Fascinating* talk by Ron Eglash, an “ethno-mathematician,” on his study of fractal organization in vernacular African architecture and urbanism, and also why the machine on which you’re reading this owes its existence to African divination.
For many months I’ve noticed that my top search engine referral is “organic lipstick.” I finally googled this phrase and sure enough … Unbeknownst to me, this post from January 2006 on my humble blog is the internet’s #1 source of information on organic lipstick.
Um. Glad to be of service to the community.
Yeah, so I might as well go ahead and set up a shrine to Jon Stewart in my bedroom. It would make my worshipping a lot more convenient.
Not the Daily Show, with Some Writer.
I should be glad for the writer’s strike, because the other night I saw Stewart’s interview with John McCain from April, which I hadn’t seen. I have never seen Stewart dig into a guest like that. Wow. It was awesome. I was very nearly cheering.
The interview can be found here, on onegoodmove.
Stewart talks with Bill Moyers about that interview here.
Here are the other parts of the interview with Moyers:
Part 1
Part 3
Part 4
I’m frankly a little worried for Stewart. His brand of honesty and mindfulness strikes me as genuinely dangerous for the establishment. It’s the kind of thing that has gotten political figures of other eras assassinated.
So my friend Marj is doing graduate research on how photographic depictions of landscapes, and national parks in particular, can influence the experience of visiting these places. She’s using the online photo-sharing community Flickr as a test tube: people visit well-known landscapes, take pictures, post them on Flickr where other people see them, and then those Flickrites visit, take pictures, etc.
I helped Marj build an on-line survey for Flickr folks who have visited the Grand Canyon. If you’ve been to the Grand Canyon and have a Flickr account, help Marj graduate and fill out the survey!