Succulent House demands a systemic and structural reorganization of contemporary residential architecture. It explores possible solutions to water shortage issues and environmental consciousness  by treating the water collection capacities of houses as integral part of the design, instead of reducing it to a foreign body- an artificial addition to our, otherwise unburdened everyday lives.

Excellent idea on the Peter Principle (except it's not really the Peter Principle) etc

The wonderful, wonderful quote is, erm, wonderful.

The psychological stuff is WEIRD-specific? We know that drunkenness is, so perhaps this makes sense.

One to follow up, no doubt.

Copyright is a full-on thing for the Thallium watchlist thingy.

The cartoon's the one about Gallileo and the post is called 'Mark Waid is right'.

Satire is indistinguishable from bonkers.

I'd love to see this alongside a visualisation of Brittanica.

A visualisation of edits on Wikipedia in real-time. Fascinating.

The fact that the reader creates the text is *extreme* ie French? Possibly.

I love the idea of escaping into thinking.

There was a report done by the military a while back which highlighted the danger of BoDia - people who care more about their friends on 4chan than they do their nation. (Actually, it was more about the cosmopolitans and the Brussels people, but you know what I mean.)

The 100-year career is a powerful one, too.

Anyway, the Internet Marginal is something I think a lot about.

The difference between finite and infinite publication models. TV says it's finite but really it's infinite. And a lot of us moved to the finite model.

Newspapers say they're infinite but, in fact, they're finite. Because they have a message.

etc

Yep, I think this is the key, the whole key and nothing but the key.

And an opportunity for games too. If you can get people to interact around content and doing fairly finite activities, you get metadata.

Worth digging up the Extropians again - and checking out the LifeExtension ad on the sidebar of this page!

I know somebody who pays good money for cryo-head stuff.

I think this should probably go up against the 'why it's easy to laugh at atheists' thing. Atheists vs Singularitarians.

This is that word for shameful embarrassment.

A growing body of work suggests that cultural worldviews permeate all of the mechanisms through which individuals apprehend risk, including their emotional appraisals of putatively dangerous activities, their comprehension and retention of empirical information, and their disposition to trust competing sources of risk information. As a result, individuals effectively conform their beliefs about risk to their visions of an ideal society. This phenomenon — which we propose to call “cultural cognition” — not only helps explain why members of the public so often disagree with experts about matters as diverse as global warming, gun control, the spread of HIV through casual contact, and the health consequences of obtaining an abortion; it also explains why experts themselves so often disagree about these matters and why political conflict over them is so intense.

This is a great example of the kind of thing you get in Gestalt arguments.

Are there (at least) four viewpoints to this?

Yeah, whatever. The Indivisibility of Man is nonsense. And even the indivisibility of *a* man is nonsense.

I wonder where this puts me on Grid/Group.

via @johnt on Twitter. Does this need to be 'right' in order for it to have power?

I don't think so. A hundred monkeys - when you don't have an infinite number...

All things need different communication styles. Whether something is communicated synchronous/asynchronous/normative/positive/didactic/incrementally,extensibly etc will have a big impact on genre.

A couple of things: there's a whole load of these German words which are really useful.

And I'm not sure I get all this. But the idea of the Umwelt is powerful, to say the least. Related to schemata?

Guru photos are endlessly fascinating.

How much of profit is down to 'external effects'? Why don't we base taxes on this rather than some stupid idea of fairness to society?

Korzbyski's Structural Differential tool.

Once again, the mental hygiene thing. Tim O'Reilly says when religious battles take place, they're semantic events. Are they?

Is it possible to think more about the power of forgetting without overegging and overextending?

Clumsy Solutions deserves a better write-up than it gets.

As usual, a good column. Advice with hindsight is flawed - how can the speaker possibly know that the thing they didn't do would have been better?

cf Paul Graham and Advice for Start-ups

The bit about Psychogeography and cities being engines is important.

Cyborgs construct engines. This is incredibly important.

Managers construct engines.

RT @elearningPosts: WordPress Plugin #14: Mobile-friendly Blog | useful, good series

"Too lazy to walk, ya fuckin homo?"

Why do Segways provoke this reaction? The reason you look like a dork riding a Segway is that you look smug. You don't seem to be working hard enough.

Virginia Heffernan vs. ScienceBlogs « by @Neuroanthropology {I agree, but she mistakes polemic SBs for all sci. blogs}

"Her expectations ... are part of the story."

Yep, she's speaking from the point of view of ignorance, but it's partly reasonable ignorance. (and partly unreasonable professional ignorance).

Why yesterday's NYT piece is only half stupid, and why that troubles me:

This is smart, I think.

Reading: 'Did we pronounce privacy dead this week?' [CNET News]

The 'class divide' idea is interesting.

Topology?

This one's at the crux of it. I'm so much in disagreement - but with everybody here. Everybody.

Hmmm, untenability feels odd.

Haven't tagged this, but it's this particular mode of 'new journalism' 2.0 that I'm into and feel a need to defend.

Kevin Kelly chooses the best magazines articles ever. And they're all amazing.

This is awesome. Utterly awesome.

And it describes the BoDia pretty much perfectly.

A lot of the post-modern stuff is just about current. It's not just science-fiction that becomes real, but post-modernist literary critique.

One to note,a wonderful piece by John Kay of Obliquity fame.

This pretty much gets what the danger of Facebook is. It's not privacy - this is a massive red herring. It's the tyranny of indivisibility.

So many of the new things have hateful names. And so many people have jobs they can't talk about with about wincing - I'm a Lean Agile Scrummaster who works in the social ideation field to leverage web 2.0 currency in order to squeeze the last drop of juice out of SEO virality.

The story of Stacy Snyder illustrates perfectly the idea of indivisibility.

Moves images around and makes them into a kind of a jigsaw, like those puzzle thingies.

There's a huge amount of kerfuffle going on here. It's essentialism in its most essential form. Not least, because David Irving uses it as part of his bricolage in the smearing of Churchill. And then it gets messy.

I'm interested in this whole business of 'how to win an argument'. Some people (see Slightly Evil) seem to study it. Which is interesting.

Anyway, the 'High Ground Maneuver' is definitely a Pearl.

I've found a new word for one of the things I love. It's called the Pillow Shot.

Storytellers, comedians and, I suppose, teachers all have their own versions of the Pillow Shot.

The lifecycle of the Pearl, in seven stages.

1. words are used as blunt instruments, usually more than one - they triangulate. This creates a space.
2. schema gap. The lexical area, the designated meaning area has created a space. It's vacant. It's a bit like magic - nature abhors a vacuum. (this makes a better No. 1 and is probably better named by the 'magic' stage.)
2. conscious coinage. a few people coin expressions to describe that particular thing. The semantic gap spreads.
4. big dog. A big dog coins a new phrase. The original coiners moan that this isn't what they meant and that, in fact, this is a new semantic area. Nobody cares.
5. Flynn moment. the phrase catches on and society incrementally and irreversibly gets just a little bit smarter.
6. Marketing genius. It gets moved into a strapline and it's fresh and it's genius and everbody loves it.
7. It's ubiquitous in marketing and over time, everybody learns to fear it.
8. Retriangulation. It's like simplicity meets frictionless meets intuitive. Erm, you mean it works? It's, erm, good? yep, that's it, it's good.

RT @noahwg Life without language. A nice read on the plight of the language-less & the role of language in cognition:

Loads of Whorf stuff here. Whorf needs a round-up.

Whorf-Sapir kind of.

When people talk about training and education, they forget stuff like this.

This is fairly textbook disruptive innovation. It's Enders Game, kind of.