Recent miscellani
About an hour ago I woke up from a dream in which the funding for the Project ran out and lots of people were laid off.
I don't seem to have anything to do this weekend. Should I go to Providence?
The internet is big. There are a lot of technologies on it that are super cool that didn't even get on my radar until I heard a talk about web apps yesterday. Activist types: have any of you used Change.org?
Speaking of the internet, at work we encouraged to check out Google Groups to get an idea of the kinds of tools that are out there. I've meant to check out the philosophy groups over there for some time. As you can imagine, results were mixed. This thread, entitled "Why isn't Objectivism taken seriously in philosophy?" was especially cute. Excerpt:
Query:
"Lastly, I consider myself a new student to philosophy, and I lean
very strongly towards what Ayn Rand had to say, but I don't like the
almost religious tones that some of her students take. Is there a
web site, or school, or lecture series that treats her philosophy
like other philosophies and just teaches what it has to say?"
Response:
".... As for unbiased views of objectivism... I'm not sure. www.aynrand.org is a
good place to start. They're the official arm of Objectivism today. "
The one disappointing thing about most on-line community technologies I've seen is that they don't have LJ's "innovation" (I guess) of having comments structured like a tree instead of linearly. It's just stupid not to not support this sort of thing when the signal to noise ratio of internet communication is so low. The fact that this sort of structure arises spontaneously in structurally unconstrained settings like Wikipedia discussion pages is telling.
LJ apparently has recently changed its UI so that it takes me an extra click and some typing to log in where before I would only have to click one button. Now that I'm doing UI work again, I'm hypersensitive to this sort of thing. DO NOT WANT