In some sense, these collected netnews postings ought to paint a full portrait of my interests and character... but I suppose they really don't.
You can see my fondness for simple living in posts on the psychology of frugality, on the idea that educators should be pursuing 'lo-tech' not hi-tech, on why I like ascii art, along with various ascii maps I've made. My interest in ascii-art also comes into play in my 'warlords' posted to alt.fan.warlord, where they make fun of people's .sig files, and in my explorations of how we can use ascii to represent emphasis in new ways. I also used ascii-art to present a glimpse of my new symbolic language called AntiMath.
My varied esthetic tastes are reflected in praise for the spectacularly corny Bollywood musicals (from Bombay), a Hollywood novel called Shadows on a Wall, my favorite zine, Sidney Suppey's Quarterly and Confused Pet Monthly, and a Lynda Barry mini-faq. Roseanne fans may enjoy my Seven Beckys FAQ (humor).
My particular tastes are less evident in several surveys I collated: best female voice (from alt.music.alternative.female), when-was-the-first-music-video, and 'nonfiction pageturners'.
I also repost others' best netnews postings to alt.music.category-freak (my private best-of group), alt.best.of.internet, or alt.usenet.reposts.
As an unregenerate hippie, my countercultural leanings are apparent in two essays on 'The Changes' of the Sixties: From Cat Ballou to Barbarella and The 1964 Democratic Convention. I got some interesting answers on sci.archeology about the prehistory of corporate conformity. My sympathies for the Unabomber [I've HTMLized his Manifesto, not DejaNews, though] are qualified in my inquiry, Is Ted Kaszinski nuts?. I summarize a biography of media-mogul Ted Turner, and explore some new metaphors for evolutionary ethics, the role of 'self-credibility' in corporate mindcontrol, Hollywood without sex, and the Jesus Seminar on the origins of the New Testament.
My critiques of academia include an expose on the 'Career-Limiting Move', a debunking of the value of classics, and various critiques of the social sciences, summarized on this site (also non-DejaNews). Some threads: Novel = Robot, The Virtual Adam = Leopold Bloom?, quantifying literary progress, literary indications as a unit of literary progress, The Naive Witness and the Human Sciences, The Wisdom in the Words, The Naive Witness and the Wisdom of Words, and the human sciences, without denial.
I see artificial intelligence as a useful antidote to, eg, semiotics, and I see computer simulations as fundamental to the future of the scientific method. Every so often I bait the materialists on sci.skeptic for being too 'Skeptically Correct' (as the science equivalent of political correctness), eg on the phenomenon of sparkling eyes, or a thought-experiment on the atmosphere, or various new ideas in science. Another meta-thread here was about the claim that a given idea 'seems solid'.
Other science topics include a simple explanation of how TV works, the psychology of typos, reverse-engineering the brain, a critique of neural nets from an evolutionary standpoint, and a simple model of how nerves evolved. More complex topics on bionet.info-theory include the semantics of memory molecules and the evolutionary costs of behavioral complexity.
More abstractly, I've pondered the role of pornography in the Internet's success, an alternative history in which Apple's HyperCard included WWWeb-like Internet capabilities in 1987, exposed discrepancies in Lycos's URL-counts, proposed a solution to the problem of postings more than 80 columns wide, and challenged a local poser to explain PGP encryption (additional scattered odds and ends of this). My review of the Millenium Whole Earth Catalog centered on its Internet coverage.
Other DejaNews threads can be found in my wings for AI, James Joyce, and hypertext, and my draft page about politics.
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