Sinister Dexterity

Friday, November 15, 2002, 08:34 p.m.

You know what's a really hard piece of information to find on-line? The heart rate of a daphnia. Why you would need to know this, I have no idea, but if it's this hard to find, it must be good. Look how long it took them to find the Nag Hammadi library! The sites telling you what to do to change the Daphnia are legion, but they don't actually tell you the rate. But finally I found one. So don't say I never gave you anything.

Thursday, November 14, 2002, 10:29 a.m.
wood s lot

I was going to write a little note about how wood s lot is becoming my favorite new oasis of fancy-pants intelleckchewal content, and then I decided to see how it was rated in Eatonweb. 3 seemed low, so I chipped in my tuppence:

Rating: 5 by http://seanscott.pitas.com, 11.14.02 A previous reviewer said that this site gives "Little sense of what the weblogger thinks himself." I feel, on the contrary, that the selection of what he thinks *about* is much more revealing than blogs filled with unoriginal personal thoughts and what people ate for lunch and their who their friends are dating. Besides, even if the blogger is just trying "to impress by quoting weighty, abstruse sources," and even if it doesn't tell us much about the blogger, the assortment of materials is fascinating. This is my new favorite place to feed my head with varied, stimulating material.

Wednesday, November 13, 2002, 11:30 p.m.

Which Element Represents You?
created by kefkafanatic @ mental insanity

Wednesday, November 13, 2002, 08:47 p.m.
What Beatle are you? Or are you Buddha?

The other day, as the result of one of those desultory random walks of the mind, I started thinking about what Beatle, I would be, had I the choice. I have always had a certain affinity for George, and a friend in college said that I reminded her of him. But I was thinking of who it would be good to be, not who I am most like. The brooding, political, angry John, who wrote the angst-filled "Mother" and "Cold Turkey" but also sweet confections like "Beautiful Boy" and "Watching the Wheels," or the more confection-oriented Paul, who also managed to inspire the Manson family with "Helter Skelter"?...(more)

Wednesday, November 13, 2002, 08:04 a.m.

click here to find out which Beatle are you!!

Wednesday, November 13, 2002, 07:54 a.m.

"There is light within a man of light, and it lights up the whole world. If he does not shine, he is darkness."
—The Gospel of Thomas

Tuesday, November 12, 2002, 10:28 a.m.
Review: The Tetherballs of Bougainville

One more from the wayback machine: my review of Mark Leyner's The Tetherballs of Bougainville, originally published in the Sacramento News & Review.

Mark Leyner’s fifth book is many things — a relentless yet loving pop-culture satire, a formal parody of various genres, a hot and infinitely dense sampling of exuberant, hypercaffeinated prose. Whatever else can be said, the book surely stands in a class by itself, blazing into virgin territory as the first tetherball novel ever...(more)

Monday, November 11, 2002, 09:46 p.m.

permalinks defunkified
Permalinks should all be hunky dory. Many thanks to John of Webcrimson for fixing my goof.

Monday, November 11, 2002, 05:01 p.m.

permalinks temporarily funky
As of right now, the continuation/permalinks are funky. Until I fix them, you'll have to click to the archive page and then search or scroll. Sorry. Will fix it soon.

Monday, November 11, 2002, 08:24 a.m.
my googlism

Googling yourself? That is just so 2001. Now is the time to Googlism yourself. I did.

Sunday, November 10, 2002, 09:45 p.m.
Michael Pollan, Peter Singer, and meat

In this New York Times article, Michael Pollan (Michael J. Fox’s brother-in-law, for people who enjoy freaky linkages as much as I do) takes a critical look at Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation and other arguments for vegetarianism, comparing them with his observations of nature and the relationships between humans and other animals. I always enjoy Pollan’s meditations on the disputed border between nature and culture, and a one-man argument about vegetarianism that cites not only Singer but Daniel Dennett, Jeremy Bentham, and John Berger is sure to hold my attention...(more)

Sunday, November 10, 2002, 05:01 p.m.
Wake up! Gnosticism and Buddhism in The Matrix

Pretty interesting academic article about, well, just what the above title says it's about. Makes me want to go back and watch The Matrix again sometime, with all this newfangled intellekchewal stuff in mind.

Saturday, November 9, 2002, 11:07 a.m.
What's Info Got to Do With It?

David Weinberger, who you may know as one of the conductors of the Cluetrain, wrote an interesting piece about what information is and isn't, and what the Web is and isn't. I'm not sure if I agree with his answers, but I agree with his questions.

Saturday, November 9, 2002, 8:00 a.m.
9/11 and Batman

I saw a photo in honor of the September 11 attacks that showed a mother and child at the American Embassy in Australia. What really got me about this picture was that the kids was wearing a Batman suit. That seemed to symbolize America, at least to me, as much as the stars and stripes...(more)

Friday, November 8, 2002, 08:21 p.m.
Æmilius waxes thoughtful...

...on blogging, compassion, knowing thyself, Buddha, me, election woes, and other stuff. "I believe there are reasons for everything, and maybe eventually we'll find out what they are," quoth Æmilius, l'homme du poisson.

Friday, November 8, 2002, 04:33 p.m.
a perfectly reasonable request

I asked the oracle of leuschke a question, I got a bunch of shiny pretty links. Life is nifty, especially now that I know the name for an ambihelical hexnut. Thanks, leuschke.org!

