January 2012
1 post
My Goodreads profile →
I’ve just signed up for Goodreads in the hope that their recommendations will be better than I get from Amazon. Given their general cloudiness and the adequacy of their iPhone app (the barcode scanning, in particular, is merely adequate) I think I’ll be using this now instead of Delicious Library 2.
December 2011
2 posts
Sometimes I start to believe the utopian vision of the future proposed by some technologists and futurists. Sometimes brainwashing gets a toehold and the “wisdom of the crowd ” or “democratisation of publishing” start to be more than just ridiculous mantras.
When this happens I pop over to YouTube or a newspaper web-site and read a few comments. Cure effected.
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Pascal's Wager
If Pascal’s Wager is best interpreted as a guide to action — the expected payoff
of belief in X warrants acting to obtain belief in X — then it’s a singularly
unhelpful one: many religions make claims that must be characterised as
infinite payoffs so their respective expected payoffs must also be infinite
and thus equivalent. So the wager provides no basis for...
September 2011
1 post
August 2011
5 posts
“[I]n the coming weeks it might seem piquant that so soon after unveiling...”
– Zoe Williams in the Guardian Weekly 19.08.11
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July 2011
1 post
June 2011
1 post
Jonah Lehrer on the Wisdom and Foolishness of... →
(via Instapaper)
May 2011
5 posts
A Philosopher's Take On Former State Department... →
(via Instapaper)
Magical Block Store: When Abstractions Fail Us «... →
An interesting perspective in the aftermath of the Amazon EBS outage that it’s philosophical root cause is a problem of abstractions: that developers demanded and Amazon promised to provide an untenable abstraction. Perfectly reliable and available networked disk storage is just a fantasy we need to move beyond and its lack is something applications will just have to handle. I think I agree.
The Possibilian →
North Korea’s Digital Underground →
April 2011
9 posts
Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code →
“[T]he hipster moment did not produce artists, but tattoo artists[.] It did not...”
– What Was the Hipster? by Mark Greif in New York Magazine
On Cyber-Utopianism →
A great critique of the views of cyber-utopians, who think the Internet will make us all well-informed, participating and free while destroying authoritarianism. Alas, it also uses the word “webmaster”.
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Back home in Perth
After six nights in Tokyo I’m now back home in Perth. My stay in Tokyo was not quite as super awesome as I expected it to be but still pretty fantastic. I particularly enjoyed my visits to the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and the Mori Art Museum which both had impressive exhibitions. I also visited the National Museum of Western Art with its Rembrandt: The Quest for Chiaroscuro...
What Does Your Phone Know About You? More Than You... →
(via Instapaper)
My first earthquake
It’s a day of firsts: my first night in Tokyo and my first earthquake! About 10 minutes ago I’d just gone to be in my seventh-floor hotel room in Ueno and it started to wobble! There was a magnitude 6 (on the Japanese scale) earthquake in Chiba prefecture which was a 2 magnitude here in Ueno.
And as I type this post there was a bit more of a tremor.
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Nagasaki: Day One
So much for “more tomorrow”. Rather than get further and further behind, I’ll jump ahead to the present. Today I left Fukuoka and took the train to Nagasaki (though I think that the ticket counter guy at Hakata station gave me a seat in the green car, for some reason). I arrived and, rather than try to find the information centre that will help make accommodation bookings I...
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Osaka
Today I moved on to Hiroshima after nearly a week in Osaka and Kansai so I thought I’d better get some of my notes typed up before the details start to elude me.
After dropping my bags at the hotel (on Saturday, April 2) I spent the balance of the first day at 四天王寺 (してんのうじ; Shitennō-ji), the first and oldest Buddhist temple in Japan. This was the first day of my two-day Osaka Unlimited...
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Arriving in Osaka
My flight landed at Kansai International Airport at around 8:10 AM and quickly off the plane and onto a shuttle to get to the luggage collection area. That done it was off to passport control. I’m not sure why, but the inspector wanted me to add the name of my hotel to my disembarkation card as well as it’s address and phone number. Then it was time for the customs inspection where my...
March 2011
1 post
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Traveling to Japan
Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be jetting off to Japan for a holiday. While the situation in Tōhoku is dire and there is still cause to be concerned about the nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi and there is ongoing disruption around Tokyo caused by the power cuts and transport interruptions, I don’t think that these problems necessarily mean that tourists should stop visiting all of...
January 2011
1 post
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September 2010
3 posts
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December 2007
1 post
“The playing field is not level, but no one — even those in whose favor the...”
– Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth by Derrick Bell (p. 35)