Disqus - Latest Comments for Joel Hewett

Re: Memory fading? Aw, don’t sweat it. [Guest Post]

Joel Hewett — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 08:53:45 -0000

Alas, seems even that was tried! After the whiteboard was discovered, either Jarred or Dan found in the laundry room a xeroxed flyer, attempting to sell the board for...wait for it....$20. Twenty smackers. Maybe $10. Or maybe I'm stingy.

Re: Introducing the TROPOphy

Joel Hewett — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 09:01:11 -0000

Is there any way we could meet the people in that picture? They look like fun. The guy in the back also about %10 resembles Jarred.

Re: Monday Morning Links: January 14th, 2008

Joel Hewett — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 10:54:28 -0000

Interesting additional point to the notion of using online traffic as a polling method of sorts: the professional bookies are betting on Clinton as the big winner: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/01/13/online....

Ireland's biggest betting house, Paddy Power (which has a massive and truly almost-instutional presence on the island), has also already begun to pay out cash on those who placed bets on Clinton! Now that's in euros, mind you!

Re: Steve Jobs on Reading

Joel Hewett — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 14:03:31 -0000

A few years ago the National Endowment for the Arts started their flagship program called The Big Read (http://www.neabigread.org/), and their director, poet Dana Gioia put it best when he basically said that we are reading more than ever before -- but (to paraphrase) we are reading total crap.

Harry Potter is of course a wonderful exclusion to that, but the overall effect is the same: we read snippets of online articles (when was the last time you scrolled through one of those 15-pager articles on the New York Times website?), blog posts and commentary (ahem), and the advertisements on the roads to and from work.

The Kindle will fail, I hope, for two reasons. One, because it is connected to online newspapers, journals, etc., as well as books, it skirts the prime reason we never sit down to read books for any appreciable length of time--we can't beat to NOT be distracted these days.

But also, people need to realize that books, that bound paper, is the ultimate "digital" format. I'm not sure exactly how I mean that, but I think you probably know what I mean - you can write with an "ink pen" on the pages of a book -- and next time you log in - I mean open it up - your markings are STILL THERE! Pretty amazing. Sustained reading, the kind that books necessitate, require a bit of isolation from the world around us, and the clearning of sufficient mental space for the assimilation of the printed word. No amount of technological progress will change that.

Re: i can haz change?

Joel Hewett — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 14:36:47 -0000

Can't help myself: http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/11/02/pardon...

Re: Sustainable Diets [Guest Post]

Joel Hewett — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 14:14:07 -0000

Booze locally, too!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ideal-bite/ideal-...

Re: Satellite Challenge #7

Joel Hewett — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 11:31:50 -0000

Would that be the FutureGen "clean coal" power plant, located in Mattoon, IL?

Re: Satellite Challenge #8

Joel Hewett — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 09:42:26 -0000

Definitely a Vauban fort...hmm.

Re: New York Times to Steve Jobs: “You Are Wrong”

Joel Hewett — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 09:46:32 -0000

"What is timeless, Steve, is story, and that’s why people will never stop reading."

True. But I'm getting more and more of my storylines, my fictional narratives, not from reading, but from my little red friend, Netflix. Great article; wish the author had defined what "reading" means!

Re: Satellite Challenge #8

Joel Hewett — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 13:10:06 -0000

::high-five::

Re: Invisibility: A Violation of the Social (Networking) Contract?

Joel Hewett — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 15:29:25 -0000

Jarred is right - there is already an "invisibility" option with the "block" function. I also always thought that the Red "Do Not Disturb"-esque status indicator was supposed to display to your friends the equivalent of, "no frivolous conversations, please," but it seems that user habit has trumped design - about 1/2 of my gchat contacts keep this status up at all times.

Re: Invisibility: A Violation of the Social (Networking) Contract?

Joel Hewett — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:49:37 -0000

@Jarred: this is half-serious, half-joking, but do gchat users really know what they want? Do we think Google implemented it unilaterally, or because of feedback -- and if it is the latter, how do they measure that? I live and die by what Google allows me to have and to hold, so who knows.

Re: Get These Mother-Effing Snakes Out of This Mother-Effing Habitat

Joel Hewett — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:16:41 -0000

This influx of snakes has long been predicted by badgers:
http://www.badgerbadgerbadger.com/

Re: Movie Review: In The Shadow Of The Moon

Joel Hewett — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 15:13:49 -0000

Coming later this spring: a brilliant new scholarly work on the Apollo missions, from MIT professor David Mindell:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262134977/ref...

If you enjoyed the movie, you'll love this book.

Re: Sunday Cooking…With the Internet

Joel Hewett — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:27:19 -0000

Ashish, I quote Nellie McKay to you:

"Feminists don't have a sense of humor / Feminists and / Vegetarians...."

:D

Re: Sunday Cooking…With the Internet

Joel Hewett — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:28:13 -0000

Also, wasn't Gandhi, it was Obama.

Re: Mapping Our Memories

Joel Hewett — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 11:54:44 -0000

From Huxley's "Brave New World":

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence.

"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. "You're welcome," he said.

What worries me most about our world is the "long silence" in contemplating what alterations are possible to the human being via applied technology - "comfort," in this instance. Just because human disease is regrettable, sometimes awful and horrible, does not mean that it is "bad." And similarly, the mere fact that we have the capability of installing such a brain chip implant, does not mean that we should. Awful as the symptoms of the disease are, I'd stick with the perils of Alzheimer's over the implant - it's the right to preserve the integrity of the (natural) decline of the body.

(NB: I'm not against medicine, nor am I pro-syphilis!)

Re: Facebook Chat: Social Networking Comes Home

Joel Hewett — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:57:39 -0000

if Google Chat is known as "gchat"... will Facebook Chat become "fchat"?
'cause that just doesn't look so great.

