iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Re Amz customer profile: "Product Preferences: Consistently replenishes tennis consumables" ---> this is too much; we have to regulate this kind of invasive profiling

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Reposted by Jonathan Goodwin

doleful moo of a cow @oulipien.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I wrote a screed: www.wastebooks.org/posts/old-wi...

wastebooks.org

Old Wine in New Bottles

Nescire Aude

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Latest Miéville not on display in local Rouse's.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

It amazes me how some academics never learned from S&W!

"I. Only the dead, such is the satirist's declaration of intent. The product conforms. Juvenal attacks no person or group invested with power and influence; and the poems disclose no concern with matters of high politics in his own time. Themes and examples come out of the past, Domitianic in the first instance, turning later for supplement to the reign of Nero, to the 'luxuriam imperii veteris,' as he styles it (4.137)." (Syme, "Juvenal, Pliny, Tacitus" AJP, Summer 1979)

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

He must have been haunted by the future depicted in "Seven American Nights."

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

"Millions more who have never read the poem nonetheless know its story thanks to the 1984 song 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by the English heavy metal band Iron Maiden. [citation needed]"

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

See that Cosma Shalizi here was puzzled as well by the popularity of Warhammer 4k: bactra.org/weblog/algae...

bactra.org

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, May 2026

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

streaming popup asking me if I like the show I'm binging---surprisingly good question. They put those bits to use, after all. Consumer information I mean.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

"A senior C.I.A. official was arrested last week after investigators found hundreds of gold bars worth over $40 million stashed in his Virginia residence, a small fortune that he apparently brought home from work, according to court papers." $40m 'small fortune' per NYT style guide.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

It's a phased operation. Next is Canva. Then Cava. then (Ca)lifornia. Then all the C compilers.

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doleful moo of a cow @oulipien.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

www.wastebooks.org/posts/chu-au...

After following post-Kant English-languages discourses of authority and criticism to the present, Chu concludes by proposing that we abandon authority as a "governing concept" for criticism. She is very reassuring that doing so would not mean abandoning "the word authority", or "the authoritative style", or "scholarship, tradition, history, wit, or charisma". We will only "have to reckon with our longing for authority". This concluding thought, that overcoming the idea of "authority" in criticism means giving up exactly no actual critical practices, merely (merely!) the desire for someone to tell us what to think, to relieve us of the burden of exercising taste and discernment and thought, risking error, whatever error would mean when we have given up the idea that there is a fact of the matter about beauty, or about whatever aesthetic qualities of a work interest us, echoes the concluding thought of the first essay: "for who is to say if the critic is right? The rest of us, of course. The only measure of judgment is more judgment". Now to be clear, I think this is completely correct, just not quite as novel a call as one might have gathered from her presentation. One might even summarize it thus: the embrace of criticism à la Chu is "our emergence from our self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Sapere aude!"

There is no reason to insist on a false mutuality of reader and writer: it is odd, and probably not very ethical, to insist to the passenger that she is the one flying the plane. What the critic always knows for sure about her readers is that they are not, at this very moment, reading the book under consideration; they are reading her review of it. These are the only readers worth writing for: one’s own. I do not write to persuade the reader; I write to give her a chance to experience herself as the subject of thought, as if I am reading aloud what is already written on the inside of her own skull.

This is the view of her readers that a critic who wishes to give up the dream of authority has? Yes, the review-reading scene is one in which the reader cannot be assumed already to have experienced the work being reviewed, and the reader who hasn't does more or less have to take the critic at their word as far as the adequacy of their descriptions goes. That is as much as to say, to adapt Chu's metaphor, that the critic is the one presently at the controls. But we're all pilots here, ma'am. We are all, I dare say, capable of experiencing ourselves as the subject of thought!3 How can we reconcile idea that the reader of "Hanya's Boys" needs Chu to "give her a chance" so to experience herself with the idea that it's up to "the rest of us" to say if the critic is right, as she says mere pages later? The rest of us don't even know what it's like to think for ourselves, the poor dears. Belay that sapere aude!

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

The rumors that Nanaimoteuthis haggarti communicated telepathically and still broadcasts certain earworms and the kernels of whimsical posts from abyssal vents are just that---rumors.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

Light-source puzzles involving monsters in the dark are thin grue for players at this point.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

the pan aves --> pandemonium pathway well grooved, though I of course have no idea if allbirds is an id app, a restaurant, or some heretofore-unimagined thing.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

Mildly curious if the base rate literature has any conjectures that doctors are selected somehow for being bad at it.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

It does raise a question: are there novels that maintain the canons of probability but for a single Waffle-Haus teleport?

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

There's an analysis of the claude code leak going around that seems almost certainly written by one of claude's models. Short sentences getting shorter at the end of a paragraph, in a kind of reddit-cadence, that's the essence of online.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

Need a reliable heuristic for spelling "Gigerenzer"---can't even come close most of the time.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

Fisher's lady who tasted tea, Dr. Muriel Bristol, was an algologist, which is not in fact a student of sadism, unless you consider sustained attention to algae, their properties & doings, necessarily painful.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

I'm sure there are people who hear the story about Thales and the olive presses and think: you must be very smart indeed to make a lot of money.

