Nations and Nationalism is an influential 1983 book by the philosopher Ernest Gellner, in which the author expands on his theory of nationalism.[1] O'Leary describes the book as "Gellner's most elaborate statement on the subject (of nationalism); because it is largely an expansion of the themes first sketched in Thought and Change.... he never repudiated any of the core propositions advanced in these texts", but he clarifies and qualifies some of them further in his Encounters with Nationalism (1994). (more)

Cosma Shalizi reviews Dan Sperber's Explaining Culture. Roswell is certainly worthy of contemplation: like Lourdes, it has become famous for something which never happened. I refer, of course, to the infamous myth that a flying saucer crashed there in 1947, making the national news, (more)

Cosma Shalizi reviews Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild. Human beings coordinate their actions to do things which would be hard or impossible for them individually... It was a commonplace of the Enlightenment, that most sociable age, and the philosophes were even, it seems, the first to realize that thinking, too, can be a collective activity, one conducted and amplified by social groups (more)

Patrick Dubroy on Casual programming. I’ve got three young kids. If you were to spend a day in my house, one thing you’d notice is that there are a lot of alarms going off. (more)

Itamar Gilad: The Hype Economy. Observing tech companies you may notice a broad, disturbing phenomenon: everyone’s hard at work “selling” their product ideas — stakeholders and engineers are selling to product managers, product managers are selling to management, and management is selling to everyone (soft skills). It seems that when it comes to promoting ideas, critical thinking, humility, and evidence are not widely in use, while salesmanship, politics, and hype are the norm. (more)

Michael Strong: The Missing Institution. What if many of the ills of our society are due to the fact that we are missing a key institution for the improvement of the human condition? What if young people need to be raised in healthy moral ecologies that are becoming increasingly rare? (more)

Joe Fassle: The Empty Promise of Endless Steak. The Revolution That Died on Its Way to Dinner (more)

Dan Davies: it's all artificial. I recommend you all to read this essay in The Economist by Farrell & Shalizi. ((2023-06-21) Farrell Shalizi Artificial Intelligence Is A Familiar-looking Monster) (more)

Alexander Obenauer: The importance of personal computing. Personal computing is one of the most important things humanity has ever built. (more)

Douglas Hofstadter on Godel, Escher, Bach, and AI. The actual story behind GEB begins with me as a 14-year-old, when I ran across the slim paperback book Gödel’s Proof by Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, and was soon mesmerized by it. I intuitively felt that the ideas that it described were somehow deeply connected with the mystery of human selves or souls. (more)

Fastly is an American cloud computing services provider. It describes its network as an edge cloud platform, which is designed to help developers extend their core cloud infrastructure to the edge of the network, closer to users.[2] The Fastly edge cloud platform includes their content delivery network (CDN), image optimization, video and streaming, cloud security, and load balancing services.[3] Fastly's cloud security services include denial-of-service attack protection, bot mitigation, and a web application firewall.[4] Fastly's web application firewall uses the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) ModSecurity Core Rule Set alongside its own ruleset. The company follows up on unsolicited emails with VOIP phone calls spoofing local phone numbers. The Fastly platform is built on top of Varnish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastly

The Glitch web application launched in the spring of 2017 as a place for people to build simple web applications using JavaScript.[9] Pitched as a "view source" tool that lets users "recombine code in useful ways".[9] Glitch is an online IDE for JavaScript and Node.js with and includes instant hosting and automated deployment and live help from community members.[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(New_York_company)#Glitch_(application) https://glitch.com/ Created by FogCreek. Later the company was renamed to Glitch! Fastly acquired the company in 2022.

cf True Fan Game Rule - whose work will I automatically consume? (more)

The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies (FedSoc) is an American conservative and libertarian legal organization that advocates for a textualist and originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.[4][5][6] Headquartered in Washington, D.C., it has chapters at more than 200 law schools and features student, lawyer, and faculty divisions; the lawyers division comprises more than 70,000 practicing attorneys in ninety cities.[1] Through speaking events, lectures, and other activities, it provides a forum for legal experts of opposing views to interact with members of the legal profession, the judiciary, and the legal academy.[7] It is one of the most influential legal organizations in the United States.[8][9] (more)

Totally subjective; see also Teen Movie (more)

Made a FreeForm MindMap on the current RedVsBlue CultureWar: Social Media, Middle Class economics, or other? (more)

The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era.[1] The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generationers in the 1950s, better known as Beatniks. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.[2][3] Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959), and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) are among the best known examples of Beat literature.[4] Both Howl and Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize publishing in the United States.[5][6] The members of the Beat Generation developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_Generation

Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac[1] (/ˈkɛru.æk/;[2] March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet[3] who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.[4] Of French-Canadian ancestry,[5][6] Kerouac was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. He "learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens."[7] During World War II, he served in the United States Merchant Marine; he completed his first novel at the time, which was published more than 40 years after his death. His first published book was The Town and the City (1950), and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957. It made him a beat icon, and he went on to publish 12 more novels and numerous poetry volumes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kerouac

William Seward Burroughs II (/ˈbʌroʊz/; also known by his pen name William Lee; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century".[1] His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs

classic novel by William S Burroughs