Walter Logeman: Journal
AFI’s 100 YEARS…100 MOVIE QUOTES, loved looking at this list, some great quotes, some just part of the language, but I did not know where they came from. Like this one:
Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make.
Dracula 1931. I only know the phrase from the Cassandra Wilson song. And “Round up the usual suspects” – Cassablanca. Makes me want to see some old movies just to hear the quotes!
Reason: You’d Have to Be Crazy: Mental illness is the new normal:
In the sketch Steve Martin plays Theodoric of York, a medieval barber with a patient whose condition has not improved despite a bloodletting, a sheep’s-urine-and-staghorn poultice, and a night buried in the marsh up to her neck. ‘Medicine is not an exact science,’ Theodoric tells the girl’s mother, ‘but we are learning all the time. Why, just fifty years ago, they thought a disease like your daughter’s was caused by demonic possession or witchcraft. But nowadays we know that Isabelle is suffering from an imbalance of bodily humors, perhaps caused by a toad or a small dwarf living in her stomach.
That funny bit makes its point well. As does this more serious bit:
Judging from the way psychiatrists respond to Szasz’s critique, most of them believe schizophrenia and perhaps a few other conditions described in the DSM are diseases of the brain in the same sense as Alzheimer’s or multiple sclerosis, albeit with etiologies that are not yet clear. But when it comes to habits and traits such as smoking, gambling, gluttony, shyness, impulsiveness, inattentiveness, dishonesty, and nastinessnot to mention diagnoses that have fallen out of psychiatric fashion, such as homosexuality and multiple personality disorder even psychiatrists recognize the arbitrariness of their taxonomy.
In my eyes psychotherapy is a way of talking about the psyche that is nothing to do with health or illness, it is a way of reclaiming a holistic account of the self that was provided by religion and superstition and in the past. The language of medicine distorts the holistic endeavour.
Later Saturday, 6 February, 2010
Metaxy.
How does the “way of talking” relate to science? I think it is something of value, even if it is full of “dormative hypothesis”.
My defense of the dormative hypothesis (ie that it is not so bad if seen in the right way) is that it is a poem, and that poems are a way of compressing and making order. Making order is a form of science.
property for the people More review of the Koepsell Ontology book, and also of another: Peter Drahos & John Braithwaite
INFORMATION FEUDALISM
Here is the first chapter of the book by David Koepsell –
The popular culture, and unfortunately, even the few philosophical works pertaining to cyberspace, do not challenge the assumption that cyberspace is intangible, or that its objects are somehow special. In actuality, cyberspace is just another expressive medium. Since the sixties, however, notions about the nature of media have been confused in no small part due to Marshall McLuhan whose confused and confusing mantra — “the medium is the message” — survives in almost every existing account of cyberspace. The medium is the medium and the message is the message. There is, as we will see, no theoretically sound basis to conflate the two. Moreover, everything we create purposefully is an expression in some medium.
Mistakes about these concepts have led to a confused ontology, or categorization, of cyberspace and its constituents. These mistakes have also, as a result of parallel developments, come to be reflected in a legal scheme which no longer works. What follows is an argument in support of these contentions, and a proposal for a new ontology of cyberspace and of intellectual property in general. The new ontology avoids the mistakes outlined above, and serves as a rational alternative to the myths which surround cyberspace and all computer-mediated phenomena.
Saved Search – MozillaZine Knowledge Base
Thunderbird has a Saved Search function that is really the best idea yet for email. Rivals Gmail’s Labels – (Thunderbird also has support for labels). I am testing it now to see if this will replace ALL my folders and allow me to have ONE BIG inbox plus virtual folders? And no filters at all to sort thee mail as it arrives? Could that work? Right now it is working well for me in some test folders. I particularly like the way I can set it up to have my replies go into the folder next to the sent messages. The fuctionality is very like playlists in iTunes and Sets in Flickr. So far I have not been able to mix AND and OR searchers. In iTunes a smart playlist can search other playlists, and that is how I acheive that there.
