Links for Later 5-25-18

Jordan Peterson takedown edition:

1. Bernard Schiff: "I Was Jordan Peterson's Strongest Supporter, Now I Think He's Dangerous."
2. Seth Abramson twitter thread: Using Metamodernism Against JP's Rhetoric.
3. Pankaj Mishra: "Jordan Peterson and Fascist Mysticism."
4. Robert Jago: JP is not a member of the Kwakwaka'wakw tribe
5. Kate Manne: "Reconsider the Lobster."
6. Elizabeth Sandifer: "Jordan Peterson: Bumbling Cult Leader or Delightful Satire?"

Links for Later 8-21-17

1. It's eclipse day.
2. When your son becomes a Buddhist monk in Thailand.
3. Get yourself a pair of elf ears. Maybe a whole-elf makeover. Why not?
4. The joys of Classics with the Perseus site.

Bruno Borges

A 24 year old Brazilian man named Bruno Borges disappeared on March 27th, leaving behind a room covered in elaborate art and containing a life-sized statue of Giordano Bruno and fourteen numbered notebooks. The name Bruno Borges is a little on the nose, as my friend Ted Hand puts it, since it's a combination of Giordano Bruno, whose statue appears in the room, and Jorge Luis Borges, author of numerous labyrinths and literary games. The whole thing feels like a Borges story, anyway.

Bruno Borges story on reddit.
Daily Mail article on Borges.
El Globo's story on Borges.

An update on the Bruno Borges disappearance, connecting it to Cicada #3301, can be found here.



I have no idea what to make of it all. It's awfully neat handwriting for someone who's experiencing mental problems, which suggests that it's an art project or part of the Cicada scavenger hunt.

Update: It may all have been part of a book marketing scheme.
http://www.surrealista.com.br/2017/05/amigo-de-bruno-o-desaparecido-do-acre-e-preso-e-caso-ja-e-tratado-como-jogada-de-marketing

It seems that the season of the "Boy from Acre" case, Bruno Borges, mysteriously disappeared on March 27, is coming to an end. The Civil Police made two operations at the home of two friends of Bruno and found, among other things, two contracts signed giving friends part of the income from the sale of the 14 books he left in his room, along with scrawled walls and the statue of 2 meters. Bruno's cousin, Eduardo Borges, could also be involved in the case.

One of Bruno's friends, Marcelo Ferreira, was arrested, reports the G1 , for omitting information about the case, which would constitute false testimony. In the house of another friend, Mario Gaiote, the bed and the rack of Bruno's room were found, set aside for the setting of the scene found after his disappearance. Both Marcelo and Mario had signed contracts at home to distribute the proceeds of the sale of the books, drawn up in a notary's office on the very day Bruno disappeared.

"On the day Bruno left, he went to the notary's office and recorded the contract. So, for us, it is very conclusive that it was not a disappearance whatsoever, it was in fact a conscious plan of remoteness, and the contract shows that there is a deadline for disclosure of these books, deadline for publication, percentage allocation for those who helped him, in the case , These three people who helped him right away. For us, this is very clear, "said Alcino Júnior, the delegate of the case, to the G1 .

Update 6/11/17: More from the police investigation here.

EP 027: Mitch Horowitz and the Secret History of America

Today on Startup Geometry, I talk with Mitch Horowitz, editor, voiceover artist, historian of alternative religion and the occult, and author of Occult America and One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life. We discuss the influence of experimental religions have had on American history, our favorite uncanny tourism sites, how the belief that "thoughts are causative" has affected the real world, and why having a Definite Chief Aim can help you achieve it.

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EP 026: Gordon White

This week I talk to Gordon White, former "weird kid", proprietor of the popular Rune Soup podcast and blog. Gordon is also a documentarian, world traveler, digital strategist and practicing magician. He's the author of three books that came out in the last year or so: Star.Ships, which we discuss in this podcast; The Chaos Protocols, which takes a heterodox view of how to handle the post-financial crash economy; and Pieces of Eight, a personal history of the Chaos Magic movement.

