Greedhead Records founder @Himanshu put this call out on Twitter yesterday:
Hi! My names HIMA! I like rap and Queens where im from and India where my parents from. What do you like?
What followed was a stream of retweets from his fans who answered that question. Eliminating the noise words, others that appeared most frequently included “girls,” “rap,” “pizza,” “music,” “art,” “weird,” and “witchy.”
Here’s a snapshot.
Not many surprises there, I know…though I guess I thought there’d be more Dadaism.
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I’m going to go out on a limb here and promise you that this will be the first of two posts on Present Shock, the Douglas Rushkoff book that has been getting a mountain of attention in the tech press since it was released earlier this month.
The second post will be an in-depth discussion of the book, and I hereby pledge that it will be unveiled two weeks from today. There. Made a promise and barring that thresher accident I’ve been fearing since I was 14, I’ll be keeping that promise.
This post, however, is my surface review. You see I finished the book a week ago and I can’t stop thinking about it. I don’t want to, either. In fact I don’t really want to do anything these days except talk about the book with other people who’ve read it. Which is why Present Shock is this week’s edition of THE WEEKENDER.
The essential thesis of Present Shock is this: time is out of joint. The digital technologies that we have woven so deeply into our lives have a different relationship to the concept of time than the human brain does. No human can multi-task as efficiently as a computer can, and our attempts to do so are driving us a kind of crazy. (more…)
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Alix Spiegel/NPR on Wednesday, Apr. 3rd
From NPR’s All Things Considered.
Were people happier in the 1950s than they are today? Or were they more frustrated, repressed and sad?
To find out, you’d have to compare the emotions of one generation to another. British anthropologists think they may have found the answer — embedded in literature.
Several years ago, more or less on a lark, a group of researchers from England used a computer program to analyze the emotional content of books from every year of the 20th century — close to a billion words in millions of books. (more…)
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Because sometimes the oddest news that manages to have the most insight into the state of world affairs is a Foreign Policy blog post about ice cream world records:
On Monday, the Iranian ice cream company Choopan appeared to unseat Baskin-Robbins as the reigning Guinness World Record holder for the largest tub of ice cream. In celebration of Nowruz, the Persian New Year, Choopan made a five-ton batch of chocolate ice cream in a carton more than six feet wide and five feet tall. Representatives from the Guinness Book of World Records were on hand to observe the occasion but have yet to announce whether the Iranian company officially beat Baskin-Robbins’s 2005 record of four tons of vanilla.
Creative Commons Image byFlickr user Joyosity
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There’s a trope in science fiction that one day the idea of “race” will blur right out of humanity. That we’ll have spent so much time getting it on across broders and regions that ethnicity will be mostly a thing of the past. Heck, it’s a cornestone of the Mass Effect character generation system.
In the current issue of Toronto Life writer Nicholas Hune-Brown delves into his own life as growing up biracial, or as he puts it a “mixie.”
“Mixie” is a sibling word, a term my sister and I adopted to describe people like ourselves—those indeterminately ethnic people whom, if you have an expert eye and a particular interest in these things, you can spot from across a crowded room. We used the word because as kids we didn’t know another one. By high school, it was a badge of honour, a term we would insist on when asked the unavoidable “Where are you from?” question that every mixed-race person is subjected to the moment a conversation with a new acquaintance reaches the very minimum level of familiarity. For the record, my current answer, at 30 years old, is: “My mom’s Chinese, but born in Canada, and my dad’s a white guy from England.” If I’m peeved for some reason—if the question comes too early or with too much “I have to ask” eagerness—the answer is “Toronto” followed by a dull stare.
It’s a big feature, complete with a photo/interview series with 10 mixed-race Toronto kids. A glimpse into America’s future, as well as Canada’s, perhaps. (h/t Noah Smith, via Richard Florida)
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Look, I try and steer clear of politics when writing here, but watching the House of Representatives these past few weeks has been nothing short of embarrassing. I’m not going to dig down into the ideologies at work, in part because I don’t think that’s the problem. In fact, what I think is really going on, and the solution to that problem cut against the conventional wisdom. Because I think that what’s wrong with Congress comes down to a creativity problem: one that could be solved by throwing some more brains at America’s problems.
Find out why I’m not crazy, after the jump.
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Before we headed off for the holidays I asked the newsroom staff at Turnstyle and Youth Radio to send me their predictions for 2013. I’ll be sharing mine on the 31st. Enjoy!
Image Credit: Creative Commons photo by Matthew Kirkland.
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If you like to get your serious nerd on then you probably dig the arcane mysteries of fictional languages. Tolkien’s Elvish, the Dothraki tongue as spoken in Game of Thrones, the Nadsat of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. Kibo knows I do.
Which is why last Thursday’s story on PRI’s The World tickled my geekus plexsus when I heard it. Patrick Cox’s piece is a deep dive into literary fictional languages and the personality types that create them. What they’ve archived online is an expanded edition that runs a healthy 14:40.
I know what I’m doing today!
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Consider this more of a note than a post, but the segment of the Occupy Wall Street movement that evolved this year into “Strike Debt” have announced their first big public action.
And it’s a telethon.
Strike Debt is going to stage an online telethon, raising funds to buy people’s debt from the shadowy debt market and then– forgive it. They call the overall idea the “Rolling Jubilee” riffing on a practice from earlier times when all debts and other trangressions would be forgiven by the decree of the powers that be.
In a democracy, of course, the powers that be are the people.
There’s a hell of a lot to digest in this idea, but for the moment I just wanted everyone to be aware that the telethon, called “The People’s Bailout” will be going live on November 15th, with a host of politically active celebrities in attendance. Check the links for more info.
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Music Machinery
The blog Music Machinery eats up data farms of music-related information and processes the internet chatter to reveal surprising music trends. This week the blog caught the political bug, and asked the question: which popular musicians have been mentioned the most this election season? Niki Minaj, sure– but like a hand from the grave, Megadeth makes the list too. Here’s the full list.-Ike Sriskandarajah
Airbnb’s Airstreams
When I’m looking for a place to stay on my travels, I like to prioritize three things: affordability, location, and quirkiness. Why stay at the Hilton when you could hole up in a Westfalia van or treehouse for the weekend? So it’s no surprise I’m obsessed with Airbnb’s alternative housing section — airstreams, repurposed spaces (think former water towers), and environmentally friendly pads. In case you’re not familiar with Airbnb, it’s kind like of the grown-up form of couchsurfing — rather than look for a free place to crash (hello, scary sofa covered in cat hair), Airbnb connects budget travelers with locals who have low cost rooms to spare. So happy booking, but I call first dibs on the “glamping” airstream in Andalucia.–Teresa Chin (more…)
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Now streaming: the archive of our Google Hangout On-Air with Jesse Vigil of Psychic Bunny, one of the designers of the new audio adventure game FREEQ (iOS/Android).
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We’ve featured dancer Matt Luck’s work before.
I first encountered Sifteo Cubes back at IndieCade last October, and spent some time playing around with the little blocks which I first mistook for iPod Nanos.
Over the weekend I was having a conversation about the new Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Museum that’s been announced.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and promise you that this will be the first of two posts on Present Shock, the Douglas Rushkoff book that has been getting a mountain of attention in the tech press since it was released earlier this month.
