Beginning with the understated observation that “The web is turning writing into a conversation,” Graham expands on Shirky’s themes on online communication. One consequence of dialogue is disagreement, which outpaces agreement online by a sizeable margin. He sets out a hierarchy of disagreement, stepping from the base of name-calling through layers of common fallacies (ad hominem, appeal to authority) on through more rarefied forms to ultimate direct refutation.

How to Disagree

After years of seeing the same patterns of low-grade argument used in email, Usenet, forums, and now blog comment threads, it would be gratifying to see any evolution of disagreement along the lines Graham describes.

(The related articles – “The Age of the Essay” and “What You Can’t Say” – are also both interesting reading.)

Simultaneously an epic undertaking, a staggering display of wit and craft (and patience), a useful reference to the huge collection of featured bands, and a paragon of flash reviewing as featured in Kevin Kelly’s "short is in". Earlier examples included the oft-hysterical Movie-A-Minute and Book-A-Minute reviews and the experimental "Mad Ape Den" three-letter-word writing project by an earlier GeekLife. Also, don’t miss Albert Eistein’s Theory of Relativity in Words of Four Letters or Less. 

Six-Word Reviews of 763 SXSW Mp3s by Paul Ford – The Morning News

As you might expect, the snarky comments ("Someone’s been eating Hall and Oatesmeal.", "Five seconds of music 120 times.") are much more entertaining than the complimentary. And yet when someone who has taken the time to listen and encapsulate 763 songs in a row then says "I’ve listened to this thirty times" it speaks volumes.

You can also grab the torrents and grade them yourself, but just like college radio, be prepared to swim through a lot of Meh to find the Awesome.

Following in the footsteps of A. J. Jacobs’ The Know-It-All in which the author devoted himself to reading the complete Encyclopedia Britannica, Ammon Shea has spent the past year reading the Oxford English Dictionary and will publish his experiences in Reading the OED this July. This first preview mentions some of the ‘absurd entries’ that he came across.

Absurd Entries in the OED

One example is a tautological pair that reads like a lexicographical snigger -

The entry for unpoetic gives no definition, but there is a note that tells the reader to ‘cf. next.’ The reader dutifully looks ahead to the next entry which is unpoetical, the definition of which reads ‘cf. prev.’

Others might be considered circumlocutive obfuscation, such as trondhjemite (“Any leucocratic tonalite, esp. one in which the plagioclase is oligoclase“) and disghibelline (“To distinguish, as a Guelph from a Ghibelline“). Yet ironically, when I posed the latter to my friend SW as a joke, she immediately started describing the differences between those terms – for as it happens, they are two warring factions from 12th and 13th century Italy…and she is a doctoral student specializing in art of the Italian renaissance. So maybe KA’s geology class will have covered trondhjemite (aka plagiogranite). For my part, I fondly remember getting Yggdrasil as a selection in a game of Balderdash and casting it as some kind of Yiddish, while of course knowing it as the World Tree from Norse mythology where Odin hung for nine days (cf. Gaiman’s American Gods).

Courtesy of Kottke, ran across this article in the New Yorker that recounts field linguistics work by Dan Everett that has tremendous implications for language study. The Pirahã tribe in the Amazon of northwestern Brazil reportedly exhibit a number of traits that not only undermine some of the tenets of Noam Chomsky’s universal grammar, but also resurrect the cultural acquisition theory of Edward Sapir and even aspects of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

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[KA was not totally swayed by my first pass on "code poetry" so, with her permission, here is the exchange that builds out the concept a bit more.]

These things are certainly possible but what would be missing, at least in my stubborn take on it, is the creative aspect that attempts to incorporate human emotion/experience/transcendence into the
supernatural, etc.

I try and take this on without instinctively defending what is really a fledgling idea, and not automatically assume that code can be poetry. But I will try and address some of your questions to see how far the idea can go.

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This started with a podcast I was listening to that mentioned Ruby, a relatively new programming language that emphasizes clean layout of its code as well as syntax that encourages simplicity and human comprehension. That plus code’s emphasis on line breaks, punctuation, white space, etc. struck me as a variation of my friend KA’s “poetry space” idea (“the idea that a poem can exist as a space for symbol that could not be understood in any other context…a closed system analysis”).

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