Philip's Tunnel to Nowhere 3

The database for this site was down somewhere between 2 and 8 weeks. I didn’t even notice. That’s how underutilized this site is.

First year of school has been interesting. I’m surprised that what takes up my time is absolutely not classes, which haven’t been too demanding, but all the external stuff:

• TA duties
• grant applications
• conference submissions
• journal submissions
• research team meetings

I guess in that sense it’s good preparation for academic life.

I really don’t know what to do with this site, and a lot of posts about not knowing what to do with this site aren’t very interesting. I don’t feel like I have anything new to say. If I did, I’d make sure the syndication was feeding to Facebook, but then no one would comment on here because everyone would comment on Facebook. I really hate how FB has taken over so much of our communication, and yet… it’s taken over our communication! There are “friends” (admittedly, not close ones) who wouldn’t bother to reply to emails but who reply to FB messages.

I don’t know the way out of this. I think we need to be as devious as the blue menace. Someone should write a FB app that sucks in content via syndication (RSS, Atom), but only to the cut line, and then offers a link for more. It should allow FB comments, since everyone’s conditioned to them — but cut them off after 80 characters, offering to let the user post more on the native site. It should allow Likes, but periodically fail, and instead post a “Like” comment on the blog.

I’m not so silly as to think my empty content would lure people over here, but some people’s would. I don’t know, what solutions do you have?

I commented this to a friend on Facebook and thought it was succinct enough to make it worth keeping (edited slightly).

I’ve considered myself Libertarian in the past (to the point of actually leading the meetings for my city’s LP for a year) and admire the LP’s ideological consistency. In a better electoral system, I would be very likely to vote for a PRAGMATIC libertarian-leaning candidate.

My biggest critique of the LP is that they don’t show much pragmatism, either in how they propose to govern or in organizing people to get to that point. Most Libertarians I’ve met would be far more inclined to sit for 2 hours praising Hayek than knock on doors for 2 hours doing outreach.

When the 2008 crisis hit and all my libertarian friends basically proposed letting the whole system go belly up and sort itself out from the rubble, I parted ways.

You know, if the NYT had a pricing model where I could just pay $2 or $3 a month to read FiveThirtyEight, I’d be all over it. I have no reason to subscribe to the whole NYT, but Nate Silver is just brilliant.

Climate change hasn’t really been an issue near to my heart, but at some point it’s going to become near to all of our hearts. (Don’t worry, the free market will solve the problem by bidding up the price of land in Kansas and other places that aren’t covered by water; the Cayman Islands might not make it though.)

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_09/arctic_ice_melt_record_being_s039757.php

I need to change themes after 50 thousand years, and for spite I’ll pick one that’s offensive to the eyes, only for a few days. Enjoy!

You should comment on my blog to let me know that you, too, want the benefits of social networking without having it all controlled by one corporation. Then we can go be subversive together.

Here’s my current Facebook status:

I ask this from time to time, but how would one really “get off of Facebook”? I don’t mean quit cold turkey and sacrifice the benefits of S/N, which is obviously possible; I mean to replicate as many of those benefits as possible in a less proprietary setting.

E.g., I can use Twitter for my statuses, but that’s a pain because I don’t buy into the artificial 140 limit. So I’d like someplace to put my statuses that’s less clumsy than Twitlonger.

More after the jump.
(more…)

Obviously i am now the absentee blogger i feared becoming. (Is that really such a bad thing?)

I still have things to say, and this could be a venue to say them. Maybe not important things, but important-to-me things. So i need to get back to writing here, and that starts now, with a mostly contentless post about how little i have to say.

I’ve been under the weather a bit, and it’s times like that that remind me how much i need to slow down. (Carl Honore: In Praise of Slowness. The last couple of days, i’ve gone crazy watching TED talks.) It sucks that i don’t feel like being around people, but i also feel so isolated.

What do single adults in the US in 2012 do to keep from feeling isolated?

It’s really interesting how much of my approach to school is based around sudden bursts of inspiration. I sort of like the work, those rare times that i can get into “flow”. But i have to stay marginally engaged with the subject matter the other 90% of the time to get to flow. It’s staying even marginally engaged that’s like pulling teeth.