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Posted on November 30th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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Protected: Taboo acts and language and how they work together
Chinese folklore and the colors green, white, red, yellow, and black
From Allen Abel and Madeleine Czigler’s “Ireland, Islam and envy” (National Post: 24 June 2008):
According to a Chinese folk tale, there once was a turtle whose wife fell in love with a snake. Too humiliated to watch their pan-reptilian canoodling, the turtle pulled a large green leaf over his eyes. Hence the usage, still current, [...]
Posted on November 27th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history | No Comments »
Virtual kidnappings a problem in Mexico
From Marc Lacey’s “Exploiting Real Fears With ‘Virtual Kidnappings’ ” (The New York Times: 29 April 2008):
MEXICO CITY — The phone call begins with the cries of an anguished child calling for a parent: “Mama! Papa!” The youngster’s sobs are quickly replaced by a husky male voice that means business.
“We’ve got your child,” he says [...]
Posted on November 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, law, security, technology | No Comments »
6 reasons why “content” has been devalued
From Jonathan Handel’s “Is Content Worthless?” (The Huffington Post: 11 April 2008):
Everyone focuses on piracy, but there are actually six related reasons for the devaluation of content. The first is supply and demand. Demand — the number of consumers and their available leisure time - is relatively constant, but supply — online content — has [...]
Posted on October 12th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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Bush’s Manicheanism destroyed him
From Glenn Greenwald’s “A tragic legacy: How a good vs. evil mentality destroyed the Bush presidency” (Salon: 20 June 2007):
One of the principal dangers of vesting power in a leader who is convinced of his own righteousness — who believes that, by virtue of his ascension to political power, he has been called to a [...]
Posted on October 11th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, law, politics | 1 Comment »
An elderly Eskimo & his unusual knife
From Wade Davis’ “Wade Davis: an Inuit elder and his shit knife” (Boing Boing: 26 September 2008):
The Inuit didn’t fear the cold; they took advantage of it. During the 1950s the Canadian government forced the Inuit into settlements. A family from Arctic Bay told me this fantastic story of their grandfather who refused to go. [...]
Posted on October 6th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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People being rescued run from their rescuers
From Les Jones’s email in Bruce Schneier’s “Crypto-Gram” (15 August 2005):
Avoiding rescuers is a common reaction in people who have been lost in the woods. See Dwight McCarter’s book, “Lost,” an account of search and rescue operations in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In one chapter McCarter tells the story of two backpackers in [...]
Posted on April 15th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, weird | No Comments »
Imagining a future of warring balloons
From Tom Reiss’s “Imagining the Worst: How a literary genre anticipated the modern world” (The New Yorker [28 November 2005]: 108):
… the first mini-boom in invasion fiction began in the seventeen-eighties, when the French developed the hot-air balloon. Soon, French poems and plays were depicting hot-air-propelled flying armies destined for England, and an American poem [...]
Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, art, history, language & literature, science, security, technology | Comments Off
Politics as pathology
From Charles Platt’s “The Profits of Fear” (August 2005):
It seems to me axiomatic that most primary actors on the global stage are disturbed people, because an obsessive lust for power is itself a pathology, and in a competition among thousands or millions of power seekers, only the most pathological are likely to win. …
I think [...]
Posted on July 31st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics | Comments Off
The Cold War as game theory
From Charles Platt’s “The Profits of Fear” (August 2005):
Game theory began with the logical proposition that in a strategic two-player game, either player may try to obtain an advantage by bluffing. If the stakes are low, perhaps you can take a chance on trusting your opponent when he makes a seemingly fair and decent offer; [...]
Posted on July 31st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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Why the color-coded threat alert system fails
From Bruce Schneier’s “Color-Coded Terrorist Threat Levels” (Crypto-Gram Newsletter: 15 January 2004):
The color-coded threat alerts issued by the Department of Homeland Security are useless today, but may become useful in the future. The U.S. military has a similar system; DEFCON 1-5 corresponds to the five threat alerts levels: Green, Blue, Yellow, Orange, and Red. The [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, politics, security | Comments Off
How doctors measure what percentage of your body is burned
From Daniel Engber’s “How Much of Me Is Burned?” (Slate: 11 July 2006):
In the 1950s, doctors developed an easy way to estimate the ratio of the area of a patient’s burns to the total area of his skin. The system works by assigning standard percentages to major body parts. (Most of these happen to [...]
Posted on July 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, science | Comments Off
The real vs. stated purpose of PowerPoint
From Paul Graham’s “Hiring is Obsolete” (May 2005):
For example, the stated purpose of Powerpoint is to present ideas. Its real role is to overcome people’s fear of public speaking. It allows you to give an impressive-looking talk about nothing, and it causes the audience to sit in a dark room looking at slides, instead of [...]
Posted on July 7th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society, business, history, technology | Comments Off
Media-induced fear & its effects
From John Twelve Hawks’s “ How We Live Now” (2005):
In his insightful book “The Culture of Fear,” Barry Glassner shows how many of our specific fears are created and sustained by media manipulation. There can be an enormous discrepancy between what we fear and the reality of what could happen to us. Glassner analyzes several [...]
Posted on July 6th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, commonplace book, politics, security | Comments Off
The US is becoming less democratic
From Tony Judt’s “The New World Order” (The New York Review of Books: 14 July 2005):
For there is a precedent in modern Western history for a country whose leader exploits national humiliation and fear to restrict public freedoms; for a government that makes permanent war as a tool of state policy and arranges for the [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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Fouche proud of terror, expanded
From Napoleonic Literature’s “The Court and Camp of Buonaparte: The Ministers: Fouche“:
But whatever might be the merit of his services at Nantes, it was far eclipsed by those he had soon afterwards the happiness to perform at Lyons. On his arrival there with Collot d’Herbois, he announced to the terrified citizens the reward they [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, language & literature, politics | Comments Off
5 reasons people exaggerate risks
From Bruce Schneier’s “Movie Plot Threat Contest: Status Report” (Crypto-Gram Newsletter: 15 May 2006):
In my book, Beyond Fear, I discussed five different tendencies people have to exaggerate risks: to believe that something is more risky than it actually is.
1. People exaggerate spectacular but rare risks and downplay common risks.
2. People have trouble estimating risks for [...]
Posted on June 19th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, commonplace book, science, security, technology | Comments Off
Ulysses Grant & the torpedo
From Greg Goebel’s “Februrary 1862: Unconditional And Immediate Surrender” (interpolation from Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville [187]):
On the afternoon of 5 February, during a conference between Grant, Foote, and the two division commanders, the captain of a gunboat sent a message to Grant that he had actually pulled a torpedo out [...]
Posted on April 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history | Comments Off
3500 forgotten cans
From “Mental Health Association of Portland“:
Over 3,500 copper canisters like these hold the cremated remains of patients of the Oregon State Hospital that went unclaimed by their families and friends. They sit on shelves in an abandoned building on the grounds of the Oregon State Hospital. They symbolize the loneliness, isolation, shame and despair [...]
Posted on March 25th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, weird, writing ideas | Comments Off
Night terrors
From Science News’ “Night of the Crusher: The waking nightmare of sleep paralysis propels people into a spirit world“:
As a college student in 1964, David J. Hufford met the dreaded Night Crusher. Exhausted from a bout of mononucleosis and studying for finals, Hufford retreated one December day to his rented, off-campus room and fell into [...]
Posted on January 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: science, weird | Comments Off