myothernotes.com

Time is flying by and I have been busying myself with sifting through the gaziliion e-mails that have accrued over the summer. I am now fully organized with inbox zero every night. I also had the interesting task of commenting on net dating for MMORPGers here.

So, I have now gotten myself a great little thing, a macbook pro, 13″ black wonder of technology. I love it. I love getting software like omni focus, omni outliner, scrivener and mellel. This is really a shift that has been long overdue. I am not going back, curiously. The last shift I did to Mac was disappointing and hopeless. This has been just wonderful. My next computer will also be a mac, and then the one after that, too.

Thanks, Apple.

I am the last guy in the universe to discover The National, but the lyrics and music is lovely.

Stay out super late tonight
picking apples, making pies
put a little something in our lemonade and take it with us
we’re half-awake in a fake empire
we’re half-awake in a fake empire

Tiptoe through our shiny city
with our diamond slippers on
do our gay ballet on ice
bluebirds on our shoulders
we’re half-awake in a fake empire
we’re half-awake in a fake empire

Turn the light out say goodnight
no thinking for a little while
lets not try to figure out everything at once
It’s hard to keep track of you falling through the sky
we’re half-awake in a fake empire
we’re half-awake in a fake empire

I take it this is genius. It feels like it. This is a runner up:

Falling out of touch with all my
friends are somewhere getting wasted,
hope they’re staying glued together,
I have arms for them.

Get inside their clothes
with my green gloves
watch their videos, in their chairs.
Get inside their beds
with my green gloves
Get inside their heads, love their loves.

The tambourine on Green Gloves is subtle perfection. Mmmmm.

I always wanted a hat like that

I laughed and enjoyed Soon I Will Be Invincible. It is a great little book about a super villain and a heroine, and contains much of the atmosphere of comic worlds, with additional graphics to match. Recommended!

Great beach read. No, really.

Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge is another cup of tea. It has been rightly described as a methodological afterword to The Order of Things, and I think it merits the title. It is great reading anyway. I read it with a specific problem in mind, and I imagine that helps. I have heaps of notes in the margins now.

So book design obviously was not included.

The Logic of Liberty, Polanyi, was another great summer read. It is a series of essays, but they make the important point that science and its moral foundations are essential for a free society, but not given, but must be accepted as an act of faith. This is importan for several reasons, I think. The first is that any set of principles you pronounce your belief in changes from disengaged facts to articles of faith, and that in turn makes the defense of these principles seem as necessary as it really is. Science will not win automatically. We have seen this in the old Soviet Union. Polanyi’s book is fascinating, not least because it offers an alternative version of the demise of the Soviet Union. The reason the crops failed so badly, he notes, was that the genetics used to deliver seeds was based on lysenkoian principles…

Well, the cover is nice.

I really liked the atmosphere in Gibson’s Spook Country and the idea of immersive GPS-oriented VR-art, but it wasn’t new or exciting in terms of ideas and the plot did not blow me away. Great for setting the mood for post-cold war cynical fragmented ideological pondering though.

Uh, uh…should we really buy this house?

I have a fetish for ghost stories, having written about them and caring for the genre. James Herbert is one of the perhaps best-selling authors of the genre, and his Crickley Hall is easy to read, but felt produced to a great degree. The ghosts, the fights, the scares never…well…scared me. Hm. Curious that. I wonder what the best haunted house story ever would be. Do comment if you have views. Dreams in the Witchhouse?

I am living in the archipelago to and fro in the summer months. Boats in regular, albeit heavily subsidized, traffic here allow for daily travel to the city and nothing beats waking up on an island and then going by boat to work.  It is a great privilege. I am currently thinking a lot about what the autumn will bring and what projects will be worthwhile engaging in. I have few a writing ideas, and my dayjob has a tendency to stretch into the wee hours, so there should be a lot to do.

I noted that the talented and smart writers at Skiften.se ran with my all-too-brief Weberian analysis of the recent FRA-issues as well as the copyfights. It will be worthwhile to reference them in the paper I want to write on this subject too.

The night is large. Somewhere in the distance there is the hint of thunder. Life is really mysterious.

Always interesting, always provocative. Posner on newspapers:

The few people who actually read, compare, and take seriously opposing views on matters of public policy will continue to do so after they stop subscribing to print newspapers. With the rise of the blogs, moreover, the amount of information and opinion reaching the public is far greater than in the heyday of the print newspapers.

The man, the myth, the melodrama

I am taking a leave from reading serious sociology by plowing Göran Persson’s autobiography. It is fascinating, not least stylistically. It reminds me very much of Bill Clinton’s book on his years as president. The same unabashed self-focus, promotion and intellectual egocentrism. But the man is not stupid and he is that rare breed of politician, the true homo politicus, that views all things as politically interesting — I am not really sure how to regard the man after this book. As a pragmatist genius of Swedish politics? As a lucky guy getting along? Mr Persson is and remains an enigma after the perhaps most extensive biographical effort made over any Swedish politician.

The main impression, though, is the divide between him and the earlier generations of politicians, the move from the engaged to the distanced. In a sense we see here a move from what Weber refered to as government to administration. In itself a fascinating phenomenon. The other thing that strikes you is the level of melodrama he is using in his presentation. The irony, the slings and arrows. He likes to point to people’s inconsistencies as if they were condemning evidence of weakness of moral character (witness his murdering Jan Nygren for requesting extra pay for becoming prime minister; basically he says that in the movement you never ask for money, you ask if you can do the job, and then he pauses and states: such is the moral of the movement. Thus condemning Mr Nygren utterly through dramatic rhetoric. It does signal selfimport but also a certain sense of the theatrical).

A great summer read!

The wonderful online journal SCRIPTed features an interesting article in its current issue: Criminal Friends of Entertainment: Analysing Results from Recent Peer-to-Peer Surveys by researchers Herkko Hietanen, Anniina Huttunen and Heikki Kokkinen.

So I am still reading Weber - there are after all two volumes and I need to get through them both. I haven’t published any mindmaps in a while, for the simple reason that it became impossible in the chapters following the first one. What I will do is write summaries of interesting concepts instead, I think.

Writer and thinker Doctorow comes up with a nice response to the graduated response:

I think we should permanently cut off the internet access of any company that sends out three erroneous copyright notices. Three strikes and you’re out, mate.

Even if you don’t agree with Doctorow this perspective allows for a real discussion on the severity of the Internet death punishment for whatever crime we may be currently discussing. In fact, it seems reasonable to discuss if there are indeed any other examples of information and communication restricting measures that are not also connected to physical confinement. Should it be possible to prohibit someone from writing articles in news media? To prohibit someone from reading books?

It is and remains as far as I can see a horrible idea.