Some folks at Viz are having an interesting discussion about Will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” video which I blogged about below. Melanie also points to this hilarious (and somewhat frightening) parody in which the performers try to find three words from John McCain that can inspire as much as Obama’s “Yes we can”:
identifying top blogs
Marshall at Read/Write Web has a useful new post “Comparing Six Ways to Identify Top Blogs in Any Niche.” The real discovery for me has been the Ask.com Blog Search. For the last hour I’ve been looking at the results of a search for “education“—the link to Weblogs in Higher Education was worth the time. This will be a fixed reading for all courses where blogs are assigned, something I am doing more frequently as I try to better understand the relationships among multiple Web 2.0 writing spaces.
corn’s scheme for world domination
Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, "Playing God in the Garden" (which I used to give to my first year writing students when I was at Rutgers and now give to my Engineering writing students here at Rowan), and others, talking about the ecological implications and benefits of considering nature from the point of view of the animals or plants being observed.
Particularly insightful about Pollen’s discussion is his observation that despite our acceptance of Darwinian evolution, when considering our relationship with nature,we are still Cartesians: it is either nature or us, not both together. Ironically, if we consider our relationship with corn from the corn’s point of view, our Cartesian approach to planting more and more corn (to fuel our cars and sweeten our beverages) benefits the corn more than any one of us: the more corn there is, the better it is for the corn (which, naturally, is in competition with other grasses and trees and humans for space).
His discussion of the important role of feces in symbiotic farming for the generation of excellent soil is illuminating when taken next to Frederick Kaufman’s discussion of the re-egineering of human waste in "Wasteland: A journey through the American cloaca" (subscription required) from the February 2008 issue of Harper’s. Kaufman goes to places where one never wants to bring their nose to show just how far removed we have positioned ourselves from our waste (and how large corporations are making billions off of it). The two—Pollan and Kaufman—present compelling arguments for taking a more ecological perspective to our observations of and work with nature.
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series of concentric circles emanating from glowing red dot
Via information aesthetics, The Onion reports on "a series of centric circles [that] have begun emanating from [a] glowing read dot in the big blue area over [the newscaster’s] left shoulder." One of the funniest Onion videos ever, and a thoroughly wonderful comment on symbolic representation and the spectacle of news inforgraphics.
Breaking News: Series Of Concentric Circles Emanating From Glowing Red Dot