The Unemployed Philosophers Guild

Talk about great presents! For my birthday I got “The Great Philosophers Finger Puppets” from the Unemployed Philosophers Guild.

The Unemployed Philosopher’s Guild began in 1992 when two students of philosophy found their inner creativity in the midst of a dwindling academic job market. As it turned out, fulfilling gift giving needs proved to be almost as satisfying as probing eternal questions. Though we still contemplate justice and truth, it is our wish to fulfill the gift giving needs of the funny & sophisticated everywhere! (About us)

It’s good to know that philosophy and gift giving go together. Coming soon – my Philosopher-Finger-Puppet Theatre!

Konfabulator Moves to Windows

According to Slashdot, Arlo Rose is porting Konfabulator to Windows. The Konfabulator site now goes to a strange “notebook” essay on “Ten Days In The Wild” which pretends to have discovered two types of creatures in the wild (Macs and PCs.) To see what Konfabultator in Windows would look like see image here.
This came to me from Chris. See also a previous grockwel: Research Notes: Konfabulator blog entry.

WORDCOUNT

fuck sex granulation love the shit god

WORDCOUNT and its companion QUERYCOUNT are two text-art experiments by Jonathan Harris of Number27. (StÈfan Sinclair pointed this out.) WORDCOUNT uses the Britich National Corpus to present an interactive Flash view of all the words sorted by frequency (thus “The” starts the list of 86800 words.) QUERYCOUNT tracks the words people ask to see in the WORDCOUNT list, not surprisingly starting with “fuck” and “sex”, but followed (when I checked) by “granulation”. (There must be some group repeatedly asking for “granulation” or a bug for that to show up so high.) What does the list of words we look for (quoted at the start of this entry) say about us?
Continue reading WORDCOUNT

Ideas as Play: HalfBakery.com

halfbaker.com is a site for wacky ideas (some of which turn out to have happened.) Nice design and great idea itself.

“Ceci n’est pas un ideÈ.”

This site makes communal play out of what we do – fantasize about things that could be done (to make a million.) Such ideas are a rhetorical trope – a conversation starter (or stopper) independent from any desire to implement.