Stung Eye link

Link: Best of MetaFilter

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 16:45:17 +0100

No time to meander through the big blue? Catch the curated best of MeFi.

Link: Thou shalt not commit logical fallacies

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 18:37:36 +0100

A printable poster.

Link: Things to Worry About

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 13:07:00 +0100

A letter from author F. Scott Fitzgerald to his 11-year-old daughter at camp, in which he threatens to beat her cat (“Do you react to that?”) or call her Egg if she ever calls him Pappy again.

More endearing is his list of things to worry about, and those things which she should not worry about.

Things to worry about:

Worry about courage
Worry about Cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship

Things not to worry about:

Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions

Link: I’m Not a “Curator”

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 23:08:00 +0100

A response to the curator’s code, an attempt to codify and standardize “via” links and attribution from link blogs and aggregators.

I usually try to provide “via” links here on stungeye, but I don’t believe online discovery should require attribution.

“The value of authorship is much more clear. But regardless of how much time it takes to find interesting links every day, I don’t think most intermediaries deserve credit for simply sharing a link to someone else’s work.”

Also, from Infinite Monkeys and Infinite Links:

“The idea of taking the relatively rigid and formal conventions of academic attribution and translating them to a website doesn’t sit very well with us. It’s not just that we’re lazy, but that the lack of proper attribution is not the same as plagiarism or copyright violation; no-one is losing out financially by not being credited with an online ‘discovery’.”

Link: Mobile HTML5 Post: Tumblr App Groundwork

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:17:46 +0100

“It’s time to build our first native app using web technologies. We are going to build a simple photo gallery app using images from my Meow Reader Tumblr. The code presented should be flexible enough to turn any Tumblr into an app.”

Link: Switcheroo

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 12:31:19 +0100

Couples swap clothing for photo shoot.

Link: L.E.D. Surfer

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:05:51 +0100

A man, covered in light emitting diodes, snowboards at night.

Link: New Mobile HTML5 Post

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:48:32 +0100

“Hi there. I hear that you want to build native mobile apps using only web technologies. Me too. Before we begin we need to define our required toolset.”

Link: New Blog: Mobile HTML5 Development

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 23:43:37 +0100

I’ve started a blog about mobile app development. I’ll link to the new posts from here.

Link: The New French Hacker-Artist Underground

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:26:00 +0100

Like computer hackers who crack digital networks and surreptitiously take control of key machines, members of UX carry out clandestine missions throughout Paris’ supposedly secure underground tunnels and rooms.

Through meticulous infiltration, UX members have carried out shocking acts of cultural preservation and repair, with an ethos of “restoring those invisible parts of our patrimony that the government has abandoned or doesn’t have the means to maintain.”

Link: What the Public Commons Is Missing

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 12:57:00 +0100

“The natural home for ideas and creations is in the commonwealth, the public domain. We cleverly give the creators of ideas and art and inventions a temporary monopoly for their creations outside of the commonwealth in order to encourage them to make more new things. That is good. For a while that temporary period in the US was 58 years after the work was created for copyright and 17 years for patents.”

When copyright was first brought into law in the UK (1709) the terms were 21 years for books already in print and 14 years for new ones, with an additional 14 years if the author was still alive when the first term ran out.

“Unfortunately, as creators became corporations, they have lobbied for laws (and financially supported the elections of lawmakers) that have extended the “temporary” period till it is in effect, unlimited for copyright.”

Also: Copyright and Wrong - Why the rules on copyright need to return to their roots

“The notion that lengthening copyright increases creativity is questionable. Authors and artists do not generally consult the statute books before deciding whether or not to pick up pen or paintbrush. And overlong copyrights often limit, rather than encourage, a work’s dissemination, impact and influence. “

Link: Canada Considers Extending Copyright to Life + 70 Years

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 12:52:00 +0100

“Canada celebrated New Year’s Day this year by welcoming the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Carl Jung into the public domain just as European countries were celebrating the arrival of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, 20 years after both entered the Canadian public domain. Canada’s term of copyright meets the international standard of life of the author plus 50 years, which has now become a competitive advantage when compared to the United States, Australia, and Europe, which have copyright terms that extend an additional 20 years.”

“The Canadian government filed notice of a public consultation on December 31, 2011 on the possible Canadian entry into the Trans Pacific Partnership (TTP) negotiations, trade talks that could result in an extension in the term of copyright that would mean nothing new would enter the Canadian public domain until 2032 or beyond.”

