Category Archive

Starting Over. Again.

Quinn Warnick02.2013Digital Self

I built my first website, an online version of my university’s literary journal, in 1999. Actually, I convinced my much smarter roommate to build it for me, then I duplicated his template, copied and pasted each story or poem from QuarkXPress into NotePad, and added a few basic HTML tags. And boom — we were live on the web. I was … Read More

Why an end-of-the alphabet last name could skew your grades
"Wang and her two co-authors analyzed over 30 million grades at a large university that uses the most popular LMS, which is called Canvas. They calculated that surnames starting with U to Z were docked a little more than half a point (0.6 points) on a 100-point scale compared with A-to-E surnames."
Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art
Ted Chiang, in the New Yorker: "The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world."
Smithsonian Open Access
Great resource for media artifacts: "Welcome to Smithsonian Open Access, where you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to more than 4.9 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 21 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo."
How it feels to get an AI email from a friend
Neven Mrgan: "I definitely do not want small talk and relationships outsourced to server farms. This stuff shouldn’t feel hard or taxing; it’s what our presence here on Earth is mostly made up of. The effort, the clumsiness, and the time invested are where humanity is stored."
The Comfortable Problem of Mid TV
James Poniewozik, in the NY Times: "What we have now is a profusion of well-cast, sleekly produced competence. We have tasteful remakes of familiar titles. We have the evidence of healthy budgets spent on impressive locations. We have good-enough new shows that resemble great old ones. We have entered the golden age of Mid TV."