Today’s worthless word of the day is “codswallop: nonsense, drivel; rubbish.” This made me look up wallop (the name of the MS project) and learn that it means “to hit with force; to thrash soundly; to beat by a wide margin; to move with reckless or disorganized haste.”

Sometimes, words just humor me… if you wallop with a cod, you get reckless rubbish that hits with a force. Hmmm…

Of course, i still like the fact that YAFRO stands for Yet Another Friendster Rip Off. Not nearly as eyebrow raising, and utterly to the point.

I’ve been in school all of my life. School has *always* had finals right before the holiday of the big fat white man in red adorned by the green guys in tights. The shrinking of the days is always aimed at finals. And as much as i pretend to prepare for that period of the year, i’m never prepared. And thus panic sets in. Panic hit today. The next 10 days will be hell.

Liz has a great article today on why graphic design is *not* essentially harmless.

All too often, technological/graphical designers have come to believe that they are working towards the *best* interface, as though there is a universal good. They fail to remember that design is culturally and politically situated. [If this is a foreign idea to you, check out some of the materials from Nancy Van House’s course – social construction of technology, configuring the user, bias…]

Love to Adbusters.

Here’s a great feature-style article on Friendster that shares anecdotes similar to what i’ve seen.

Note the Buzzlife community memorializing one of its own through Friendster. (When you can search on Friendster again, check out Sean Wisniewski’s profile.)

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Today, i was reminded of a parable that means so much to me. I remember the roots as being Hindu, but Google seems to have a million versions of it, so i’m not sure of the details. (What on earth do you do when Google is internally inconsistent? ::giggle::)

“The world rests on the shoulders of an elephant.” “What does the elephant stand upon?” “The elephant stands upon the back of a turtle.” “And what does the turtle stand upon?” “Oh, after that, it is turtles all the way down.”

Infinite recursion, closed nonorientable surfaces. Everything is interpreted… interpretations built on interpretations. No beginning, no end. No eternal truth, only process. The perfect mantra for all of my techno-“soci/anthrop”ology discussions lately. Chew on turtles for a day and the world looks much more whimsical.