Regardless of your opinion on homosexuality, gender-based stereotyping is entirely cultural and limits our self-expression

One teachers approach to preventing gender bullying in a classroom

"Gender is not a subject that I would have broached in primary grades a few years ago. In fact, I remember scoffing with colleagues when we heard about a young kindergarten teacher who taught gender-related curriculum. We thought her lessons were a waste of instructional time and laughed at her “girl and boy” lessons."

Wikileaks is not necessarily the apotheosis of the Cypherpunk movement

The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution › I went to the same school as Julian Assange, but we learned different lessons:

"Not being able to go to The State for help, if the situation I’d been in escalated to Men With Guns, left me with a clear understanding: I needed the State’s protection to be a full human being. Now, let me say that again: I needed the State’s protection to be a full human being. This is the start of my divergence from the classical cyperpunk’s anti-State crypto-anarchist market capitalist stance."

Anthropomorphising [parts of] the Internet is intellectually crippling and denies us agency

The New Inquiry - What We Talk About When We Talk About the Internet:

"When I hit a nail with a hammer, I think: witness the power of my will! But when I google “How do I build a birdhouse?” it appears that I have asked Google a question and that it has answered. As though Google were a conscious entity, not the world’s most complex hammer."

Using a service without paying? If you're not the customer, you're the product...

Don't Be A Free User:

"Were you a big Gowalla fan? Did you like Dodgeball? Did you think Trunk.ly (gasp!) was better than Pinboard? Did you make a lot of contributions to Nextstop? Do you miss Aardvark and EtherPad? Did "I Want Sandy" change your life?

These projects are all very different, but the dynamic is the same. Someone builds a cool, free product, it gets popular, and that popularity attracts a buyer. The new owner shuts the product down and the founders issue a glowing press release about how excited they are about synergies going forward. They are never heard from again."

The art of not drowning: a critique of airline safety cards through the ages :-)

Paris Review – The Unlikely Event, Avi Steinberg

"The artist behind a current AeroMexico safety card is not convinced. In an echo of The Son of Man, the 1964 painting by Belgian Surrealist René Magritte, the AeroMexico man is rendered in realistic detail—from rolled up sleeves to tousled hair—all of which is, however, a set up for the darkly comic punch line: the man has no face. This bit of surrealistic surgery, more than the yellow life preserver, is what we remember. It is plain to us that this creepily inanimate son of man is, in struggling to preserve his life, in some sense already dead."

The last Steve Jobs link I'll ever share.

Be a Jerk: The Worst Business Lesson from the Steve Jobs Biography - Tom McNichol - Business - The Atlantic

"Steve Jobs was a visionary, a brilliant innovator who reshaped entire industries by the force of his will, a genius at giving consumers not only what they wanted, but what they didn't yet know they wanted.

He was also a world-class asshole."

Charlie Brooker | The most dangerous drug isn't meow meow. It isn't even alcohol ... | Comment is free | The Guardian

Charlie Brooker | The most dangerous drug isn't meow meow. It isn't even alcohol ...

"It's perhaps the biggest threat to the nation's mental wellbeing, yet it's freely available on every street – for pennies. The dealers claim it expands the mind and bolsters the intellect: users experience an initial rush of emotion (often euphoria or rage), followed by what they believe is a state of enhanced awareness. Tragically this "awareness" is a delusion. As they grow increasingly detached from reality, heavy users often exhibit impaired decision-making abilities, becoming paranoid, agitated and quick to anger. In extreme cases they've even been known to form mobs and attack people. Technically it's called "a newspaper", although it's better known by one of its many "street names", such as "The Currant Bun" or "The Mail" or "The Grauniad" (see me – Ed).

In its purest form, a newspaper consists of a collection of facts which, in controlled circumstances, can actively improve knowledge. Unfortunately, facts are expensive, so to save costs and drive up sales, unscrupulous dealers often "cut" the basic contents with cheaper material, such as wild opinion, bullshit, empty hysteria, reheated press releases, advertorial padding and photographs of Lady Gaga with her bum hanging out. The hapless user has little or no concept of the toxicity of the end product: they digest the contents in good faith, only to pay the price later when they find themselves raging incoherently in pubs, or – increasingly – on internet messageboards."

New Left Review - Dylan Riley: Tony Judt: A Cooler Look

"Few Anglophone intellectuals have received such posthumous acclaim as the Director of the Remarque Institute, leading contributor to the New York Review of Books, and late champion of social-democracy. Regularly compared to George Orwell, if not Isaiah Berlin, does any careful examination of his oeuvre sustain such panegyrics?"

