Seven Quick Takes - Blogging Around

I've been enjoying reading everyone else's blogging so much, I've yet to finish any of the half dozen posts in my drafts folder. So instead, here's a taste of what I've been reading.

1. 

One of my favorite news pieces this week. Believe it or not, this headline is not from The Onion.

Man angry his photo was used to show all hipsters look alike--then learns it wasn't him

A man threatened to sue a technology magazine for using his image in a story about why all hipsters look the same, only to find out the picture was of a completely different guy.

The story in the MIT Technology Review detailed a study about the so-called hipster effect — "the counterintuitive phenomenon in which people who oppose mainstream culture all end up looking the same."

The inclusion of a version of a Getty Images photo of a bearded, flannel-wearing man, tinted with a blue and orange hue, prompted one reader to write to the magazine: "Your lack of basic journalistic ethics in both the manner in which you 'reported' this uncredited nonsense, and the slanderous, unnecessary use of my picture without permission demands a response, and I am, of course, pursuing legal action."

But it wasn't actually him. 

2. 

In all the fun of laughing at the hipster who couldn't tell that a generic picture wasn't actually him, I don't want to miss pointing you to the original piece the picture ran with, titled The hipster effect: Why anticonformists always end up looking the same, which concludes,

Hipsters are an easy target for a bit of fun, but the results have much wider applicability. For example, they could be useful for understanding financial systems in which speculators attempt to make money by taking decisions that oppose the majority in a stock exchange. 

Indeed, there are many areas in which delays in the propagation of information play an important role: As Touboul puts it: “Beyond the choice of the best suit to wear this winter, this study may have important implications in understanding synchronization of nerve cells, investment strategies in finance, or emergent dynamics in social science.”

Go and read it, and then, if you find the topic at all interesting, go pick up this fun little novel by Connie Willis, which plays with chaos theory and group trend patterns in highly entertaining fashion, sweetened with a dollop of romantic comedy.

3.

I don't even remember how I stumbled across the following blog, but every once in a while the pseudonymous Latin scholar/medievalist author of A Clerk of Oxford points to some weird and wonderful piece of the past that resonates across the centuries. For example, this piece on the demon Titivillus, who collected sinful words.

From a glance at the Middle English Dictionary's entries for jangler and janglen, you can see that this concern about harmful words was a very wide-ranging one. It covers all classes of people, from bishops to schoolboys, and all kinds of destructive speech: snide carping, drunken boasts, unnecessary arguments, ignorant gossip, and many forms of excessive, wasteful words. Since the onslaught of email and social media in the past few years, it has sometimes felt as if our culture is drowning in words - billions of words, most of them of no lasting good to anyone, and many of them actively doing harm. (Appropriately, you can see in the MED entry that one of the uses of jangle was to refer to birds' chatter, to which noisy human speech, then as now, was often compared, and so 'to twitter' is in fact one of the definitions of the word.) But perhaps it felt the same in the Middle Ages.

And a few pieces from my fellow bloggers:

4. 

From DarwinCatholic, some thoughts on Earth's "hopeful monsters": us.

We should see each person, not as another problem, but as another solution to the problems which face humanity.

5. 

This whole blog renewal thing had me catching up with some of the backlog on my feedreader, including this next piece that Erin from Bearing Blog wrote last month, pointing to St Francis de Sales as a guide to true self-care.

I love St. Francis de Sales's tender regard for the human self, not a kind of disappearance of the self in favor of the divine, but recognizing the value of the human person as a creature that can be taken up to participate in the divine.   

6. 

My friend Deirdre wrote on grief and grieving:

Burying the dead is a corporal work of mercy. Praying for the dead is a spiritual work of mercy.  Life is pain, and anyone who tells you anything different is trying to sell you something. (Hey, it’s  canonical work of scripture now, right?)   Instead, we live in a world that has rejected the rituals of mourning from ages past. The Victorian rules may have been elaborate, but they had a point. 

7. 

The last panel in this Wondermark strip sums up my productivity problems fairly well. 

Happy blogging!

Kate