I have a bit of a queue of posts, including at least one review, but I've been on a training course all week and had no cognitive surplus.
In the meantime, some recent discoveries:
- Bigthink.com - Rachel Maines - discusses the shared history of technology, sexuality and medicine - and Extreme Ironing
- Ted Talks - short and well-presented talks on a delightful variety of subjects, including how social networks predict epidemics, the representational art of invisible things, the meeting and mating of ideas, child-centred education in India and Gateshead, web video, imitation and innovation, the world's oldest living things, the sounds made by marine mammals, human sleep in the absence of artifical light, the hurdy-gurdy, the independent diplomat, marketing, and why it's so often a mistake to tell people your goals. I'm enjoying these. Some of them are self-regarding or unconvincing in the argument they present, but they are all short: most of them are interesting and some of them are excellent. All available as podcasts to take with you on the Tube.
- And if you like that sort of thing you will also like the A History of the World in 100 Objects (the website is a little confusing, though much improved, so I've linked directly to the podcast episode list). Apart from some rather weak remarks by an Archbishop in an early episode, they've been uniformly excellent.
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5 comments:
In evolutionary terms how do trolls fit into cognitive surplus?
Evolution doesn't make value judgements. They eat it, though.
Shouldn't they have some kind of purpose though? At least diseases and so forth help with the whole survival of the fittest / population control. I can't see what use trolls are, or come to think of it why more cognitive surplus isn't used to figure out how to get rid of them!
Naah, that's not how it works. The ichneumon wasp doesn't serve any purpose but its own.
Apparently they can be used for organic pest control - so trolls are even less useful than parasitic wasps or diseases!
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