menti

"Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted."

nómada, blog de juan freire: Sobre las razones del éxito educativo de Finlandia o las perversiones de la excelencia y la evaluación

"it satisfies the security syllogism: “something must be done, I am doing something, something has been done."

Cory Doctorow

"The true story of Pasqual Pinon is actually more interesting in its strangeness. Pinon was actually a railroad worker from Texas who had a large benign tumor growing from the top of his head. He was discovered by a sideshow promoter in 1917 while splitting rails. For some reason the promoter decided that the huge tumor protruding for the head or Pinon was not odd enough and decided to create a fake face – a mask of wax."

PASQUAL PINON – The Two Headed Mexican | The Human Marvels

"My old cat developed hypertension blindness across forty eight hours. After an evening of disorientation, he flatly accepted his condition and began to work on his new territory, setting off in random directions until he encountered something he knew. By the next day he had mapped his way to the food, the water, the litter box, the favourite chair. He had stopped bumping into things. He would approach a surface head on, then turn suddenly but smoothly (as if he had detected its temperature, or its smell, or some small air movement associated with it, a draught moving along the skirting board, say, down the steps from the hall, into the kitchen) and walk along it as quickly as he had before the lights went out."

hypertension blindness | the m john harrison blog

"Si entendemos cómo funcionan nuestros medios digitales, sabremos qué podemos esperar de ellos, y si conocemos estas posibilidades, tenemos la opción de ponerlas en prácticas y hacer de este mundo un lugar un poco mejor. Se mire como se mire, la magia digital no permite hacer esto. Por chispeante que sea, no deja de ser una ilusión. Con magia jamás cambiaremos el mundo, porque el mundo sólo se mueve al son del conocimiento. El conocimiento de las tecnologías digitales y sus posibilidades pueden ser decisivos de cara al empoderamiento de las sociedades, permitiendo a los ciudadanos tomar las riendas de sus asuntos civiles y adquiriendo horizontes inimaginables para los que hoy están arriba, limpios de toda mancha tecnológica."

Tinta-E: Magia y empoderamiento de los medios digitales

"The bottom line is that about 40% of us have at some point worked for exactly the same firm that at some point also employed our fathers. But if dad’s earnings put him in the top 25% these chances are above average, they start taking off if dad was in the top 5%, and reach the stratosphere for top earners. Almost 7 out of 10 sons of top earning dads had a job with his employer. All parents want to help their children in whatever way they can. But top earners can do it more than others, and with more consequence: virtually guaranteeing, if not a lifetime of high earnings, at least a great start in life."

Inequality and Occupy Wall Street 4: daddy put you in the top 1% ! « milescorak

"Something more interesting than simple gang growth/spread, is the increasing presence of gang members in the military (primarily the Army) and the transfer of combat skills gained in Iraq/Afghanistan to the street. The FBI report states that 100 police jurisdictions have reported coming into contact with gang members with recent military experience. This training, gained on the battlegrounds of Iraq and Afghanistan, is extremely good (and for some people, extremely addicting). As we have seen in the recent past, even a single man with combat experience and some weaponry can be a HUGE problem for local police."

JOURNAL: US Military Gangs - Global Guerrillas

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Joe Milutis: Lovecraft’s “Call of the Cthulhu,” as well as its immediate predecessor, Machen’s “The Great God Pan” are about data management. I love that Cthulhu has as its ratiocinative center a “clipping agency”—something that I don’t think exists anymore, or exists only in highly rarefied modes, because of the web. It comes as no surprise that these weird stories have as their core, an engine of information technology, or even just the impulse to make meaning out of information gone awry, since it has always been recognized that the supernatural is also a type of allegory of information—no more so than in Bram Stoker’s _Dracula_ of course. We can talk about Dickens’ “The Signal Man” also, and things like _The Hunchback of Notre Dame_ which, at least in the 1939 film version, has at its core, a debate about the merits of the Gutenberg press. We could go on and on with examples both obvious—dealing with the “uncanny” impact of any new technology—and implicit: that all supernatural literature spectacularly stages the absences that communication both exacerbates and attempts to repress.

But there’s something a little different going on in Lovecraft and Machen that I think might be directly related to what Charles Fort was doing with his “data of the damned.” Fort seems to have been his own voracious clipping agency, yet at the same time he was compiling all these news stories about blood falling from the sky, vampire cattle mutilation, and girls spontaneously combusting on beds, he was reflecting on the ultimate absurdity of the human mind to make sense of this data. I’m going out on a limb here, because I haven’t read it in a couple years, but I think _Dracula_ is ultimately positivistic about the ways all the modes of communication that comprise its text allow us to see the vampire in a way that each individual character can not. Whereas, what you start to get with the Lovecrafts and the Forts is this clear sense that data-overload itself is a kind of monstrosity.

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Weird stories have as their core an engine of information technology

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