Friday, December 04, 2009

Doxology

Michael Langan's short film about tennis balls, dancing cars and God. Or something like that.

Thursday, December 03, 2009

Fueillade's Les Vampires

Damien Walters

Super Parkour

Grant Morrison Biopic

Grant Morrison gets the biographical documentary treatment by director Patrick Murphy.



Money quote: "Is this world hell? I've said it before, this is the part of heaven we're able to touch."

“His life is just as interesting as his work,” said Meaney. “In the ’90s, he went through an abduction experience, where he was taken outside of time and shown the nature of the universe. He used The Invisibles to explore the ramifications of that experience, and even lived a crazy rock-star lifestyle that was largely intertwined with that of King Mob, The Invisibles‘ main character.”

Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Hot Stuff

The Jung Red Book arrived today. Beautiful, beautiful book. It looks like a wizard's diary, which I suppose is what it actually is.

Monday, November 30, 2009

Confabulation

Jonah Lehrer on Tom Stafford on confabulation, the process of making up stories as seen inpatients with frontal lobe damage. Also seen in normal people as we go about our daily lives, lying and making crap up, the way we do.

Oh, Catullus, You are a Pistol

"Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo" A quote from a Roman literary spat recycled for a sexual harassment suit. What was Catullus going on about?

Friday, November 27, 2009

Kanye Hands

by Barats & Bereta

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Necessity is the Mother of Invention

Thomas Friedman on the greening of China:

China’s leaders, mostly engineers, wasted little time debating global warming. They know the Tibetan glaciers that feed their major rivers are melting. But they also know that even if climate change were a hoax, the demand for clean, renewable power is going to soar as we add an estimated 2.5 billion people to the planet by 2050, many of whom will want to live high-energy lifestyles. In that world, E.T. — or energy technology — will be as big as I.T., and China intends to be a big E.T. player.

“For the last three years, the U.S. has led the world in new wind generation,” said the ecologist Lester Brown, author of “Plan B 4.0.” “By the end of this year, China will bypass us on new wind generation so fast we won’t even see it go by.”

I met this week with Shi Zhengrong, the founder of Suntech, already the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels. Shi recalled how, shortly after he started his company in Wuxi, nearby Lake Tai, China’s third-largest freshwater lake, choked to death from pollution.

“After this disaster,” explained Shi, “the party secretary of Wuxi city came to me and said, ‘I want to support you to grow this solar business into a $15 billion industry, so then we can shut down as many polluting and energy consuming companies in the region as soon as possible.’ He is one of a group of young Chinese leaders, very innovative and very revolutionary, on this issue. Something has changed. China realized it has no capacity to absorb all this waste. We have to grow without pollution.”


Greening is a seriously smart business strategy, because it cuts risk and improves the performance of the inputs of production. We'd better get to it sooner, rather than later, or we're going to be puffing hard to catch up.

Peter Mandelson's Very Bad Plan

Cory Docotorow takes apart Mandelson's plan to ban filesharers from the Internet.

There's a lot to hate about Peter Mandelson's controversial Digital Economy Bill, but there's one provision that perfectly captures the absolute, reality-denying absurdity of the whole enterprise. That titbit is the provision that holds the Bill's most drastic measures in reserve, only to be used if Britain's illegal filesharing doesn't drop off by 70% within a year of the main part of the Bill coming into force.

The idea that, at some time in the future, the volume of unauthorised copying will somehow drop off at all (let alone by an astounding 70%), is, frankly, barking. For that to happen, Britain's general capacity for copying would have to decline faster than the increase in the British desire to make unauthorised copies.

Alice's Restaurant

Arlo Guthrie live.


As an interesting side note, I once shared a transatlantic flight with a speed metal band called Implements of Destruction. Nice guys, actually.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Emanuel Derman at Bloomberg

On Fisher Black, plus Spinoza, Keynes's insight into Newton, and the difference between models and theories.

Key line:

"Intuition is a merging of the understander with the understood."

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Gifties

Coilhouse is really on a roll this week. They've got a roundup of great indie Christmas/{insert your holiday here} gifts.



