minding my own business when I passed by Peter Merholz’ site and found this link to a really fun site on McLuhan: McLuhan TV – Where Marshall McLuhan’s Words Come to Life. Cool. And in the spirit of sharing, I’ll link to Arthur Kroker’s excellent (and very densely packed) article, Digital Humanism: The Processed World of Marshall McLuhan.
I’m just catching up
to the story about the ruling in the 2600 case. If you haven’t been following it, well, industry won. I can’t figure out how the guy who was moved, some might even say shaken, by Touretzky’s testimony turned around and dismissed it out of hand when it came time to rule. Sometimes I’m convinced that there are pod people who step in when real humans look like they’re going to do something against the wishes of big industry.
Random odd Montreal
memory of the day: When I worked at CTHEORY, I walked or took the bus to work. One day I was standing at the bus stop and this bike courier rides up St-Laurent and turns right onto Sherbrooke, with one hand on his handlebars. A regular bike courier too – in all his bike courier splendour, not some buttoned-down facsimile. So he passes me, and in his right hand he’s carrying a Coleman cooler; white with a red lid. As he passed me, I clearly read the label: Alert – Live Human Tissue. Only in French. And I thought, “it can’t be normal to transport transplant organs by bike courier, can it?” No, I didn’t think so.
Boring news of the day (I)
They have completed a working draft of the human genome. I would have been interested in this a couple of years ago. Now, though, it’s painfully obvious that a) this is going to be yet another scene in the ‘fuck everyone, we own this shit’ drama; b) it’s intrinsically boring. Proof? One of the researchers was quoted as saying having the map is “like being given the best book in the world, but it’s in Russian, and it’s incredibly boring to read.”
I’ve been trying to
lay off the cross-blog posts a wee bit lately, but Heather has made a good point very eloquently – something to remember. People earn respect, but a certain amount of respect is due everyone just by dint of their humanity. At work, that’s the least one should expect. For my own part, I have to remember how good I have it at my job, no matter that I’m slightly cynical and jaded from time to time.
