Disqus - Latest Comments for mako

Re: Baseball, Surrealism and Romance Novels? - Lawspeak for L33t Speakers

Benjamin Mako Hill — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:20:13 -0000

I've heard Mark Leyner's work described as "Avant Pop" although, like his fiction, I'm not completely sure I understand what that means. I love it though.

Re: Reading Fast and Slow - Lawspeak for L33t Speakers

Benjamin Mako Hill — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 19:45:06 -0000

Not only is Eunoia often treated as poetry, I heard it was the best selling book of Canadian poetry in history! :)

Re: Lawspeak for L33t Speakers

Benjamin Mako Hill — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 19:43:32 -0000

I'm glad Glad you liked Holy Tango! "I Will Alarm Islamic Owls" is probably my favorite poem in the book. There a bunch of great ones.

And sorry that Secret Rendez-vous didn't work out. If you feel like giving Abe another try, you won't find "Woman in the Dunes" pointlessly pornographic but you very well might find it broken in the other ways. I'd also be interested to see if you like Haruki Murakami.

Re: http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=270876

Benjamin Mako Hill — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:02:36 -0000

It seems that the link here is broken. Can you fix this or report it to someone?

Re: The U.S. Bureau of Fabulous Bitches

Benjamin Mako Hill — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 13:11:07 -0000

This is a classic page. Thanks for referring me again. Glad to see WP is continue to churn out the lame edit wars.

Re: Happy National Elevator And Escalator Safety Awareness Week!

Benjamin Mako Hill — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 17:08:24 -0000

I'm feeling safer already.

Re: Happy National Elevator And Escalator Safety Awareness Week!

Benjamin Mako Hill — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 17:06:50 -0000

I like:

MYTH: The steps will flatten out and all the people will slide down.

and

MYTH: Children often think that the steps fall into the basement and have to be restacked every morning.

I do not believe that children (or anyone else) often thinks this, but I like imagining that they do.

Re: Happy National Elevator And Escalator Safety Awareness Week!

Benjamin Mako Hill — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:54:47 -0000

Also, I just remembered that EESF publishes one of the best FAQs on the Internet. I saw this years ago. Glad it's still online: http://eesf.org/education/p...

Re: Happy National Elevator And Escalator Safety Awareness Week!

Benjamin Mako Hill — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:49:59 -0000

I remember the last National Elevator and Escalator Safety Awareness Week. Has it really been a whole year?

Re: Pro-High Fructose Corn Syrup PSAs

Benjamin Mako Hill — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 19:07:41 -0000

If this were the hydrogenated fat (i.e., transfat) lobby, i'd be backing you up. The science in that case actually shows that the shit is more harmful than alternatives.

But the science, in fact, doesn't back up the HFCS alarmists. That makes it, well, scare mongering. Until that, I've got to think that the corn lobby is pretty justified in putting stuff like this out.

Re: Pro-High Fructose Corn Syrup PSAs

Benjamin Mako Hill — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 15:53:30 -0000

Dude. Did you actually read that Wikipedia article?

The most critical comments are unsourced (unsourceable?). The actually science cited simply shows a correlation between obesity and HFCS. But HFCS is sugar, so, duh! Yes, sugar is bad for you. We should eat less sugar. Much less. Of course.

The question the ads seem to be responding to is whether we should treat HFCS as different from sugar which it is in vogue to say that we should. With the exception of a couple reasonably weak findings with tenuous extensibility to human diets, I don't know of any reputable science (and didn't see any on the Wikipedia article) that implied that we should.

I'm no fan of the corn lobby but I'm even less of a fan of people claiming scientific validity for essentially baseless fears. The ads seems as accurate as any advertisements (low bar perhaps), as far as I can tell. So I'm not so unsettled.

Re: Feature: Tim Hwang Drinks The Entire Berkman Coffee Supply For You

Benjamin Mako Hill — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 10:59:12 -0000

This is such a fantastic project.

Re: The LBT Project: The One With Animaniacs As Dinosaurs

Benjamin Mako Hill — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 10:20:27 -0000

Great stuff. Keep it up!

Re: Feature: Tim Hwang Drinks The Entire Berkman Coffee Supply For You

Benjamin Mako Hill — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 08:53:47 -0000

This is a worthwhile project.

Re: Carving Out A Free Culture Agenda

Benjamin Mako Hill — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:25:08 -0000

Oh, and I proposed such an ultimatum several years ago in the form of a adoption of an existing set of explicit goals in the Free Cultural Works Definition -- even if it was only a statement about a utopian vision. The Free Culture board rejected it but Wikimedia Foundation, the now-defunct Free Culture Foundation, and even Creative Commons in a weird way has accepted it. Perhaps it's time to raise the issue again?

Re: Carving Out A Free Culture Agenda

Benjamin Mako Hill — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:22:46 -0000

Forgive my ignorance here but is the MPAA really suing students up the wazoo? They are certainly sending lots of DMCA takedown notices but I was under the impression that very few were followed up with lawsuits. The MPAA is much smarter than the RIAA. They are having the ISPs and institutions do the dirty work (cheaper for them!) while they don't end up having to look bad for trying to squeeze cash out of kids and innocents.

Re: The U.S. Bureau of Fabulous Bitches - Conceptualizing Internet Time

Benjamin Mako Hill — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 01:04:57 -0000

It's easier to switch than you might think. I switched to Ethiopian time very quickly when I lived there. Lunch at six took a little getting used to but we can adjust.

On the other hand, I never did really get the hang of the Coptic calendar.

Reform can come in different places and in little steps. I'd be thrilled just to get rid of timezones. We can do that by communicating in UTC today which, while I'm on the Internet communicating with potentially non-local people, is exactly what I already do.

Re: The U.S. Bureau of Fabulous Bitches - Conceptualizing Internet Time

Benjamin Mako Hill — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:10:01 -0000

Our current base-60, base-60, base-24 Sumerian clock makes imperial units look neat and clean and prohibits all sorts of useful quick calculations (do you have any idea how hard it is to subtract one time from another?!). As someone who works on several world-wide Internet-based projects, I can testify that timezones really are very problematic. And believe it or not, 3:00 and night is not always dead of the night (Ethiopia, for example, is offset by six hours).

Metric time (i.e., as a measurement of some amount of time) is already in frequent use in computing and science for the same reason metric units are in other places. Decimal time schemes have tried and failed for a variety of reasons but they really do have quite a lot to offer.

People like to make fun of Swatch time. For some reasons, they should! It seemed to be designed for hype. It was tightly controlled by a single company in way that spelled doom or any standard. The biggest problem, in fact, was that the Internet already had a decimal clock (usually expressed as seconds since the epoch). Humans just don't see it often.

I don't think the idea of building a demonstrably better clock is any more inherently cockeyed than the continued use of our current system. People laughed at decimal money and decimal units too! Decimal units still haven't won either, they only will because a group of people took the time to imagine that we might change fundamental systems that most of us take for granted for the better. That's a type of initiative we should applaud, not mock, even if most attempts fail.

Re: The U.S. Bureau of Fabulous Bitches

Benjamin Mako Hill — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 11:42:38 -0000

I think DAVE SECRETARY might actually just be bad.

Re: The U.S. Bureau of Fabulous Bitches

Benjamin Mako Hill — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:49:50 -0000

When you upgrade for this small reason, you are letting them win.