Wednesday, April 16, 2025
Rational Astrologies and Security
In 2003, [Bruce] Schneier coined the term security theater to describe security measures that provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to actually achieve it.
[…]
There is another non-security way that designers can spend their security budget: on making their own lives easier. Many of these fall into the category of what has been called rational astrology. First identified by Randy Steve Waldman, the term refers to something people treat as though it works, generally for social or institutional reasons, even when there’s little evidence that it works—and sometimes despite substantial evidence that it does not.
via Cory Doctorow
Saturday, December 7, 2024
This Strange Moment
A message to you from the fleeting present.
For when this moment passes (and it will pass, as all things do), every effort will be taken to erase it from memory, to exclude it from the official record.
Thursday, November 21, 2024
Practice of neurosurgery on Saturn
The practice of neurosurgery on Saturn is almost identical to the one practiced on Earth. Because the art of practice of Medicine was transferred by homo sapiens sapiens “exearthed” 30 years ago from Earth to Saturn.
[…]
These cases give us the means of reflection to improve the practice of Neurosurgery.
A Deadhead Sticker on a Cadillac: Don Henley’s ‘The Boys Of Summer’ at 40
Instead of the counterculture being a metaphor for lost love in ‘The Boys Of Summer’, therefore, the lost love is a metaphor for the counterculture.
The Kekulé Problem: where did language come from?
Language can be used to sum up some point at which one has arrived—a sort of milepost—so as to gain a fresh starting point. But if you believe that you actually use language in the solving of problems I wish that you would write to me and tell me how you go about it.