Will Wheaton's selling "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot" mugs, and his brother Jeremy's got dancing seal mugs.



Weta's got rayguns.



And Tom Gauld has a new print of "Characters for an Epic Tale".

So, now you know what to get me

Immanuel Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement

"The Drastically Condensed Awesome Version"

It's a hell of a lot better to watch Douglas Wolk explain this in five minutes while showing slides of, viz. Wolverine with a severed ear on a claw, than it is to read Kant in translation or, God forbid, the original, which is written in the kind of philosophical German that delights in its own impenetrability, and which conveys the sense-experience of having one's head parboiled. True that.



(via Coilhouse)

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Prophets

And a friend shall lose his friend's hammer. And the young shall not know where lyeth their fathers' things that their fathers put there just the night before...

Friday, November 20, 2009

Fixing the Schedule

Cal Newport describes the benefits of the fixed schedule approach to time management, so you too can get everything done in 40 hours a week, if you're gritty enough.
Scrawled on a whiteboard in the conference room of Collins’ Boulder, Colorado office is a simple formula:

Creative 53%
Teaching 28%
Other 19%

Collins decided years ago that a “big goal” in his life was to spend half of his working time on creative work — thinking, researching, and writing — a third of his time on teaching, and then cram everything else into the last 20%. The numbers on the whiteboard are a snapshot of his current distribution.

Evolving in Real Time

About 200 years ago, a member of a tribe in New Guinea that practices funerary cannibalism developed a mutation that protects against kuru, a prion disease transmitted by consumption of the brains of the deceased. The protective mutation has been passed down through inheritance ever since.

(via boingboing)

The Future Is Now, Vol LXXVII: Cortical Simulation Advances


Using an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer, scientists in California simulated a cortex with approximately 6% of human complexity, "that exceed[s] the complexity of the cat cortex".
Not representing a full cat cortex, as has been described elsewhere--a subtle but important distinction. It's going to be one thing to do a large scale simulation with an appropriate number of neurons and connections, and quite another level of difficulty to do a specific type of brain. Still, this is moving ahead nicely.
Update: Markham says, "it's a scam". Just a big neural network, not a simulated brain.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

The 36 Stratagems

Based on a 500 year old Chinese treatise, there are some very colorful ideas in here for dealing with the competition, including:

Deceiving the emperor [by inviting him to a house by the sea that is really a disguised ship] and [thus cause him to] cross the sea
Harro von Senger compiled a commentary on the 36 stratagems after coming upon them by chance while studying in Taiwan.

It was pure coincidence that led Harro von Senger to the "36 stratagems." One day, a professor from the Center for Chinese Language and Culture Studies of National Taiwan Normal University, suddenly said to him that, of the 36 stratagems, running away was the best. When von Senger asked him what were the other 35 stratagems, the professor said he didn't know. At that time, von Senger was living in a students' dorm of Taiwan University and he questioned his Chinese roommates on the subject. Two or three days later, a Chinese student gave him a copy of all the names of the 36 stratagems. Several weeks later, when von Senger was at a book market and a Chinese student who was with him picked up one book and said: "This is a book on the 36 stratagems; are you interested?" Thus von Senger purchased his first book on this subject.

Monday, November 16, 2009

The Grand Strategy of Byzantium

Edward Luttwak on the lessons of Byzantine strategy as they apply to the US. A lot of this seems to be inflected with modern theories of strategy (e.g., maneuver warfare) that may not have been present in the original texts. There are, however, a number of stereotypically Byzantine pieces of advice:

VII. When diplomacy and subversion are not enough and fighting is unavoidable, use methods and tactics that exploit enemy weaknesses, avoid consuming combat forces, and patiently whittle down the enemy's strength. This might require much time. But there is no urgency because as soon as one enemy is no more, another will surely take his place. All is constantly changing as rulers and nations rise and fall. Only the empire is eternal -- if, that is, it does not exhaust itself.


(via kottke)

Better than Full Moon

Vampire Attack!