But instead you'll enlist in the Navy, like planned, and somewhere off the island of Okinawa, bright and young and shiny with sweat in the tropical sunshine, you'll drown.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Quote of the Day
But instead you'll enlist in the Navy, like planned, and somewhere off the island of Okinawa, bright and young and shiny with sweat in the tropical sunshine, you'll drown.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Monday, June 27, 2011
Links for Later
- Hollywood accounting: how Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix "lost" money
- Archeological beer today (via boingboing)
- Debate over whether Silver Lake will be punished for its Skype options policy. Felix says no, Primack and Wilson (among others) say yes
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Links for Later
- Ansel Adams' home
- Skype and Silver Lake repossessing vested shares from ousted management. Wow, that's some hard dealing right there
- These are good problems to have
Krokodil
This is in the running for all-time most screwed up things ever. The article is accompanied by the kind of photo that Warren Ellis likes to mail to people to induce retinal scarring. You have been warned.
More: And of course, it took Warren about two minutes to latch onto this stuff. The iodine smell is a nice touch.
Bachman-Crazy Overdrive
In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you've always got a puncher's chance. And Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she's living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she's built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.
After that, he really gets going. I love the scene where she's crouched behind a shrubbery supposedly "resting her heels."
Price.
Less.
Enterprise Dry Dock
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Links for Later
- Spices as a response to celiac disease (via marginal revolution)
- Robert Nozick profiled in Slate
- Daniel Tammett at TED
- Sketchnotes: visual notetaking
- Sean Tan interview without words
- Patricia Churchland takes on Neuroethics
Evolution in a Nutshell
Monday, June 20, 2011
Memory Tapes - "Yes I Know"
Memory Tapes "Yes I Know" from Najork on Vimeo.
(via Devour)
Links for Later
- Seven life lessons from the very wealthy
- The Ryan Reynolds aging timeline. Time has been kind
- How Ryan Reynolds works out, eats
- The Obama Administration makes a fatal error on the legality of Libya
- Hitchens disembowels Mamet
- John Stewart disembowels Fox News
- Paul Krugman picks 5 books
- Swimming pool in a New York City apartment
- Good to see that Lewis Hyde is still doing well. Sorry I almost altogether missed him at Kenyon
- David Foster Wallace in The Nation
- Baroness Park of Monmouth
- My Daguerrotype Boyfriend
A Real Garden
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Naming rights
Mine: Sleeping Giant Wilderness Study Area
George Saunders' Writing Aphorisms
“A father and son in a bedroom doesn’t mean that something sexual has to happen.”
“Any monkey in a story had better be a dead monkey,”
“Aunts and uncles are best construed as the heliological equivalent of small-scale weather systems,”
“The number of rooms in a fictional house should be inversely proportional to the years during which the couple living in that house enjoyed true happiness.”
in Bomblog
Quote of the Day
Voyage Around My Room
Prague Skywalkers
And then I thought, I need to hop a flight to Prague.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Consciousness as Interaction
The Shelf-Pod: a House Made of Bookshelves
Shelf-Pod is a private residence and study building, located in Osaka prefecture, Japan. The client owns an extensive collection of books on the subject of Islamic history, so he requested that we create this building with the maximum capacity for its storage and exhibition.
In order to satisfy this demand effectively, we designed a lattice structure made from 25mm thick laminated pine-board which serve as book-shelves. The dimensions of each shelf are as follows: 360mm height, 300mm width and 300mm depth. All of the architectural elements in this space (stairs, windows, desks, chairs, etc) have been designed on the basis of this shelf scale, with the aim of achieving geometrical harmony which is comparable to Islamic Architecture. This innovative structural system affords not only large amount of book storage, but the possibility of flexible floor level which can be delivered from every height of bookshelf. Each space for different activity rise up helically, giving the impression of exploring a wooden jungle gym.
The original image of this structure is derived from the Japanese woodcraft of Kumiko. The structural integrity against an earthquake is provided by a panel of plywood board nailed on the shelf.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Links for Later
- The Guardian's list of 100 greatest non-fiction books
- George Saunders on writing part 1 part 2
- Steve Blank and Ben Horowitz debate the existence of a tech bubble
- Personality seepage
- The art of the feud
Monday, June 13, 2011
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor
Patrick Leigh Fermor, who has died aged 96, was an intrepid traveller, a heroic soldier and a writer with a unique prose style. His books, most of which were autobiographical, made surprisingly scant mention of his military exploits, drawing instead on remarkable geographical and scholarly explorations. To Paddy, as he was universally known, an acre of land in almost any corner of Europe was fertile ground for the study of language, history, song, dress, heraldry, military custom – anything to stimulate his momentous urge to speculate and extrapolate. If there is ever room for a patron saint of autodidacts, it has to be Paddy Leigh Fermor.
