Thursday, November 17, 2011

load01 11/17/2011

  • See the guy in the photo there, dangling an ax from his left hand? That’s Greece’s new “Minister of Infrastructure, Transport and Networks” Makis Voridis captured back in the 1980s, when he led a fascist student group called “Student Alternative” at the University of Athens law school. It’s 1985, and Minister Voridis, dressed like some Kajagoogoo Nazi, is caught on camera patrolling the campus with his fellow fascists, hunting for suspected leftist students to bash. Voridis was booted out of law school that year, and sued by Greece’s National Association of Students for taking part in violent attacks on non-fascist law students.

    With all the propaganda we’ve been fed about Greece’s new “austerity” government being staffed by non-ideological “technocrats,” it may come as a surprise that fascists are now considered “technocrats” to the mainstream media and Western banking interests. Then again, history shows that fascists have always been favored by the 1-percenters to deliver the austerity medicine.

    tags: news

  • Some time ago, I was asked by David Carlton if I was interested in assembling a Critical Compilation on The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind for Critical Distance. I liked the idea, but research appeared to confirm my initial suspicions that, despite its rampant popularity, reams of fanfiction and endless debates about the lore, there is relatively little critical writing on Morrowind that has survived the vicissitudes of the internet since its release in 2002. This made me sad, so I thought I’d better write some!

    Part 1: Introduction

    When we talk about the world we live in, we can talk about physical laws, like gravity and the rules of thermodynamics. We can also talk about metaphysics: meta being Greek for “beyond”. This is where science meets philosophy, where we might try to identify underlying principles of reality that go beyond standard physics. Theories of time and space, of causality and determinism, of the nature of existence itself.

    tags: games

  • Before moving to Yale and becoming a bestselling historian, Paul Kennedy grew up on Tyneside in the 50s and 60s. "A world of great noise and much dirt," is how he remembers it, where the chief industry was building ships and his father and uncles were boilermakers in Wallsend. Last year the academic gave a lecture that reminisced a little about those days.

    "There was a deep satisfaction about making things," he said. "A deep satisfaction among all of those that had supplied the services, whether it was the local bankers with credit; whether it was the local design firms. When a ship was launched at [Newcastle firm] Swan Hunter all the kids at the local school went to see the thing our fathers had put together and when we looked down from the cross-wired fence, tried to find Uncle Mick, Uncle Jim or your dad, this notion of an integrated, productive community was quite astonishing."

    Wandering around Wallsend a couple of weeks ago, I didn't spot any ships being launched, or even built. The giant yard Kennedy mentioned, Swan Hunter, shut a few years back, leaving acres of muddy wasteland that still haven't lured a buyer.

    You still find industrial

    tags: economics

  • Listen: Bank of America is a shitty neighbor.

    To clarify, I have no beef with any specific retail banking location. The folks on Main Street (where I tread water on my mortgage each month) seem like basically good folks serving their clients in good faith. I have no gripe with them. I don’t even really have much of a gripe with Bank of America as an institution [1].

    tags: culture

  • Or: Why work 8 hours/day for someone else when you can work 16 hours/day for yourself?
    I've been a consultant of one form or another since 1985 when I started my old company, V-Systems, with a friend from college, and actually did bits and pieces of consulting as early as 1982. I have been asked often about the business, and I decided to write this up.
    Please note that I am providing observations from my own personal experience, but I am not providing tax or legal advice. You need to pay somebody for that, and I'm not qualified.
    Furthermore, I am not even attempting to make this a comprehensive guide for everything required by one in or contemplating the consulting business. I am purposely omitting whole areas, such as licensure, insurance, and negotiating — there are other books for that, and this isn't trying to be one of them.
    These sections (except the last) aren't in any particular order.

    tags: misc

  • Using Wikis for undergraduate courses was invented at Georgia Tech. We started in 1997, long before Wikipedia.  Ward Cunningham talks about our work in his book “The Wiki Way.”  Our paper on how we designed the Swiki (or CoWeb) at CSCW 2000 is, I believe, the earliest reference to wikis in the ACM Digital Library.  Jochen “Jeff” Rick built the Swiki software that we use today, and he did his dissertation on his extensions to Swiki.
    We published a technical report in 2000 about the varied uses of Swikis that we saw around Georgia Tech’s campus.  Some classes were having students create a public case library.  Others were have cross-semester discussions between current and past students.  Others had public galleries of student work.
    All of that ended yesterday.

    tags: news

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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