Rules for computing happiness

Software developer Alex Payne offers twenty-five rules for happiness in Computerland. I wish I'd read such rules years ago. I especially like these two:

Use as little software as possible.

Use a Mac for personal computing.

(Found via Paper Bits)

ETATSE LAER

Yes, it would be funny to walk down the street and see that window. [Hi and Lois, September 23, 2008.]

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

Against knowingness

Mark Edmundson, in the 2008 College Issue of the New York Times Magazine:

Good teachers know that now, in what's called the civilized world, the great enemy of knowledge isn't ignorance, though ignorance will do in a pinch. The great enemy of knowledge is knowingness. It's the feeling encouraged by TV and movies and the Internet that you’re on top of things and in charge. You're hip and always know what's up. Cool — James Dean-style cool — was once the sign of the rebel. But the tables have turned: conformity and cool have merged. The cool character now is the knowing one; even when he's unconventional, he's never surprising — and most of all, he's never surprised. Good teachers, by contrast, are constantly fighting against knowingness by asking questions, creating difficulties, raising perplexities.

Read it all: Geek Lessons (New York Times Magazine)

Related posts
Mark Edmundson tells it like it is
Words, mere words

Proust in the news

From an article in the London Sunday paper The Observer, "Bread sells like hot cakes":

Psychologists are putting it down to nostalgia, while pragmatists say it's the credit crunch. But whatever the reason, sales of part-baked bread have doubled in the past year.

Tesco says its part-baked bread sales have risen 47 per cent, while Asda has seen a 60 per increase. Asda attributes the rise to the increased trend for staying in to save money. 'People are cooking for themselves more and cooking for friends. Part-baked is a cheat's way to serve piping hot, fresh bread,' said a spokesman.

Tesco believes there is a deeper reason and drafted in a scientist to explain it. During a time of insecurity and uncertainty, it's all apparently down to the 'Proust effect', named after the 19th-century French author who suggested that the rich, heady smell of baking bread created feelings of nostalgia for mum's kitchen and an instant sense of homeliness.

Sigh.

"[T]he 19th-century French author": Yes, Proust did write and publish in the late 19th century. But he's a 20th-century writer. The first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu appeared in 1913.

"[T]he rich, heady smell of baking bread": No, it's the taste of a madeleine, or more precisely, a madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea, that brings back the narrator's past.

"[M]um's kitchen": No, the narrator's aunt Léonie would give him a bit of a madeleine in her room.

"[M]um's kitchen": No, the taste of the madeleine brings back "the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water lilies of the Vivonne, and the good people of the village and their little dwellings and the church and all of Combray and its surroundings": a world.

It's difficult to decide whether the mistakes here are the work of Tesco's scientist or the newspaper reporter. Did the scientist mention only the "Proust effect"? Did the reporter assume that it concerned bread? Was someone getting confused by a recollection of Anton Ego and Ratatouille?

[Passage from Swann's Way translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 48.]

Related reading
All Proust posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

"That bathroom has a dearth of toilet paper. That's the opposite of a plethora — a dearth."

Related reading
All "domestic comedy" posts

Blogger "recent posts" feed

The community-college-based server hosting the service that has provided my "recent posts" feed seems to have gone kerflooey. So I found a better way to set up a "recent posts" feed: Feed2JS.

Feed2JS allows any number of posts in its display (Blogger's widget has a maximum of five). Feed2JS is a free service, coded by Alan Levine, hosted by Modevia Web Services. (Thanks!)

Fungible

"Oil and coal? Of course, it's a fungible commodity and they don't flag, you know, the molecules, where it's going and where it's not. But in the sense of the Congress today, they know that there are very, very hungry domestic markets that need that oil first. So, I believe that what Congress is going to do, also, is not to allow the export bans to such a degree that it's Americans that get stuck to holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here. It's got to flow into our domestic markets first."

Palin Takes Questions at a McCain Town Hall (ABC News)

Not allow the export bans? What bans? Huh? (Here are some details as to where American oil exports currently go.)

What fascinates me in this stream of semi-consciousness is the word fungible. To which one might also say, Huh? But Merriam-Webster's on the case. I've added the pronunciation from the entry for the noun (which means "something that is fungible — usually used in plural"):

fungible
Pronunciation: \ˈfən-jə-bəl\
Function: adjective
Etymology: New Latin fungibilis, from Latin fungi to perform — more at FUNCTION
Date: 1818

1 : being of such a nature that one part or quantity may be replaced by another equal part or quantity in the satisfaction of an obligation < oil, wheat, and lumber are fungible commodities >
2 : interchangeable
3 : flexible

And that's my word of the day.

A Neil Postman story

I heard Robert McChesney tell this Neil Postman story during a lecture earlier this week. The story appears to have originated with the psychologist Gordon Allport. Its point: there's no such thing as a neutral question:

The form of a question may ease our way or pose obstacles. Or, when even slightly altered, it may generate antithetical answers, as in the case of the two priests who, being unsure if it was permissible to smoke and pray at the same time, wrote to the Pope for a definitive answer. One priest phrased the question "Is it permissible to smoke while praying?" and was told it is not, since prayer should be the focus of one's whole attention; the other priest asked if it is permissible to pray while smoking and was told that it is, since it is always appropriate to pray.

Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993), 125–26

Robert McChesney

I went to a talk by University of Illinois professor and media critic Robert McChesney the other night. McChesney spoke on various matters related to journalism, politics, and democracy: the Constitution's safeguards against imperial ambition, the distinction between freedom of the press and freedom of speech, the enormous decline in the numbers of professional journalists and D.C. bureaus, unreported stories (the growth of the American prison population), the roles of anonymous sources and public relations in journalism, the work of Free Press ("Reform media. Transform democracy."), the importance of Net Neutrality, the limited efficacy of political humor (the Soviet Union under Stalin, he noted, had great political humor), and an instructive story from Neil Postman about the importance of asking the right question.

One exact quotation about the present shape of things:

"Professional journalism makes politics a liars' paradise. . . . There's no accountability. It's a liars' paradise."

Typewriter

The delightful webcomic xkcd.