A Saved Search folder is a “virtual folder” in the sense that it merely displays a set of messages that meet the search criteria, while the actual messages remain stored elsewhere. If you select and delete a message inside a Saved Search folder it will get deleted from its actual location, but if you delete a Saved Search folder itself all of the actual messages will remain intact. Moreover, unlike a normal folder, if you modify the search criteria for a Saved Search folder its virtual “contents” will be accordingly updated. Your Saved Search folders will remain in the folders pane even after you exit and restart Thunderbird, until you delete them, thus giving you quick and convenient access to your pre-defined searches.
PCTronix Ltd Cheapest Audigy 2nx I found in NZ, though also looking at thison Trade me. But will it actually work?
* USB 2.0 audio support is required for 24-bit/96kHz Multi-channel playback, and simultaneous playback and recording. USB 2.0 is only supported in Windows XP and requires online software update from Microsoft and Soundblaster.com when available.
Comments would be appreciated.
Google Search: “Wouter Logeman” My original dutch name did not come up in search – so I am fixing that. If you find me this way you are probably a relative! “Leuk dat je me hier heb gevonden.” I changed my name in 1952 – all on my own bat when I found that children at the Oyster Bay School just made a mess of the pronounciation. At the age of 7 or 8 I was too young to really make that decision, but it stuck. Worse was that as the older brother I also chose a new name for my brother Huug. I translated it to Herbert, which was not right, and a name he hated. Later he called himself Hugh.
comments to the question on the geeks.opml.org page… which uses a Minala design??? (Looks like the blogger template I use here.)… Anyway a meditation on what a Home page is, is a good thing!
A big list of links here worth lg at: lifehack.org, Blog Archive, Essential list of links on tips and info regarding Email
A few posts ago I bemoaned the iPod interface. Well Tod Maffin has a way to work around all this. How I Listen to 100 Podcasts A Day (I Love Radio .org):
STEP ONE: SET UP AN iTUNES ‘RIVER OF SOUND’ PLAYLIST
I have what I call my River of Sound smart-playlists (taking a page from Dave Winer’s ‘river of news’ metaphor. I have two: Podcasts-Cdn and Podcasts-Other. These are based on genres I force in place through my podcatching client: Canadian podcasts are forced with the Podcast-Cdn genre and all others get the Podcasts-Other when they are downloaded.
The criteria for these Smart Playlists is critical to making this work. They are:* Genre is Podcast-Cdn or Podcast-Other
* My Rating is 0 stars (this last criteria is the big secret. That way, as soon as I rate a podcast, it disappears from my River of Sound smart playlist, and I can ‘work through them’ much like you’d read and email then put ita folder.)STEP TWO: USE RATINGS AS A CODE SYSTEM
I use my star ratings as a way to categorize podcasts I’m listening to. Here are my five categories:* 1 star: Delete from iTunes at next sync
* 2 stars: Potential content for The Feed — I used iPodderX to convert to bookmarkable format, so that when I find a moment I think would work, I pause it right there, rate it 2 stars, and move onto the next one. Then when I’m back at my Mac, I can easily find that moment again.
* 3 stars: Great podcasts. These are just ones I really love listening to again and again, or playing for people as an example of what a good podcast is like.
* 4 stars: Take action. This reminds me to do something — email the podcaster, change the genre it’s filed under, check out their web site, etc.
* 5 stars: My favourite music. Gotta have a list.
I also have a cheat-sheet label on the back of my iPod to remind me of what all the codes mean.
STEP THREE: SET UP CATEGORY-CATCHERS IN iTUNES
Now, the last step is to create ‘category catchers.’ These are Smart Playlists that funnel your star ratings into their own playlists for you. That’s fairly simple — it’s just one playlist for each star (i.e. When My Rating equals 1 star.) This way, when you rate something as a particular star on your iPod as you’re listening (or, indeed, when listening from iTunes) they will pop into the right category here. (Note to Apple: I wish I could delete files from a playlist — you can only remove it from the playlist, not actually remove the file.)