Ordinary Affects is an exercise, not a fact. I like this very much.

Ordinary Affects is a singular argument for attention to the affective dimensions of everyday life and the potential that animates the ordinary. Known for her focus on the poetics and politics of language and landscape, the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart ponders how ordinary impacts create the subject as a capacity to affect and be affected. In a series of brief vignettes combining storytelling, close ethnographic detail, and critical analysis, Stewart relates the intensities and banalities of common experiences and strange encounters, half-spied scenes and the lingering resonance of passing events. While most of the instances rendered are from Stewart’s own life, she writes in the third person in order to reflect on how intimate experiences of emotion, the body, other people, and time inextricably link us to the outside world.

Stewart refrains from positing an overarching system—whether it’s called globalization or neoliberalism or capitalism—to describe the ways that economic, political, and social forces shape individual lives. Instead, she begins with the disparate, fragmented, and seemingly inconsequential experiences of everyday life to bring attention to the ordinary as an integral site of cultural politics. Ordinary affect, she insists, is registered in its particularities, yet it connects people and creates common experiences that shape public feeling. Through this anecdotal history—one that poetically ponders the extremes of the ordinary and portrays the dense network of social and personal connections that constitute a life—Stewart asserts the necessity of attending to the fleeting and changeable aspects of existence in order to recognize the complex personal and social dynamics of the political world.

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From Wikipedia:

Harvey Bernard Milk (May 22, 1930 – November 27, 1978) was an American politician and the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Politics and gay activism were not Milk’s early interests; he did not feel the need to be open about his homosexuality or participate in civic matters until around age 40, after his experiences in the counterculture of the 1960s.

Milk moved from New York City to settle in San Francisco in 1972 amid a migration of gay men moving to the Castro District in the 1970s. He took advantage of the growing political and economic power of the neighborhood to promote his interests, and ran unsuccessfully for political office three times. His theatrical campaigns earned him increasing popularity, and Milk won a seat as a city supervisor in 1977, a result of the broader social changes the city was experiencing.

Milk served 11 months in office and was responsible for passing a stringent gay rights ordinance for the city. On November 27, 1978, Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by Dan White, another city supervisor who had recently resigned but wanted his job back. Conflicts between liberal trends that were responsible for Milk’s election and conservative resistance to those changes were evident in events following the assassinations.

Harvey Milk advocated for the fair treatment of all people, consistent with the beliefs of religious peoples such as Christians, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, or anyone else who loves the US for what it originally set out to do: allow its citizens the right to practice and believe how they wish – treat others the way they’d want to be treated – to live and let live regardless of our differences. It is those differences that make this culture a rich one, unrivaled in its depth.

For that, we owe Harvey Milk a respectful nod for helping us to keep this ship of fools off the rocks of prejudice, discrimination and hate even if for just a bit longer.

Cheers to you, Harvey. And thank you.

If you haven’t yet seen Sean Penn’s brilliant film, Milk, it is beautifully done:

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Jim Rossignol is an interesting fellow, particularly in the context that he writes in a unique way about gaming and its influence on culture. Not to mention, the trajectory and contrast of his own story against what he writes makes him an authentic source IMO.

I am anticipating the arrival of his book, This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities published by the University of Michigan Press.

Amazon’s product description reads like this:

“In May 2000 I was fired from my job as a reporter on a finance newsletter because of an obsession with a video game.

It was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

So begins this story of personal redemption through the unlikely medium of electronic games. Quake, World of Warcraft, Eve Online, and other online games not only offered author Jim Rossignol an excellent escape from the tedium of office life. They also provided him with a diverse global community and a job—as a games journalist.

Part personal history, part travel narrative, part philosophical reflection on the meaning of play, This Gaming Life describes Rossignol’s encounters in three cities: London, Seoul, and Reykjavik. From his days as a Quake genius in London’s increasingly corporate gaming culture; to Korea, where gaming is a high-stakes televised national sport; to Iceland, the home of his ultimate obsession, the idiosyncratic and beguiling Eve Online, Rossignol introduces us to a vivid and largely undocumented world of gaming lives.

Torn between unabashed optimism about the future of games and lingering doubts about whether they are just a waste of time, This Gaming Life also raises important questions about this new and vital cultural form. Should we celebrate the “serious” educational, social, and cultural value of games, as academics and journalists are beginning to do? Or do these high-minded justifications simply perpetuate the stereotype of games as a lesser form of fun? In this beautifully written, richly detailed, and inspiring book, Rossignol brings these abstract questions to life, immersing us in a vibrant landscape of gaming experiences.

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In my quest to learn to translate between Fahrenheit and Celsius quickly and accurately, I’ve put this handy calculator here to help me and also to enable me to cheat until I can do it on my own. Type a value in either field below and its equivalent will populate the other:

I *borrowed* this bit of javascript code from NOAA so I should thank them appropriately : )

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Some of us have been capturing video since the beginning via Cycorder on the 2g. The 3G had little or no differences in its capabilities from the 2G. That isn’t the case with the 3Gs.

First, there is a distinct advantage to the 3Gs due to its frame-rate capabilities. 30fps beats the snot out of 15fps any day of the week under any conditions. Double it!

Since this capability is tied to hardware, in this case the processor in the 3Gs has a significant advantage, in addition to the camera itself being upgraded. The example below shows that the difference is clear.

This demo was put together by iPhoneArena [thanks, man]:

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Douglas Coupland’s new book is due in September of this year:

In the near future bees are extinct—until one autumn when five unconnected individuals, in Iowa, New Zealand, Paris, Ontario, and Sri Lanka, are stung. Immediately snatched up by ominous figures in hazmat suits, interrogated separately in neutral Ikea-like chambers, and then released as 15-minute-celebrities into a world driven almost entirely by the internet, these five unforgettable people endure a barrage of unusual and highly 21st-century circumstances. A charismatic scientist with dubious motives eventually brings the quintet together on a remote Canadian island. But their shared experience unites them in a way they could never have imagined.

Generation A mirrors the structure of 1991’s Generation X as it champions the act of reading and storytelling as one of the few defenses we still have against the constant bombardment of the senses in a digital world.

Wind power has already sparked a clean energy revolution, however, a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science finds that wind power could provide for the entire world’s current and future energy needs.

In order to estimate something like the planet’s capacity for this, researchers first sectioned Earth into areas of ~ 3,300 square kilometers while surveying local wind speeds every six hours. According to the paper, if 2.5 megawatt turbines crisscrossed the planet, excluding “areas classified as forested, areas occupied by permanent snow or ice, areas covered by water, and areas identified as either developed or urban”, this would work. The possibility of 3.6 megawatt offshore wind turbines was also considered, though restricted to 50 nautical miles off the coast and to oceans depths less than 200 meters.

Using this criteria researchers found wind energy could supply not just the world’s energy requirements, but over forty times the world’s current electrical consumption and over five times the global use of total energy needs.

Good news – thanks, Slashdot

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