Cyberflanerie: Miscellaneous Neat Stuff Edition

Write Your Own Academic Sentence

Apparently the latest mind-blower is an Interactive Dynamic Shape Display.

Those British pod-like self-driving thingies. (Once again, hat tip to Marginal Revolution).

Who would have thought? A major Mexico collection in Hawaii.

Wordoid a creative naming service. (Which reminds me of Write Your Own Academic Sentence.)

Write Your Own Academic Sentence

Oh, Karma, you are just so fab.

And oh, such very bloggable bee loafers. (For socialite apiculturalists?)

Nancy Marie Brown on Icelandic Witchcraft.

Chip Kidd says Good is Dead. Well, OK.

Write Your Own Academic Sentence

More anon.

Cyberflanerie: New (and Not New) on the Blogroll Edition

New:

Heribert von Feilitzsch's Mexican Revolution Blog
By the author of the deeply researched paradigm-smasher In Plain Sight: Felix Sommerfeld, Spymaster in Mexico.

Marginal Revolution by economists Tyler Cowan and Alex Tabarrok
Nerdy surf candy galore.

Richard Goodman's Geezer Journal
(He's a writer and uyy, he moved into the French Quarter.)

Kurt Hollander's DF Death Blog

Not New (But I am Reminding You):

Querétaro's Own Burro Hall
Hot tamale (and sometimes just evil) sense of humor, Mexican beauty contestants in bikinis, Franci the super-perisistent Mexican photo dude, and the cutest, sweetest little 'ol pug.

Burro Hall's Soulful Señor Pug

Nicholas Gilman's Good Food in Mexico City
Like the title says.

Leslie Pietrzyk's Work-in-Progress for writers
Check out her online magazine Redux's 100th piece, a superb and riveting essay.

Nancy Marie Brown's God of Wednesday
All things literarily Icelandic.

Rachel Laudan: A Food Historian's Take on Food and Politics
Always thought-provoking. Check out her recent post, "The Grain Chain."

Rice Freeman-Zachery VoodooNotes
Zingy and zany creativity plumper.

COMMENTS

Cyberflanerie: Tabarrok on the Emerging Servant Boom

Over at Tyler Cowan and Alexander Tabarrok's excellent & ever-effervescent Marginal Revolution blog, Tabarrok notes the emerging servant boom. 

My take on this issue: Yes, it looks like economic polarization is sending us back to the Victorian age, somewhat, which does not bode well. But there's a big difference between now and the 19th century: cheap information changes everything.

Ponder the implications:

1. When a US family member had to have a live-in nurse, this nurse, who happened to be from a small town in the Philippines, casually mentioned that she had, from her cell phone, uploaded a photo of my relative's "super cute" dog, which was resting on the bed, to her facebook page. 

2. I live in Mexico City where most of the maids come to work with a cell phone. Increasingly these have cameras and wifi capabilities. 

3. Emerging information-rich intermediaries may change the dynamics between employer and servant and quite dramatically in the direction of customer and peer provider. I am not just talking about the growth of age-old British nanny providers and home health care agencies, but Task Rabbit. And one big service in this category is dog walking. Read what the NYT had to say about adding information to that. The other is Ikea furniture assembly. Of all things.

Cyberflanerie: Bug-A-Salt, Dave Meslin, Margaret Dulaney, Digital Tattoos, Tyler Cowan, Gene Logsdon

Salt is the new bullets! For your Texas BBQ, the Bug-A-Salt.

Remove that cement block to get up off the couch: Dave Meslin's TED Talk: "The Antidote to Apathy"

Inspired sandwich accompaniment: Margaret Dulaney's "Listen Well" podcast, "The Lean of the Dog"

Juan Enriquez's TED Talk on how to think about "digital tattoos"

(I was horrified when I logged in one day to facebook from an "unrecognized device" and facebook made me answer a multiple choice test to identify-- from faces circled in photos on their fb pages-- several of my personal friends. There was M on vacation with her children, B reading in a bookstore.... eeeeeeeeew.)

Yummy brainy surfing: Tyler Cowan's Marginal Revolution blog, like a bin to root around in, lots of good stuff in there.

Guess the Beijing poobahs don't have fond memories of the 60s: "The Contrary Farmer" Gene Logsdon's take on the latest Chinese mass boondoggle