infobong.com

material in sophisticated

I saw that this year's class of McArthur Fellows has been announced, and remembered that one of my professors from OU, Bret Wallach, had said he won some big fellowship, so I looked to see if he was on the list of past recipients. Indeed, he was. I didn't really think about it at the time, but that's really quite impressive. Dr. Wallach was a good teacher, too. I took his "Human Geography" class my first semester of college, and he seemed genuinely concerned that I was going to drop out, and did his best to encourage and engage me in class.

based on just cause

I brought up this quote in Historiography class today, so I reckon I should post it on the blog.

I guess the comments on this blog suggest that the remark is taken out of context, but, boy howdy, is that a creepy thing to say.

indie 500

Alright, this is post number 500 on the infobong, so I thought I might try something a little special. I'm posting a few draft questions for today's RTF 319 quiz, and see if readers know the answers.

Click "Yeah... And it don't stop" for the correct answers. 500 posts in a little less than two years is hardly prolific, but that's still not a bad rate of posting... right?

The Answers

aground on its own ambitions

The New York Times has another story today about Philadelphia's plans to light the City of Brotherly Love with free Wi-Fi goodness. As a former Philly resident, this plan strikes me as incredibly goofy; most of the people in Philly are so poor, even a crappy $600 notebook is beyond their means. Unless John Street is going to be handing out laptops at The Gallery, the only people using this service will be tourists and Penn students. That sounds callous, I know. There are indeed structural issues in Philadelphia that reinforce the digital divide. West Philly, where I lived lagged the suburbs by two years getting DSL service from Verizon, and cable modem was unavailable until the local minority-owned cable operator was acquired by AOL-Time Warner. In 2001, Baltimore Avenue, which ran by my house was completely torn up to replace the trolley tracks. At the time, I quipped that the city should install fiber-optic trunks in the street while it was dug out, but, alas, that did not happen.

The Times is usually pretty fastidious about getting names right, but the article refers to "Love Park," which is what locals call the public space Northwest of City Hall, but the proper name of the joint is "JFK Plaza." Which leads me to the Infobong.com Trivia Question of the Day! What was President Kennedy's blood type? Click "yeah... and it don't stop" for the answer.

President Kennedy's blood type was B-Negative. We watched the CBS and NBC breaking news coverage of his assassination at my screening today.

faculty: mcconnell

Oh crap, I think I might be a grown-up now. According to this Web page, I get my very own class next semester. It all seems so official and weird.

rhizomatix

I've been fooling around with the scanner and filters, and this came out.

intricately constructed reservations

Sweet, the Center for the Study of Political Graphics has Abu Ghraib/iPod remix posters on sale. For $25, you can have that image of "iRaq" decorating your walls. And here's a nice short history of the CIA's use of torture.

surf and find

At Danah's suggestion, I added this site to Radio-TV-Film is closest to “Arts.” I feel so pretentious.

exceeded in virulence

Good gravy, I feel like I'm newsblogging up a storm tonight, but Salon.com has a crazy story on Tom Coburn, the Republican candidate for the Oklahoma Senate seat, the same guy who supports capital punishment for doctors who perform abortions.

I hope Oklahomans can distinguish between the evil of liberalism and the evil of sterilizing a poor young woman without her consent. The Sooner State elected a Democrat Brad Henry for governor over former Seattle Seahawk and Republican Steve Largent in 2002, so maybe they exercise some caution when they pick their ultra-right politicians.

analysis had been suppressed

Lordy. The mental health industry exists to help people. But I don't have a lot of faith in it when I read stuff like this, or consider the current emphasis of medication over talk therapy - they seem more interested in just drugging people rather than help them solve their problems. The article doesn't mention this, so I may be mistaken, but my understanding is that the FDA doesn't require clinical trials of antidepresants for teenagers before allowing doctors to prescribe them to minors - drug companies only need to demonstrate that Prozac, et al, are regarded as safe for adults in the general population, so, inductively, the drugs are safe for teens.

general is becoming erratic

Willard Uncapher posted an interesting item on the Association of Internet Researchers list lamenting the lack of historical knowledge of communications technology among people in the field. He says, “I like to think about the question as to whether the development of the Internet and CMC during the later 20th century was 'revolutionary' or 'evolutionary' or what.” I do too. Having come of age in the 1990s, reading WiReD, and following new technology with some fervor, I long thought that the Internet was indeed revolutionary and uniquely disrupted social relations. Yet my work writing for computer magazines and my later work in graduate school eventually made me realize that the Internet was only one of many technologies, like the telephone or radio, that seemed to threaten an existing social order until it was comfortably situated within society.

I'm starting to think that my calling might be history of communications technology, and I enrolled in my department's Historiography class. (Here's the syllabus in .pdf) Janet is a historian of some reknown and presumably has some faith in history as a means of sharing knowledge and wisdom, but I am a little disappointed that the class is largely devoted to historiographic theory critical of existing histories; I would rather learn how to write effective histories than debate the nature of reality or discuss the hopelessness of making sense of the past.

I presume some readers share my interest in the history of technology, and I will recommend Carolyn Marvin's When Old Technologies Were Newwhich is a highly readable and interesting book with nearly no theoretical mumbo jumbo.

grassroots capitalism

I noticed this morning that The Media Foundation is taking orders for its antibrand "Black Spot Sneaker." I'm really tempted to grab a pair in order to give myself a much-needed dose of cultural cachet. I tend to disagree with Prentiss' assertion that $60 is a lot to spend on sneakers. Unless you're biomechanically perfect, running shoes start around $90, and I'll bet that the all-hemp Adidas I wore in college cost about $50-60, so a well-made pair of hemp sneakers is going to cost some money, whether or not they're made in unionized factory in Portugal or not.

But what does keep me from ordering a pair Black Spots is the fact that I don't really need another pair of sneakers. I bought a pair of Puma Californias - the greatest sneaker ever made - back in March, and it'll be years before I need to buy new shoes. It doesn't make sense to consume simply to contest the social role of consumption.

down their feeds

Here's interesting post on the "economics" of RSS from a techie's point of view. Herr Scoble is correct in his assertion that

Sometime this spring the index.rdf overtook the infobong main page as the most frequently-accessed file on this site. In August, the RSS file was access three times as much as the default page. On a low-volume blog like this one, that seems about right, dedicated readers wait for their newsreaders to tell them when this site is updated, so people only visit when there are new posts up.