I learned about this Tumblr blog where people try to summarize their PhD dissertations in the style of xkcd’s “Up Goer Five” comic—that is, “using only the ten hundred words people use most often”. There’s an online text editor that checks whether you’ve strayed from these thousand most-common words.
Inspired by this blog, here’s my attempt to summarize my dissertation (Koszul and generalized Koszul properties for noncommutative graded algebras) in “Up Goer Five” style:
Let’s consider two morally problematic actions:
Surreptitiously taking photographs of women, or stealing them from the women’s Facebook pages, and posting them on a forum with the explicit intent of having you and your buddies leer at said women.
Unmasking the identity of a person who participates in a forum pseudonymously, against that person’s wishes.
The last few days, since a reporter at Gawker did action (2) to the moderator of a forum dedicated to (1), I have been trying to imagine a reasonable system of ethics under which (1) is acceptable but (2) is not.
Someone tried to leave this comment on my blog:
Aug 21st 2012 – Interior decoration is a matter of pleasure or stress, depending on how you look at it. This technology is brand new and has only been around for the past 6 months. The flight is scheduled according to the needs of the passenger at his or her own pace complete with any stops or side-trips that may be requested.
Aja Romano chronicles the demise of LiveJournal. (It’s still around, but far less busy than during its glory days.)
I joined LiveJournal in 2001 and used it pretty heavily until the mid- to late-noughties. It makes you wonder if Facebook will still be as popular as today in, say, 2020. (Of course, the Eff Bee has a lot higher market penetration than LJ ever did.)
About a year or so ago, I took my journal down from LJ’s servers.