Dancing Monkey Mania

Interesting piece discussing _Beauty_ and _The Art Instinct_, both of which take on the fascinating subject of evolutionary aesthetics…

"Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet. The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it – on knowing how to look at it."

Great collection of some of the more unfortunate handicrafts for sale on Etsy…

Rethinking the human-computer interface and GUI

"In that regard, the furor over Obama's complete inaction on gay issues vividly illustrates the same elements that shape political controversies in virtually every other area — from war to civil liberties to health care and beyond: "

What does it mean to be 'digitally literate'?

Though Twitter may be guilty for promoting (or at least encouraging) a short attention span, forced brevity is not entirely a bad thing. Humans have been perfecting the art of keeping it short since the beginning of literature. I, for one, am starting to see Twitter as a modern day epigram generator.

I, too, have an instinctive belief that learning to write by hand has benefits not found in writing by keyboard, but I'm still not convinced by most of the reasoning, including Eco's. 

"I realize that this is what I've spent the past 10 years trying to do with prose: To write so that my ideas are sharply defined, vivid, and pleasurable. The process has required a painful unlearning of nearly all I'd been taught as a professional."

"Does absurdist literature make you smarter? Giraffe carpet cleaner, it does!"

Most of the comments are pathetic (and some illustrate perfectly why so many people get turned off of it), but I appreciated reading one person's story of coming to care for poetry again. Who cares if his philosophy aligned… poets and poetry-lovers should appreciate someone else joining the fold.

Good local roaster

Home roasting, cool coffee pots, green and roasted beans

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Foer.uaf.edu%2Fcommons%2FCITS220-F09%2FDailyMaterials

Class materials for CITS 220 – implementing internet technologies

Troubled childhood, bad brain chemicals, addiction, recovery and death dominate Wright’s work. You couldn’t fake his obsessions, not over a 30-year career so steadily, idiosyncratically productive. His father, James Wright, though a canonical American poet and, like his son, a Pulitzer Prize winner, would probably be less frequently mentioned in reviews of the son’s books if he weren’t so present, as absence, in the son’s poems. Franz Wright is uningratiating, bumptiously witty, inexhaustibly joyless and routinely surprising.