Remember that urban legend about waking up in a bathtub full of ice with a note to call an ambulance because you've had a kidney removed? Now take away the ice, the bathtub, and the note. Now add some really lax laws governing the trading of human organs. Suddenly it's no legend, it's a burgeoning industry!
I remember seeing an interview with Michael Moore several years ago where he haughtily warned (as he does often, right or not) that half of all books sold in the U.S. were sold by two companies: Borders and Barnes & Noble. In addition to their mega-stores, each owned chains of smaller stores (Waldenbooks, B. Dalton, &c, &c) which allowed them to rack up massive aggregate market share. In and of itself Moore noted, this wasn't a particularly bad phenomenon - what worried him was the increasing willingness of publishers to take potential books to these chains to gauge the amount of orders the two would place, and whether they would promote the prospective work in-store. Since they comprised such a mammoth percentage of the wholesale market, if both declined to carry a book it was tantamount to a veto of any work which publishers were considering.
Now the same effect is being seen here. In the short-term, this is good news - fragmentation weakens the influence of the aforementioned "big two" - but in the long term the trend toward an Amazon monopoly results in dangers far more egregious than the erstwhile duopoly, giving a single entity the power to decide what will and will not be given the chance to succeed. Even more frighteningly, at some point it would make economic sense for Amazon to just cut out the middlemen and publish authors directly (a likely path would be to purchase one or more existing publishers). Don't get me wrong, there's nothing inherently evil about a company that signs authors, provides editorial services, publishes the material, and then sells the physical work (see: McSweeny's et al), but if they're the only (mainstream) game in town, it's a problem.
When I was 17, my pa moved us to what would affectionately become known as "the farm". It was a barren stretch of land off Interstate 80 in the middle of Nebraska, a few hours west of Lincoln. Pa was convinced he could revolutionize the glue industry by using hydroponic farming techniques to increase the yield of several key components of the most potent industrial-strength adhesives. What pa didn't realize was that the chief benefit of ultra-efficient hydroponics is that no soil is needed, and certainly land of the scale he'd envisioned was frivolous. There was absolutely no need to move, but then again, pa wasn't the smartest.
What I remember most about the farm is the summers, notably the late waning broil of August and early September. I recall relaxing outside by the glue-mixers, leaning up against the turgid tanks, a bottle of home-brew in one hand and a smoldering branding iron in the other. It's hard work branding glue, and I made sure to make the most out of my time off. It was on one of those lazy afternoons that I met Ms. Sally.
Ms. Sally ran the local tire-repair shop which she'd inherited from her father, Mr. Sally. Sally & Daughters had a bullet-proof reputation around those parts, and it was well-deserved: they could patch a flat before you could say "trite, treacly literary device". She'd come over to survey some of the new glue Pa had rounded up that very day. She had her father's entrepreneurial spirit, and smelled the potential for new patching material. I hadn't the heart to tell her she was really smelling cyanoacrylate.
Although it often put my life in jeopardy due to the constant exposure to corrosive chemicals, I rarely wore shirts on the farm. That's just how life was there: laid back and negligent. But my temerity was rewarded by the look on Ms. Sally's face when she saw my sinewy form propped against the throbbing steel cauldron, a sheen of sweat coating my entire body, even my jeans. She approached timidly at first, as if unwilling or incapable of giving herself over to the urges obviously welling up inside of her. She had quite a libido for a septuagenarian.
She asked me where my pa was, and I slowly replied I had no idea, but perhaps I could be of some assistance. She smiled.
Long story short: I rewarded her trust in me by bilking her out of upwards of 200 grand. She died not long after I met her, but not soon enough that I didn't get her to change the deed to her house and shop to include both our names. I skimped on the funeral services (flowers are pricey) and let her bratty grandkids fight over the spare junk from the basement before I sold all her (my) property to some commercial real-estate developer. I think there's now a Gap where Sally & Daughters used to be. The weather in Fiji sure is nice this time of year, especially when enjoyed from my gilded veranda.
Sometimes analogies are delicious. Especially when the involve attempts to regulate and solve a scientific problem via government intervention and negotiations between affected parties.
First, Slashdot posts a review of Robert Prechter's new book on socionomics, then Stewart Butterfield addresses the speculation raging over whether or not Google plans to acquire Friendster. Quite the day for social networks it seems. Much to digest.
The review of Prechter's work raises the issue of the need for solid methodology to be developed in order for socionomics to transition into a respectable scientific discipline. From what I can glean off of Prechter's site, many of his postulations rely on limited data sets (this may be intentional, but without any methodological clarity I cannot tell). Data indicative of "social mood" are few, far between, and beset with interference, at least as they stand now. Prechter primarily relies on stock market charts to derive a direct causal relationship between this mood (as evinced by movies, political races, mass reactions to power blackouts) and the performance of several key financial indicators. This is a start, but such consistency leave him prone to claims of assertion-by-least-resistance and, if not esotericism, than at least over-reliance.
