jarmin.com

katlalog

040428 19:47 Web design : standards

Eric Meyer interview at the Web Standards Group site about the new books, CSS3 and more.

040427 23:30 Tech

Great topic over at Slashdot including some useful re-install tips: First Ten Programs on New Install?

040422 23:00 Media

We're in the middle of TV Turnoff Week.

April 19-25 marks this year's annual seven day celebration of tube-free existence. What will you be up to? Meeting neighbors, smashing up TVs, or just opting out?

040419 19:51 Literature / intellectual property

Warren Ellis is an ingenious weirdo. I've not had the chance to read his graphic novels but I read everything he publishes online - which is a lot. In this age of intellectual property paranoia his approach of just throwing everything out there that he scribbles on a metaphorical paper napkin down the pub is refreshing. Too bad his dead-tree editor stopped him continuing The Listener online. That was beginning to be a damn good story.

040418 21:18 Comix

Get out more.

040418 01:32 Currently reading

Just finished The Watch by Dennis Danvers. It's about Kropotkin.

"People talk about books changing their lives, and when I was younger it seemed like it happened all the time, but never like this before, certainly not lately. To tell the truth, I thought I'd outgrown feeling that way - one more misconception of youth chucked overboard. But I started reading these books, and it's like I've been waiting for someone to say theses things my whole life."

040418 01:22 Science fiction

The Hugo Award Nominees 2004 have been announced. Neil Gaiman is in there and two episodes of Firefly.

[Update 040418 21:22] ...and here are the Nebula Award Winners 2003.

040418 00:01 Science / philosophy

Just came across this very interesting site (Butterflies and Wheels / Philosopher's Magazine) when following a lead from Kuro5hin to this morality test.

There are two motivations for setting up the web site. The first is the common one having to do with the thought that truth is important, and that to tell the truth about the world it is necessary to put aside whatever preconceptions (ideological, political, moral, etc.) one brings to the endeavour.

The second has to do with the tendency of the political Left (which both editors of this site consider themselves to be part of) to subjugate the rational assessment of truth-claims to the demands of a variety of pre-existing political and moral frameworks. We believe this tendency to be a mistake on practical as well as epistemological and ethical grounds.

040415 21:39 Comix

Hilarious Sinfest Public Service Announcement.

040415 21:22 Tech industry

Slashdot polls can be disturbingly revealing sometimes.

040404 12:49 Politics

Noam Chomsky has got a weblog now.

040404 12:40 Intellectual property

Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture is available for free under the Creative Commons license:

Lawrence Lessig shows us that while new technologies always lead to new laws, never before have the big cultural monopolists used the fear created by new technologies, specifically the Internet, to shrink the public domain of ideas, even as the same corporations use the same technologies to control more and more what we can and can’t do with culture. As more and more culture becomes digitized, more and more becomes controllable, even as laws are being toughened at the behest of the big media groups. What’s at stake is our freedom—freedom to create, freedom to build, and ultimately, freedom to imagine.

040403 11:34 (GMT+1) Currently reading

Cory Doctorow: Eastern Standard Tribe.

So you start to f with your sleep schedule. You get up at four AM so you can chat with your friends. You go to bed at nine, ’cause that’s when they go to bed. Used to be that it was stock brokers and journos and factory workers who did that kind of thing, but now it’s anyone who doesn’t fit in. The geniuses and lunatics to whom the local doctrine tastes wrong. They choose their peers based on similarity, not geography, and they keep themselves awake at the same time as them. But you need to make some nod to localness, too—gotta be at work with everyone else, gotta get to the bank when it’s open, gotta buy your groceries. You end up hardly sleeping at all, you end up sneaking naps in the middle of the day, or after dinner, trying to reconcile biological imperatives with cultural ones. Needless to say, that alienates you even further from the folks at home, and drives you more and more into the arms of your online peers of choice.

040401 19:00 April Fool

My favorite April Fool this year:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is merging with the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) in a stock-swap deal that will create a freedom advocacy giant better able to compete with the ACLU, the current industry leader.

Screenshot, because it'll be gone tomorrow.

[Update 040403 11:33] Also worth a mention: Google is interviewing candidates for engineering positions at our lunar hosting and research center, opening late in the spring of 2007. And SciScoop's very scary Scientists at the Center For European Research Nuclear (CERN) and FermiLab have accidentally created an artificial black hole that seems certain to engulf the entire Earth in a matter of hours.

040401 18:45 Currently reading

Orson Scott Card: Xenocide (Volume 3 of the Ender Saga)

Earthborne animals do this thing, inside their brains - a sort of mad firing-off of synapses, controlled insanity. While they're asleep. The part of their brain that records sight and sound, it's firing off every hour or two while asleep; even when all the sights and sounds are completely random nonsense, their brains are trying to assemble it into something sensible. They try to make stories out of it. It's complete random nonsense with no possible correlation to the real world, and yet they turn it into these crazy stories. And then they forget them. All that work, coming up with these stories, and when they wake up they forget almost all of them.

[current]
[archive]