“Now is the opportunity to help preserve the public domain in Canada by speaking out against TPP copyright provisions that would extend the term of copyright or impose even stricter digital lock rules. The consultation is open until February 14, 2012. All it takes a single email with your name, address, and comments on the issue.

The email can be sent to consultations@international.gc.ca.”

Link: Flaws in the 2010 Winnipeg Police Annual Report

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:54:46 +0100

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Looks like the Winnipeg Police Service needs bone up on their math skills. Their 2010 annual report includes some strange stats. When comparing 2010 with 2009:

They report a 20-30% decrease in crime per district, even though their reported city-wide decrease is only 7%.
This 7% decrease, when compared with their actual reported offence numbers, turns out to be a 9% increase.
They report a decreases in “Events for Service” for all districts, even though there was no significant city-wide change in “Events for Service” between the two years.

Some of these discrepancies appear to be tied to the new WPS policy of listing certain incidents as “non-district specific.”

Link: Precise Knowledge of Good and Evil?

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 11:12:00 +0100

A Quora thread on Etz haDaat tov V’ra, the fall of man from Genesis the first book of the Jewish and Christian Bibles.

Some responses worth reading:

“The question exhibits three further imprecisions about the fruit of this tree.”
— A close look at the question at hand.

“Genesis is just one of many attempts on the part of early man’s collective unconscious to narrativise a growing awareness that our species.”
— English gentleman Stephen Fry’s response.

“God did not want us to live forever in fear and shame, He needed to heal the self-inflicted wounds from the knowledge of good and evil before eternal life would be a gift.”
— Brother Francis Thérèse of Salvador da Bahia Mission

Related: On the Marionette Theater. In search of grace in adulthood, the burden of self-aware.

Link: It’s Time to Stop Talking About Copyright

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 15:12:41 +0100

I’m all for sorting out the rules that govern the entertainment’s supply chain, but let’s keep some perspective here: when we ‘‘solve’’ copyright problems at the expense of the Internet, we solve them at the expense of 21st-century society as a whole. — Cory Doctorow

Link: This is a Work of Fiction

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 12:09:51 +0100

“Work of Fiction is a strange little game. 20 puzzles to solve and an enormous conspiracy theory to uncover.” - 2DArray

Link: On the Marionette Theater by Heinrich von Kleist

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 13:10:00 +0100

This is a fictional dialogue where one character comments that marionettes possess a grace humans do not, even though the marionettes are themselves controlled by humans.

From the post-script: “Kleist’s essay pivots around a reference to the third chapter of the book of Genesis, the story of the Fall of Man, the discovery of that self-consciousness which establishes and perpetuates human isolation. But ‘discovery’ implies a historical event. [However, it] is only our concept of time which makes us think of the Fall of Man as a historical event in the distant past. It is happening all the time. The biblical story is a mythical representation of constant human awareness of self.”

From Wikipedia: “Our consciousness and capacity for reflection cause us to doubt ourselves or become self-conscious, and prevents us from acting with the singlemindedness and purity of an animal or a puppet. And yet, consciousness is the effect of eating from the tree of knowledge, and we cannot escape it, as long as we are barred from Eden.”

In other words, as we become self-aware (which we all do as we grow up) we fall from grace. Kleist posits that the only way to return to this state of grace is through the continued pursuit of knowledge, the continued discovery of self. And perhaps that is what we call wisdom, the grace of youthful innocence regained through conscious self-discovery. A backdoor to the Garden.

Link: Melissa Martin's Love Letter to the Village

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 09:53:47 +0100

“I love the shape of the place; I love the green of its ceiling, pierced by the spires of aging churches and the battered red bricks of old post-war apartments. They’re mostly condos now. Because the Village has changed, but not for the worse. When I moved into the Village, it seemed most people here were like me: young, teens and early 20s, out for a party, buying pot at the Circle and mix at Shoppers and moving on into the arterial back lanes.”

Link: Is it OK to run an illegal library from my locker at school?

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 19:10:00 +0100

Private school student starts a library of school-banned books out of his or her locker. (Original question deleted at Yahoo Answers. Preserved as an image.)

Link: Leave the libraries alone. You don’t understand their value.

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 14:11:00 +0100

Philip Pullman’s call to defend libraries.