Technology Gone Bad
thusspakezuska | June 21, 2010I know I'm supposed to be posting installment three in the work-life balance series - and it's coming tomorrow, I promise - but I was distracted by this post by Isis's new co-blogger. I think there's a relatively strong consensus that this invention is clearly a bit of Technology Gone Bad.
In a really old Saturday Night Live sketch, Gilda Radnor and Dan Akroyd play a befuddled couple at home in the kitchen, arguing over Shimmer. It's a floor wax. No, a dessert topping. But wait! Spokesperson Chevy Chase pops in to tell them it's BOTH!!!!!
What does this have to do with understanding…
thusspakezuska | June 9, 2010HuffPo summary and link to NBC Today Show lying liar doing his lying here.
It "may be down to how you define what a plume is here."
Really? Yeah, who can believe those stupid scientists and their stupid librul observations and data.
Well, here's an idea, lying oilbag BP CEO Doug Suttles. Why don't you go down to the Gulf, and take a dive. Swim around a good long time through that area where "no massive underwater oil plumes in 'large concentrations' have been detected". Then come up, and try diving repeatedly through the oil pooled on the surface. After all that, you just climb…
thusspakezuska | May 16, 2010The last week or so I've been reading that classic of naturalist writing, The Outermost House by Henry Beston, as the last of this year's selections for the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society Book Club.
The book is a delight to read for those who love language - it is essentially one long prose poem. But at the same time, it is sweetly painful, as one takes the measure of all the glory that must have been lost in the time since Beston wrote.
Nothing quite prepared me, however, for encountering the following passage about halfway through the book, in the chapter titled "Winter Visitors".…
thusspakezuska | April 26, 2010I was making a quick jog through the local supermarket the other night, seeking out cough drops and a few other things for a sad soul at home with the croup, when I rounded a corner and came upon this fresh new vision from hell:
And here I am wasting my extra cash on donations to food pantries for hungry humans in the greater Delaware Valley area. You, poor sap, may be throwing away cash on stupid causes like earthquake relief in Haiti, or trying to save birds from extinction. Let's just all live it up and make sure Fido has a nice Fresh Meal. Maybe we could give the leftovers to the…
thusspakezuska | April 7, 2010Today I googled the phrase "eyes on the prize". Here's an excerpt from one link that came up.
The fire hoses and police dogs. The Montgomery bus boycott. The march on Washington. You've probably seen scattered footage of these images, but no project ever connected pictures to context with the tenacity of Eyes on the Prize.
The 1987 PBS series brought the strategies and struggles of the civil rights movement to new generations worldwide. Now, after years of wrangling over copyright and licensing issues, Eyes is finally available on DVD for a new mass audience. (It was already available for…
thusspakezuska | May 15, 2009Hat tip to reader James Ramsey...
What do women really need in computer? Because, what with our vaginas and all, our computing needs are so, so different from those of men. Thank the goddess Dell is looking out for us, with its helpful marketing strategy that emphasizes "color schemes, cases and dieting tips". Oh my god, I can accessorize my laptop? I must have died and gone to heaven! Here's a "Tech Tip" from the Della site (isn't that so cute??? get it? Dell, the real site, is gendered "guy", while Della is for us girls. I mean, who would want to buy a laptop from a guy site, right…
thusspakezuska | February 26, 2009SCENE:
At the YMCA: they used to have perfectly serviceable water fountains in the room with the treadmills, elliptical trainers, and weight machines. They ripped them out and replaced them with water coolers that require the use of little conical paper cups - which, of course, must be used once and then thrown away. I and a few others left comments on their comment cards to the effect that this was a fucking stupid move, wasteful in the extreme, bad for the environment, blah blah. Response: we hear your concerns; we are so concerned about sanitation, water coolers are better for everyone,…
thusspakezuska | February 24, 2009As a graduate student, I observed the nascent field of functional magnetic resonance imaging and thought to myself with some amusement "modern phrenology! Now with big, fancy, expensive equipment!" Count me among those who have never been terribly impressed with fMRI, and certainly not with its applications in what is known as social neuroscience.
Now we have this:
Late last year, Ed Vul, a graduate student at MIT working with neuroscientist Nancy Kanwisher and UCSD psychologist Hal Pashler, prereleased "Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience" on his website. The journal Perspectives…
thusspakezuska | February 16, 2009I found out about both of these courtesy of the Chronicle Review Note Bene/New Books in Print feature. Both look extremely interesting.
First, Revisiting Race in a Genomic World, from Rutgers University Press.
With the completion of the sequencing of the human genome in 2001, the debate over the existence of a biological basis for race has been revived. In Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, interdisciplinary scholars join forces to examine the new social, political, and ethical concerns that are attached to how we think about emerging technologies and their impact on current conceptions…
thusspakezuska | January 29, 2009A week or so ago I finally gave in and allowed my friends to convince me that I really, really needed to go on Facebook. It has been fun - I've gotten back in touch with some old friends I'd lost track of; I've enjoyed reading tidbits about the daily goings-on of my friends' lives; I've tried to figure out what the heck L'il Green Patch is all about.
Yet it also seems to me, in some ways, like a nightmare. With email, I log on, read messages, respond, delete, I'm done. With blogging, I log on, write a blog post, post it, check comments to see if anything is languishing in moderation, I'm…
thusspakezuska | January 27, 2009The other day I needed to pick up a few items at the grocery store, and run a few errands. So I made a list, because I cannot keep more than two or three things in my head with any degree of accuracy. I used time-tested technology to achieve this purpose: paper and pen.
But apparently this is no longer sufficient. Oh no. You need a SmartShopper Grocery List Organizer!
The SmartShopper is small electronic device for you to speak your grocery list and errands into, because after all, who can be bothered with the time-consuming chore of writing down something like "eggs" or "toothpaste"…
thusspakezuska | December 27, 2008I wasn't able to blog this when I first saw it in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Dec. 19, but it annoyed me so much I hung onto the paper and saved it for a time when I could.
The typical traffic light is roughly the size of a large table fan.
The hardware necessary to switch a signal from green to amber to red in a fail-safe way can probably fit into the space of an old desktop computer.
So why does Philadelphia need to install control boxes as big as refrigerators to operate its traffic lights?
Thank you, Department of Homeland Security. Requirements for specific kinds of surveillance…