author: Daniel Quinn

name: Steev

average rating: 3.91

book published: 1998

rating: 4

read at:

date added: 2010/03/09

shelves: spirit-self

review:

author: Daniel Quinn

name: Steev

average rating: 3.89

book published: 1992

rating: 5

read at:

date added: 2008/07/08

shelves:

review:

It was a Mexican gunfighter western movie kind of dream, mixed with an old dream i always used to have in college, that i had
forgotten to go to a class all semester and suddenly realized i had a final exam. At the end of the dream I was in
a math class taking the test I wasn't prepared for, didn't expect, but I did okay on it. but then we students were complaining about the teachers, who were like 3 quiet dorky Mexican men, and as we were complaining lunch arrived, a giant pizza like 10 feet in diameter. the toppings on the pizza were not evenly spread out but instead were like a pie chart, with relative proportions of toppings indicated by the width of a wedge of that topping on the pie. I suddenly stood up and exclaimed, "this society will always be regimented as long as pizzas are made like that!" and i stepped up and started re-arranging the toppings, scattering lettuce and everything else evenly around the pizza. In a few seconds a bunch of other students got the idea and joined me. in a few minutes the toppings were all spread out like on a normal pizza and we stepped back to admire our work.

I'm not sure what that has to do with anything.

I happened upon an article in Wired, I think it might be last month's coverstory(?), about how working with huge amounts of data (their big buzzword they keep repeating is Petabytes) and clusters of computers to crunch the data with statistical methods have qualitatively changed the way science will be done. The lead is basically "the end of the scientific method."

Of course the comments on the page after the article are full of people arguing and protesting that of course the writer is wrong and of course he knows nothing about science and this isn't fundamentally changing science.... blah blah blah.

The article is actually interesting, a bit, but it's mostly hype, and the conclusion that's most important is that Wired magazine is still up to the same old tricks: throw a bunch of smoke and mirrors up around a certain pop-tech idea and watch as all the outraged and/or excited geeks scurry around buying copies of the magazine and/or hitting the web site. It doesn't matter what's true, as long as it sells.

It's the same way with most papers and magazines, like the local arts/culture rag here in Tucson, the Tucson Weekly. Full of bullshit written by either imbeciles or racists (or both), spewing hate, nonsense, borderline softcore porn, and/or silliness that the editors may or may not agree with - but it doesn't matter because the outrage inflates circulation, which inflates advertiser revenue. I'm so sick of it but what to do? A letter to the editor would just be proof that one more chump reads the paper. Ka-ching! In fact, you probably shouldn't click on those links in this paragraph. doh!

author: Che Guevara

name: Steev

average rating: 3.74

book published: 1995

rating: 4

read at: 2003/12/01

date added: 2008/07/03

shelves:

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency
Hilarious, as usual, from the Onion (via Demarcated Landscapes).

I wasn't going to say anything about George Carlin shuffling off this mortal coil, but when I saw some very topical for our times quotes of his I just had to re-cite them. This is from a bit he was doing in the late 90s:

As far as I

• steev's blog

Yesterday's Twitter tweets:

• 09:34 dreading the afternoon cuz my swamp cooler is busted and my landlord is out of town. ugh. #
• 14:37 blogging about a clever video concerning McCain calling his wife a cunt. detritus.net/steev/mt/archives/001018.html #
• 20:36 working on animating maps of the u.s.-mexico border while listening to this cool palestinian electronic band called Checkpoint 303 #

Via a blog called Feministe I found out about a gaff that Senator McCain committed 16 years ago that should by rights cost him at least all of his female voters, all but his most piggish male voters, and certainly the election. He called his wife a cunt - in front of reporters. Absolutely inexcusable.

It's interesting that one story on the incident concentrates on it as an example of McCain's bad temper - yes, this is a problem, but the way I see it, the bigger problem is that it's a sign of a basic disrespect or even hate for women.

What an asshole. He doesn't deserve to have a wife, much less be president or a senator.

Wonderfully, when you google the word, you get the story as the 3rd entry, right after the wikipedia and wiktionary entries. Let's try and make it the first! Keep linking to the story and any other stories about it.

And now for your further entertainment, here's this humorous little video about the incident by The Public Service Administration, an LA-based comedy group. It had me LOL:

author: William S. Burroughs

name: Steev

average rating: 3.55

book published: 1962

rating: 5

read at: 1991/01/01

date added: 2008/06/23

shelves:

review:
This is probably my favorite WSB book, and the essay at the end called "The invisible generation" is pure genius.