We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Edu-blog

· E

noun. An education oriented blog. Also: Edublog

September 16th, 2002 | Comments are closed

Slashdotted

· S

tr. verb. To have your blog mentioned on Slashdot.org.

Also see: Instapundited

Usage: “Omfug! Our hosting server has just used up the whole month’s bandwidth in the last 12 hours! We must have been slashdotted!”

September 16th, 2002 | Comments are closed

Google bomb

· G

verb. To intentionally insert words or phrases into as many blogs as possible to increase the ranking on the Google search engine. Held by some to be a form of ‘meme war’.

(coined by Adam Mathes)

September 16th, 2002 | Comments are closed

Ego-googling

· E

verb. Looking up one’s own name in Google to check on its prominence. Also: e-googling or self-googling.

September 16th, 2002 | Comments are closed

Old media

· O

noun. Newspapers, magazines and major network television. Also see: Dead-tree media.

September 16th, 2002 | Comments are closed

Dead-tree media

· D

phrase. Paper newspapers and magazines, also known as Old Media. Also: ‘on dead trees’.

September 16th, 2002 | Comments are closed

Pilger

· P

verb. To destroy facts in a ‘John Pilger’ fashion, to ‘pillage’ the truth, poor or no fact checking, wild accusations, conspiracy theories etc..

(coined by Auberon Waugh)

September 16th, 2002 | Comments are closed

Violence is violence

· Children's issues

Alice Bachini is a blogger in her own right and supporter of Taking Children Seriously

Think about this: your husband decides that you need to go to the dentist. He drags you there against your will, and orders you to have a tooth extracted. You don‚t want the treatment. He threatens you, then strips half of your clothes off, in full view of everyone in the waiting-room, forces you down onto your front, and starts hitting you painfully on the exposed parts of your body.

The wrongs of the case of the man who was convicted for smacking his daughter as mentioned by Natalie Solent on her blog go much deeper than smacking and whether it should be prosecutable. Of course, I think that violence against children should be illegal if violence against adults is illegal, which it is. But I don’t know how much laws about it will help children in the current climate. A law change might even damage children more than they are being damaged already, if it results in people they want to have around being forcibly removed from their homes, for example.

There is a correlation between bad coercive parenting and smacking, but it is perfectly possible to be extremely damagingly nasty without smacking, and (theoretically, at least) above (the not-very-impressive) averagely useful to your kids while habitually tapping them lightly on the wrist if they do something you don‚t like (although IME this kind of pointless exercise is not actually the most of it).
→ Continue reading: Violence is violence

September 16th, 2002 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)

How to die in an airplane

· Aerospace & Astronautics

More from my webwanderings. This is from sashinka, who is one of the other bloggers that the Guardian bloggers like.

One of the other students revealed [that] adopting the Brace Position during airplane emergencies does not improve your chances of surviving an impact. What it does do is preserve the location of your teeth in proximity to your mortal remains in order to aid forensic odontologists in corpse identification.

That sounds horribly true to me. Sashinka got it from somewhere (don’t know where) in a blog/website/virtual place called Methysalicylate. Most blogs go up and down, but Methy-etc. scrolls sideways. Well why not?

September 16th, 2002 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)

Warblog from the front lines

· Afghanistan

It’s not quite MASH but it’s blogging from the war zone. Thanks to Instapundit for this one.

Staff SargentSanchez appears to be almost as heavily armed as our own Perry de Havilland!

September 16th, 2002 | Comments are closed

Not what you would expect

· Science & Technology

The September 2002 issue of Scientific American contains a truely amazing statement in “Clocking Cultures’ by Carol Ezzell:

Levine and his colleagues have conducted so-called pace-of-life studies in 31 countries. In ‘A Geography of Time’, published in 1997, Levine describes how he ranked the countries by using three measures: walking speed on urban sidewalks, how quickly postal clerks could fulfill a request for a common stamp, and the accuracy of public clocks. Based on these variables, he concluded that the five fastest paced countries are Switzerland, Ireland, Germany, Japan and Italy; the five slowest are Syria, El Salvador, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico. The US, at 16th, ranks near the middle.

I don’t know about you but… Ireland???? I suppose this means everyone emigrates from here to New York City for the laid back lifestyle?

September 16th, 2002 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)

To Protect and Serve (criminals)

· UK affairs

Are you an anti-social thug? Do you enjoy terrorising your neighbours? Stealing from them? Generally making everybodys else’s life a hell? Do you sometimes long to live in a country where you can just destroy other people’s property and get away with it scot-free?

Well, then I suggest you come and live in Britain:

“Three men collared a teenage thug who hurled a brick through a window — only to end up charged with Kidnap”.

It gives me such a warm, fuzzy glow inside to know that I live in a country where the police won’t lift a finger to help you and you daren’t lift a finger to help yourself.

[For non-British readers the word ‘nick’ in the article headline is a British slang for ‘bust’]

September 15th, 2002 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
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