Well, “here we go”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/europe/6669039.stm . An open thread for pre-match speculation and post-match analysis. Me, I’m feeling confident. Milan are a great side, but they’ve been doing all the talking and I think their desire to avenge 2005 will work against them. They were terrific against Man U, but profited from suicidal defending, and great performances are often followed by average ones. Hold on tight.

I just read Born On A Blue Day [amazon], by Daniel Tammet. It’s subtitled ‘inside the extraordinary mind of an autistic savant’. He really is pretty extraordinary – a high functioning autistic savant syndrome synaesthete of the first order. First paragraph: [click to continue…]

John Tierney has a piece in the NYTimes about Dan Ryan‘s work concerning the sociology of notification and information dissemination among friends and acquaintances (based on Dan’s recent article in Sociological Theory).

I saw Dan give a talk on this recently and it’s a really fun and interesting topic. His work makes you think about things like why/when it is and is not appropriate to use cc vs bcc on emails, the proper order in which we should notify various people in our networks about certain types of updates, what medium is suitable for what types of material, etc.

The NYTimes piece specifically mentions the idea of setting up email filters for some friends. I must admit that I have filters set up for all sorts of people. I tend to do it by type of person (as in type of network) more so than by specific individual, although the latter idea isn’t foreign to me either.

As someone who studies savvy with IT, I consider the thoughtful use of email filters an important part of skill in how we interact with IT. Email filters are increasingly important for being able to manage the amount of material that comes our way via that particular medium.

[Thanks to Steve Mintz for alerting me to this piece.]

UPDATE: I forgot to post a link to Dan’s blog about the Sociology of Information. Check it out for more goodies.

Brad DeLong “links approvingly”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/05/thomas_pm_barne.html to Thomas Barnett’s “attack”:http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/2007/05/an_overwrought_ideologically_m.html on James Mann and other China ‘fearmongers.’ Insofar as I can read through Barnett’s self-created jargon of “the Gap” etc, I don’t find this critique to be insightful, compelling, or indeed particularly accurate. [click to continue…]

I thought this news item involved several of those colorful British idioms that I never quite get exactly. But no – these are real birds.

A pair of gay flamingos have adopted an abandoned chick, becoming parents after being together for six years, a British conservation organisation said Monday.

Kieran asks where John Holbo is. Ahem. (Longer wikipedia entry here.)

“The 17-year Cicadas are coming.”:http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/05/070521-cicada-facts.html The fact that subsets of them are named by Brood Year and the current batch is Brood XIII is just fantastic. Surely (where’s John Holbo when you need him?) there is a ’50s Attack of the Giant Cicadas film called Brood Thirteen. Or an early comic book? Even better, according to National Geographic, “Each brood of 17-year cicadas actually consists of three different species … and each one has its own song. … The three songs have been described as sounding like the word ‘pharaoh,’ a sizzling skillet, and a rotary lawn sprinkler.” _Cicadas of the Pharoah_ (Tor 1986), shortlisted for a Hugo. _Lawn Sprinklers of the Pharoah_ was the admittedly failed sequel.

My fifth blogiversary was almost two weeks ago and I nearly missed it. I think when I came on sabbatical my blogging went on one as well even though I’ve tried to stay on the scene to some extent.

Looking back, I can tell I was an early adopter, because in my first post I felt the need to explain what a blog is.

People often wonder when (if ever) is a good time to start blogging. I’ve decided that graduate school was the perfect time. [click to continue…]

