The adolescent purgatory of FaceBook — with its castings into the Eternal Now of instant praise, acceptance, and rejection — reflects, magnifies, and acerbates the perpetual adolescence of the contemporary culture of the United States, intensifying its shallow longings and displaced panics, its narcissistic rage and obsession with the superficial. It devours libido, by providing a pixilated facsimile of the primal dance of human endeavor, leaving one’s heart churning in thwarted yearning, locked an evanescent embrace with electronic phantoms, as one, paradoxically, attempts to live out unfulfilled desires by means of hollow communion with the soul-negating source of his alienation. (....)

A Heap Of Broken Images: Social media and the architecture of anomie
Phil Rockstroh
Ebullient Skepticism

ht woods lot

They say that if you love something you should set it free. And if it returns it’ll be yours forever.

I’m starting to find that this may actually be true.

If by ‘love’ they mean ‘are quite used to having around’. And if by ‘quite used to having around’ they mean ‘is a District Council-mandated necessity’.

And if by ‘set it free’ they actually mean ‘wonder where the fuck it’s gone.’

The wheelie-bin for my recycling went missing didn’t it.

Tired Dad (who would never have been whipped through the BC revolving door because he would never have got a foot in the door in the first place, O Britain Britain Britain)

New Labour’s policy on celebrity sheen - populism without popularity - was part-and-parcel of a well-documented world of spin, shady unelected advisers, myriad consultants and a pernicious hyper-real feeling that politics was all about being seen to do something, but not actually doing it. Whether we think that New Labour was a continuation of the Thatcher project, or, alternatively, that the Cameron-Clegg axis is a continuation of the New Labour project is perhaps less important than the fact that this unpopular populism is still guiding policy. Alongside the interminable restructuring of public services, particularly education and health, we have flashy, gimmicky one-liner celebrity interventions whose supposedly popular appeal is, at the end of the day, profoundly mysterious, if all pervasive.

...

The recent announcement that Niall Ferguson has been invited to ‘revitalise the curriculum’ for history is very depressing but entirely in keeping with this tendency. Ferguson proposes to introduce a ‘world war two-based video game designed for use as a classroom aid’, but promises he’ll avoid Eurocentrism by claiming that he is also interested in ‘the stagnation of China, the underachievement of Mughal India, and why the Ottoman empire – despite its good mathematics and good-ish astronomy – ultimately failed. It just failed to be part of the scientific revolution.’ May I not-very-controversially suggest that avoiding Eurocentrism isn’t best served by misrepresenting the supposed ‘underachievements’ of other parts of the world. ...

Infinite Thought

So if a certain disease is more common in rich people within a country, that's big news because it suggests that something unusual is going on. Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) have long been known to show this pattern, at least in some countries, but this has often been thought to be a product of diagnostic ascertainment bias. Maybe richer and better-educated parents are more likely to have access to services that can diagnose autism. This is a serious issue because autism often goes undiagnosed and diagnosis is rarely clear-cut.

An important new PLoS paper from Wisconsin's Durkin et al suggests that, while ascertainment bias does happen, it doesn't explain the whole effect in the USA: richer American families really do have more autism than poorer ones. The authors made use of the ADDM Network which covers about 550,000 8 year old children from several sites across the USA.

Autism and Wealth at Neuroskeptic, ht MR

I think some of the confusion that has arisen from Ed Tufte's work is that people read his book and then want to go make cool graphs of their own. But cool like Amis, not cool like Orwell. We each have our own styles, and I'm not trying to tell you what to do, just to help you look at your own writing and graphics so you can think harder about what you want your style to be.

Andrew Gelman at Statistical Modeling...

It is said that analysts of the fighting in World War Two, concerned at the apparent reluctance to participate or even fire their weapons of so many of the Western armies’ combat soldiers, tried to figure out what characteristics marked the born warrior. Were they big macho types? Little guys overcompensating? Well-educated men with a strong belief in their cause? Or hooligans like the ‘dirty dozen’? The only feature they could find which seemed to have strong predictive power was that effective fighters had a strong sense of humour. And that is one of the really distinguishing features of Old Norse poetry, legend and saga: grim gallows humour. It is always a bad sign in a saga when someone cracks a joke.

Tom Shippey at the LRB

I meet Sam Frank of Triple Canopy at Neues Ufer. It's hot. We're both sweating. I apologise many times for being shellshocked.