Fan Is A Tool-Using Animal—dConstruct Conference Talk “But the fanfic people were doing something very different. They had converged on a set of elaborate tagging conventions that allowed them to turn Delicious into a custom search engine for fanfic.” “In my foolishness I asked, “Could you make me a list of those features? I’ll take a look, maybe some of it is easy to implement.” Oh yes, they could make make a list. I had summoned a very friendly Balrog.” “Here I’ve shown a paragraph where someone asks me if I can build a user search feature, and I reply at length about why that’s not trivial. At that point someone decides that it’s easier for them to just go build the feature on the spot. They set up a little app in Heroku that mapped Pinboard usernames to Delicious usernames. In the time it took me to explain why I couldn’t build the feature, someone did it for me and stuck a hyperlink into this document that is spiraling out of control.” @ddmeyer The other interesting analogy to the MTBoS I like is pinboard/fanfic: https://t.co/q9XVxshFUs tags: #fav folksonomy tagging fan construction weekly tag knowledge structure bookmarks thoughtvectors fanfic The Echo Chamber “how do folks continue to ignore facts? How have people’s viewpoints become so insular and isolated that any […]

Tool use in crocodylians: crocodiles and alligators use sticks as lures to attract waterbirds | Tetrapod Zoology, Scientific American Blog Network “As described by Dinets et al. (2013), Mugger crocodiles Crocodylus palustris in India and American alligators Alligator mississippiensis in the USA have both been observed to lie, partially submerged, beneath egret and heron colonies with sticks balanced across their snouts. Birds approach to collect the sticks for use in nest building and… well, let’s just say that it doesn’t end well for the birds. If the crocodylians really are using the sticks as bait to attract their bird prey, this is tool use, since the sticks are objects that are being employed for a specific function.” tags: animal crocodile tools tool science adaptation weekly How meaning comes to technology: PCR at 30 | Jean-Baptiste Gouyon | Science | theguardian.com “More than a technique, PCR is a concept, that enables molecular biologists to think in new ways of their object of study, DNA, to ask genes new questions. Opening the way to new experiments, it literally frees the imagination. Some even use PCR machines as fridges. After all a thermocycler is nothing but an intelligent heating and cooling block. It can be set on 4ºC for 48 hours, to conserve the result of an experiment over the week-end. ” How meaning […]