Culture
Cellphones in movie theatres?
Many years ago I attended the Toronto Film Festival and what amazed me almost as much as the films was that the moment the curtain went up and the credits started the audience was utterly silent. They were actually paying attention. Wow! Though my theatre experience varies quite a bit from noise all the way [...]
David Nutt lecture: drug use, policy and prohibition
I don’t agree with everything he says but overall this is brilliant for anyone interested in the issue of drug use and prohibition, and particularly the varying legal and media responses to drugs. What I find a little uneven is his quasi-prohibitionism regarding alcohol while being much more open minded about illegal drugs. Part of [...]
Jaron Lanier, again.
I do like hearing what this man has to say. In a recent article in the NewYorker: At the South by Southwest Interactive conference, in Austin, in March of 2010, Lanier gave a talk, before which he asked his audience not to blog, text, or tweet while he was speaking. He later wrote that his [...]
Design: 2 films and ramblings
Just finished watching Objectified The speaker is Rob Walker who writes the Consumed column at the NYT. This short excerpt does not contain the most interesting insight I think he brought to this film which was that when people buy a car (for instance) it is not so much that they are trying to project [...]
I guess even postmodernists need to use the toilet…
This book is a mixed bag of intriguing information, interesting insights and postmodernist blather. Thanks to it being a collection we can keep these things in different stalls as it were. I was happily trundling through the pages when I ran across this article written by Bryan Reynolds, a free range academic from U of [...]
Two tech related news items or concerns re the me-phone
1. Cellphone crash during U2 performance part of a bigger problem, expert says EDMONTON – Wednesday night’s breakdown of cellphone service as an estimated 65,000 U2 fans at Commonwealth Stadium overloaded communications antennas with calls, texts and tweets underlines a potentially serious problem as demand outstrips network capacity. Fiona Pynn said she and her husband, [...]
