Big Big Question

Do you suppose spam is actually just the God of the Internet’s way of saying “make a new post already, dammit?”

Is there an underlying karmic infrastructure to the internet?  If not that, precisely, what other latent metaphysical metaphors do you think could apply to the blogosphere?

For some unknown, magical reason, you will be able to have one hour of alone time with President Elect Obama.

What conversation would you have with him? What would you ask for? What would be the most important thing that you’d want to convey to him?

In my ideal world, I would have portable phone, music player, GPS, with unlimited storage (stored securely and redundantly online somewhere) that would hold all of data and programs.

I would be able to approach any computer/terminal and that computer would auto-magically (blue tooth or wirelessly) access my data and programs for me so I could be running my desktop anywhere from the little device in my pocket.

Come on engineers, get to it.

Classic chatfilter: who (living or dead, fictional or non-, go crazy) would you like to have over for dinner? Why?

Language acquisition is an amazing, and amazingly complicated, process. We learn to speak essentially by accident, starting at an age when we’re not competent to feed ourselves or change our own clothes. Which is pretty awesome.

But it’s also a process prone to errors. We pick up phrases incompletely, or incorrectly, and then walk around for years saying this or that wrong. For all intensive purposes, it’s a doggy-dog world, and so on. Eggcorns, they’re called, and everybody’s had (and likely still has) some.

What’re yours? Any specific horrifying revelation memories?

Telephones are beyond ubiquitous, but some people spend a lot of time on them (by choice or by necessity) and some hardly use them at all. Which makes me wonder:

Do you remember when you first started using a phone regularly?
Did you like talking on the phone from an early age? Did you dislike it? Why?
Have you ever done phone-heavy work? Did you get into it on purpose? Did it change your non-work phone habits?

What major or minor errors or faux pas did you make in your early days of using the Internet? Any embarrassing moments or behaviors?

I first got online in 1998. At one time I started noticing that a lot of search results I got were from some site called “wikipedia.” Being the naive little teenager I was, I assumed it was some kind of Wiccan encyclopedia.

Though unfamiliar with the term, I once created a sockpuppet at a major online forum (not Metafilter). I was called out in approximately 0.0001 milliseconds.

Does anyone really use the “high priority” flag on email other than spammers and jerks?

If you could ask one question, big or small, of (your preferred, for this exercise, conception of) God, and get a straight, thorough answer, what would it be? Why that question?

Taken from Lifehacker: What books have truly changed your life? I’m not talking about books that you thought were mind-blowingly excellent – I mean books that have changed the way you think or made you change your life.

I’ve found myself in a few discussions about just how permanent web content is, and how permanent it should be, and what folks expectations on that front are. It’s a big question, and I’m curious what sort of take you folks have on it.

What do you expect to stay around? What do you not count on? Why? Is how you things see right now how you’d like to see them? Where do your feelings on this come from, historically?

Etc. Go crazy.

If you’re a newspaper reader, are the obits a part of the paper you read daily? Occassionally? Never?

If you read them, why?

If you don’t read them, why not? Does it simply not occur to you to bother, or do you actively avoid them?

And, given that Netcraft has confirmed the imminent death of the printed newspaper, will reading the obits go the way of the rest of print media? Will online obits have the same feel? How do you suppose the change in how people get their news will affect this niche issue in the years to come?

It occurred to me that if we do find some kind of life on another planet, our first instinct is probably going to be try and communicate with it.

What if it is an animal with the intelligence equivalent of a dolphin, horse, or a cat?

It seems to me we have an extremely long way to go with “communicating” with cats and the like, how in the world can we expect to converse with an equivalent alien being?

Would it behoove us to make more of an effort on human to animal communication?

How do you handle panhandlers? Do you give cash? Do you feel guilty about it, either way? Are you actually helping, or just enabling, and is that a bad thing?

tabula rasa?

What are some really short phrases that you find deeply meaningful, moving or powerful?

On a lighter note than “This too shall pass”, I’ve always thought this was a brilliantly funny entry into the Five-Word-Acceptance-Speech contest:

“Fools! Release the giant robot!”

Yesterday and this morning, I’ve been involved in the zillionth argument of my life about words. I have these arguments (not generally the angry kind) all the time. They generally take this form:

Someone: Word X means Y.

Me: I guess it does to you. That’s not what it means to me. To me, it means Z.

Someone: Well, then you’re wrong. It doesn’t mean Z; it means Y.

Me: How can I be wrong? Do you mean my definition is non-standard? That most people mean Y and I’m going against the social default?

Someone: No, you’re just wrong. Word X MEANS Y.

At this point, if I question further, Someone either doesn’t want to talk about it any more, or he starts using mystical language that I can’t parse, e.g. “Words carry energy with them, you know.” Sometimes Someone brings up word origins. If you study linguistics, you learn that most origins are pretty murky. But even if they’re crystal clear, linking a word’s meaning with its origin is like linking a building’s purpose with its designer’s original intent: “You can’t move your car factory into there! In the 1930s, that building was built as a warehouse for storing cork!”

To me, it makes complete sense to use words in standard ways. But that’s just a matter of utility. It makes communicating easier. It says nothing about what words MEAN in some cosmic sense.

I guess it also might make sense to defer to some sort of authority, like a dictionary. But I don’t see how we — as a culture — can agree on a specific authority. I think that would be hard to do even within a small circle of friends. Imagine saying, “Whenever we argue about what a word means, let’s agree to go with whatever’s in the New Heritage Dictionary.”

Even if meaning just implies conventional meaning, why are people SO sure they know the consensus. “When most people say ‘Democracy,’ they mean blah blah blah…” How do you KNOW? Have you taken a survey? Based on my conversational experience, as a talker and as an observer, words are very fuzzy and meanings slip all the time from person-to-person. That’s one of the reasons we have so many conversational confusions.

Where does this idea come from, that words have fixed meanings? Why do so many people believe it?

If you believe it, why do you believe it? If you believe my “fuzzy” view is wrong, why is it wrong?

Who is your current cell phone carrier, and what do you like and dislike about them?

Say you were spending one night in a haunted inn that is located at the center of an ancient English stone circle. Supposing that ghosts, spirits, and so on exist, what would you do, say, or bring to provoke an encounter?

Is doing something repulsive well a valuable kind of art? What merit do you see (or not see) in refined, skillful ugliness in graphic art, music, writing? Does a mastery of something unpleasant make it more reprehensible, or subvert its reprehensibility, or both?

What piece of art (door wide open for what qualifies) has most struck you relevant to these questions? What has caught your eye, or makes your point?

Not all people, granted; in fact, it only occurs to me because I personally love ‘em. But there are a lot of folks out there who react negatively to puns or even to the abstract notion of puns. Where’s all this wordplay animus coming from? Did puns beat someone up as a kid?

The internet will never be free of spam and shilling and astroturfers — human nature plus a profit motive is a pretty resilient thing — but are we past the worst of it, or are we just in the eye of the storm?

Are things going to get worse? What ground do you see the spammers making? Or are the hard problems solved and it’s all going to get better from here — gmail’s apt handling of email spam-filtering as a promising sign for the future?

Lousy novel?  Awful non-fiction?  Horrific columnist?  What’s the worst piece of writing you’ve spent time on in the last year or two?

Setting aside the pat answer of “because we can”, where does singing come from?  Why do we do it?  What’s the story with bursting into song?

Everybody’s got a mother, and everybody knows yo mama jokes. They’re classics but they’re also fight-starters — yeah, it’s just a joke, but you better not talk about my momma, etc.

Why are the reactions to these jokes so complicated? What makes yo mama jokes funny, and what makes them offensive, and how do those things overlap?

Humans seem to like to give advice. Some more than others (Mary Worth, we salute you), but at the base of it it seems more or less universal. It’s also free, in theory, and valued accordingly. But!

But sometimes advice isn’t just as good as you paid for it. Sometimes it’s bad. Really bad.

So what’s the worst advice you’ve ever gotten?

It’s a bad cliche and a weekly truth for folks working on a M-F schedule: nobody likes Monday. The weekend is over, the workweek recommences; things left dangling on Friday have to be caught back up with; next weekend could literally not be further away.

But is the notion of Monday’s badness — so celebrated (and is this a distinctly American thing? Distinctly Western?) in pop culture — something we collectively trump up and colloborate on just to have something to get together against? Is Monday made better for us by an unspoken agreement to see it as awful?

When (and how, and why) has the border between art and the Real World broken down? If life imitates art, what are some examples of life doing so in a particularly notable fashion?

Accepting as a given that (a) nearly everyone has engaged in some language-related grousing in their lives, and that (b) most of us are aware that this strange half-discipline, this “peevology“, is more about the pleasure of grousing (and even blogging) than anything more righteous and defensible…

What are your language / grammar / usage / paralinguistic peeves? And where did you pick them up? Do you remember when any specific bit of usage first began to drive you crazy — or when you first stopped taking it so seriously?

Have you ever seen a peeve develop in someone before your very eyes? Or, more on the side of the angels, successfully fought one down?

AskMe Chatfilter rescue mission:

In case of nuclear holocaust, alien attack, meteor strike, superflu pandemic or other world-wide catastrophe, how might survivors (in a very specific set of circumstances, discussed after the jump) communicate?

Hat tip to kbanas; more preamble/detail in his deleted question if you’re hungry.