East Coast vs West Coast stereotypes | Ask MetaFilter:

East Coast vs West Coast stereotypes
April 4, 2006 7:29 AM
Can you give me some stereotypes on East Coast vs West Coast differences?

I’m not an American. In about every media I’ve had contact (Metafilter included), there is some stereotyping of Blue State vs Red State, or North vs South, or Urban America vs Rural America (Yeah, I know most of these overlap a lot). And yeah, much of it is offensive.

But stereotyping among the Urban, Blue State population is either rarer, or subtler. About the only things I get about this is that West Coasters are much more informal than New Englanders, and that people in the West Coast tend to use their cars a lot more than New Yorkers, and everywhere but California is damn cold.

So, can you give me some stereotypes about these places? What do New Englanders think of Californians? What about Seattleites and New Yorkers?

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some are funny, some are foolish, others have a ring of truth (like the avacado)

ZabaSearch.com – Free People Search:

find your location based on your ip….

Wired News: Laptop Detractors Shrugged Off:

“The hundred-dollar laptop is an education project,” he said. “It’s not a laptop project.”

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seems more like a promotional tour to me…. educational projects enable learning. how does this laptop do that? how does it enable learning? I don’t see the answer because i see a fundamental disconnect between the cultural context and the technology. i see this technology as primarily alien to the environment that it enters, and without any adaptation or educational programs to support it within that environment, will it have the major effects as claimed?

nightmare science:

In short, the elite that has been created by practice of the scientific method uses the concomitant power not just to express the results of particular research initiatives, but to create, support, and implement policy responses affecting many non-scientific communities and intellectual domains in myriad ways. In doing so, they are not exercising expertise in these non-scientific domains, but rather transforming their privilege in the scientific domains into authority in non-scientific domains. Science is, in other words, segueing back into a structure where once again authority, not observation, is the basis of the exercise of power and establishment of truth by the elite. But the authority in this new model is not derived from sacred texts; rather it is derived from legitimate practice of scientific method in the scientific domain, extended into non-scientific domains. Note that this does not imply that scientists cannot, or should not, as individuals participate in public debate; only that if they do so cloaked in the privilege that the scientific discourse gives them they raise from the dead the specter of authority as truth.

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there is a difference between authority, truth and power. my famous example is the use of the idea of hell in the bible…. what purpose does it serve, who does it empower, and why are there so many bibles produced that never mention hell? where did it come from and where is it going, for whose benefit?

Wow, that’s creepy:

install a grid of little cameras on the ceiling of their stores that can track people as they walk around the store, starting from when they walk in the door until they leave. The grid would be self-organizing, adjacent cameras talking to each other and handing off trackees to each other. It couldn’t recognize people, although if you buy something with something other than cash, it’d know who you were from that transaction. This isn’t intended for loss control (retailese for shoplifting) but more for marketing. They could, for example, rent a rack in a prominent position to a supplier, and charge them by the number of people who stop to look at it.

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this is an interesting phenomena… it is a growing phenomena too. how many shopper cards are already rfid tagged? want to bet that you have one that is?

One Laptop Per Child Project Abandons Hand Crank:

One Laptop Per Child Project Abandons Hand Crank
One Laptop Per Child project abandons hand crank in favor of a foot pedal attached to the AC adaptor. Negroponte also says Linux is too “fat” for the 500 MHz AMD processors they plan to use. -dj

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interesting…. a foot pedal and a cord…. give a kid a solid object on the end of a string and what do they tend to do with it?

USA Today tastes tests popular coffees:

Out of possible scores of “5 slurps,” Starbucks ranked at 4 1/2, while McDonald’s followed with 3 1/2 , Burger King with 2 1/2 and Dunkin Donuts and 7-11 with 2 slurps each. While Starbucks was also the most expensive drink in the test, the “dead-serious brew with an intense bitter chocolate aroma, a silky texture and a complex, fruity, almost wine-like flavor” made it worth it to the tasters.

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coffee is not supposed to be bitter. starbucks has habituated people to expect bitter coffee because it mixes so much sugar in their coffee drinks that you need bitter to offset the sugar. now people just expect the bitter without the sugar…. iewww. bitter comes from poorly, usually over, roasted and stale beans. good coffeeshops everywhere will sell you coffee the way it is supposed to taste… instead of how the starbuck’s paradigm has lead you to think expensive coffee should taste. expense in this case, is not a sign of goodness.

ok, that is my anti-starbucks coffee rant.