Comments Enabled
I’ve finally gotten around to adding comments to my tumblr. Now I’ll know if anyone actually reads this stupid thing.
You can also comment anonymously if you have something hateful to say.
Gov’t/Econ back in the day… Why wouldn’t you doodle?
Old Password
I applied to Cal as an English major. Thus I felt it natural to use an entire poem as my password for all my online school busy-ness. Calnet for y’all familiar with Cal’s online system. Anyhow, here is my old password, it’s the red wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
besides the white
chickens
In Defense of Twitter
In light of a friend saying that she is unceremoniously leaving twitter I feel compelled to offer a case not to–and in more than 140 characters.
First of all, Twitter is a Web 2.0 thing where you tell your friends what you are doing or thinking at the moment. The messages have to be really short. Some say Twitter is like facebook’s status update but last time I checked the new UI interface at facebook looks a lot more like Twitter than the other way around. Others say it’s like the next evolution in chat rooms since those got taken over by perverts on AOL. Twitter is really whatever you want it to be.
Twitter, some say kills in-person social interaction. What a claim! In-person social interaction has been at war with the printed word, then the telephone, then e-mail, and IM for ages. The list goes on and on but for some reason we keep commiserating around watering holes.
“But no Brian, after I’ve twittered/tweeted (OK, what to a call ‘Twitter entry’ is subject to debate, that is a point for the anti-twitter crowd) I have nothing to talk about with my friends when we do meet up!” If all you’ve had to say to someone can be summed up in 140 characters then your social interactions are dying because you are deathly boring, not because you’ve said all there is to say.
On the contrary, these short little messages can serve as the spark a conversation needs. “On Twitter I saw that you are allergic to cats, tell me what type of cats make you sneeze the most, friend!”
“But Brian, I’m a wheeler and a dealer. I have money to make and can’t always be glued to my computer and replying back to tweets.”
That’s one reason why Twitter was invented! Modern society dictates we work our asses off so we can have nice things. We have to work hard and that means we can’t always be with our friends. When we hear the tiny minutae happening in friends’ life or a fleeting thought we feel closer to them. Which is good, because you can never be too close to your friends. You don’t even have to be tied to your computer (which I don’t see as a bad thing) because Twitter has a texting interface where you can send tweets and receive them via your cell phone. So while we’re all off being world leaders and scions of industry we can still be close to the things that really make us happy, the people we choose to spend our time with, not the people we’re paid to spend time with.
Finally, Twitter has many practical purposes imparted to us by really ingenuous people. Several of my friends like to use Twitter as digitized quote logs. Why carry around a notebook you can lose when you can save a quote as a tweet safe online? I like to see what is on sale at the Amazon MP3 store and what Cheeseboard is serving today.
That being said, Twitter will make your life better than Barack Obama will. Get an unlimited text or data plan and if you use it your friends will think you’re really cool. You’re using it now and all the dumb luddites out there will be using something like Twitter in five years after you’ve moved on to something else.
[Article Link] Conflict of Interests: A Critic at Large: The New Yorker
[special note] I think the RSS feed for this site is going funky on me, some posts don’t show up for me or show up a couple times. Let me know if you are having any problems. Anyhow.
Here’s a classic question of political science but in the form of a book review. It’s articles like these that make The New Yorker and The Atlantic great mags.
I am of the latter inclination that special interests are the real combatants of political entanglements. And I feel everyone’s interests are represented by some special interest–even if indirectly. The big business vs. general public dynamic is over-simplified. Different groups interest are often represented by groups they would not expect.
Let us take Net Neutrality as an example. Those in favor of the two-tier internet were represented by the telecoms. The general public’s interest was represented by lobbyists also from big business-Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, etc. While progressives might rally against big business, I don’t think they’d want to opposed the big businesses on their side who won the battle for them on Net Neutrality.
Nor should progressives and liberals oppose Wal-Mart and the Detroit Big-Three being on their side in the fight for more equal health insurance coverage. What matters is that we have the same goals in mind. The varying reasons for those goals are secondary unless they would create more problems down the line.
And finally, special interests often represent our political desires better than our elected officials do. The only feedback officials get is a crude yes/no vote. Special interests are a far finer apparatus for communicating our wants to our officials.
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The Uncertainty of 'The Polls'
This year I’ve heard that Obama was a shoe-in for New hampshire and then Hillary made her come back.
Also heard that Hillay was slipping in California and she won the primary handedly.
I’m actually scared to think that these polls politico’s love citing might mean nothing this year. And if so, why is this year so different? Are cell phone’s finally making a difference in polling like we’ve been talking about for years?
Too Fit to Be President? - WSJ.com
Arguement from the sages at the WSJ: Obama is in good shape and thus we are jealous of him. In response, Americans will vote for a atrophying whitey with bad cholesterol like them.
