Joel's humanistic blog

As mentioned by dorkbot's founder, NYC meeting organizer and sexy geek douglas irving repetto earlier today, he has just replaced the static dorkbot logo on the dorkbot home page with my animated GIF version assembling the several alternate-color-schemed logos douglas had previously created. Though I've contributed in various small ways to dorkbot over the years, this is a true honor! And I think it's the perfect encapsulation of the dorkbot spirit that an animated GIF, whose frames are images created by douglas with an old-school analog pen plotter, joins a BLINK tag on a webpage that's remained in plain-vanilla HTML all these years while waiting for the world to catch up with it. Posted with Blogsy

Here's the perfect opportunity for aspiring  libertarian op-ed writers  to follow  Murray Rothbard's lead  in getting into the opinion section of The New York Times : send in a response to the newspaper's weekly "Invitation to a Dialogue" feature.  I've floated the general idea of having libertarians coordinate on responding with letters to the editor  before , but this feature is particularly suitable for unconventional contributors due to being specifically aimed at soliciting contrasting responses from across the political spectrum to each week's piece (which makes it even more of a letdown when a promising topic gets a weak response).  And while the usual contributions make it clear that New York Times  regular columnists have no monopoly on  banal authoritarianism , this week's opening letter  Invitation to a Dialogue: Skipping 12th Grade  is a surprisingly Paul Goodman-esque  "practical proposal"  "to break the rigi...

From this morning's David Brooks column : Likewise, many teachers have an intuitive sense that different students have different learning styles: some are verbal and some are visual; some are linear, some are holistic. Teachers imagine they will improve outcomes if they tailor their presentations to each student. But there’s no evidence to support this either.

Les Misérables : everything Americans know about French revolutions. The Big Lebowski : everything Americans know about the New Left. Monty Python and the Holy Grail : everything Americans know about anarcho-syndicalism. Monty Python's Life of Brian : everything Americans know about leftist sectarianism. Posted with Blogsy

At 92YTribeca. It's been a while since the ultimate fan project has been shown in the NYC area, so this is a rare opportunity for Indiana Jones buffs!   Posted with Blogsy

FDR was closer than the Koch brothers to being a real-life Duke brother. Posted with Blogsy

As part of a fresh start for the new year, I decided to finally try out Tumblr (as a supplement to, not a replacement for, "regular" blogging on this blog and elsewhere). My currently-very-work-in-progress Tumblr is here .

New Girl:  This week is the second week of its second season. dorkbot:  This week is the second meeting of its 0x0cth season . New Girl: Adorkable. dorkbot: Adorkable. New Girl: Has a theme song written by Jess. dorkbot:  Has many theme songs written by dorkbots . New Girl: Rocks a lot of polka dots. dorkbot:  Rocks a lot of  pen plots . New Girl: Stars the pinup of williamsburg . dorkbot:  Created by a top 10 sexy geek . New Girl: Has inspired many animated GIFs. dorkbot:  Has a BLINK tag on the front page .

This Saturday, the Friends of the Modern School is having its 40th annual reunion  at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey to commemorate a unique anarchist educational experiment and utopian community.  This event may be of interest to those in the New Jersey/New York State area interested in alternative education, anarchist history, utopian intentional communities, and/or freethought. I've written more on the general background of the Modern School here and all of the coverage of the Modern School on this blog is here .

After a long stretch of tapering posting quantity followed by inactivity, I'm finally returning to regular blogging. For now, I'll be posting at this location, though I am considering a move, but I intend to post on a regular basis. It's a very different online world from when I started this blog in 2005, less blog-centric but much larger, and it's a good time to start afresh.

This weekend, NYC's IFC Center is showing John Carpenter's cult favorite Big Trouble in Little China at midnight on Friday and Saturday as part of a series of Carpenter midnight screenings.  And an item on the screenings is currently running as the top front page news item at the Big Trouble in Little China fansite The Wing Kong Exchange as a result of "BTLC fan Joel" sending it in!

