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The Miseducation of the Doodle
“Having exhausted traditional learning methods such as highlighting, note-taking, and rote memorization, Virginia chose to unleash a powerful, primitive tool that ultimately turned out to be her savior: The Doodle. Virginia decided to draw rudimentary visual representations of every concept in her Morrison and Boyd textbook. She deployed a problem-solving technique that defied conventional wisdom and all the academic advice she had received. And the story has a happy ending. Not only did Virginia ace her organic chemistry final and eventually become Dr. Scofield, she also became a celebrated immunologist, earning accolades for one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs related to HIV transmission. She credits much of her success, then and now, to her world-turning decision to doodle.
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Jehovah’s Witnesses: A Case Study in Viral Marketing
“By Pew’s analysis, Protestantism, Catholicism, and Mormonism are all net-negative: there are more people raised in the religious groups who have left, than there are people who have converted into the religious groups. Even Hinduism — which has the lowest attrition rate — is just breaking even. But Jehovah’s Witnesses are actually net-positive. Despite their heavy leakage, Jehovah’s Witnesses are the largest Christian group gaining American membership. They’re winners!
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Paved Paradise: Cemeteries in Parking Lots
“And it got me thinking: were there others like it? Surely this wasn’t the only time the deceased had stubbornly spoiled the aesthetics of a well-drafted parking lot. “
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Strategies for Coping with Information Overload, ca.1550-1700
“This article surveys some of the ways in which early modern scholars responded to what they perceived as an overabundance of books. In addition to owning more books and applying selective judgment as well as renewed diligence to their reading and note-taking, scholars devised shortcuts, sometimes based on medieval antecedents. These shortcuts included the use of the alphabetical index, whether printed or handmade, to read a book in parts, and the use of reference books, amanuenses, abbreviations, or the cutting and pasting from printed or manuscript sources to save time and effort in note-taking.
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“Half of the respondents (teachers) made a conscious effort to drink less while working, to avoid needing to use the toilet.”
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The Last of the Monsters with Iron Teeth | Carcinisation
“As a result, children’s society has less and less to do with the land around them – land which, anyway, they are unlikely to occupy when they become adults in our hypermobile society. Children’s society exists on the internet if at all, with raids in video games and chat rooms replacing geographically colocated monster hunts. (This is increasingly the case with adult society as well, which also lacks architectural and geographic support.) It should be noted that the internet is not the cause of these problems. Rather, the internet is the precarious reservation onto which culture has been driven, bleak and uncanny, inhuman in scale. And even the internet is increasingly monitored and reshaped by the same malignant tiling system that drove culture here in the first place. What will happen to culture when even this frontier is closed?
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As he lay bleeding, Noll raised the phone and snapped a selfie.”
“The alarm sounded as he headed upstairs. When she fired, he could smell the gunpowder.
As he lay bleeding, Noll raised the phone and snapped a selfie.”
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Things to Come – Futility Closet
1946 Internet-ish prediction
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10,000 Eyes to See Through — Backchannel — Medium
“At the FlyEye site you scan a huge video wall that shows you a feed from every person out in the streets who is sporting a meshed GoPro or Google Glass wearable video camera. Thousands of them. All 4K, of course.
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