You are the Low-Fidelity All-Star. You were born
with your cool, and it's totally natural. You
run the gamut from Hipster Supreme (only they
can ingest as much coffee as you) to the geeky
hipster (Mario Kart, anyone?).

What Kind of Hipster Are You?
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Buying of the President 2004. The Buying of the President. A look at the special interests who are bankrolling Bush and his Democratic rivals. [MetaFilter]

And where were you educated?.

Last week in class I asked my students where we had all learned that it is illegal to kill people. (Let’s set aside for the moment why this question would come up in a grad seminar on the Social Implications of Info and Communication Technologies.. the question seemed to make sense at the time.:) When I posed the question I wasn’t sure about my own answer to it so I was especially surprised when I saw that most students (of the eight in this class) had an immediate response: church.

[Crooked Timber]

The need for digital preservation. Scott Carlson, The Uncertain Fate of Scholarly Artifacts in a Digital Age, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, 2004 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: Some authors “wonder whether we are entering a digital dark age or a bright new era for scholarship. The raw materials of research — novels, notes, artwork, letters — are being produced on computers and saved on floppy disks and hard drives. Many scholars fear that these materials are in danger of ending up in the junk heap, trapped in obsolete computers. Others say the information age could be an age of plenty, an age when scholars reconceive their habits of research to cope with mountains of data, which then yield bold new discoveries. That future, however, will depend on digital-archiving strategies that are just now being planned. They have not yet been tested, or paid for.” (PS: For an article focusing on the same problem in the sciences, see Robert Dellavalle et al, Going, Going, Gone: Lost Internet References, Science, October 31, 2003. Thanks to Harlan Onsrud.) [Open Access News]

somehow, i don't think that the people who gave to harvard endowment meant for it to be spent like this. imagine if you are a small donor, giving what you can then you hear this? i'd be very upset……. over 100 million…

this is a pretty interesting examination of the question 'what makes a terrorist' i'm not sure that i agree it takes a religion, unless religion can be expanded to include ideology, because certainly many capitalists perpetrate terror in their pursuit of money, likewise environmentalists have been accused, etc. etc.

'It's just wrong what we're doing'

In an exclusive interview, repentant Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara breaks his silence on Iraq: The United States, he says, is making the same mistakes all over again.

He decided to break his silence on Iraq when I called him up the other day at his Washington office. I told him that his carefully enumerated lists of historic lessons from Vietnam were in danger of being ignored. He agreed, and told me that he was deeply frustrated to see history repeating itself.

“We're misusing our influence,” he said in a staccato voice that had lost none of its rapid-fire engagement. “It's just wrong what we're doing. It's morally wrong, it's politically wrong, it's economically wrong.”

[Politics in the Zeros]

——-

how can it be wrong? doesn't this administration believe that they act under some gods will, etc, etc. while it is the case that any rational person would see the problems and wrongness of the situation, people on religious crusades seem to miss that point because they can't be morally wrong in their own mind.

Cambodian hybrid motorcycle/WiFi network [bOing bOing]

The Blacksburg campus of Virginia Tech is closed on Monday, January 26, due to the snow, ice, and low termperatures. Classes are cancelled and offices are closed. This includes night classes. Check with local media and other sources to determine the status of extended campuses and off-campus offices.