Friday, June 10, 2011
Lion Tamer
Professors' Club
"No Girls Allowed"
The PKD Method
Letter to Ron Goulart
excerpted in Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K Dick by Lawrence Sutin
(via The Saturday Boy)
Thursday, June 09, 2011
A Delphinium, Blue
The last words he wrote before he died were "HB true love"; HB is Kevin Collins, his partner. Reading it, you ask yourself what it must have felt like to be on the other side of that love story.
Here's the story of how they met.
Links for Later
2. House collapsing under 350,000 books
3. Children of Russian oligarchs
4. Umberto Eco on the novel
5. A man who wants to fight lions with his bare hands
6. Andy Murray cracks a tooth on a baguette
7. Newt Gingrich's campaign staff quits while he's on a Greek cruise
8. Ryan Avent feels uneasy about Obama's economic policy
9. AS Byatt on men's clubs
10. Architectural toys to teach thinking
11. Green Lanterns of Glee
12. Cpl. Aaron Mankin after 50 reconstructive surgeries
13. More of Aaron Mankin
14. Erez Lieberman Aiden, "How to Become a Scientist Over and Over Again"
15. Updates on the whole Wikileaks/Manning situation
Weird Algo
Zero Hedge's Tyler Durden has three articles up on this:
Yesterday, just after 8 pm Eastern we presented a very curious move in NatGas trading on the NYMEX when under very light volume, the NG performed something akin to a sine wave expansion, with about 12 peaks and troughs with ever increasing amplitude, until ultimately it triggered a major sell off when it appeared to touch off an avalanche of limit orders about 3% from the prevailing price, leading to an almost instantaneous 8% drop in Natgas which was promptly recovered. We dubbed this a fractal pattern, and after a follow up with the trade forensics experts at Nanex, it appears this was a very spot on designation, as zooming into the pattern indicates increasing levels of self-similarity and complexity. Yet aesthetic observations aside, this latest algo appears to be nothing more than a limit order-busting market manipulation device, whose sole purpose is to destabilize and generate volatility for the creator of the algo.Take a look at the market graphs in the linked article(s). There are some weird people programming these things. That or we're seeing rogue AI's, and Skynet really did go live.
Wednesday, June 08, 2011
Links for Later
2. Critique of Adapt at Whimsley: Trial and error ain't everything
3. Critique of The Great Stagnation: It's the redistribution, stupid
4. Geithner: Stimulus is 'sugar for the economy'. Putz.
5. Intertwingularity, the Noosphere and Idea-Sex
6. Android SDK homepage
7. Cesar Hidalgo's network map of exports and industries
Last Man Standing
He's also a fan of weak tea: that's why there hasn't been a single prosecution for bank fraud stemming from the crisis, and that's why every stimulus and jobs bill that's even proposed is "too big".
Do us all a favor and resign, Tim.
More: Andrew Leonard's take on the issue.
Tuesday, June 07, 2011
Hector Thunderstorm Project
Hector Thunderstorm Project from Murray Fredericks on Vimeo.
High def, high speed clouds. Can I have this as my screensaver?
Monday, June 06, 2011
Quote of the Day
Crystallisation of Loss
One, Ten, One Hundred
Two of the stars of the event were Stephen Voltz and Fritz Grobe who are famous for their viral Coke and Mentos videos. I enjoyed a talk they gave on their approach to innovation as it applies to performance art. Their method follows the 1-10-100 principle. It takes one experiment to spark a concept. By experiment 10 one should have fleshed things out and have defined a direction. By experiment 100 one hopes to have found something that is sublime… The four rules that they espouse are: 1) seek variation – explore the possibilities. 2) be obsessive – keep focused until one finds something special.3) be stubborn – don’t give up until you work through the problems. 4) set limits and work within them – unconstrained innovation meanders and wonders, only by setting limits does it force one to dive into the depths of a concept. Their thoughts are somewhat reminiscent of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, where the key idea is to have an obsession with quality and to always have a good pot of coffee close at hand.
Links for Later
2. The un-New York city (via bruce sterling)
3. 100 great cinematic threats (via andrew sullivan)
4. What to say to a cancer patient
5. Rafael Nadal, an appreciation
6. Michael Fassbinder was great in X Men First Class
7. How Magneto Got His Hat
8. "Were-Gay"
9. John Banvard
Sunday, June 05, 2011
Links for Later
2. Vintage lesbians
3. Teach the Controversy T-shirts
4. Dealing with large data sets
5. Acid house comes to London
6. Umberto Eco on mad scientists and hollow Earths
Idiocy
One aspect of American politics that receives insufficient attention is that a significant percentage of self-identified Republicans—around half—are complete idiots. And the candidates who wish to be elected by them must pander to them, either by being idiots themselves—see “Bachmann, Michele”—or pretending to be. Nobody in the MSM is empowered to say this aloud. Indeed, the very act of pointing it out brands one a “liberal elitist” who is biased against proud, patriotic conservatives.
