Boing Boing’s Iceland correspondent reports on a wonderful and antithetical response to the scourge of off-shoring and out-sourcing (and indeed even proxy-wars) in the plan, having already secured parliamentary endorsement, to make the country a designated safe haven for the freedoms of expression and information.
Previously we’ve looked into how emojis are rendered differently across different platforms, a sort of diglossic code-switching between sender and receiver, should they have different devices, but here’s a deeper, academic investigation into the potential for misinterpretation by the differences in emotion, sentiment that they signal. Hannah Miller’s thesis abstract is pretty interesting. Via Kottke’s latest batch of quick links, one supposes that through this study (provided that competition extends into the future and allows the time needed for dialogues and regional accents to foment) the way the symbols are used might fracture from the mother language into increasingly non-mutually intelligible and distinct languages, sort of like the Romance tongues emerging as splintered versions of Latin.
Happy Mutant Rob Beschizza relays the news that the venerable but faded internet pioneer Yahoo! (the backronym above) is being courted by the UK’s broadsheet, the Daily Mail.
At first, I felt the perennial (or ephemeral) disparagement that I always put off having held the same email address the past two decades. I admit I’m a little protective of my virtual address, although I am recognising that the two tabloids probably are very deserving of one another, running the same sensational, catch-penny content and attendant sponsored content. In the end, the change in management, if it comes through, probably won’t signal a change in mentality that has not already been slipping for some time. What do you think? One ought not expect rewards for loyalty—and lethargy in not wanting the inconvenience is surely its own, but the steadfast have been receiving less and less in return.
There was a 2001 episode of The Lone Gunmen, a spin-off series from the X-Files, titled as above (after its parent’s flair for headings, though probably even the most dedicated fans could only conjure up “Post-Modern Prometheus”) above the government’s suppression, at the behest of the petroleum industry, an automobile that could run on water. The inventor and the Gunmen, however, ended up destroying the prototype over the realisation that having cars with unlimited mileage on a free and limitless resource would see the entire planet paved over.
This reasoning is a perfect illustration of what’s called the Jevons effect (or Jevons’ paradox)—named after the English economist William Stanley Jevons—positing that while technology might increase the efficiency of using a resource (the steam-engine and coal in the original case), progress in the long run does not lower consumption as growth, facilitated, increases demand. Scholars are still not sure whether these conditions hold or are unsustainable—a sort of moral panic for ecologists, whether the Gunmen were short-sighted in their assessment or whether, prescient, the move towards tele-presence would have been stifled without scarcity—but the warning is certainly a fair one, to be ignored at one’s own peril. No condemnation of progress or pursuit of greater production, similar unintended consequence might be said to arise out of diet (guilt-free) foods or bracketing a motorway with more lanes that only leads to more congestion. What do you think? Did Jevons take the right tack or was taken the underprivileged view that progress would always be steam-powered?