Something I'm pretty sure I didn't expect to see when I flipped through today's New York Times op-ed page: a detailed plot summary of an op-ed writer 's "favorite children's book" by Frank Tashlin, who has a strong cult following among both fans of his live-action movies and animation buffs who know him for his relatively brief but influential period working on the Looney Tunes (and the book in question was later adapted into a cartoon at MGM, not Warner Bros., but made by Termite Terrace alumni Chuck Jones and Maurice Noble): The situation reminded me of my favorite children's book — "The Bear That Wasn’t," by Frank Tashlin — in which a factory is built around a bear while he is hibernating. When the bear wakes up, no one believes that he is a bear; everyone is certain that he is a malingering factory worker "who needs a shave and wears a fur coat." The bear keeps protesting, "But I am a bear." Ultimately, his confidence...

Well, I'm still figuring out how to use it, but at the beginning of the new year I finally stopped holding out and got an account .

This Wednesday, December 1, dorkbot-nyc is having its 10th anniversary meeting with a special extra party : The 37.8.4-th dorkbot-nyc meeting and 10th ANNIVERSARY PARTY will take place from 7-10pm on Wednesday, December 1st, 2010 at Location One in SoHo. THIS IS OUR 10TH ANNIVERSARY! COME HELP US CELEBRATE! Wear a homemade suit! Wear a crazy dress! Wear your jeans and a t-shirt! DOESN'T MATTER! Come hear three old-timey dorkbot pals rant and rave! Eat some pizza and drink some beer. Bring a cake?!? Bring some blinky lights! Just bring yourself?!? WHATEVER YOU WANT! It'll be a semi-normal dorkbot meeting that morphs into a casual party/celebration of 10 years of world-wide dorkbot nerd-on-geek action. Meeting starts at 7pm, party continues until 10pm.

Ethan Persoff has just announced the completion of The Realist Archive Project , in which the complete run of Paul Krassner's legendary and rare satire/freethought/conspiracy underground magazine has been scanned and posted online. Jesse Walker describes "the lost bridge between Mad and Wikipedia" (with a bonus find of a letter to the editor from a then-conservative Karl Hess): In 1958 Paul Krassner set out to create a Mad magazine for adults. He was well-qualified for the task, being both a former Mad contributor and, in fact if not always in spirit, an adult. The result was The Realist, a journal whose great innovation was to refuse to label which articles were journalism and which were satire, and sometimes to add just enough truth to a piece of fiction that readers would be left completely befuddled as to what, if anything, they should believe. Some call it a prelude to the underground press. I call it a prelude to the Internet. Over a three year period, a quarte...

I couldn't resist combining Google's John Lennon birthday doodle with another famous line drawing portrait:

The announcement for the 38th annual reunion of Friends of the Modern School , coming up this Saturday at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, has been posted . The Friends is an alumni association for people associated with an anarchist school and colony which was at Stelton, New Jersey (near current-day Piscataway), and the reunions are open to interested members of the general public.

Well, it's been a while, but after a hiatus, I'm back to blogging! I'm currently doing some long overdue housecleaning, and expect to get back on a semi-regular posting schedule.

This Wednesday, dorkbot-nyc is starting the first meeting of its 10th season; as I described it in my post about its 5th anniversary, "its motto, 'People doing strange things with electricity', gives the impression of what to (un)expect. Its dorky arena includes almost anything within the wide bounds of electronics, including both hardware and software, with a square emphasis on low-budget, do-it-yourself, personal projects. The results are geeky, goofy, technical, off-beat, and as wacky as the presenters' personal interests". This promises to be an exciting season; the previous one saw the introduction of a Vimeo account that has videos of some of the presentations.

There's a new video interview with Noam Chomsky (a transcript is also available), based on an open submission thread on reddit, that includes a question about anarchist strategy posed by Roderick T. Long (using the handle BerserkRL, which I find amusing to hear Chomsky read out loud in the video interview; it's the third and final question, starting at 15:40 in the video, and is slightly condensed for time but otherwise similar to the version originally posted on reddit, although the reference to Kevin Carson didn't make the cut; hat tip to commenter "Joel" , not me, on Roderick's blog). Chomsky has been one of the most well-known and intellectually respected anarchists in the world since coming to fame in the late 1960s and early 1970s with articles like "Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship" and "Notes on Anarchism", but while he's always advocated for a stateless society as the ultimate goal, his shorter-term political strategies a...