The Recursive Muffin: Archive

6 tags

Feb 21st

2 tags

Feb 19th

4 tags

Anaïs has introduced me to Robyn. Now my current favorite lyric is: “Sleng Teng drops with the ~ ~ ~”

Feb 18th

1 note

5 tags

Feb 16th

2 notes

7 tags

Feb 16th

1 note

3 tags

Feb 15th

5 tags

Feb 14th

567 notes

3 tags

Thank you Steven Hyden for pointing out Osama bin Laden’s obsession with the late Whitney Houston, per Kola Boof in Harper’s.

Feb 12th

1 note

1 tag

At three AM last night, I had one of those realizations that seems very profound when you’re mostly asleep: The whole internet smells the same.

Feb 12th

1 note

6 tags

Vostok

So the Russian team has finally reached the subglacial water lens in Antarctica called Lake Vostok, which may or may not have been a closed ecology for the last 14 million years. They’ve been drilling down to the lake for 20 years, and have attracted a lot of criticism about their technique, which might contaminate the lake with surface biota and chemicals. I went looking for some...

Feb 9th

3 tags

Feb 6th

3 tags

Feb 4th

2 notes

5 tags

THINGS I’M IN FAVOR OF: The one where the movie or TV show cuts to an establishing shot of a city or something, and then has a title, like: “Istanbul, Turkey”. Bonus points for the date and time, and extra bonus points for typewriter font and typing noise. THINGS I’M AGAINST: The one where the movie or TV show establishes this pattern and then forgets to do it when the...

Feb 1st

3 tags

Jan 29th

8 tags

Contagious psychology: some notes in lieu of an...

In the last few days, two news stories have cropped up that ring a particular bell in the belfry of things-I-am-trying-to-write-about-but-don’t-have-time. First, the CDC has finally been goaded into doing a study of people suffering from Morgellon’s disease, most of whom live in California (and indeed, most of whom live in the Bay Area.) Predictably, the CDC has determined that...

Jan 29th

1 note

5 tags

Jan 24th

17 notes

3 tags

Jan 21st

1 note

3 tags

Jan 21st

10 notes

4 tags

Jan 21st

4 tags

Jan 20th

1 note

5 tags

Jan 19th

4 tags

Jan 19th

2 notes

5 tags

A confession...

I totally support the SOPA / PIPA protest, and the Wikipedia blackout. But I now have about twenty Wikipedia windows open to get me through the next 24 hours.

Jan 18th

3 tags

“I have seen the footage, and I find the behavior depicted in it utterly deplorable….I condemn it in the strongest possible terms.” -Leon Panetta Dear orators, pundits, speechwriters, and politicians- The phrase “in the strongest possible terms” is a characterization of rhetoric, not rhetoric itself. If you want to condemn stuff in the strongest possible terms,...

Jan 13th

7 notes

3 tags

Jan 7th

14 notes

5 tags

Jan 6th

21 notes

8 tags

A former NBTSC camper has just posted a brief complaint in my blogshed. They were disappointed by the political and religious ambience of the camp, and of course it is impossible to please everyone in that regard, and the attempt would be self-defeating. But I am intrigued by the final piece of the post: “It didn’t seem that anyone had any particularly strong moral or religious...

Jan 6th

8 notes

3 tags

Fun wikipedia debate...

Way back in the archives for Human, within an endless controversy over whether humans’ conservation status should or should not be listed as “least concern”….there is a secondary argument over whether humans should be described as “extinct in the wild.” That’ll keep you thinking…

Dec 31st

5 notes

8 tags

Dec 30th

7 notes

5 tags

Dec 30th

21 notes

5 tags

Strong AI test #557

Auto-translating Japanese youth subculture blogs without getting a sentence like: “Eliminated so that the rear kitchen complete control charging and meeting with management, you can write a diary with confidence negatively.”

Dec 28th

1 note

7 tags

Why are all my news channels talking about the death of Christopher Hitchens, and none of them are talking about the death of Václav Havel? It reminds me of the concurrent deaths of Diana Spencer and Agnes Bojaxhiu, or as they are better known, Princess Di and Mother Teresa. And the comparison is singularly appropriate, because Hitchens hated Mother Teresa with a blinding passion. But the...

Dec 18th

1 note

5 tags

Dec 13th

2,950 notes

2 tags

Dec 12th

21 notes

4 tags

Dec 12th

5 tags

Dec 11th

4 tags

Dec 11th

5 notes

3 tags

Dec 10th

9 notes

11 tags

Dec 10th

1 note

3 tags

The Revolution Not Being Televised Will Be...

This is the best story in months.

Dec 10th

3 notes

8 tags

Dec 10th

163 notes

5 tags

Dec 10th

17 notes

6 tags

Dec 6th

29 notes

4 tags

BREIN Gets Busted

The Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has just been caught pirating music for their anti-piracy campaign. It’s like the Lily Allen situation all over again, except you’d think BREIN had a little more sense than Lily Allen. Hypocrisy is a spectator sport….

Dec 3rd

1 note

5 tags

Siri vs. Abortion vs. Grammar

OK, there is a widespread narrative that Siri, the Apple agent that locates the nearest KFC for you, is against abortion. It’s widespread enough that Fox News has had to weigh in, delicately, to say that Siri is not, actually, anti-abortion. This position must have involved a whole board meeting about whether it was better to depict Apple as an elitist liberal corporation, or better to...

Dec 2nd

3 notes

7 tags