I haven’t been reading much lately, so my list of things to look up or puzzle over is very short. All the scrap minutes during the day when I normally read are filled up making smudgy drawings with Brushes. I really don’t think I’ve used color this much since I painted excruciatingly detailed portraits of imaginary girls and women for junior high art contests. (“Overwrought.” Second prize.) I used to use water color as if it were gouache, dripping a tiny amount of water into the paint pans and loading a dry brush with as much pigment as I could get out of a crayola watercolor case, then coloring over and over in the same place, sometimes until the paper began to buckle and pill. One summer when we lived in a dreary suburb in Galveston, I made a studio in the windowless, unairconditioned attic space above the garage. I brought all the odd crusty paints and scrubby bits of chalk I could find and put them in jars arranged by color. I would sneak up there and pull up the ladder behind me, so that no one could find me and later I could truthfully say I didn’t hear anyone calling my name. With the trap door closed it was almost impossible to breathe but I loved it. I would stay there for hours in the 110 degree heat making chalk portraits of imaginary women with enviable hair. Not many survived because I thought they were ruined once I dripped sweat on them and no good anyhow, and usually scrumpled them up in a fit… I sometimes wonder why my parents didn’t encourage my and my sisters interest in the arts more. It could be partly because our family took for granted a certain degree of visual literacy; and partly because despite a family tree bristling with painters, there was always something suspect about the lifestyle of an artist. There’s no tidy structure of authority to rein you in if you get too crazy thinking your own thoughts all by yourself day after day…

A fine article in Time Magazine on Twitter.

And Oxford University Press lexicographers monitor Twitter. I’d be curious to see how these stats compare with daily conversation. I bet soon it will be reasonable to monitor such a thing. You might have a few days of throwaway data to begin with while people get used to forgetting they’re being recorded.

And another wacky financial data visualization. I’d like to see it with updated data.

Aspartame tastes like a robot’s bottom. But that’s not the point. I was reading an article that claimed to tell The Truth About it. It was a perfect example of what’s wrong with the scientific method or the flaccid facsimile that passes for it: “These claims by unscientific hypochondriac malingerers have yet to be proven, so go on eating this thing that you’re pretty sure makes you sick because that’s just anecdotal. Anecdotal evidence is not science and not actually evidence. Until it is substantiated by four peer reviewed double blind study published in one of three journals, it’s a pack of lies. (Also shut yer cantankerous trap about methodologies, it’s the peers and the publishing that count.) Since no one has any intention of conducting said studies, all anecdotal evidence must be considered part of a vicious campaign on the part of rabid housewives and disgruntled hobos to defame the glorious and benevolent conglomerates who barely break even selling us non food items to eat. Ergo aspartame should be considered perfectly safe. Feed it to your fetus and always remember that it’s not the product on trial; it’s you, the consumer, who is guilty until proven innocent.” That quote may not be one hundred percent accurate since I transcribed it from memory; nevertheless, I think it’s time to democratize science the way communication and media have been in the last few years. It’s a creaking, squeaking hollow machine about to cave in on itself.