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Hyvä juttuja vuodelta 2012, osa 1

Kurkistelin vähän Instapaper-arkistoihini ja poimin sieltä muutaman jutun, joista tykkäsin tänä vuonna. Jos seuraat minua Twitterissä tai olemme Facebook-kamuja, nämä ovat jo tuttuja. (Kiinnostavia artikkeleita on vaan niin pirun paljon, että joudun jakamaan postauksen useaan osaan.)

Maria Bustillos: Irony Is Wonderful, Terrific, Fantastic!All I can say is that even the idea of an irony-free culture, with adults skipping around going Hullo Trees, Hullo Sky, can only fill the rational mind with dread.

Zadie Smith: JoyIt might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy.

Harvey Whitehouse: On RitualRituals bind us, in modern societies and prehistoric tribes alike. But can our loyalties stretch to all of humankind?

Matt Haughey: Why I love Twitter and barely tolerate FacebookI find the new life history Timeline approach to be a way of constantly dredging up the past, to show others how it shaped this person, and it’s not necessarily the best way to define ourselves.

Sean Howe: The true story of life at Marvel Comics in the glory days of Jack Kirby and Stan LeeWith the introduction of the Inhumans, it was suddenly apparent that the Marvel Universe was infinite, that there could be whole civilizations in every corner of the entire cosmos: as each issue tumbled into the next, picking up momentum, expanding the cast, the grand space opera absorbed forgotten characters and established the relationships between them all.

Peter Mountford: Steal My Book!Holy crap, I thought, my book is going to be published in Russia! Then I remembered that no Russian publisher had acquired the rights, and realized that AlexanderIII must be translating it for some kind of book-pirating outfit.

Robert Capps: Why Things Fail: From Tires to Helicopter Blades, Everything Breaks EventuallyIt’s actually not hard to make a hinge that will last for a really, really long time. All you have to do is make it a tough, heavy hinge. But that creates several problems. First, a burly hinge will be stiffer and less sensitive than a small, thin hinge, so the pedal won’t feel right. Second, and worse, is the excess weight. Slap a big hinge onto the gas pedal and you may add only a couple of ounces and a few cents of overhead to the truck. But multiply that across hundreds of hinges, bolts, handles, door locks, latches, and so on, and suddenly you have a bloated truck that is slow, sluggish, gas-hungry, and expensive. A truck that is, in the parlance of reliability testers, overengineered.

Boris Katchka: Proust Wasn’t a Neuroscientist. Neither was Jonah LehrerIn fact, by the time he was caught breaking the rules of journalism, Lehrer was barely beholden to the profession at all. He was scrambling up the slippery slope to the TED-talk elite: authors and scientists for whom the book or the experiment is just part of a multimedia branding strategy. He was on a conveyor belt of blog posts, features, lectures, and inspirational books, serving an entrepreneurial public hungry for futurist fables, easy fixes, and scientific marvels in a world that often feels tangled, stagnant, and frustratingly familiar. He was less interested in wisdom than in seeming convincingly wise.

Venkatesh Rao: Welcome to the Future NauseousMy new explanation is this: we live in a continuous state of manufactured normalcy. There are mechanisms that operate — a mix of natural, emergent and designed — that work to prevent us from realizing that the future is actually happening as we speak. To really understand the world and how it is evolving, you need to break through this manufactured normalcy field. Unfortunately, that leads, as we will see, to a kind of existential nausea.

Jonathan Haidt: Reasons Matter (When Intuitions Don’t Object)A two-dimensional epistemological space showing the four cognitive states you might be in as you hear and discuss a story about X. The horizontal dimension is intuition: you intuitively “see that” X is bad (in which case you start on the left edge of the figure). The vertical dimension is “reasoning-why”: you search for reasons why X is bad (you try to reason your way downward). There are only two safe, comfortable spots on the table: the lower-left corner, where your intuitions say that X is bad and you have reasons to support your condemnation, and the upper-right corner, where your intuitions say that X is good and you have reasons to support that claim. People in those two corners believe that they have knowledge, or justified true belief. So how does a typical moral argument proceed?

Adrian Chen: Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the WebJudging from his internet footprint, Brutsch, 49, has a lot to sweat over. If you are capable of being offended, Brutsch has almost certainly done something that would offend you, then did his best to rub your face in it. His speciality is distributing images of scantily-clad underage girls, but as Violentacrez he also issued an unending fountain of racism, porn, gore, misogyny, incest, and exotic abominations yet unnamed, all on the sprawling online community Reddit. At the time I called Brutsch, his latest project was moderating a new section of Reddit where users posted covert photos they had taken of women in public, usually close-ups of their asses or breasts, for a voyeuristic sexual thrill. It was called ”Creepshots.” Now Brutsch was the one feeling exposed and it didn’t suit him very well.