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Reposted by Jonathan Goodwin

THE FAR SIDE DAILY @bot.cowtools.org · 25/02/2026

Various philosophies

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

I wouldn't mind a browser plug-in to convert paleontological species names in wiki pages to literal English equivalents: it would be easier to understand "beasthead" or "ugly dog teeth in cheek" or "lizard ass"---at least at first.

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Reposted by Jonathan Goodwin

Letters of Note @lettersofnote.com · 12/02/2026

Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

I see that I dutifully transcribed the name of the theologian Bultman as "Buttman" in several archival notes, shrugging it off as a Wilhelm Fucks-type situation, one imagines.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

Simon Newcomb, often mocked for denying the possibility of flying machines in 1903, wrote to Peirce in 1892 to note that it was pure nonsense to claim that one infinity was greater or less than another (www.jstor.org/stable/985195, p. 425)

jstor.org

The Charles S. Peirce-Simon Newcomb Correspondence on JSTOR

Carolyn Eisele, The Charles S. Peirce-Simon Newcomb Correspondence, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 101, No. 5 (Oct. 31, 1957), pp. 409-433

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

In an interview with one Steven Bannon, a certain figure in the news refers to Gell-Mann coining 'quark' from an "old poem" in the 1990s, which led to high-energy physics being defunded by the government.

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Reposted by Jonathan Goodwin

James Green @jamesrbgreen.bsky.social · 31/01/2026

While in California, Ian Watt asks Theodor Adorno how his day went

I remember one conversation with Theodor
Adorno when, after I'd said what I'd done that morning (checking out
some books from the library, going to the laundromat, etc.), and asked
"What about you," I was slightly chilled when he answered: "I have been
meditating on erotic and musicological problems."

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

Sure, historians of technology create cool new tech trees and write about the unquestioned virtues of the tech tree model, but they also have moments of: "did not involve the intercession of vulcanized rubber in the mingling of bodily fluids" (Edgerton, The Shock of the Old, p. 24)

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

The archaeologists' lament: the best stone tools always found in the hyena latrine.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

I once taught the Symposium in a FYW class at UF. I need an update from the bowties on whether that was good or bad.

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Reposted by Jonathan Goodwin

Scott Selisker @sselisker.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

New book going to press: *Character Networks in Contemporary U.S. Fiction.* It’s about social networks as context for—and formal element of—the novel. For contemporary lit, novel/narrative theory, DH, lit and sociology, network analysis crowds. Here’s what it’s about: (1/n)

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

The opening sequence of the pilot of NYPD Blue is very well written, though I could imagine a brief reference to the Portuguese Inquisition at Goa adding some gravitas.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

Watching a Japanese carpentry video---amazed at the level of craftsmanship and attention to detail. Reminds me of my approach to curricular and program assessment, outcomes, and strategic alignment, frankly.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

If we can't simply say "per-ee-frasis" for periphrasis, then pol-lik-ri-ses for polycrisis is all we cry and sees.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 24/12/2025

Gerald Heard noted, astutely, that UAPs were bees from Mars.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

Davenport to Laughlin on reading and completism: (hadn't heard this habit of Harry Levin's before, though I am Levin's Enkelschüler, if that is in fact the term):

"Reading opera omnia. You would be horrified to know how little I've read. Being a prof was a matter of reading the same things over and over. I'm trying to repair my ignorance. It was Harry Levin's practice to read ALL of any author, an ideal few can live up to, and why should one when there are authors who invite rereading and study? I would much rather have seen all paintings ever done, and all statuary." From Davenport's Letters to Laughlin, p. 220

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

[confidently] durophagy arises during the Lochkovian

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

Pluribus demonstrates one of the structural properties of SF: His Master's Voice turns into Solaris.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 20/12/2025

You can know that Bakhtin rates Rabelais highly and still be surprised by statements like the following from "Forms of Time and the Chronotope": "this extraordinary positioning of the ass in the novel is a feature of extreme importance."

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

Glance at wsj tells me "hockey romance" is trending. Cleo Birdwell invented and ended that genre, so not interested!

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

To be fair, "this opuscule appears to me utterly remiss" has been written by all peer reviewers of my various efforts.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

My version of @simonwillison.net's pelican prompt is "still from 1970s French farce showing Jack Kirby's Thor discovering his mistress Solange in bed with Loki." The buzzy model showed a figure much like Anton Chigurh recumbent while wearing a hornèd helm.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

There are games where you are killed by masked bravi hired by Cesare Borgia, but they are rare.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

"That thirst can be quenched by water as well as by spirits is, for the Parisian, an inconceivable idea" --M. Nordau, Paris Sketches.

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

"I don't want to be a professor." (S. Beckett, 1931)

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

Ask your personal trainers if they know Seneca's letter to Lucilius sometimes called "On Brawn and Brains."

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Jonathan Goodwin @joncgoodwin.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

I reposted a link to Knuth's latest fascicle, which contains a network graph of Anna Karenina from the Stanford GraphBase. The graph of Les Misérables is better known from d3 examples, I would guess, but don't overlook this important foray into character networks!

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