>…the Empire of Mediocrity (is) successfully spreading its tentacles everywhere.
>
>Anthony Bourdain. Medium Raw.
This scares the shit out of me. This is why the media/communication landscape is shifting so rapidly. It’s the Empire of Mediocrity, not anything about information wanting to be free. The Market is speaking. It wants mediocrity. Blandness. Unthinking familiarity. It’s not about The Shallows or anything like that. It is about the selection and reinforcement of brainlessness by the masses.
> While studying the paleo-environment of a fossil-bearing site situated near Franceville in Gabon in 2008, El Albani and his team unexpectedly discovered perfectly preserved fossil remains in the 2.1 billion-year-old sediments. They have collected more than 250 fossils to date, of which one hundred or so have been studied in detail. Their morphology cannot be explained by purely chemical or physical mechanisms. These specimens, which have various shapes and can reach 10 to 12 centimeters, are too big and too complex to be single-celled prokaryotes or eukaryotes. This establishes that different life forms co-existed at the start of the Proterozoic, as the specimens are well and truly fossilized living material.
The U of C has had a really great bike shop on campus for awhile now. It’s been fantastic having access to a fully equipped bike shop - although I’ve only needed it a couple of times, knowing it was there was a huge comfort.
Was.
It’s getting the boot at the end of July.
Hopefully we can find a new home for the Bike Root on campus. Perhaps the Student’s Union can find/make some space? It’s pretty crappy for the U to kick the shop out, without having a backup space available. Yes, I know it was a short term pilot project, but the shop was a huge success by all accounts. Closing it, or forcing it to move off campus, is a huge step backwards in the efforts to make the U of C bike friendly.
Alan gave a great opening keynote at CeLC2010, making the case for quiet revolution (or at least innovation and change) within existing institutions. Time to turn up the heat…