Re: Facebook Chat: Social Networking Comes Home

Joel Hewett — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 16:03:04 -0000

Oh, agreed! Also, apparently the Grateful Dead are coming out with a new album, called "Steal Your Facebook."

Re: Pork Across the Pond and Here at Home

Joel Hewett — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:00:38 -0000

I'm not enough of a biologist/ecologist to know the difference, but I'm pretty certain that what plays the largest part historically in which species we eat is their cultivatability (is that a word?) -- or which animals are most easily husbanded, kept domesticated, etc.

Does anyone else remember reading about a handful of studies recently that pretty convincingly showed that there are certain nutrients (or proteins or something?) that are only found in meat? Point being that while we do eat way too much meat as a society, the moral consideration of the abstract individual isn't entirely settled. We have evolved to be human, in large part, because we eat meat. Although, our mastery of technology may preclude us evolving along true lines of "natural selection" anymore, so that too may be moot.

Just an interesting fact, that adds to Ashish's final factoid: "The United States kills 8 BILLION chickens a year." (David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. Oxford UP, 2007. page 174)

Re: Satellite Challenge #14

Joel Hewett — Fri, 02 May 2008 13:07:25 -0000

Oil refinery?

Re: Satellite Challenge #15

Joel Hewett — Thu, 08 May 2008 00:18:28 -0000

That, sir, would be the Kremlin and Red Square beside it, as best evidenced by Saint Basil's cathedral on the right. Was the scene first of Russia's first heavy-weapon military parade a few days ago, and the inauguration of new Russian President "Med-ve-whatever" today.

Re: Satellite Challenge #15

Joel Hewett — Thu, 08 May 2008 00:19:55 -0000

*first heavy-weapon parade in years, that is...ha...

Re: Satellite Challenge #15

Joel Hewett — Thu, 08 May 2008 09:12:38 -0000

Eet is not that eet was easy, but zat it was ze motherland!

Re: The Pace of Human Progress

Joel Hewett — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 20:42:28 -0000

One of the issues other scientific thinkers have with Kurzweil's projections is that computing already exceeds the capacity of the human mind, quantitatively speaking. Even the massive, hundreds-of-cubic-feet mainframe computers out-computed the human brain exponentially. I think Kurzweil himself admits, though, that the human brain cannot be measured in terms of mere computing capacity. I like his writings and the concept of the Singularity as an abstract (though still quite grounded) explanation of the ride of computing power; the devil here is in the details, when one tries to apply it too strictly.

Re: Bomomo Contest Results

Joel Hewett — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:33:49 -0000

I vote for "Stained Glass." But I would retitle it to "teh stained glass." Also, rename the blog to "teh tropophilia."

Re: Joel on Tony Snow

Joel Hewett — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 11:42:49 -0000

Ashish, as skilled at political philosophy and rhetoric as you are, it's disappointing that the tack you take in critiquing Snow never really appropriately matches the venue. Case in point being that this was a letter to the editor -- and a personal one at that -- not a political encomium, and a political response to it makes its point indelicately and therefore ineffectively. It wasn't my title, but "Tony Snow off Camera" is an apt one for the letter, yet your response is about "Tony Snow" only insofar as he was the White House Press Secretary for a short time.

Also, anyone who knows me knows that I disagreed with him as much as you do.

The key difference, however, is that during the Q&A session, you tried to pull a "gotcha" with him -- and he rather skillfully pushed your question aside and ended your exchange. He and I, however, went on for a good while, and I was able to critique him far more stridently, and make far many more political points, than you had. So who got carried away?

Re: Joel on Tony Snow

Joel Hewett — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 21:22:05 -0000

I think the fact that Taylor and I had a similar reaction to your post, Ashish, might indicate that regardless of what you may have meant it to say, it indeed came off in a particularly venomous manner. The phrase "Snow was by no means a “really genuine guy'" is especially strong, and surprising insofar as it is not grounded in any basis of judgment.

But moreover, "by NO means" is an exceptionally strong choice of words for judging the character of a person you never really met. Again, for a philosophy major, I'm surprised to find that your logic is so messy: what does it mean, Ashish, to be a "genuine" person? Are people, whether genuine or not, always consistent, and must one be consistent across public/private lines to be genuine, and by whose measure? I, for one, would like to hope that I am a genuine guy, but I certainly have my fair share of lies, deceptions (to myself and others), and often say one thing and do the other.

As to him interrupting you and not letting you finish -- call it rude if you like, but to call it skillful isn't to morally evaluate it. It was skillful in that he used tact to defuse your question, which was patently neither tactful nor productive, and not well formulated or presented. Your question began with a paragraph-like statement, which given the Q&A circumstances, struck several people sitting near me as rude in itself.

Re: Joel on Tony Snow

Joel Hewett — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:39:12 -0000

Glad to see you've read your Hitchens, too, Ashish, but I actually don't have a strong opionion about Mother Teresa or Che. That is in large part my own fault -- I just don't really know much about them beyond the common parlance -- but I don't know enough to make any judgments. I agree with you that one need not personally know a person to make a judgment about him or her, however.

Re: Who Are The Digital Natives?

Joel Hewett — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 14:17:30 -0000

70% - nice and even!

Re: How Blogging Changed Me (For the Better)

Joel Hewett — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 23:20:48 -0000

Excellent post! You cover the downsides to blogging as well as the greater upsides -- which is why the article works so well. Too many critiques of blogging (or unrestrained praise in support of it) start with the premise, "well, I (emphasis on the "I") wouldn't blog well, so why should anyone else!" or, "I'm a fantastic blogger and it works well for me; it will work for everyone in the same way." Characterizing the pre-blogging survey of information as "silent intake" is especially keen.