Category — General

Ananova – Beerbelly is a big success :
Beerbelly is a big success
The Beerbelly – a secret strap-on beer holder that disguises itself as a bulging beer belly – is being marketed in the US.
It was the brainchild of three middle-aged men who wanted a way of sneaking beer into movies and baseball games.

<p>——<p>
you never know…..

TheStar.com – Jane Jacobs, 89: Urban legend:
Jane Jacobs was a writer, intellectual, analyst, ethicist and moral thinker, activist, self-made economist, and a fearless critic of inflexible authority.
Mrs. Jacobs died this morning in Toronto. She was 89.
<p>——–<p>
She wrote one of the classics of all social science, the life and death of great american cities.

Show Details for Billy Bragg: 2006-03-26:
Stream

World Book and Copyright Day – April 23, 2006:
World Book and Copyright Day – April 23, 2006 – By celebrating this Day throughout the world, UNESCO seeks to promote reading, publishing and the protection of intellectual property through copyright
<p>-<p>
celebrate….

Field & Stream – You Call This a Wetland?:
The Bush Administration announced last week that the nation is no longer losing wetlands–as long as you consider golf course water hazards to be wetlands.

Really.
<p>——–<p>
the environment is just a resource to this administration, it has no status beyond that.

Small children rated most malicious creatures in the world, study says – Pravda.Ru:

You got it wrong if you thought we were going to talk about tigers, lions, wolves, alligators, or sharks. It is really hard to guess who is the most malicious and cruelest of all species.

——

no news here….

Main Page – WikiNotes:

Wealth of Networks WikiNotes
Welcome to the Wealth of Networks WikiNotes.
This Wiki is an invitation to collaborate on building a learning and research environment based on Yochai Benkler’s book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.

—–

I like the purpose of this wiki of the book. it is a great collaborative reconstruction project.

The science of happiness – Depression – Health In Focus – Health And Fitness:

You can’t buy joy, but you can learn to lift your
spirits.
It’s one of those things, like art, that’s hard to define, yet
we know it when we see it. What exactly is happiness and how can
you get it? While that question has occupied the minds of
philosophers from Aristotle onwards – humans seek it above all
else, he wrote more than two millennia ago – scientific
investigation of this most elusive of emotions only really got
underway in the past two or three decades.

——

well this isn’t news, but since it is thunderstorms this morning…. I think this is something to read.

Creative Loafing – Weekly Planet Tampa: Talk Of The Town: Life Sentences: In Living Color:

The hardest thing about being colorblind is trying to explain to people who aren’t colorblind what it’s like to be colorblind.

—–

I’m not colorblind, but I always advocate colorblind friendly web design as part of universally accessible design (ok, yes for everyone that uses a standards compliant browser, not for everyone). Here is a translator so you can judge your design : http://colorfilter.wickline.org/

In any case, when i was reading thee story linked above… something else struck me. there are a variety of forms of colorblindness, i know, but what struck me was the relationship between learning the names of colors, sociality, and colorblindness. How is that learning negotiated and how the social experience must be fundamentally different for someone that doesn’t really see the same sets of things. by that i mean…. if i am pointing at something that is green and you don’t really see the same green, and you have to remember that even in color-seeing populations there are variations in what people see, then when we create the category of green in our minds over time, does it have different properties between different populations in relation to the social properties, as we know it does across cultures. so when we are learning the category green, however you want to claim that is done… what happens when the relationships between people that is implied in the learning of this category linguistically, cannot be certain of their referent. does the inability to communicate some aspects of our perception and map that onto other people fundamentally cause a different relationship between people? is our situatedness (of social relations) grounded in capacity (to share perceptions), i’d say yes, but do we supercede our capacity (to create share perceptions) through frequent shared experience. but… it is an interesting question. does someone that does not perceive color the same way as you, learn to treat people differently because of the difficulties in defining color?