be told as a series of big, “seminal events” and accomplishments that appear to have a direct logic between them. There is a sense of more »
Superstars
Superstars are not by accident a conspicuous phenomenon in our culture, but inherently belong to a meritocratic society with mass media, free enterprise, and competition. To make this contention plausible I will use Caillois’s book, Man, Play and Games to compare the mechanisms underlying the superstar phenomenon with a special kind of game, as set out by Caillois. – Roger Callois, more »
Diplomacy with Foreign Minds
In this post, I’m rambling aloud about the human “parliamentary mind” and speculate about the intelligence of other arguably-sentient creatures. The Parliamentary Mind “Some years ago, there was a lovely philosopher of science and journalist in Italy named Giulio Giorello, and he did an interview with me. And I don’t know if he wrote it more »
UpWing/DownWing and Etherealization
An Overdue Clarification I should’ve written this weeks ago, to help me outline the direction of my thinking. This article on Aeon Magazine proposed a new political dichotomy based on (as ever) views of human nature and what kind of future we are prepared for. The new dichotomy: Green (or DownWings) vs Black (or UpWings). [As opposed to more »
Veillance [Sur- and Sous-]
Damn, it’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) again. I discovered this because I started receiving drafts from old friends that used to do this kind of thing with me in grade school. I’m too busy <- that’s a terrible excuse and nobody believes you. It’s too late for me to start, I think, so maybe I’ll more »
“Driver Assist” [The Gradual Development of Driverless Cars]
Flipping back over to UpWing for a little while, throwing down some notes while it’s still fresh in my mind from recent conversations. A lot of these notes are based on your casual tech blog’s impression of the future and so they may be a bit more trite than DownWing thought seems to be. That’s more »
Hollow States (two kinds)
I don’t mean to make much of the Upwing/Downwing dichotomy. They can be understood in existing words but those words have a lot of political baggage. Better to use nonsense words if I’m going to imbue new meaning at all. And, frankly/uninterestingly, both “teams” will have plenty of objectively significant events to cherry-pick in the more »
More Mulling
Chris Matthews on “Up Late with Alex Baldwin” Something he said spoke to some half-ideas I began fielding in “Mulling Over“, when I was citing “What is Your Water Talent“. “You know when a small business guy is elected President, because he’s used to doing it all himself. Reagan was a corporate person, he more »