In the spirit of my liberal education, I present you with some snippets about Diogenes the Cynic: When Diogenes noticed a prostitute’s son throwing rocks at crowd, Diogenes said to him “Careful, son. Don’t hit your father.” … When Lysias the druggist asked him if he believed in the gods,” How can I help believing in them,” said he, “when I see a god-forsaken wretch like you?” … After being reproached for masturbating in the ...

Fantastically fun article: “When I first came to the green market here in New York City, I thought to myself, there are lots of buildings down here, and lots of flowers, but no black bears! I just needed permission to put a hive on someone’s roof and I’d be able to produce some extremely local honey. At first I got permission to put a hive on the Greenmarket’s office building on 16th Street, and from ...

My favorites include the Boomerang, Earthquake Pills, Hi-Speed Tonic, and Instant Girl.

Katherine Rosman on meeting Obama in 2003: But what I will always remember is as I was leaving that party in 2003, I was approached by another guest, an established author. He asked about the man I had been talking to. Sheepishly he told me he didn’t know that Obama was a guest at the party, and had asked him to fetch him a drink. In less than six years, Obama has gone from being ...

A world that continues to fascinate and mystify me, despite itself or its art: Thornton’s reference to the art world as a subculture ought to be surprising. A visit to one of the great museums of modern and contemporary art that exist in every important city might easily convince the observer that art is just plain culture, not a subculture–that is, something central and dominant in society. After all, so much money and civic pride ...

John Hodgman and Jonathan Coulton are both on the latest episode of the incessantly hilarious You Look Nice Today podcast, answering some of the burning questions of the age: Why is Kevin Bacon famously uncomfortable around FAX machines? How does Adam save the world by not wearing shoes? What are the slam poet’s secret romantic techniques? Why are short films so long? Or vice versa? Why do alfalfa farmers know so much about the Renaissance? ...

I will give a list of web comics you need to read (you should know most of them) and you will, in the comments, tell me of essential web comics that I don’t know about. Deal? Bunny Cat and Girl Dinosaur Comics Garfield Minus Garfield Gordian Algebra (if he ever starts it up again) If you see something Indexed The Abominable Charles Christopher XKCD I know there is more goodness out there, so lay it ...

The Guardian has five different downloadable covers with commentary of Radiohead’s Nude. Of course, in the spirit of improvisation, we need to understand “cover” a little bit differently than we would in Rock and Pop: Any interpretation should respect the original’s essence while stamping it with the character of its performer. The difference in jazz is that the interpretation may stray so far that the original tune becomes unrecognisable. Master improviser Sonny Rollins, for instance, ...

I love the sauce, and I particularly love the good stuff, and by “good stuff” I mean booze that makes you think, the opposite of the watery swill served in dive bars (Pabst or Stag, for instance). Give me a nicely hopped English Bitter, a peaty Scotch with hints of honey, a Campari and soda, or a chewy red wine with hints of tobacco and balanced oak. But even I, he who loves the bizarre, ...

Or, how Derridean thinking is modeled by the financial crisis: If the invention of derivatives was the financial world’s modernist dawn, the current crisis is unsettlingly like the birth of postmodernism. For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, evokes the elusive nature of meaning in deconstructionism. According to Jacques Derrida, the doyen of the ...

Flickr has been playing with geotagging data (via jimray): We have a lot of geotagged photos. Almost ninety million, as I write this, and the numbers keep growing especially as nearly every new smart phone released to market has not only a camera but also the ability to capture location information with it. For every geotagged photo we store up to six Where On Earth (WOE) IDs. These are unique numeric identifiers that correspond to ...

Fall always reminds me of Arcade Fire.

via jimray

As Wikipedia becomes more ubiquitous, it may begin to change the culture’s epistemic standards: So how do the Wikipedians decide what’s true and what’s not? On what is their epistemology based? Unlike the laws of mathematics or science, wikitruth isn’t based on principles such as consistency or observa bility. It’s not even based on common sense or firsthand experience. Wikipedia has evolved a radically different set of epistemological standards–standards that aren’t especially surprising given that ...

Now if only facebook would do this, then we would be in business (via fimoculous): Sometimes I send messages I shouldn’t send. Like the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over text message. Or the time I sent that late night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together. Gmail can’t always prevent you from sending messages you might later regret, but today we’re launching a new Labs ...