The Happy Moron

AmbaSewa wrote:
“I currently post comments on a fairly regular basis on four blogs.
Two are the blogs of total strangers. Mind you, the totality of their strangeness is reducing- one particularly blogs prolifically.”
There’s a weirdness that comes from reading other people’s deep expressions on a blog.
You become engaged and drawn in and you *feel* a connection. [...]

Freakonomics posed this as “The greatest question ever asked”
The economics hook is, of course, that people act according to incentives and it’s fun to try and examine a ’selfless’ act.
It’s a polarizing topic; the post gets 200 comments where a more normal number would be around 30. But what kind of comments? I looked at [...]

No new Gretel episode yesterday. There is another piece, though.

Given that I’m fresh out of real content, I’ve done some house-keeping instead.
Behold the Mostly Fairy Tales page… an index of all the Monday fairytales, without the annoying Part I – Part II – Part III baloney. As full blown pages on the site, each gets its own permanent link and is easily findable in [...]

Part I looked at how we might think of distance on the internet, working from the concept of physical distance applying its principles in a digital network.
It got as far as Google, but it ignored linking.
Arguably, the straight line of the internet is a hyperlink. It’s the shortest distance between two points. It’s the magic [...]

A few thoughts on how far apart things can be in a virtual world.
I’ve previously said that distance doesn’t exist on the internet, and that the internet doesn’t have any corners.
This is true in some ways, but less true in others.
There are many ways you can try and conceptualize distance on the internet. The question [...]

“Networking is always important when it’s real and it’s always a useless distraction when it’s fake.
What the internet has allowed is an enormous amount of fake networking to take place.”

The internet can be used to build real relationships. Perhaps it’s not the most effective medium for doing so, but it has its advantages as well [...]

Hmmm… Illinois doesn’t want sex offenders to use social networking.
Actually, the state is making it a felony for them to do so.
“The idea was, if the predator is supposed to be a registered sex offender, they should keep their Internet distance as well as their physical distance.”
For the longest time, I was able to make [...]

This is a side effect of personal publishing. Individual people, who have previously been consumers of things, are now learning what it means to be producers of things.
It’s the process of learning about that mysterious connection between an artist and his art. His art comes from him, but is not him, although it contains a [...]

You’ve got to give it away.