Flotsam & Jetsam
There’s something exquisite about boredom. Like melancholy and its darker cousin sadness, boredom is related to emptiness and meaninglessness, but in a perfectly enjoyable way.
(via ALDaily)
Prints
Some decoration for the wall above my desk. On the left is “Untitled (Let’s make better mistakes tomorrow)” by Mike Monteiro and on the right is “Velodrome” by James Deavin; both via 20x200.
Recently read:
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Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith, by Norman Cohn
A comprehensive argument that the expectation of a final consummation in which good will utterly triumph over evil was unknown to the Near East until the rise of Zoroastrianism. In addition to the main argument, Cohn also argues persuasively that Zoroaster’s innovation was due to a radical reinterpretation of the combat myth (e.g. Seth, Marduk, Indra, Ba’al, etc.) and that Zoroastrianism had a considerable influence on the Book of Revelation and the Book of Daniel (and thus, obviously, on Christianity). Although I was never much for comparative religion, I find Cohn’s books fascinating.
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The Devil’s Company, by David Liss
In which Liss trades in his fascination with the advent of modern capitalism for a wearying contempt. Yes it’s a novel (and by an author whose past work I’ve mostly enjoyed), but it’s an awfully didactic one.
SEPTA logic: Let’s cut prices but run all trains on exactly the same schedule. What is this “price elasticity of demand” of which you speak?
Note to people who keep getting stuck in the snow on my street: stomping on the gas pedal is not going to help.
Burying the lede
That’s the pullquote, which garnered so much attention that it ended up on Tumblr’s Radar; here’s the full article. Sometimes I really wonder about people’s priorities.
Neven Mrgan lays out the steps that the commenters on the aforelinked ReadWriteWeb article would have needed to go through. The whole thing is worth reading, but here are his conclusions:
The degree of faith people put in Google’s top result makes Catholics look like hippies.
I don’t really blame anyone here and I have no clue what the solution is. My only takeaway is that I’m terrified of dealing with technologies of this level of popularity.
Update: Dan Wineman reacts:
[Novice web users] ignore almost everything that doesn’t directly resemble the thing they need. This should be expected. It’s what we’ve [i.e. web designers] taught them to do, after all, with our hostility.
Read the comments. Not sure whether to laugh or cry (via marco).