This interview has a twin over on Gordon's podcast, where he interviews me about the Bruno books.You can listen to that over on Rune Soup or on iTunes.

Due to technical difficulties (or spiritual interference) the original media file for this episode dropped out after the intro. Please download again now that the media file has been replaced. If there are still difficulties, please let me know in the comments or on Twitter. -Scott

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Episode Outline, Notes and Links

Links for Later 8-15-15

1. Nonsensical centrists and debt stupidity.
2. Several things that needed to be said, but would not have needed to be said if the world was a better place: Chicago does not need a Katrina. New Orleans did not need a Katrina. Teachers are better at educating children than are random entrepreneurs. If you give away too much of your taxes as tax expenditures and/or fail to make pension contributions, your budget will break.
3. The John Feathers Map Collection, acquired by the Los Angeles Public Library, instantly doubled their map collection. Feathers had collected an entire house-full of maps. Maps on the walls, maps in filing cabinets, maps, maps, maps.
4. The dreadful, data-driven culture that is Amazon. A current employee pushes back.

Links for Later 2-1-14

1. Orhan Pamuk's tour of Istanbul.
2. Excerpt from Luke Harding's new book on Edward Snowden.
3. Stanley Bosworth of St. Anne's School.
4. Democracy vs. Inequality.
5. An 18th Century book of folk magic.

Annals of Notable Baby Names

Artist and polymath Natalie Jeremijenko likes to name her children in unique ways:

Jeremijenko’s experimental streak extended to the naming of her kids. Her oldest daughter is Mister Jamba-Djang Vladimir Ulysses Hope (Jamba for short); her daughter with Conley is E (what “E” stands for is up to E, but so far she has decided to stick with the initial); and their son is Yo Xing Heyno Augustus Eisner Alexander Weiser Knuckles. “I had wanted to give our boy an ethnically ambiguous name to challenge assumptions about race and assimilation,” Conley wrote in a 2010 essay. “For all the Asian-American Howards out there, shouldn’t there be a light-haired, blue-eyed white kid named Yo Xing?”

Previously: Dash Snow's child's name

Links for Later 5-9-13

1. The NSA's guide to searching the web.
2. Visualizing 0.5 seconds of high frequency trading.
3. US Dialect Map.
4. Brain boosting drugs.
5. Font guys Hoefler & Frere-Jones.
6. The astonishing life of Sadakichi Hartmann.
7. Free diving and attention deconcentration.
8. Shane Black, director of Iron Man 3, writes funny scripts. You should read them.
9. How to brand a "useless" degree.

Alec Baldwin Interviews Lewis Lapham

This Lewis Lapham interview from last December is fascinating throughout, as Lapham's Quarterly is:

Lewis Lapham: Right. On the other hand by the time grandfather got to be Mayor of San Francisco in 1942 he ran as an Independent. He was very open. I mean he would pick hitchhikers up. He never had a bodyguard, he never had tinted windows –

Alec Baldwin: He was more genuine. 

Lewis Lapham: – he used to like to go into the saloons in San Francisco late at night and the – he wanted to get a bond issue passed to replace the street cars on Market Street with busses, and there was some resistance about that, so he put it to a bet. He said, ‘Okay, there will be a race. I will race from the Ferry building to City Hall. I will ride an elephant against a trolley car, and if the elephant beats the trolley car we have the bond issue. If not, not.’

But he was a gambling man so he insisted on a handicap, and the handicap was that the elephant would be allowed to go through red lights. The elephant won. The bond issue passed.

Links for Later 3-19-13

1. Kirtsaeng v. Wiley decided: first sale is first sale, even if publisher wishes it were otherwise. Heinlein's pre-comment.
2. More good decisions: Why the EFF won on the National Security Letter issue.
3. Urban Explorer Bradley Garrett profiled.
4. Anne Carson talks about Red Doc>.
5. Elon Musk at TED.

