excuse me, your linguistic bias is showing

I wonder if my bone-deep philosophical skepticism about language & its categorical nature have influenced my thesis argument. I mean to say, I am wary about nouns & their ability to coherently refer to things. Example: when we call something a cup, we do not refer to the space inside the handle of the cup [...]

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links for 2007-05-30

LOLCODE
I am so geek for thinking this is incontinently funny (HAI KYLE KTHXBYE)
(tags: awesome hilarious funny geek programming language internet technology)

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links for 2007-05-29

VQR » Remembering Susan Sontag
“for her, the joy of living and the joy of knowing really were one and the same.”
(tags: beautiful writing biography memory)

NYT: Adam and Eve in the Land of Dinosaurs
a Creationist Museum opens in Kentucky; today I also read that approx 1 in 5 Americans believe the sun revolves around the earth. [...]

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links for 2007-05-28

IOS – Ancient History, Angels, Dragons, Mermaids and more
this is brilliant: extensive collections of web links for a panoply of interesting themes (among them: angels! and Ibn Battuta! I love this person)
(tags: links resource awesome history angels art religion)

“Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold
that inconsolable final stanza — or rather, to seek consolation in another is [...]

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non sequitur

Dear Rachel

I am delighted to offer you a Tunku Scholarship. This offer is conditional on your being awarded a Distinction in your MPhil in Historical Studies and an unconditional offer of a place in the PhD programme for which you have applied.
Since you have been successful in your application for funding from the Gates Trust [...]

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links for 2007-05-23

Quit Facebook | Home
ohgod, hilarious because true
(tags: facebook hilarious)

NYT: Writers Take Out Their Knives
Orion Books is to publish pared-down editions of the classics w/ all “padding” ruthlessly axed. seems to me that “padding” is rather a vague predicate & we must beware of Sorites paradox, lest we ruthlessly pare down Moby Dick, word by word, [...]

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links for 2007-05-22

Shouts & Murmurs: My Undoing: Humor: The New Yorker
who would’ve thought academic conferences could be such carnal, lustful, steamy affairs?
(tags: funny article academic)

Lecture on Ethics: Ludwig Wittgenstein
when trying to say anything about ethics, one runs up against the boundary of the world, which is language itself
(tags: beautiful philosophy truth ethics)

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links for 2007-05-21

Imagining the Internet: A History and a Forecast
shared words on the past and future of the internet. one gets a real sense from this website that one is positioned at a precarious fulcrum point between the past and the future, right at the point when contingency fossilizes into history…(via clioweb)
(tags: internet culture history future technology [...]

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oh dear

also, thinking about the irony that Iran is one of the most deeply historical societies of the Middle East (3000+ years of collective memory) but seems not to have learned anything from the relatively recent horrors of Hiroshima/Nagasaki & today seems uncomfortably, erratically close to perpetrating nuclear warfare. the bombing of Israel would be a [...]

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links for 2007-05-20

Data Mining: Mapping The Blogosphere
data maps of blogospheres (they really are spheres!) — awesome.
(tags: maps visualization networks blog graphics)

Darwin Correspondence Project
darwin’s private epistles — a whopping 2000+ people he was in correspondence with! they are superb & what a tragedy that he had to die (the world would clearly be much cooler on average if [...]

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