Even Portland graffiti artists want you to shut up and do as you’re told.
Wikipedia Continues Efforts to be Totally Useless to Computer People
Not long ago some exuberant Wikipedian got rid of the articles for a bunch of non-mainstream computer languages. Now someone has nominated and incredibly famous Perl hacker for deletion. The new motto of the Wikipedia editor is “If I have flung my poop far, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants, whose articles I then nominated for deletion.”
More Depressing Thoughts
So the other day I sent an email to Gnarles Chen that contained the following:
anything that provides access to information creates an equally effective conduit for disseminating disinformation.
Today I was thinking about points at which tools that provided information outstripped the ability of people who are served by misinformation to corrupt them. It occurred to me that the kind of journalism that went on during the Vietnam War is a good example of this, and also a really glaring example of how much easier it is to create than to relax strictures.
Absent Friends
A couple of nights ago I read “The Wasteland” out loud to C, and I’ve been keeping the containing volume around and reading from it sporadically since. I am surprised at how much I still like it. I imagine that a lot of people go through an Eliot phase at some point, and then decide that the whole thing is a little too severe and get on with things. Sadly, it seems I am a bit stunted this way.
The other thing that has been standing out about it is how contemporary the apocalyptic tone feels. I mean, every era arrives at the conclusion that the world is going to end on its watch, but the particulars tend to vary. The sort of traditional return of the messiah has a certain feel, and the nuclear holocaust of my youth had a rich texture of its own.
Eliot’s interwar poetry sees the impending end of the world as a collapse into filth. Society recedes until all we have left is squalid savagery. In our political climate in which not taking any responsibility for anything is the ne plus ultra, this all starts to feel very familiar. It’s pretty shocking how quickly a handful of maniacs can reverse so much progress.
Baboons Domesticating Dogs
Not much in the way of context, but this is definitely pretty interesting.