newspeak

I grow old … I grow old …         120

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.         125

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown         130

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

via 1. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. T.S. Eliot. 1920. Prufrock and Other Observations.

Arctic Resources, Exposed by Warming, Set Off Competition – NYTimes.com.

It is an issue whose value for social thought and action has been difficult to pin down, and thus gets forgotten. It’s hard to pin in part because the melting arctic, and all that it implies regarding resources and their getting, almost implicitly involves military defence and fossil-fuel or other geo-stripping technology. There is in short nothing beautiful to look forward to, where “beautiful” implies something whose value lies independent of the natural resources, the commodities, that lie underneath, underground and soon to be revealed to those with the most money, biggest companies, largest and most powerful navies. 

That I live in Canada is not irrelevant. That Canada’s huge wealth derives mainly from its natural resources and their gross exploitation is important to any future calculus. That there has been an effective deprecation of innovative technologies, especially green ones, is to the point. Canada, after all, has programmatically removed itself from International green treaties, and it is only very locally that one sees the necessary efforts made to keep up with, for instance, trash. But that is by no means enough. (I find this frustrating. Canada could, and should, be the world leader in Green Technology. Argh.)

Freedom’s Just Another Word For “Nothing Left to Share on Facebook Without Fear of Government Retribution” | PandoDaily.

Book is better. The larger point: we use the Web, the Internet, and we use it, mostly, as if all our communications were narrowly cast, not broadcast into time and space. That in itself wouldn’t be bad–disorienting, vertiginous, perhaps–but what such casual broadcast does is make us vulnerable to our own words held against us at some unimagined time, in some unimagined place, by some unthought of people. It’s not a question of being paranoid or anxiogenic. It rather is a recognition that we have to be aware of the life history of our Web identity.

The Bush White House Was Deaf to 9/11 Warnings – NYTimes.com.

Perhaps just me but I found this account extraordinary. It’s also the case that what counts as the history of the event is unfolding still–and will be for many years. It’s not even an onion; it’s rather that as more is revealed and publicized, more changes. Yes, we (the progressives) always knew that Iraq was always the target. But the extent to which that target’s life history was redacted to suit the narrative exigencies of public commissions is enormous.

The E Extensions to Java.

I’ve been looking into E lately: it’s fascinating. And immensely useful….

Newspeak.

Douglas Crockford’s Wrrrld Wide Web.

Inventor of JavaScript, JSON, and probably much else I use every day. And possessed of a sense of humour and insight into human communities. Then there are the games.

McGuinty government’s planned education overhaul will be catastrophic – thestar.com.

What Young People Think About Facebook And Instagram – Business Insider.

I would love to read the entire report. I cannot stand Facebook but find it nevertheless useful–And I find myself oddly agoraphobic in Google+–too much of not enough. So I spend (or waste) time on FB not being there. But my primary gripe with FB is its (crass?) marketing of interrelations as commercial occasions. It effectively seeks to colonize–replace? characterize?–“friendships” (laugh) with, as marketplace exchanges. (Putting my old hat on, and let’s change the name of FB to “Houe of Mirth”: no relation is not always already situated within the market, valued as it can be made valuable.) Do I see FB surviving as such? I see MSFT buying it in a year or so, or perhaps even Apple.

Eventbrite Manages More Republican Events Than Democratic Ones | TechPresident.

How unfortunate.