Chrome used to save your browser history indefinitely, but now it only keeps the last 90 days, with no way to change that (boo!). The History Trends Unlimited browser extension fixes that by maintaining a local database that you can search, as well as showing you some interesting statistics:
Jack Tworkov (1900-1982):
Compression and Expansion of the Square (Q3-82 #2)
Note:
Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702-1789)
Liotard Laughing (self-portrait), circa 1770
La Chocolatiere, 1743-1745
Cyndy Salisbury (unknown-present):
Medusa in Chains:
This place is not a place of honor.
No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
Nothing valued is here.
This place is a message and part of a system of messages.
Pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us.
We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
[Via this very interesting essay (the first of three parts) riffing off a recent talk by Bruce Sterling on Alien Aesthetics. -egg]
Such questions may seem fanciful or mad, but why is it so strange to ponder the experience of objects, even while knowing objects don’t really have “experiences” as you or I do? Why is it so strange to be fascinated with all “things” – from apple pies to microprocessors, tree frogs to alternating current – and to embrace that fascination not just as engineers but also as philosophers? What if engaging in this way holds important clues about a future in which the boundaries between things are fast dissolving?
This kind of engagement will necessitate a new alliance between science and philosophy, one grounded in rational speculation. From a common Enlightenment origin, studies of human culture split. Science broke down the biological, physical and cosmological world into smaller and smaller bits in order to understand it. But philosophy concluded that reason could not explain the objects of experience but only describe experience itself. One extreme led to scientism, the belief that we can know the world completely by taking it apart; the other to relativism, the belief that we can never escape the mind, that the world conforms to thought, language and culture.
Why programmers HATE being interrupted, and what they can do to mitigate the effects
http://blog.ninlabs.com/2013/01/programmer-interrupted/
I, maybe more than most people, can completely understand why broke white folks get pissed when the word “privilege” is thrown around. As a child I was constantly discriminated against because of my poverty, and those wounds still run deep. But luckily my college education introduced me to a more nuanced concept of privilege: intersectionality.
Source: Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person | Gina Crosley-Corcoran
“Construction of stepwells involved not just the sinking of a typical deep cylinder from which water could be hauled, but the careful placement of an adjacent, stone-lined “trench” that, once a long staircase and side ledges were embedded, allowed access to the ever-fluctuating water level which flowed through an opening in the well cylinder. In dry seasons, every step—which could number over a hundred—had to be negotiated to reach the bottom story. But during rainy seasons, a parallel function kicked in and the trench transformed into a large cistern, filling to capacity and submerging the steps sometimes to the surface. This ingenious system for water preservation continued for a millennium.”
Whaddya know, I have a ResearchGate page now (first I knew of it). Wonder if that’s sufficient to deduce my Erdös number…
[Maybe less than we assume. -e]
Judith Harris’s big idea–that peers matter much more than parents–runs counter to nearly everything that a century of psychology and psychotherapy has told us about human development. Freud put parents at the center of the child’s universe, and there they have remained ever since. “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do,” the poet Philip Larkin memorably wrote, and that perspective is fundamental to the way we have been taught to understand ourselves. When we go to a therapist, we talk about our parents, in the hope that coming to grips with the events of childhood can help us decipher the mysteries of adulthood. When we say things like “That’s the way I was raised,” we mean that children instinctively and preferentially learn from their parents, that parents can be good or bad role models for children, that character and personality are passed down from one generation to the next. Child development has been, in many ways, concerned with understanding children through their parents.
In recent years, however, this idea has run into a problem. In a series of careful and comprehensive studies (among them the famous Minnesota studies of twins separated at birth) behavioral geneticists have concluded that about fifty per cent of the personality differences among people–traits such as friendliness, extroversion, nervousness, openness, and so on–are attributable to our genes, which means that the other half must be attributable to the environment. Yet when researchers have set out to look for this environmental influence they haven’t been able to find it. If the example of parents were important in a child’s development, you’d expect to see a consistent difference between the children of anxious and inexperienced parents and the children of authoritative and competent parents, even after taking into account the influence of heredity. Children who spend two hours a day with their parents should be different from children who spend eight hours a day with their parents. A home with lots of books should result in a different kind of child from a home with very few books. In other words, researchers should have been able to find some causal link between the specific social environment parents create for their children and the way those children turn out. They haven’t.
