Stickybuffalo.com

I’ve noted a time or two how some sites and personalities I follow, online, prove themselves consistently, while others are much more like Terry Crowley. That is, I may read regularly but find most of the material silly, disastrously wrongheaded or just plain dull, or I may only look occasionally when I happen to remember that the site exists, and yet… eventually something always comes along that’s not only good, but so good that I never manage to completely drift away from the source.

So it is with NPR.org’s cosmology blog, 13.7.

A lot of what ends up on 13.7 is just bafflingly abstract. The same could very possibly be said of a lot of what I write, but I can understand my own digressions into angels-on-pins ephemera, at least, even if no one else can.

Every now and then, though, 13.7 and particularly Astrophysics professor Adam Frank comes up with something which manages to speak to me while still being so high-flown and unusual as to be memorably thought-provoking. Frank’s post of yesterday, “How to Save the World by Saving Yourself,” falls into this category.

(more…)

Admittedly, getting wound up over the remarks of somebody like Dan Tapscott is probably a bit like getting wound up over the remarks of Tom Friedman, Richard Florida or Faith Popcorn. Nincompoops selling half-baked pseudo-insightful drivel; shouldn’t I just ignore them?

Perhaps, yes. I would do so more readily, however, were it not just journalistic-sweatshop hacks who have to fill space on news portal sites and in business magazines paying attention to their brand of fluff.

Unfortunately this sort of starry-eyed gosh-wow new-economy-technology-future-go dogma has seeped into conventional wisdom without anyone ever questioning it. In reading a CBC interview with Tapscott the other day, I was struck by his perfect, if obviously unintentional, summarization of this mindset and how utterly barking mad it is: (more…)

This began as a comment on a post by a friend of mine, but at some point I realized that it was really turning into a post of its own. Readers may nonetheless wish to begin with the thoughts of Mr. Sean Kleefeld, here, in which he writes on the idea of innovation, and remarks that: “if the landscape changes around me, that’s no one’s fault but my own if I can’t find a place in it.”

Which, to me, seems an awfully harsh standard, excluding even a shred of sympathy. Also kind of an odd standard, given that his post mentions, multiple times, the concept of people needing to be taught how to learn; I’m not sure how that squares with the idea of absolute and total individual responsibility.

In any event, as I have suggested at other times, I have doubts that the notion is even practical, never mind desirable. (Darwinian selection is something of a dangerous concept when applied to human society; it’s a short step from explaining brutal conditions to justifying them.)

And, whether or not we as a society need or want genuinely constant innovation (and setting aside questions of what really amounts to true “innovation” and how much value it has), I don’t believe our society is remotely prepared for it. (more…)