Amanda Palmer: The Art of Asking

Or, how Amanda Palmer became Queen of TED.

Everything is delightful about Joshua Foer's profile of John Quijada, who invented a "precise" and "concise" language called Ithkuil. The language attracts the attention of some very strange Russians and a Ukranian right-wing terrorist, who initially think Foer is a spy from the Pentagon. The language is quite complex, requiring a very long time to formulate sentences, even for Quijada, making it challenging for daily use.

In the original version of Ithkuil, the word Ithkuil literally means “hypothetical representation of a language,” which reflects the fact that it was never meant to be casually spoken. It was an attempt to demonstrate what language could be, not what it should be. “The idea of Ithkuil is to convey deeper levels of human cognition than are usually conveyed in human language,” Quijada told me. For example, the phrase “characteristic of a single component among the synergistic amalgamation of things” is a single adjective: oicaštik’.

If that word looks as though it required extreme acts of tonsillar gymnastics to produce, it is because no sound or syllable is wasted in Ithkuil. Every language has its own phonemic inventory, or library of sounds, from which a speaker can string together words. Consonant-poor Hawaiian has just thirteen phonemes. English has around forty-two, depending on dialect. In order to pack as much meaning as possible into each word, Ithkuil has fifty-eight phonemes. The original version of the language included a repertoire of grunts, wheezes, and hacks that are borrowed from some of the world’s most obscure tongues. One particular hard-to-make clicklike sound, a voiceless uvular ejective affricate, has been found in only a few other languages, including the Caucasian language Ubykh, whose last native speaker died in 1992.

Links for Later 11-19-12

1. Harper Reed and Obama2012's tech team
2. Decoding the secrets of the Oculists

Links for Later 11-16-12

1. Elle Luna: "User research doesn't produce user-centered design." Advice for designers in startups.
2. William Langwiesche joins the French Foreign Legion (for a profile)
3. Kelly Starrett, physical therapist and CrossFit coach
4. "His works in number, bulk, and uselessness are not surpassed in the whole field of learning"

Gorey's Miniature Manifesto

From a recent review of Edward Gorey's works in the LA Times:

In his letters to Peter Neumeyer, a university professor with whom he collaborated on three children's books, Gorey offered a mini-manifesto, "E. Gorey's Great Simple Theory About Art." Gorey being Gorey, his artistic credo could fit on the head of a pin. Simply put, it's "the theory ... that anything that is art ... is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it's no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it's irritating."

The Ingeborg Bachman Prize

"Everyone is just waiting for someone to eat their manuscript again," said Doris Moser. 

German literary competitions are more lively than those of other countries. Discuss.

People cut themselves with razor blades, run from the stage, consume their books. Sounds like a fine old time.

 (via Bookslut)

Thought of the Day

James Altucher's resume may show a lot of wreckage, but it also shows that he gets out of bed every morning and gets in a fight. That's a good thing.

Desire and Fear

Ken Bradshaw surfed the largest wave in history. In 2011, William Langwische interviewed him for Vanity Fair.

Bradshaw told me about meeting Noll many years later. He said, “Noll asked me, ‘Do you ever close your eyes?’

“I said, ‘Excuse me?’

“‘At the top of the wave.’

“I said, ‘No! I always want to know where I’m going!’ Then I realized, that’s how he did it. He’d get to some point where it was scary, then just close his eyes and keep going. Because his desire was greater than his fear.”

(via longreads)

Links for Later 2-22-12

1. Third Frontier expands to new accelerator programs
2. How to do guilloche and other patterns in Illustrator
3. Gig poster graphics tutorial in Illustrator
4. The making of Thread's Not Dead, a book about making T-shirts
5. Crowdsourcing tools
6. Jeb Corliss hits Table Mountain
7. Jakprints
8. Bird skull necklace