Words’ End

From The Guardian:

The distractions of constant emails, text and phone messages are a greater threat to IQ and concentration than taking cannabis, according to a survey of befuddled volunteers.

Doziness, lethargy and an increasing inability to focus reached “startling” levels in the trials by 1,100 people, who also demonstrated that emails in particular have an addictive, drug-like grip.

(See also this article in The Register.)

From Halley Suitt’s blog: check out Thoughtless Acts, a site/book concerning human-oriented design. Leaving aside the fact that it’s a Flash site (bleah, accessibility-wise), looks interesting.

I’ll go back to the food porn shortly. (Yesterday evening I had an excuse for not writing: a hot date. Today I have no such excuse.)

Meanwhile, there’s a competition going on at futureofthebook.org:

Our first competition calls for a reinvention of the illuminated manuscript. How will this ancient art evolve as multimedia begins to take a central role in our reading experience? Send us a single illustrated page that exploits the unique possibilities of the digital medium while preserving the classic illuminative relationship between text and image.

Nice! Were I at all good at graphic design or video work, I’d totally go for it with Roland. As it stands, I’ll sit back and watch the results, which should be beautiful.

Cribbed from, like, everywhere. My web browsing habits, presented in alphabetical order for your delectation, some rather obvious, some perhaps not. Of course, this is the most recent browsing history, and is thus tainted by things like gift shopping and travel planning. Still more or less representative.

a: amazon

b: brown university

c: coastway (my credit union)

d: dartmouth dante project (which I in no way recommend! it’s broken in so. many. ways.)

e: the vaults of erowid

f: free dictionary dot com

g: an all-too-appropriate .gif!

h: paradiso del perverse (R-rated; hilarious)

i: ifMUD

j: jews against circumcision, a truly odd one

k: kat kunz’ personal site

l: my livejournal friends page

m: merriam-webster online

n: netflix

o: oxygen xml editor

p: nifty pic of transparent concrete (2, 3)

q: nada

r: rand mcnally

s: switchboard dot com

t: telecharge, for all your nyc ticketing needs

u: uncommon goods

v: w3c xhtml validator

w: unsurprisingly, words’ end

x: xchat site (it’s an irc client for mac os x)

y: yarnivore’s blog post on anatomically correct knitting

z: zipcode.com

And you?

My hard drive’s dead. Long live the hard drive!

Luckily, Ethan had the foresight to sit me down to make a bootable backup a couple of months ago. Most of the important information from this semester has been recovered; my browser bookmarks, though, have not. I’ll survive, for sure.

This comes on the heels of Thanksgiving, which was a challenging time in itself. We were three, my mom and Ethan and I, and although we love each other fiercely, mom and I don’t actually get along very well. We managed to get through it, and now there’s a clean and orderly apartment as a bonus.

It’s been a hectic week-and-a-half: conference, then immediately mom last week, then a weekend of recovery, clean-up and hard drive woes. I’ll be picking up again both here and at okno shortly.

With supremely patient help from Ethan, my blog is now WordPressed. Erm, sorry if that renewed all your RSS feed posts. But it’s worth it, oh yes it is.

While we were at it, I have redesigned the entire site; the main blog is now at the root, and there are some other changes. If you use a smart RSS aggregator, it’ll update the URL for the feed automatically (and there’s a permanent redirect in case it doesn’t). If you want to do it manually, and/or subscribe to the comments feed, look in the lower part of the left-hand column for links.

I’ve also started another blog, for matters geopolitical. It’s called Okno, and the first post contains more information on its raison d’être.

Article in Wired today: “New Tack Wins Prisoner’s Dilemma.” Looks like Southampton took the annual PD Competition with sheer numbers – and a cool little strategy. The game goes like this:

[T]wo accomplices are arrested and separated for interrogation by the police, who give each the same choice: confess to authorities (defect) or remain silent (cooperate). If one defects and the other cooperates, the defector walks free and the cooperator gets 10 years in jail. If both cooperate, both get six months. If both defect, both get six years. Neither suspect knows the other’s choice.

Southampton submitted 60 player programs (within the competition rules: an entrant is allowed to submit many entries) designed to recognize each other when they are pitted against each other. Upon recognition, one of them would deliberately “sacrifice” itself to maximize the other’s winnings. As a result, Southampton’s players took the top three spots on the winnings roster. It’s all about research!, they say. That, and a fun way to start my morning. :)

You decide. I’ve decided: I’m happy enough with my Gmail account that I’ll be keeping it, and using it (as I do now) for list mail and automatic special-offer mailings from airlines and such. But, for some, Google and their services really might be too creepy.

(Thanks for the link, Jill.)

I’ve got a few invites. Leave me a comment if you want one, with your e-mail address please — or e-mail me, vika-wordsend-org. I’ll edit this post when they’re gone.

It’s so odd to tune into a radio broadcast set up by someone you know and hear a relatively obscure band you’ve been listening to for years, but in utterly different contexts.