eppur si muove

The difference between me and David Hampton isn’t that he’s a con artist and I’m not; the difference is that I only told lies I could live up to, and I knew when to stop. That’s not a different type of behavior, it’s just a different amount.

And it looks to me like women in general, and the women whose educations I am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.

 

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that "we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China."

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Don't be evil, indeed.

NEED to describe a hand-held mathematical calculator? Try “buggy whip.” A typewriter? A VCR? They’ve been called buggy whips, too. Even newspapers have received that label. (That one hurts.)

Collection of Studebaker National Museum, South Bend, Ind.

Those who disparage buggies as a dead end forget Studebaker switched from carriages to cars.

Buggy whips, used to prod the horses harnessed to wagons and carriages, started to become obsolete when automobiles appeared in the late 19th century. Today, any line of business facing the life-or-death challenge of a digital age will be described, sooner or later, as a contemporary buggy whip maker.

We don't make reform our mission because we secretly hate the idea of partaking of and in the greater world, even as we purport to give it voice, to speak of its ills through critical esoterics no public ear could ever grasp. Instead we colonize that world—all in the name of liberation, of course—in order to return its spoils to our fetid den of Lacanian self-denial. We masticate on culture for the pleasure of praising our own steaming shit.

We are not central because we have chosen to be marginal, for to be central would be to violate the necessity of marginality. We practice the monastic worship of a secular God we divined in order to kill again, mistaking ourselves for the madmen of our fantasies. We are masochists in hedonists' clothing. We are tweed demolitionists.

If there is one reason things "digital" might release humanism from its turtlenecked hairshirt, it is precisely because computing has revealed a world full of things: hairdressers, recipes, pornographers, typefaces, Bible studies, scandals, magnetic disks, rugby players, dereferenced pointers, cardboard void fill, pro-lifers, snowstorms. The digital world is replete. It resists any efforts to be colonized by the post-colonialists. We cannot escape it by holing up in Berkeley waiting for the taurus of time to roll around to 1968. It will find us and it will videotape our kittens.

This is a must-read for all humanities scholars.

IT was supposed to be a carefully guarded secret but in short order word spread via Facebook after a teacher at Collège Sturgeon Heights Collegiate on Dec. 18 gave his class the essay topic for this week's provincial Grade 12 English exam.

Senior education officials said Friday telling students they would be writing about environmental issues was a serious breach of confidentiality, but what is not yet clear is how many of the 7,000 Grade 12 students across Manitoba who wrote the exam this week had prior knowledge of the exam topic, and what if any advantage they gained.

It turns out that social networks can be used for good AND for evil. No word yet on which category this group action falls into.

On this page, 159 of the most amazing people we have going answer this question: How has the internet changed the way you think?