December 2010
“People used to say that the great thing about the Internet was that it had no gatekeepers. They were right, of course, except that the worst thing about the Internet is also that there are no gatekeepers. […] The wired world needs good editors more than ever!”
—Recently deceased Denis Dutton, the founding editor of Arts & Letters Daily, in 1999.
“The eminent linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin of Oxford once gave a lecture in which he asserted that there are many languages in which a double negative makes a positive, but none in which a double positive makes a negative — to which the Columbia philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, sitting in the audience, sarcastically replied, “Yeah, yeah.”
—
Steven Strogatz, “The Enemy of My Enemy”
I have now lost count of the number of times I’ve heard or read this anecdote.
“The Economist does not print by-lines identifying the authors of articles, other than surveys and special “by invitation” contributions. The editors say this is necessary because “collective voice and personality matter more than the identities of individual journalists” and reflects “a collaborative effort.” In most articles authors refer to themselves as “your correspondent” or “this reviewer.”
—I don’t like The Economist’s policy on editorial anonymity.
Reason #34 I Am Bad At My Job
- Me: Hi, I need to speak to Mister Bater, please.
- Me: (withholding giggle)
- [...]
- Mister Bater: Hello?
- Me: Hi, Mister Bater
- Me: (no longer withholding giggle)
- Mister Bater: (no longer on the line)
Reason #34 I Am Bad At My Job
- Me: Hi, I need to speak to Mr Bater, please.
- Me: (withholding giggle)
- [...]
- Mr Bater: Hello?
- Me: Hi, Mr Bater
- Me: (no longer withholding giggle)
- Mr Bater: (no longer on the line)
“A veteran like Cringely must surely be aware that E-mail was corrupted not by spam, a problem that is not just solvable but essentially solved for all expert users, but by top-posting, which instantly destroyed E-mail as a medium of communication.”
—
‘The Decline and Fall of E-mail’ by Joe Clark.
Wait, what? Sometimes I wonder what Joe Clark is parodying.
NO RETURN FOLLOW →
akosilucila.tumblr.com
THIS IS A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: THE PEOPLE ON THIS LIST WILL NOT FOLLOW YOU BACK JUST BECAUSE YOU FOLLOWED THEM.
NO RETURN FOLLOW →
akosilucila.tumblr.com
THIS IS A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: THE PEOPLE ON THIS LIST WILL NOT FOLLOW YOU BACK JUST BECAUSE YOU FOLLOWED THEM.
5 Typical Acts of Politeness That are Inefficient and Should be Banned →
thoughtcatalog.com
I understand the function of politeness and social conventions: how they make people feel at ease, how they provide a familiar, comfortable context for interactions in which all is not known. I like politeness and social conventions for this, but I think that some are inefficient and should be banned. Here are five.
Counting on Google Books →
chronicle.com
Humanities scholars may someday count as a watershed the paper that appeared on Wednesday in Science, titled “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books.” But they’ll have certain things to get past before they can appreciate that.
Geoffrey Nunberg talks about Google Books’ giant corpus of literature and the ramifications it could have on social-science research. He cites this paper as a potential watershed moment, the authors of which claim the data they’ve gathered from the corpus could be a starting point for a new field of science called culturomics.
Last time Nunberg wrote about Google Books, he called it “a disaster for scholars.” Looks like it’s come a long way. (Further reading: Nunberg and Mark Lieberman have both written about Google Books extensively on Language Log.)
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