Well, so be it. A quarter of Republicans questioned profess to believe that ACORN is definitely planning to steal the 2012 election while another 32 percent think it might be. These numbers are admittedly lower than the 52 percent who, in 2009, went on record accusing ACORN of having stolen the election for Obama, but this should strike a person with normal mental faculties as a mite surprising, given that the organization no longer exists.
The question is: is there a cure, other than for the Democrats to hold every office in the nation indefinitely until the madness passes?
Saturday, June 04, 2011
Xerxes and Artaboanos on Risk
50. Xerxes made answer in these words: "Artabanos, reasonably dost thou set forth these matters; but do not thou fear everything nor reckon equally for everything: for if thou shouldest set thyself with regard to all matters which come on at any time, to reckon for everything equally, thou wouldest never perform any deed. It is better to have good courage about everything and to suffer half the evils which threaten, than to have fear beforehand about everything and not to suffer any evil at all: and if, while contending against everything which is said, thou omit to declare the course which is safe, thou dost incur in these matters the reproach of failure equally with him who says the opposite to this. This then, I say, is evenly balanced: but how should one who is but man know the course which is safe? I think, in no way. To those then who choose to act, for the most part gain is wont to come; but to those who reckon for everything and shrink back, it is not much wont to come. Thou seest the power of the Persians, to what great might it has advanced: if then those who came to be kings before me had had opinions like to thine, or, though not having such opinions, had had such counsellors as thou, thou wouldest never have seen it brought forward to this point. As it is however, by running risks they conducted it on to this: for great power is in general gained by running great risks. We therefore, following their example, are making our march now during the fairest season of the year; and after we have subdued all Europe we shall return back home, neither having met with famine anywhere nor having suffered any other thing which is unpleasant. For first we march bearing with us ourselves great store of food, and secondly we shall possess the corn-crops of all the peoples to whose land and nation we come; and we are making a march now against men who plough the soil, and not against nomad tribes."
49. [1] ὃ δ᾽ ἀμείβετο λέγων «ὦ βασιλεῦ, οὔτε στρατὸν τοῦτον, ὅστις γε σύνεσιν ἔχει, μέμφοιτ᾽ ἂν οὔτε τῶν νεῶν τὸ πλῆθος· ἢν δὲ πλεῦνας συλλέξῃς, τὰ δύο τοι τὰ λέγω πολλῷ ἔτι πολεμιώτερα γίνεται. τὰ δὲ δύο ταῦτα ἐστὶ γῆ τε καὶ θάλασσα. [2] οὔτε γὰρ τῆς θαλάσσης ἐστὶ λιμὴν τοσοῦτος οὐδαμόθι, ὡς ἐγὼ εἰκάζω, ὅστις ἐγειρομένου χειμῶνος δεξάμενός σευ τοῦτο τὸ ναυτικὸν φερέγγυος ἔσται διασῶσαι τὰς νέας. καίτοι οὐκὶ ἕνα αὐτὸν δεῖ εἶναι τὸν λιμένα, ἀλλὰ παρὰ πᾶσαν τὴν ἤπειρον παρ᾽ ἣν δὴ κομίζεαι. [3] οὔκων δὴ ἐόντων τοι λιμένων ὑποδεξίων, μάθε ὅτι αἱ συμφοραὶ τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἄρχουσι καὶ οὐκὶ ὥνθρωποι τῶν συμφορέων. καὶ δὴ τῶν δύο τοι τοῦ ἑτέρου εἰρημένου τὸ ἕτερον ἔρχομαι ἐρέων. [4] γῆ δὲ πολεμίη τῇδέ τοι κατίσταται· εἰ θέλει τοι μηδὲν ἀντίξοον καταστῆναι, τοσούτῳ τοι γίνεται πολεμιωτέρη ὅσῳ ἂν προβαίνῃς ἑκαστέρω, τὸ πρόσω αἰεὶ κλεπτόμενος· εὐπρηξίης δὲ οὐκ ἔστι ἀνθρώποισι οὐδεμία πληθώρη. [5] καὶ δή τοι, ὡς οὐδενὸς ἐναντιευμένου, λέγω τὴν χώρην πλεῦνα ἐν πλέονι χρόνῳ γινομένην λιμὸν τέξεσθαι. ἀνὴρ δὲ οὕτω ἂν εἴη ἄριστος, εἰ βουλευόμενος μὲν ἀρρωδέοι, πᾶν ἐπιλεγόμενος πείσεσθαι χρῆμα, ἐν δὲ τῷ ἔργῳ θρασὺς εἴη.»