A tale of two concurrency models: comparing Go and Erlang

A very interesting article:

"Out of all the languages that I never get to program in, Erlang is probably my favorite. I used it while I was working on my Ph.D., and a few times in private projects since then, but there's very little consulting work going for Erlang programmers, so it's rare for me to get to use it.

That said, when I started learning Go, Erlang was the first thing that came to mind. It's also the language mentioned in most common criticisms of Go that I encounter when I talk about my new Go Phrasebook. A common complaint is that Erlang's concurrency model is much cleaner than Go's. In this article, I'll look at both and show that it's possible to express either in terms of the other-neither language is inherently superior, but both expose different models to the programmer.

One thing that may confuse people with a theoretical computer science background is that Erlang takes some syntax from Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) model, but with different semantics, whereas Go takes the semantics but not the syntax. More confusingly, Erlang's semantics are fairly close to early versions of CSP, but not to later ones."

Maciej Ceglowski on the social graph

The Social Graph is Neither:

"I first came across the phrase social graph in 2007, in an essay by Brad Fitzpatrick, though I'd be curious to know if it goes back further.

The idea of representing relationships between people as networks is old, but this was the first time I had thought about treating the connections between all living people as one big object that you could manipulate with a computer.

At the time he wrote, Fitzpatrick had two points to make. The first was that it made no sense for every social website to try and recreate the same web of relationships, over and over, by making people send each other follow requests. The second was that this relationship data should not be proprietary, but a common resource that rival services could build on as a foundation.

Fitzpatrick subsequently went to work for Google, and his Utopian vision of open standards and open data became subsumed in a rivalry between Google and Facebook. Both companies now offer their version of a social graph API, and Google (which is trying to catch up) has taken up the banner of open standards and data portability.

This rivalry has brought the phrase 'social graph' into wider use. Last week Forbes even went to the extent of calling the social graph an exploitable resource comprarable to crude oil, with riches to those who figure out how to mine it and refine it.

I think this is a fascinating metaphor. If the social graph is crude oil, doesn't that make our friends and colleagues the little animals that get crushed and buried underground?"

The ECB and radical inaction

The ECB’s Battle against Central Banking - J. Bradford DeLong - Project Syndicate

"The ECB continues to believe that financial stability is not part of its core business. As its outgoing president, Jean-Claude Trichet, put it, the ECB has “only one needle on [its] compass, and that is inflation.” The ECB’s refusal to be a lender of last resort forced the creation of a surrogate institution, the European Financial Stability Facility. But everyone in the financial markets knows that the EFSF has insufficient firepower to undertake that task – and that it has an unworkable governance structure to boot.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the ECB’s monochromatic price-stability mission and utter disregard for financial stability – much less for the welfare of the workers and businesses that make up the economy – is its radical departure from the central-banking tradition. Modern central banking got its start in the collapse of the British canal boom of the early 1820’s. During the financial crisis and recession of 1825-1826, a central bank – the Bank of England – intervened in the interest of financial stability as the irrational exuberance of the boom turned into the remorseful pessimism of the bust."

A good series of posts on bipartisanship, and whether or not it can work:

Lawrence Lessig: One More Try: The Rules Versus the Game:

This is the final (as far as I'm aware) installment in a series of articles debating about whether or not the OWS people should be forming common cause with the Tea Party with the shared goal of changing how Washington works. Follow the links at the top to read in chronological order...

Imagine you're a player with the Chicago Bears. You're on the field, about to begin a game with the Green Bay Packers. Just before kick-off, someone races onto the field screaming: "Guys, please, can't we all just get along? Enough of this fighting. Let's just shake hands and go get a beer."

A good speech on new ideas and leadership

The American Scholar: Solitude and Leadership - William Deresiewicz

"I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else's; it's always what I've already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It's only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn't turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing."

Revolutions on the Internet (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)

Revolutions on the Internet (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)

Aaron Swartz makes a good point about approaching the "does the Internet help?" debate from a social science perspective.

"Jon Elster has a four-phase theory of revolutions:

1. A hard-core of committed activists get together to do something completely crazy.

2. The regime cracks down, attracting people who are sympathetic to the cause to rally to the support of the crazy ones...."

Evercube: DIY NAS, looks better than one you can buy in a shop...

Evercube:

"When I came across the Backblaze storage pod, I was immediately intrigued by its clever, no-frills design. But who really needs 67 terabytes (or even 135) at home?

I decided to scale their excellent design down for home use, and after a long period of experimentation, the Evercube was born.

The design is open hardware, available under a Creative Commons Attribution license. But for your convenience, I am also offering all components needed to build the Evercube as an easy to assemble Do-It-Yourself kit."