Went to see Shane Meadows’s much-hyped-by-the-critics “This is England”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480025/ last night. What a piss-poor film it is. Poorly acted, poorly scripted, and hardly redeemed by some really clunking cinematography. The film would be kind of ok as a drama offering on BBC2 (or BBC4) but insightful socio-historical document it isn’t. The action all takes place on a bog-standard depressing-concrete housing estate with the standard row of depressing-concrete shops (plus free-standing Pakistani newsagents) and — for those who don’t know — gravitates around the tensions within early-80s skinhead culture between two-tone ska fans and racist knuckleheads. Young boy with father-killed-in-the-Falklands (Shaun) gravitates to the cool(ish) multiracial ska crowd but then becomes seduced by boastful-but-insecure racist psychopath Combo, the movie then plods along to its predictable violent “climax”. Thatcher and the Falklands lurk predictably in the background. Redeeming features? The National Front meeting in the pub isn’t badly observed, but, in truth, it can’t have been all that hard to set up a little cameo involving dopey skinheads, tatooed bikers and fat Nazis in bad suits. TiE goes a long way to showing that, just so long as you make a film with a certain kind of subject matter, critics will give you a good write-up. Sit at home and watch old episodes of _Shameless_ or rent a copy of _La Haine_ : both are better acted and both offer more insight into their subject-matters than _This is England_.

Seeing as the kids are on the front page, indulge me a bit. My wife had a baby boy early yesterday morning (hurray!) and this morning I brought our three-year-old daughter up to see the new arrival. She has in principle been getting used to the idea of being a big sister for a while, and was excited to meet him. As we’re walking in she says, “What is that thing on your wrist, Daddy?” “It’s so that people here know that I’m your little brother’s daddy,” I said. She stopped walking and looked up at me. “But … but you’re my daddy,” she said.

Onward to sibling rivalry, I suppose.

For your weekend reading pleasure: the special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication I edited on The Social, Political, Economic, and Cultural Dimensions of Search Engines is out. The Introduction gives you the motivation for this collection and a summary of the pieces. From the Abstract:

Search engines are some of the most popular destinations on the Web—understandably so, given the vast amounts of information available to users and the need for help in sifting through online content. While the results of significant technical achievements, search engines are also embedded in social processes and institutions that influence how they function and how they are used. This special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication explores these non-technical aspects of search engines and their uses.

Enjoy!

I make a strict point of never blogging anything in the nature of a student-teacher or colleague-colleague interaction, but when a civilian knocks on my office door, comes in and says something funny, it’s fair game boyo.

So this kid comes in the door. (And he’s not a student at my institution but he’s home for the summer.) And he wants to ask me about Wittgenstein and philosophy of language and ‘reclaiming Kant’. And so I ask him a bit about what he means by that (sounds reasonable.) And, well, there is a bit of confusion. And it transpires that the reason nothing he is saying about the Sage of Königsberg is making much sense to me is that actually he’s talking about some project to do with Eve Ensler and The Vagina Monologues, etc. I ended up telling him I didn’t think Wittgenstein was quite what he was looking for. Still, these sorts of linguistic questions are quite interesting. Anyhoo. There was a moment there.

[edited to shield delicate sensibilities, ward off search engines, and to make the post funnier, actually]

I use Yahoo! Music for most of my music-listening at work. I like the service and at $60 for two years (they had a special when I signed up, the regular now is $72/year) it’s a great deal.

The system allows the user to customize various stations by giving it feedback about what songs and artists are of interest.* It’s a helpful feature, for the most part. But I think services like this might want to tweak the system so certain songs are kept off playlists at certain times of the year. I am not suggesting that they should be banned, of course, but perhaps not streamed unless sought out actively by the user.

I may like Boney M, but I really have absolutely no interest in listening to a Christmas song from them in the middle of May.

This reminds me of the dance club I used to go to in Budapest when I was in high school. One of the most popular Jive songs at the club was Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree . It was very bizarre to listen to it over and over again in June.

[*] For those who don’t know about Y!M, this is just one of the many ways one can listen to music on this sytem. Yes, I am aware of Pandora, last.fm, etc.

Our 5-year old, Zoë, is very bad at losing at games. Today she wept copiously, following a painful defeat in tic-tac-toe. (In her defense, she was exhausted and feeling frazzled for independent reasons. But really: one should chill, when it comes to this game.) Zoë: ‘It’s not FAAAAIIRRR!’ Daddy [against better judgment]: ‘Why isn’t it fair?’ Zoë: ‘Because I tried my very best, but I still didn’t have fun.’ There is something to that, as a theory of justice.