Jason Tanz: How a Videogame God Inspired a Twitter Doppelgänger — and Resurrected His CareerAt first Molyneux found the feed annoying; @PeterMolydeux was a pathetic character. His shtick was to spout overheated, ridiculous game ideas that could never get made. One tweet described a Kinect game that required players to cry before they could pass through a gate. Another posited a racing game in which you controlled the road instead of the cars. But over time Molyneux found himself drawn to his online impersonator. The ideas were silly, yes, but they were also oddly compelling.

Craig Mod: Subcompact PublishingNot quite website, not quite magazine, not quite book. Whatever they may be, we’re poised to see more like them — soon.

Marah Eakin: Steve Albini integrates the history of music fads into his hate for Cher’s “Believe”Those things are kind of grating if you’re aware of the area behind the curtain in Oz, and you see this happen. Whoever has that done to their record, you just know that they are marking that record for obsolescence. They’re gluing the record’s feet to the floor of a certain era and making it so it will eventually be considered stupid.

Maria Margaronis: Fear and loathing in Athens: the rise of Golden Dawn and the far rightStanding among the citizens of Megara as Michaloliakos addresses them, I feel as if I’ve slipped into a parallel universe. As a Greek, I’ve known these people all my life: middle-aged women with coiffed hair and well-upholstered bosoms, men in clean white shirts and neatly belted trousers. They’re the people who run the cafes and corner shops; who work hard every day, often at two or three jobs; who pinch children’s cheeks and won’t let you pay for your coffee; who were always cynical about politicians’ promises. I never thought they could fall prey to fascist oratory. Yet here they are, applauding Michaloliakos as he barks and roars, floodlit against a low white building next to the petrol station. We could almost be back in the 1940s, between the Axis occupation and the civil war, when former collaborators whipped up hatred of the left resistance.

David Wallace-Wells: A Brain With a HeartIn 1962, he took a residency at UCLA, where he became a regular at Muscle Beach and set a California state weightlifting record with a 600-pound power lift: “I was known as Dr. Squat,” he says, “which rather pleased me.” And he continued to motorbike, riding solo and loaded with amphetamines as far as the Grand Canyon, stopping only for gas. One day, a patient paralyzed from the neck down and blind from neuromyelitis optica heard Sacks was a biker, and asked to come along for a ride; with the help of weightlifting friends, he abducted her from the hospital, strapped her against his own torso, and rode up and down Topanga Canyon.

Ron Rosenbaum: Lewis Lapham’s Antidote to the Age of BuzzFeedEach issue is a feast, so well curated—around 100 excerpts and many small squibs in issues devoted to such relevant subjects as money, war, the family and the future—that reading it is like choosing among bonbons for the brain. It’s a kind of hip-hop mash-up of human wisdom. Half the fun is figuring out the rationale of the order the Laphamites have given to the excerpts, which jump back and forth between millennia and genres: From Euripides, there’s Medea’s climactic heart-rending lament for her children in the “Family” issue. Isaac Bashevis Singer on magic in ’70s New York City. Juvenal’s filthy satire on adulterers in the “Eros” issue. In the new “Politics” issue we go from Solon in ancient Athens to the heroic murdered dissident journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 21st-century Moscow. The issue on money ranges from Karl Marx back to Aristophanes, forward to Lord Byron and Vladimir Nabokov, back to Hammurabi in 1780 B.C.

10 vuotta

Eka merkintä

Ei näytä meininki kymmenessä vuodessa paljon parantuneen. Pitäisin hirveät bileet ja keräisin tähän sata parasta merkintää, mutta on kauhea kiire.

Laters!

Word 300: Propitious

The invisible hand is similarly beguiling. It claims a propitious pattern for which no one is responsible, even while everyone participates.

propitious (adj) 1: presenting favorable circumstances; likely to result in or show signs of success – source: Sleight of the ‘Invisible Hand’

Hyvä Itella tai Posti, minulla olisi asiakaspalautetta

Saapunut on

Tulin Hakaniemen postin kautta kotiin. Eteisessä minua odotti lappu, jonka mukaan isokokoinen kirje ei ollut mahtunut postiluukusta, mutta voisin noutaa lähetyksen Hakaniemen postista 12.10. klo 9. Se on tänään.