Until he can prove this to be a robust phenomenon by way of a broad range of analysis, socionomics will occupy the hinterlands of coffee-table pseudoscience.
Now to return to the other development I mentioned above - is it me, or would a Google/Friendster pairing provide a cornucopia of information from which to mature the methodology, and hence conclusions, of socionomics? Perhaps they could re-brand as "Zeitgeister"?
I would best summarize my time here through the following snippet of introspection: "is this a pillow? Oh. Well, maybe if I roll it up... There we go. Wait, are these pants? Oh. I wonder if trees feel pain."
Tyson was one of the meekest people I’d ever met, and, somewhat fittingly, his Tai Chi technique was exceptional. I’d watch him snake limberly through fluid forms well beyond my recognition with the skill of a practiced expert, though he was only 18 at the time. The right-hand man of the school’s founder/instructor/jester/serial-womanizer, he served as the reserved counterbalance to his teacher’s flamboyant persona, assuaging our anxiety by tempering the latter’s outlandish claims of expected progress and imposed monastic discipline. When sifu’s demands, as intense as they were jocose, would rattle us (or, more often, leave us chuckling and distracted) Tyson would guide us back to focused study with a soft paternal hand.
Though we attended the same high school and, only being separated by a year, would occasionally socialize together, it is the Tyson I knew through Tai Chi that I remember most today. There, his passivity paradoxically conferred an unaccustomed puissance upon him: the confidence of a man whose manner is entirely consonant with his environs. Perchance this ease persisted for the remainder of his night... perhaps this is why, in the midst of giving him the occasional ride home, he would take the rare opportunity to divulge his idiosyncratic theories on life, the state of things, and just about everything.
One of Tyson’s primary beliefs - unsurprising given his demeanor - was that, the first several decades of life (I never could get him to specify the exact length with any satisfactory level of precision) should be spent in a state of voracious preparation and learning. One’s information flow should be asymmetrical in favor of intake almost to the point of being unidirectional. Past some critical threshold (the unspecified point at which the decades in question have passed), the flow should reverse itself, and one’s time should be devoted to action. In short, the first phase of life was best spent preparing, and the second, doing. This was not a groundbreaking assertion by any means, but the calm assuredness and consistency with which it was expressed ensured it an indelible place in my memory.
I think often now about the transition in question and have preoccupied myself of late with its vacillating estimated applicability to my own life and with the complication of a minor wrinkle: some learners in question grow very accustomed to learning. A robust routine - a homeostasis or sorts - creates a bulwark to change. Preparation becomes doing. The battering ram-as-catalyst to smash this must come from the outside, a push from the nest to incite flight.
I’m talking, of course about reinstating the draft. Beyond reinforcing our current men and women in uniform with the added power of hundreds of thousands of conscripts so needed in these troubled times, it would light a vital fire under the individual asses of so many young people wallowing in the mire of self-perpetuating study. The push into action will unearth the latent reservoirs of study and, like a sponge squeezed, douse the fires of the undone, from whose smoking ashes will rise the pungent smell of progress. The dogs will like us - and why shouldn’t they? Who brings treats for them? THEIR MASTERS.
It's odd not fusing word pairs. Some combinations are so inextricably bonded that it shocks me how syntactically independent they remain. Chemical imbalance. Collateral damage. Aiding and abetting. Some languages (German, I'm looking in your direction) cut out the middlemen (i.e. spaces) and just smack the originals together like conjoined twins. Sometimes, I sit and imagine what the book on tape version of my autobiography will sound like. When Donald Sutherland, in his paternal drawl, recounts the trials and tribulations of my atavistic return to gang life (proving the old adage that you can take the boy from the streets but not vice versa), I dearly hope he pronounces it "maliceaforethought".
With the caveat that I only brought my camera out of its case for one day of the three - and ipso facto there was much that was not captured by it - here are some pictures from the previous weekend, which was long... and not at Bernie's.
What in the dickens is wrong with David Blaine? This is worse that that contrived VMA make-out stunt. If he really wanted to cause a stir, he would have taken that knife and carved "I am a robot. I require your attention so that I may attain supermodel girlfriends whom I will devour for sustinence." on his chest, a statement which isn't really that far from the truth.
My company semi-rebranded, so we needed a new website to showcase our expanded offerings: Vindigo Studios. You might not see anything interesting at first glance, but if you study (a word, like studio, also derived from the Latin studium) the titular hand of Mr. Watts at the top, you might notice it in fact belongs to yours truly (actually you probably wouldn't notice that, but it's the truth). That's right - my hand is on the front page of my company's website. Well, not the whole hand... but portions of my thumb, index, and middle fingers.
Anyone know of a good publicist, PR rep, and agent? I'm gonna ride this star to the top.
I know when a reporter from the New York Times asks one and one's friends some questions, then takes down names and occupations, one shouldn't assume one's quote will actually appear in said reporter's article. But I built up my hopes nonetheless. Then they were dashed. Such is life.
