Archive for 8th of February, 2008
The mother of all Dodos
Feb 8th
WS: I think one of the things that inspired me to write Great Apes was the imminent extinction of the chimpanzee in the wild, which I think will be one of the most philosophically queasy moments. But I don’t think people have reckoned on it at all.
SW: Any extinction, but particularly chimpanzees.
WS: Particularly the chimp, surely.
SW: It’s the finality of it and the notion that, “These are our cousins, and we’re the ones who caused their demise.”
I think I should pay more attention to the SEED salon. There’s a few conversations in there I’ve missed, and from the highlights, it looks like the full version of the Will Self / Spencer Wells conversation could be fun if it’s put online. They were talking about what it means to be human.
Will Self was being Will Self, which he does very well. He was talking of the interest in seeing a Chimpanzee-Human hybrid. Spencer Wells in contrast would like to talk to a chimpanzee, but not create a hybrid. It’s interesting because Self sees humanity as a constructed idea. It’s interesting, because it raises the question “Is what makes you human a hardware or software issue?” Self also raises the question of More >
Ma.gnolia and del.icio.us
Feb 8th
I’ve remembered why I stopped doing Vidis. They very easily pile up into time consuming posts which take a couple of hours to put together. One solution I tried was auto-posting from del.icio.us. You can set it up so that when you have five or more new links that it sends a post to your weblog. I stopped using del.icio.us because there’s a tight limit on what you can note about a link. Sometimes it’s too tight.
Ma.gnolia looks like it could be better. It has the option to post every day, every three days, weekly… and so on. The description of a link can be a lot longer. If you highlight text before clicking the bookmarklet then it also puts this straight into the description a bit like tumblr. So for now I’m experimenting to see if ma.gnolia would be worth using as a quicker way to link and post.
The downside is that ma.gnolia’s standard output is not very friendly to WordPress.com weblogs. The title links are encased in h4 tags and the description between div tags rather than p tags. It means that the descriptions can be illegible on some templates. This is why I’ve changed the template. If you’re More >
