An oldie but goodie. I certainly enjoy watching students squirm their way into naming me.

Linux?

I have found myself, at least on a few occasions, talking to a person whose relationship to the Internets is much thinner than my own, trying to explain the nature of certain Internet memes. I find this a pretty tough task to pull off as I tend to make memes sound really infantile (and perhaps that is just what they are).

To explain this world to the uninitiated, I either: 1) very quickly give up and move onto some other less obscure 2) go into semi-professorial lecture mode and give a mini-low down on memes, some of the early examples, a small theory of self-referential irony, 4chan, rickrolls, encyclopedia dramatic etc etc and then show a bunch of memes as really you can’t do it justice without the audio visul component.

Now, I can just point people to the Meme Factory –to three youngish guys from Brooklyn who put together a **fantastic show**** a few weeks ago on, yes, Internet Memes. It was a dazzling ride into the (sometimes very obnoxious) territory that is memeology, addressing and displaying both the happy-cheery-cute side of memes as well as its darker side.

The video they have on their site documents their presentation and the word is out that they will soon craft something more like a stand-alone video-essay about Internet memes. As we wait for this next step in their project, this video is an amusing watch (though the interesting stuff starts about 3 minutes in).

Even if you are a facebook hater, we should be thankful for its invention just for this

Last week I was confronted head on with an uber cheerful person and he was clearly not undergoing this fine new treatment.

Ok, so I know many have come across this as it was featured on BB but I would like to archive it here so I can find it later. It was just so well done

I am sure this is making the rounds but this seems like an appropriate place for this list: If Programming Languages Were Religions. My favorite description:

Lisp would be Zen Buddhism – There is no syntax, there is no centralization of dogma, there are no deities to worship. The entire universe is there at your reach – if only you are enlightened enough to grasp it. Some say that it’s not a language at all; others say that it’s the only language that makes sense.

Speaking of computer languages and projects and religious holy wars, in the last few weeks I have been totally intrigued by the culture being built by the Ruby on Rails “guys.” As a researcher of Free and Open Source Software, I, like others, actually tend to see the similarities more than the difference between these two poles (in part because I focus on practice, not on the purist ideologies or two ideologues, you know who I am taking about) but it seems to me—-and I could be wrong here but I suspect I am not—-that Ruby on Rails is producing a unique Open Source culture, one that really diverges from some of the core principles of Free Software, much more so than other Open Source projects like Apache.

The rail guys as I have heard, are Open Source evangelists of a certain stripe, who are quite “cultish” (you know, it is “weird if you don’t use github, a Mac, TextMate).

What do you think of Ruby on Rails? Are the attacks fair? Are they a bunch of douchebags, as this (very incisive) post argues? Is it where Open Source meets and marries, for better or for worse, the Web 2.0 craze?

If I could clone me, this is definitely one line of research, I would love to dive into right now but since I can’t, your opinions would be greatly appreciated.

do-not-eat, originally uploaded by the biella.

America is a land brimming with paradoxes, one of them being our simultaneous obsession with freedom and rules. We purport to be the land of the free (and while this is and may not be true, we do hold steadfast to this idea). But we also love rules rules and rules, and wait there are more and more and more rules, too many rules, which often come in the form of the form of a sign, this one being one of my favorites. (shall not produce grease laden fumes?! yes, I think it was written by an academic).

So I appreciate small reminders that poke fun of and holes in our love of rules and warnings, such as the one I found on my new bamboo-based shirt, pictured above. I have taken a huge liking for bamboo shirts as of late (I am obsessed with the tactile and can only stand soft cloth, which is why I love bamboo-based cloth) and I ordered a few shirts of the Internet. I only noticed the “warning” when I pulled the shirt out of the dryer late the other night and it was by far one of the only times I smiled from left to right at 1 am when doing laundry. More people should take the time to plant these easter-egg type jokes as they are, I am sure, much appreciated.

Next time I have to explain why I (really) prefer dogs to cats, I will not provide an argument. Instead, I will point people to this video.

While the video is not an instance of joking, it is nonetheless a potent example of humor, at least in the way that the philosopher, Simon Critchley has defined it in his compact and very powerful (and very beautifully written) book, On Humour:

Jokes tear holes in our usual predictions about the empirical world. We might say that humour is produced by a disjunction between the way things are and they way they are represented in the joke, between expectation and actuality. Humour defeats our expectations by producing a novel actuality, by changing the situation in which we find ourselves…

This is a great little book filled with everyday wisdom though I have to say, this is patently untrue (at least for me).