gazette or worth-1000

Here is a thoughtful essay from veteran blogger Jason Kottke that expands on the lingering and drawn-out obituary and eulogizing of blogging as a form of communication that have been steadily eroding the format for sometime.

It's really thought-provoking and Kottke is being a gad-fly in demonstrating how journals and journalism are being splintered into different presences and personae spread along a variety of specialised platforms that are very compart- mentalised and don't communicate very well with one another. Taking any usual type of sharage to task, one would probably not describe the activity or announcement as web-logging—or writing. Surely no one old school gets to gauge quality by virtue of formatting and window-dressing alone, since expression is a plastic and ever-evolving thing and means are just media. It seems to me however, there is an important distinction with a blog that lies in the difference between what one might list as a hobby, a project (or a passion or a living), and what one might list as a habit, an interest.

haus am see or sugarcubes

This isolated structure located on the Icelandic island of Elliðaey is actually a lodge established in the 1953 just as the last permanent residents were leaving for the mainland.  

As the sustained isolation made it not an ideal place for ranchers and fisherman, a group of hunters had the lodge built, though called the Bjork Hús it has nothing to do with a grace-and-favour residence being granted to the singer Björk Guðmundsdóttir for being a national treasure or for making Iceland famous, as a place to gather for annual puffin-hunting expeditions—which would not be an activity that I would like to have my name connected with. The pictures of the place are really breath-taking, however.

narrative-arch or denouement

Fast Company presents an interesting study in the grammar of comic strips and finds that the human mind interprets the funnies, according to their established conventions, as a distinct lingual system.
The brain probably makes its own ways of making sense or following a story or a message presented in any venue or format and comics offer a good test subject as there are measurable elements of predictability from the set-up to the punch-line and when presented with irregular panels the departure was registered as jarring, like a linguistically value but non-nonsensical construction. I suppose there are too many variables within the plastic arts, a meme for example, to understand how it might be comprehended—or got.

toy breed or companionship task

A Scandinavian laboratory, which has introduced such products as a rocking chair battery charger, a hovering lamp that follows one around and a cloud for indoors, now purports to be working on a device to translate the barks and whimpers of ones pet dog to human language by triangulating the electro-encephalograph readings with a known canine lexicon and special adaptive software (sadly, the link is not working any longer so perhaps the experiment folded, bad, bad host). Though I don't know whether a talking dog (imagine the frank and uncensored admissions and the obligatory conversations and ethical considerations) would necessarily be an improvement on the current relationship that we enjoy with animal friends, I think it is absolutely fantastic that such mad scientists exist and are there and with a sandbox to be kick-started.