50. [1] ἀμείβεται Ξέρξης τοῖσιδε. «Ἀρτάβανε, οἰκότως μὲν σύ γε τούτων ἕκαστα διαιρέαι· ἀτὰρ μήτε πάντα φοβέο μήτε πᾶν ὁμοίως ἐπιλέγεο. εἰ γὰρ δὴ βούλοιο ἐπὶ τῷ αἰεὶ ἐπεσφερομένῳ πρήγματι τὸ πᾶν ὁμοίως ἐπιλέγεσθαι, ποιήσειας ἂν οὐδαμὰ οὐδέν· κρέσσον δὲ πάντα θαρσέοντα ἥμισυ τῶν δεινῶν πάσχειν μᾶλλον ἢ πᾶν χρῆμα προδειμαίνοντα μηδαμὰ μηδὲν παθεῖν. [2] εἰ δὲ ἐρίξων πρὸς πᾶν τὸ λεγόμενον μὴ τὸ βέβαιον ἀποδέξεις, σφάλλεσθαι ὀφείλεις ἐν αὐτοῖσι ὁμοίως καὶ ὁ ὑπεναντία τούτοισι λέξας. τοῦτο μέν νυν ἐπ᾽ ἴσης ἔχει· εἰδέναι δὲ ἄνθρωπον ἐόντα κῶς χρὴ τὸ βέβαιον; δοκέω μὲν οὐδαμῶς. τοῖσι τοίνυν βουλομένοισι ποιέειν ὡς τὸ ἐπίπαν φιλέει γίνεσθαι τὰ κέρδεα, τοῖσι δὲ ἐπιλεγομένοισί τε πάντα καὶ ὀκνέουσι οὐ μάλα ἐθέλει. [3] ὁρᾷς τὰ Περσέων πρήγματα ἐς ὃ δυνάμιος προκεχώρηκε. εἰ τοίνυν ἐκεῖνοι οἱ πρὸ ἐμεῦ γενόμενοι βασιλέες γνώμῃσι ἐχρέωντο ὁμοίῃσι καὶ σύ, ἢ μὴ χρεώμενοι γνώμῃσι τοιαύτῃσι ἄλλους συμβούλους εἶχον τοιούτους, οὐκ ἄν κοτε εἶδες αὐτὰ ἐς τοῦτο προελθόντα· νῦν δὲ κινδύνους ἀναρριπτέοντες ἐς τοῦτο σφέα προηγάγοντο. μεγάλα γὰρ πρήγματα μεγάλοισι κινδύνοισι ἐθέλει καταιρέεσθαι. [4] ἡμεῖς τοίνυν ὁμοιεύμενοι ἐκείνοισι ὥρην τε τοῦ ἔτεος καλλίστην πορευόμεθα, καὶ καταστρεψάμενοι πᾶσαν τὴν Εὐρώπην νοστήσομεν ὀπίσω, οὔτε λιμῷ ἐντυχόντες οὐδαμόθι οὔτε ἄλλο ἄχαρι οὐδὲν παθόντες. τοῦτο μὲν γὰρ αὐτοὶ πολλὴν φορβὴν φερόμενοι πορευόμεθα, τοῦτο δέ, τῶν ἄν κου ἐπιβέωμεν γῆν καὶ ἔθνος, τούτων τὸν σῖτον ἕξομεν· ἐπ᾽ ἀροτῆρας δὲ καὶ οὐ νομάδας στρατευόμεθα ἄνδρας.»
Friday, June 03, 2011
Writers' Advice
5. I do not write from the beginning to the end. I write in the order that particular parts take form in my mind and I enjoy mulling them over… I mull and mull and imagine I am explaining them to someone and then I write them down. I have the order in mind, so I write whatever part is bubbling energetically in my mind, print it out (always) and begin a stack on THE BOOK on a corner of my desk into which I can add pieces (in their proper order) as they get written and so I have a visible proof at all times that something is happening.I think the importance of this mulling process is commonly overlooked because there's no sharply focused concept that can be used to describe it, no better verb for the mulling verb. It's a nonlinear process that resembles digestion, it's absolutely critical to creative thought, and I have no idea how one might translate it into a neurological correlate because the manipulation of the underlying representations is so vague.
Gary Shteyngart's Book Trailer
Mmm Hmmm Hmmm Hmm. From the chest.
Thursday, June 02, 2011
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
Links for Later
2. Terrence Malick
3. The Big Kahuna, examined