Category — General

scicult. Scicult: bridging science & culture through contemporary art. [MetaFilter]

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interesting bit of art….

so I've been wanting to talk about amazon since i did the amazon ego surf yesterday to find who talked about my work in their books, two books, not bad:)

anyway now i was just looking at my what's new list and i wonder how normal mine is:

The Art of UNIX Programming

The Haraway Reader

Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World

and then it goes on with quicksilver, which i have no intention of reading, even though I've read everything else he's put into print….. I still say Stephenson's Big U is one of his best works.

now my recommendations is actually a bit strange too, it goes: baudrillard, annamarie mol, embracing insanity which is a book on open source software, then an allan moore graphic novel 'Supreme', then crypto by steven levy, then the letters of paul valery….

all in all, i know why amazon gives me these somewhat strange lists, but i'm not sure how effective they are. for instance, i have no intention of reading most of the things in these lists. however they do provide an entryway for a bit of reflexive consideration of my relation to commoditized publishing.

today i'm 31, my goal for this year is to get a job that will last a few years instead of 1 year, and to finish my dissertation.

Grants.gov. Grants.gov
http://www.grants.gov/

[Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker]

this is handy

U.S. Prisons and Mental Illness. Prisons have become America's default mental health system. According to a new study by Human Rights Watch, between two and three hundred thousand men and women in U.S. prisons are seriously mentally ill, about three times more than the number of mentally ill who are in mental hospitals. [Via TalkLeft.] [MetaFilter]

Crisis and opportunities in scholarly publishing. The 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies took place in Philadelphia, May 9-10, 2003. The presentations from the one public session, Crises and Opportunities: the Futures of Scholarly Publishing, are now online. See the separate pages by Carlos Alonso, Cathy Davidson, John Unsworth, and Lynne Withey. [Open Access News]

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there are some interesting presentations here. However, Professor Unsworth is no longer at Virginia, so I wonder what's up there…

Computers don't do good security screening. It's a recurring fantasy: if we could compile a nice database of information on people and then load it into a computer we could set the computer on “autopilot” and it would tell us which people to watch out for…. [Ernie The Attorney]

Preliminary speed of the G5 cluster: 7.41 teraflop/s. I updated my story about the G5 cluster at Virginia with preliminary benchmark results. The R_max figure of 7.41 teraflop/s would put this supercluster to position 4 in the top-500 list of supercomputers. Not bad at all. [Universal Rule]

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it seems pretty slow to me, i suppose this is because of the network architecture, it would be nice to fix that, but i suppose they can't.

UNESCO statement on universal access to information. On October 14, a UNESCO Ministerial Round Table Meeting (Paris, October 9-10) issued communiqué, Towards Knowledge Societies. The communiqué ranks “universal access to information and knowledge” on a par with “freedom of expression” as a priority for the world community. Excerpt: “No society can claim to be a genuine knowledge society if access to knowledge and information is denied to a segment of the population. We therefore affirm the need for universal access to information and knowledge. By access we imply: infrastructure and connectivity; content; affordability; information literacy; know-how for use and development; education; and, the free flow of opinions and ideas.” For more detail, see the meeting press release. [Open Access News]

Which Dr. Seuss character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

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this is one i like