Some highlights from what I have been reading this weekend:

1. The Deification of Hugo Chávez, by Xavier Marquez (Abandoned Footnotes), a Venezuelan who teaches political theory and political science at Victoria University of Wellington.
2. A long essay on interaction rituals, by Randall Collins, professor of sociology at University of Pennsylvania:
   

   IR theory is an explanation of what people will think, as well as what they will do. At any particular moment, people are speaking certain words or thinking certain thoughts; the thoughts that go through one’s head are internalized from previous talk with other people; more innovative thoughts are assembled out of the ingredients of verbal ideas already internalized. The world is a network of conversations, and what people think at any point in it is a product of what has circulated in previous conversations.

   It has interesting applications for entrepreneurs, companies and startups. In my personal experience, the most successful companies I worked for where the ones who had the best organizations and cultures. They also were the most innovative and the less competition-shy ones, but that was as much an effect as it was a cause of their success.

3. My friend Ilaria Mauric reports her experience attending a UX course at Cooper U (in Italian): intro, day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4.

1. Online comments hurt science understanding, study finds. A meta-proof that science articles are the perfect troll bait.
2. Slavoj Zizek: I am not the world’s hippest philosopher! To me, Zizek —as a public figure, not for the content of his work— feels a bit like Houellebecq:
   

   “My big fear is that if I act the way I am, people will notice that there is nothing to see. So I have to be active all the time, covering up.”

   A orderly-crafted public image of disorderly behavior.

3. The Post-Productive Economy. On Industrial Revolution vs. today’s Information Revolution.

1. Five Jobs in Reading. Interesting tale from America poorest town.
2. Of Malevolent Democracies and Benevolent Autocracies: A Very Short Quantitative History of Political Regimes. Data science applied to regime analysis.
3. Ford equips Engineers with MakerBots, cheap desktop 3D printers.
4. Causal Universes, or why Harry Potter’s Time-Turners violate the quantum hamiltonian operator. In short, it’s geek porn.