Some extremely obvious reflections on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz

It’s all connected. Yesterday was the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. I don’t believe I had any relatives at Auschwitz, but members of my extended family did die in the Holocaust. They also died because of anti-semitic conscription during World War I in the Austro-Hungarian empire (in fact, this is the reason my mother’s …

Is It Time Yet to Talk About the Conservatism of German Media Theory?

At least in the circles where I travel, Anglophone importers haven’t really reckoned with the political conservatism of so-called* German media theory. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young has a few good lines on the subject in Kittler and the Media, but I have not found a systemic critique, and there is little discussion. At this historical moment, when …

How to delete Adobe Acrobat MS Word Add-in for Mac desktop apps

Just because I lost two hours to this yesterday and it’s hard to find this information online* hopefully this will pop up in the search engines. Search in finder for the file linkCreation.dotm and then delete it. Reopen MS Word and the problem should be gone. This works on MacOS Mojave; I haven’t tested elsewhere. …

Hypersensitivity Phenomenology, or Touch-and Learn with Hand-Foot Syndrome

So I appear to have the “hand” part of hand-foot syndrome. It’s a relatively mild case, as hand-foot syndrome can be so bad that it’s painful to touch anything with your hands or impossible to walk. In my case, it’s just in the hands. I’ve got the tight skin, tingling and burning, and extreme sensitivity …

Advertising makes the internet worse; here’s what that means

I remember standing in Microsoft Research New England, talking with a few brilliant mathematicians and computer scientists. Twitter had just started including ads in their feed, and there was much grumbling and surprise. I responded that Twitter only had a few choices–fewer, given that they were giving away their service for “free.” A quick look …