Friday, November 8, 2002, 08:01 a.m.
Halloween etc.

Rex writes:

"There are many aspects of Christian ritual practice that Jews find odd, but we do our best to cope. Consuming the blood and body of your man-god to become pure? Fine. Celebrating the rebirth of said god by encouraging small children to believe that a large anthropomorphic rabbit is secretly hiding brightly colored eggs for them to find? I can buy that..." (more)

Thursday, November 7, 2002, 03:56 p.m.
Kurt Vonnegut

I'm a firm believer in recycling -- not just newspapers and bottles, but also recycling old journalistic content into shiny new blog entries. Here's an appreciation of Kurt Vonnegut I wrote several years ago for the Sacramento News & Review. This is the actual text I e-mailed to the editors, not what appeared in the paper, so if it looks non-copy-edited, that's why. I actually gave a copy to Vonnegut when I got Slaughterhouse Five signed at the lecture mentioned in the article, so I can always pretend to myself that he has read my work, too.

Wednesday, November 6, 2002, 10:17 a.m.
Bloody teeth boost memory

Vaguely disturbing article from Nature about how people who watched a film of a bloody tooth extraction performed better on memory tests (testing on unrelated information) than people who watched a boring tooth-cleaning video. This story helps justify my suspicion that people who don't want to watch violent movies or think about disturbing things are not assuming a moral high ground, but actually missing out on brain-cross-training. Bring on the Thomas Harris!

Now this is more than vaguely disturbing.

Tuesday, November 5, 2002, 08:42 p.m.
9/11, chaos theory, and Margaret Mead

An old thing about Sep. 11, written October 27, 2001
America is a country in chaos. I mean not only the plurality of religion, the mosaic of races, the glorious willingness to do things wrong for fun and profit... (more)

Tuesday, November 5, 2002, 10:14 a.m.
#1 "sinister dexterity" search at msn.com!

and Hotbot, too!
and Lycos!
and Vivisimo!
and go.com!

Monday, November 4, 2002, 07:27 p.m.
TechnoPop: The Secret History of Technology and Pop Music

Great NPR series on technology and music, from the phonograph to DIY recording. Who knew Bing Crosby was such a technological pioneer?

Monday, November 4, 2002, 11:25 a.m.
To the Liberal Arts, He Adds Computer Science

Interesting article from the NYT about computer pioneer Brian Kernighan teaching a class called "Computers in Our World" for liberal arts undergrads. I really think this kind of thing is crucial — computers are not just technical things for technical people, they're ubiquitous cultural artifacts and I think a class like this is a good effort toward bridging the gap between the "two cultures."

Sunday, November 3, 2002, 12:47 p.m.

"Nothing benefits our inner growth like a few good laughs at anything stilted, self-important, puritanical or sentimental"
—Hannah and Ole Nydahl

Sunday, November 3, 2002, 12:09 p.m.

"Interesting sociolinguistic phenomenon: men don't keep diaries. They keep journals. Both words, of course, derive from the same Latin word, dies--which, Drs. Polsky and Schultz have taught me well, is a fifth-declension noun."
—j.s.f.

Sunday, November 3, 2002, 11:43 a.m.
Louis Sass, Michael Gazzaniga, brain hemispheres

On page 392 of Madness and Modernism, Louis Sass describes neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga's theory that the left brain is not just the seat of logic (as is generally held) but that it also holds "the source of self-consciousness, freedom, and rationality," and that the "minor" hemisphere, by contrast, is often assumed to be capable only of consciousness of the environment, not of that superior function: self-consciousness.

This notion seems strange to me, considering that the right brain is generally considered to be the seat of creativity and artistic inspiration...(continued)

Saturday, November 2, 2002, 07:10 a.m.
How do you politely refuse the body of Christ?

A couple years ago, my wife and I attended the wedding of one of her relatives. A Catholic wedding in a Catholic church — my first. Not only was I not raised Catholic, I was raised with no religious background, not even the religion of anti-religion...(continued)

Saturday, November 2, 2002, 06:36 a.m.
Resident Bush's Reproductive Health nominee

I found this on Æmilius' Blog Spot and I was going to paraphrase but decided he said it nicely enough the first time:

More on whether to vote or not
 Please read Raye's post on the "President's" nominee to serve on the Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee at the Food and Drug Administration, and think whether you want to help elect as many Democratic candidates as possible this election.

Friday, November 1, 2002, 01:12 p.m.
odd ways to find me via search engine

Like a new parent enthralled by each new round of effluvia from one or another of the infant's orifices, I've been riveted to my referral stats. Hey, those of us who don't own stocks have to have something to obsess about... (continued)

Friday, November 1, 2002, 05:28 a.m.

The Times They Are A-Changin'
Since my posts have been growing longer and longer, and since I have been realizing that permalinks are crucial to being a part of the great intertext that is the blogging world, I have started a new Webcrimson blog page at http://sinisterdexterity.crimsonblog.com/. For now, I will continue to maintain http://seanscott.pitas.com as a more traditional "microcontent" page for annotated links to outside pages as well as links to the longer essays on the Crimsonblog site. Kind of like the "front page" of a news site like Salon.com or NYT.com.

I'm still working the bugs out of the permalinking process, so the real permalink for the first essay on the new page might be this or, frankly, it might be more like this or this. Either way, if you go to either of these links you should arrive at a little bagatelle about Dave Eggers and Pizza Hut.