Jos olen oikein ymmärtänyt, jakajan pitäisi jättää lappu jo silloin kun hän tuomassa lähetystä, eli siis tässä tapauksessa eilen. Kyseessä ei suinkaan ole ensimmäinen kerta, kun Posti – tai Itella tai mikä hitto sen asiakasrajapintanimi nykyään mahtaakaan olla – tekee näin.

Olen maininnut asiasta pari kertaa postilaisille, mutta vastaus on ollut ”no kai kantaja ajattelee että paketti palautuu Hakaniemeen vasta myöhään illalla ja ihmiset saattaisivat käydä kyselemässä jo ennen kuin se on ehtinyt sinne”, mikä kuulostaa huonolta selitykseltä.

Tämänhetkinen olettamani on, että jakaja ei ota pakettia edes mukaan koko kierrokselle, vaan tyytyy tuomaan saapumisilmoituksen. Olettamus perustuu siihen, että olemme olleet moneen otteeseen kotona, kun posti tuodaan, eikä jakaja ole edes soittanut kelloa. (Olkoonkin, että ovikellomme kuuluu tosi huonosti sisälle.)

Pitää siis tehdä ylimääräinen reissu Hakaniemen postiin, vaikka juuri tulin sieltä. Siihen muuten liittyy toinen hauska tarina, heh heh.

Tilasin nimittäin Verkkokauppa.comista paketin Express City -toimituksella. Ajattelin, että kannattaa maksaa muutama euro siitä ilosta, että kamat kannetaan kotiin asti enkä joudu noutamaan niitä Hakaniemestä.

Olin juttukeikalla Ruoholahdessa, kun lähetti soitti. Kello oli 12.46. Kerroin olevani kotona kahden jälkeen, johon hän totesi ”se on vähän myöhään” ja sanoi vievänsä paketin Hakaniemen postiin.

Josta sitten kävin sen äsken hakemassa ja tulin kotiin, jossa eteisessä minua odotti lappu…

Näin tunnistat loppuunmyydyn tuotteen Stockmannin verkkokaupassa

Huomaat varmaan, että tämä ulkoinen blu-ray-asema on loppuunmyyty:

Stockan ostoskori, kuva 1

Senhän tietää siitä, että kassalle-nappi on disabloidun harmaa:

Stockan ostoskori, kuva 2

Hienosti toimii! Meininki vain paranee, kun korissa on useita tuotteita, joista osa on loppuunmyytyjä ja osa ei. Eron näkee yhdellä silmäyksellä:

Stockan ostoskori, kuva 3

Aiemmin: Lippu.fi ja VR.fi

Word 299: Trice

When the company went out of business, Mr Fleenor bought all the test gear from Rollei of America and set up shop in Manhattan Beach, California—just 15 miles down the coast from where your correspondent resides. With camera in hand, he was round at Mr Fleenor’s repair shop in a trice.

trice (n) 1: a very short time (as the time it takes the eye to blink or the heart to beat) [syn: blink of an eye, flash, heartbeat, instant, jiffy, split second, twinkling, wink, New York minute] – source: Difference Engine: Digital disillusion

Word 298: Harum-scarum

The 1905 scene has a harum-scarum looseness and wit; the destructive action scenes in movies now are brought off with a kind of grim, faceless glee, an exultation in power and mass.

harum-scarum (adv) 1: in a wild or reckless manner (syn: pell-mell); (adj) 1: cheerfully irresponsible (syn: carefree, devil-may-care, freewheeling, happy-go-lucky, slaphappy); (n) 1: a reckless impetuous irresponsible person (syn: daredevil, madcap, hothead, swashbuckler, lunatic) – source: Has Hollywood Murdered the Movies?

Tig Notaron poikkeuksellista komiikkaa

Jos et ole vielä kuullut Tig Notarosta, hyvä. Älä googlaa lisätietoja, vaan kuuntele This American Lifen toukokuisen jakson Groundhog Dayne -osuus ja tule sitten takaisin.

Sen jälkeen kuuntele This American Lifen uuden jakson kaksi ensimmäistä osuutta, joissa Notaro kertoo, mitä hänelle on tänä vuonna tapahtunut.

Se on poikkeuksellista komiikkaa. Huomasin kiinnittäväni huomiota etenkin siihen, miten yleisö reagoi – kuinka nopeasti voi nauraa, mille kaikelle voi nauraa, miten esiintyjän pitää melkeinpä antaa lupa nauraa jutuille ja niin edelleen.

Koko show’n voi ostaa netistä 5 dollarilla.

Edit: KCRW:n The Business -ohjelma on julkaissut Notaron 45-minuuttisen haastattelun vepissä: