TheBlueNebula

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A limited but charming gallery of examples of aesthetic inferiority.

Museum of Bad Art

This research shows that going to lunch with other people may make you slow and inaccurate, but happy. The explanation seems to be something like, "Well, after all, you have to relax your standards to put up with those friends of yours."

How about Lunch? Consequences of the Meal Context on Cognition and Emotion

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"Things fall apart;
The centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" 

Doing It Wrong

With his Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, economist Carlo M. Cipolla demurred at the received notion of a  "self-evident" truth of human equality:  

"It is my firm conviction, supported by years of observation and experimentation, that men are not equal, that some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors."

Cipolla's Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

1. Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

2. The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

3. A stupid person is a person who caused losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be costly mistake.

5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

In this view, what we should be uniting ourselves against, whether as a community, society, nation, race, or whatever, is not drugs, crime, Godlessness, poverty or whatever, but rather stupidity.  However, to combat something that is truly a natural and endogenous characteristic of some individuals would entail social measures that should radically challenge our current political and ethical structures. Perhaps the political system that will supplant ours is the one that clears the egalitarian hurdle to better mitigate the inimical effects of human stupidity.

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

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This site's owner claims to be interested in calling attention to failures of critical thinking. It seems to me that it would be a failure of critical thinking to take all of the various unfortunate outcomes listed here as irrefragable failures of critical thinking 

I think a more pertinent question may be "What's the point?"

What's The Harm? 

This NOAA online tool offers a look at how extensively sea level increases may impact coastal property. Pair this up with the dire forecasts in a recent HuffPo blog "Coastal Cities are Doomed!" and you might just decide to pass up that deal on a timeshare near Cannon Beach.

So, Boston, NYC, and Miami are doomed. Bad news for sure! But "'tis an ill wind that blows nobody good," and according to NOAA's hokey visualization (zoom in to see the visualization icons), the Toledo Oregon Skateboard Park is destined (at 6 ft. above mean higher high water) to become a rather inviting-looking water recreation area.

The Egyptian Theater at Coos Bay is apparently a lost cause, however.

Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flooding Impacts

I kind of look at it this way. In eras past, the intellectual and material wealth of a civilization inhered in its achievements--its "great works." Today, however, we are somewhat more fair and egalitarian and such.

So, instead of giving one lady a Taj Mahal, putting up one guy's Great Pyramid, or interring one big shot's massive terra cotta army, we give more or less everybody a shot at an SUV, a smart phone, and a venti non-fat caffe caramel macchiato -- Did I say that right? -- (and we have pretty much determined that it's not a good idea to try to "consume" all of them at the same time).

Mass-produced consumer goods instead of unique Wonders of the World. Paradigm shift. Different measures of value.

What if Shah Jehan had said to his twenty-thousand artisans, "Hey guys, instead of building a monument for the eons, why don't you take all these materials we have assembled, the finest gems and stone gathered from all over the continent, and each of you just do something to amuse or impress your friends?" What if Khufu had commanded his 7000-strong labor force to render the giant limestone blocks into small representations of whatever was on their mind at the time? What if the master builders of Chartres had said, "Hey, you village peasant-types, here are some pieces of stained glass. See how many cute pictures of kittens you can make out of them."

Yeah, the historians of the future are going to have to adapt their discipline's techniques to include a robust capacity for intellectual waste management.

Hey, there may be some things of relative value in there, though. Who (except the historians of the future) can tell? Perhaps it's like that infinite monkeys and infinite typewriters theorem..Except that we are now dealing with around two billion . . . umm "monkey surrogates?" . .  and maybe about the same number of social media content input interface instances.

So yeah, it could take a quite a while before anything really valuable shows up.

Oh yeah, and what if the Ming Emperors, weary of many decades of costly maintenance, had opted for an ad-based funding model for the Great Wall of China? Just asking you to think about it.

Historians of the Future, Sorry About All My Photos Called DSC987234534.jpg or Whatever

I submit that social media content models, like living species, survive and compete by adapting to environmental and population pressures. The content-life-forms classified here as demolisticles suggest a lemming-like survival strategy that is not particularly effective and contributes little to the ecosystem as a whole.

To me, the interesting part is that, while broad appeal was often a critical success factor in pre-Internet publishing, recently social media have enabled content providers to realize a measure of popularity within very narrowly-scoped audience demographics. Such popularity does not emerge from intrinsic content value, but rather from specialized audience-specific references and relevance to a group identity.

40 Signs You Can Publish Any Old Crap Nowadays as Long as It's Well-Targeted 

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Some to read online, some downloads, even some audio book links.

Open Culture Free Science Fiction Classics on the Web

Thoughts While Studying at Hanlin Academy Sent to My Colleagues at the Chi-Hsien Academy

At dawn I hasten toward the Purple Hall,
At dusk I await edicts from the Golden Gate.
I read book after book, scattering rare manuscripts all around.
I study antiquity to search for the ultimate essence.
Whenever I feel I understand a word,
I close my book and suddenly smile.
Black flies too easily defile the pure,
A lofty tune like "White Snow" finds few echoes.
By nature carefree and unrestrained,
I've often been rebuked for eccentricity.
When the cloudy sky becomes clear and bright,
I long for visits to woods and hills.
Sometimes when the cool breezes rise,
I'll lean on railings and whistle aloud.
Yen Kuang angled in his T'ung-lu Creek,
And Hsieh K'e climbed his Ling-hai Peak.
When I finish my task in this world,
I shall follow them and try my fishhook.

--Li Po (trans. Joseph J. Lee)

From Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry