This article is interesting, though its title, “Social Networking Affects Brains Like Falling in Love,” should have a question mark at the end, since the experiment (with Twitter) was a simple one-off. I’d be very curious to see studies of people who use Social Media professionally. (Like, say, someone like pro SF authors twittering like mad at a science fiction convention, or low-level political candidates using Twitter.) I’d also be very curious to see how mediated interaction works compared to non-mediated interaction — how much difference in oxytocin do we see in couples talking on the phone a few hours …
Category: PERSONAL
Back on my feet (sorta)
All the posts that have gone up in the past four or five days have been prewritten, in fact were pre-scheduled a week or more ahead of time. Why am I mentioning this? Because anyone following along on my blog might think I was okay the past weekend, when in fact I had the worst case of food poisoning I’ve had since Jakarta. Unfortunately, I think I know where I got it. I wish I could say it was my own fault… well, maybe it was, but I don’t know. I will say this: whenever I eat anything at Times …
BP, Chickens, Roosts
I’ve been reading about the BP Oil Spill down in the Gulf of Mexico, about how people discussing where in the litany of biggest single oil spills ever the current one fits in [1], about how it might hit the Gulf Stream and spread all around the Atlantic, about how painful it is to see it. Well, I’ve held my tongue, but I’ll be honest, folks. When Malcolm X said that thing about chickens coming home to roost, maybe it was impolitic. It’s probably impolitic for me to use his words now… but that’s because it’s true. This is what …
Random Linkage
I didn’t know until this week, but both Corey Haim and Gary Coleman died this year. Which means little to me, except that when I was searching for other things, these two cases came up in Google again and again. Zenkimchi on the internationalization of Korean food, and how the guys claiming to spearhead it are going wrong… all a case of not knowing their market, and having things backwards. My rule about Korean restaurants isn’t quite the opposite of his title — the best Korean restaurants aren’t always the cheapest, though he’s right that the worst are usually the …
Hotlinking Bastard Scum Retaliation… What Do You Think?
So, I just got myself a hotlink blocker, after noticing a few websites that have been pirating bandwidth off this site. (I got busy/lazy, and didn’t update, and the old plugin didn’t do enough, I guess.) Should I display this image (which I’m currentl using)? Or should I get the old goaste.cx JPG and add a caption about how only assholes hotlink? What do you think? On the one hand, it’s a punishment to the hootlinker that seems fitting — but on the other hand, I guess it punisher’s that hotlinker’s readers more… especially, for example, in forums where the …
For Neda
One of the comments to this post included a link to this video documentary “For Neda”… about a woman who was murdered (along with so many others) during the recent post-election crackdown in Iran last year, about a year ago now. I said that the video deserved its own post, and it does. Watch it!
Where the Wild Beers Are…
A few brewing-related events lately warrant a post. First, I ended up supplying the beer for a party hosted by Soyeon Jeong and her husband Dongjin Lee. She posted about the party here, with a photo (though all the faces are blacked out for some reason… privacy, I guess). I haven’t said much about it here, so I’ll just say I had a great time, it was fun to geek out, talk SF (and other stuff) and it was fun to see so many people enjoying my beer. Anyway, there were a few bottles of IPA left over, which I …
Goodbye
I’m talking to my student debt. It will never trouble me again. Goodbye, student debt. Took me long enough, but it’s done. Now, on to better uses of my money.
Geek Out
“You know you’re with a bunch of geeks when…” was the line I said most often last night. Being among SF geeks is salutary, though; it’s normal for everyone to totally geek out over an iPad (as we did — trying out a bunch of bookreader and comic book reader applications in sequence), or to check out the bookshelves and talk about all the great books and authors contained thereupon, and so on. There was a party including a nice chunk of Seoul’s SF fandom population, including a number of my own friends and acquaintances. I supplied a sampling of …
Darwin’s Shockwave: On Violence and Human Nature
Last semester, I think it was, one of my students asked me what I thought about “나영이 사건” as an article topic for the campus English magazine for which students write articles in my journalistic writing course. If you haven’t heard about it — and you probably don’t live in Korea if you haven’t heard about it — “The Nayeong Incident” was a case in which a 57-year-old man raped a 9-year-old girl in a church. Brian in Jeollanamdo has the basics and some links, and all I can add to that is that there were a lot of variation …