"It's a waste of time," she said, "because most of the time they're talking about nothing."

Don't knock nothing. Seinfeld was a show about nothing. Nothing can be quite something.

The young have become adept at managing multiple sources of information at once, but the ability to multitask has curbed their "ability to focus on a single thing, the ability to be silent and still inside, basically the ability to be unplugged and content."

"What we're losing is the contemplative dimension of life."

Parents Fret That Dialing Up Interferes With Growing Up

Decius wrote:

The graph tracks blog mentions of Paul Krugman, Thomas Friedman, and David Brooks over the past month.

This is a really neat graph. What is even more neat is that you can make your own graphs for any keyword!

Ho hum.

Are these graphs statistically significant? It seems not especially meaningful to use "percent of all blog posts" as the Y axis for this particular graph. You need more data to make sense of this.

There is definitely a trend in this graph, but it isn't necessarily the one that is implied by the title of the post.

It could be that the absolute number of Friedman posts has stayed exactly the same over the past month. Instead, we've seen an incremental growth in the total number of posts.

If you do a least squares fit to the Friedman line, it looks like there's been about a 50% drop in the percentage. In other words, in early September, Friedman was mentioned in approximately 6 out of every 100,000 blog posts In early October, it's down to 3 out of every 100k posts.

What this says to me is that Friedman was a blip in the blogosphere before, and he is a blip now.

Look at terms like katrina and rita over the last several months. Now there's a meaningful graph. Or consider mentions about the SCOTUS nominees.

I could make a chart comparing louis armstrong and thomas friedman, and if you look at the period from 3 September to 3 October, you could just as well talk of "the waning influence" of Louis Armstrong.

If you compare johnny cash and thomas friedman over the last two months, you'll find that Thomas Friedman has about as much "influence" on the blogosphere as the late Johnny Cash. Interestingly, you'll also find that a curiously large percentage of the peaks and valleys coincide on the two graphs, suggesting that other factors are at work. The same can be said for sheryl crow. In other words, garbage in, garbage out. This isn't exactly a well-groomed data set.

The never-was influence of the NYT columnists

The challenge? Take any movie and cut a new trailer for it — but in an entirely different genre. Only the sound and dialogue could be modified, not the visuals, he said.

Mr. Ryang chose “The Shining,” Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. In his hands, it became a saccharine comedy — about a writer struggling to find his muse and a boy lonely for a father. Gilding the lily, he even set it against “Solsbury Hill,” the way-too-overused Peter Gabriel song heard in comedies billed as life-changing experiences, like last year’s “In Good Company.”

His 'Secret' Movie Trailer Is No Secret Anymore

Richerson and Boyd reject the simplistic model of gene-like "memes," but they are rather vague, as they must be, on how to recognize culture or its structure. They are aware that one aspect of culture will change in reaction to and in concert with other aspects of culture, that there is a complex network of causal dependency among parts of culture. Changes in technology, occupation, education, political attitudes, division of household labor and parental responsibility, leisure activities, and styles of speech and dress are connected as both causes and effects within and between generations.

The most important question is why we should use a Darwinian model at all for history and culture.

That a theoretical formulation is desirable because it makes it easier and more efficient to write more articles and books giving simple explanations for phenomena that are complex and diverse seems a strange justification for work that claims to be scientific. It confuses "understanding" in the weak sense of making coherent and comprehensible statements about the real world with "understanding" that means making correct statements about nature. It makes the investigation of material nature into an intellectual game, disarming us in our struggle to maintain science against mysticism.

The Wars Over Evolution

Great scientists come in two varieties, which Isaiah Berlin, quoting the seventh-century-BC poet Archilochus, called foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes know many tricks, hedgehogs only one. Foxes are interested in everything, and move easily from one problem to another. Hedgehogs are interested only in a few problems which they consider fundamental, and stick with the same problems for years or decades. Most of the great discoveries are made by hedgehogs, most of the little discoveries by foxes. Science needs both hedgehogs and foxes for its healthy growth, hedgehogs to dig deep into the nature of things, foxes to explore the complicated details of our marvelous universe. Albert Einstein was a hedgehog; Richard Feynman was a fox.

Wise Man

I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse . I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America's fabled "marketplace of ideas" now functions.

It is important to note that the absence of a two-way conversation in American television also means that there is no "meritocracy of ideas" on television. To the extent that there is a "marketplace" of any kind for ideas on television, it is a rigged market, an oligopoly, with imposing barriers to entry that exclude the average citizen.

Al Gore tells it like it is

Today's theme is elegant underdogs: the devices or solutions that don't lead their markets but are in many ways more admirable than the ones that do.

What Do TiVo and the Mac Mini Have in Common?

As Mr. Whedon knows, the fastest way to a geek's heart is a story about other geeks, albeit ones with good hair and hot bodies.

Serenity

Ever since we started the Music Genome Project, our friends would ask:

Can you help me discover more music that I'll like?

Those questions often evolved into great conversations. Each friend told us their favorite artists and songs, explored the music we suggested, gave us feedback, and we in turn made new suggestions. Everybody started joking that we were now their personal DJs.

We created Pandora so that we can have that same kind of conversation with you.

This is very cool. It already integrates Amazon and iTunes. It needs an open API to link in other sources, although I doubt they'll do that, because they're probably banking on the referral fees from Apple and Amazon.

If you like Pandora, you should also check out GNOD and its music map.

Pandora

What does Fukuyama now think of America's Iraq adventure, and of claims that Iraq could somehow provide an alternative model for Arab states which, believe the neo-conservatives, have somehow become stuck in history?

He holds out hope that Arab governments can improve without becoming fully democratic. As an example, he points to Singapore, which he says is "relatively corrupt" but still manages to govern well.

"Without a change on the level of ideas, any reconciliation of Islam and democracy is not going to come about.

Unless you fight out that battle on the plain of ideas and say it is perfectly legitimate to have a more liberal version of religion, then I think ultimately you will have long-term problems having genuine democracy in a Muslim country.

We should not minimise the fact that there is a conflict of ideas at the present, not with Islam as a religion but with particular interpretations of Islam."

Francis Fukuyama: The acceptable face of the neo-cons? | Al-Ahram Weekly | Profile