A Visit to the Top of Shenzhen Tower

Links for Later 9-26-13

1. Giordano Bruno's prediction of the infinite worlds and an infinite God made the Catholic Church freak out.
2. Using vector space mathematics to resolve linguistic problems.
3. Entrepreneurial sales: five models, four steps to success.
4. Urban exploration with Bradley Garrett.
5. Steve Albini's letter to Nirvana about producing.
6. Brad DeLong about the economics of global warming. Can we afford to do something? Can we afford not to?
7. OODA loops and markets.

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.

Links for Later 1-3-13

1. Sharers, takers, carers, makers 
2. The amusement park abandoned at the heart of Berlin, used in Hanna
3. Aaron Carter is, surprisingly, a human being
4. Where murders happen in Chicago
5. Hypomania, schizotypic disorder and creativity

Russian Bridge Climbing

Looks like a cure for a boring weekend.

UX Update

Paris is famous for having a large number of movie theaters. I'm more impressed by the number of underground ones I hear about. Underground as in covert, and underground as in literally subterranean. We've previously linked to stories about Parisian urban exploration group UX, and this month, Jon Lackman has a fascinating interview with them, published in Wired, in which, among other things, they are sued for surreptitiously restoring a 19th century clock belonging to the Pantheon:

As soon as it was done, in late summer 2006, UX told the Pantheon about the successful operation. They figured the administration would happily take credit for the restoration itself and that the staff would take over the job of maintaining the clock. They notified the director, Bernard Jeannot, by phone, then offered to elaborate in person. Four of them came—two men and two women, including Kunstmann and the restoration group’s leader, a woman in her forties who works as a photographer—and were startled when Jeannot refused to believe their story. They were even more shocked when, after they showed him their workshop (“I think I need to sit down,” he murmured), the administration later decided to sue UX, at one point seeking up to a year of jail time and 48,300 euros in damages. Jeannot’s then-deputy, Pascal Monnet, is now the Pantheon’s director, and he has gone so far as to hire a clockmaker to restore the clock to its previous condition by resabotaging it. But the clockmaker refused to do more than disengage a part—the escape wheel, the very part that had been sabotaged the first time. UX slipped in shortly thereafter to take the wheel into its own possession, for safekeeping, in the hope that someday a more enlightened administration will welcome its return.

Meanwhile, the government lost its lawsuit. It filed another, which it also lost. There is no law in France, it turns out, against the improvement of clocks. In court, one prosecutor characterized her own government’s charges against Untergunther as “stupid.” But the clock is still immobile today, its hands frozen at 10:51.

Links for Later

1. Rafael Nadal, conceived as a brand
2. Dionne: Obama needs to go big or he'll go home
3. William Gibson on cities
4. Miguel Serdoura's tutor for the baroque lute

Not All Alike

BLDGBLOG shows us some of the "twisty little passages" found underneath several churches and farms in Bavaria, and featured in Der Spiegel. The passages form "very small labyrinths" with "Schlupfe (slips)" that are "only 40 centimeters in diameter". Almost nothing has been found in the passages, so they probably weren't places to hold animals or humans for any length of time.

There are lots of them, they're also found elsewhere in Europe, and there are no records of why or how they were built. Werebadgers? Cave Hobbyists? Underground railroad predecessors? Underwear gnomes? Who knows?

Links for Later

1. Andrew Gelman's five recommendations for statistics books (via Alex Tabarrok)

2. Bruce Sterling's annual State of the World conversation on the Well

3. Calcio Fiorentino, "the manliest game on earth". Basically a brawl with a ball, played while wearing 16th century pants.

4. Cross sectional map of Kowloon Walled City, with annotations in Japanese. (via @greatdismal)

5. Chinese haute couture from Guo Pei's 1002nd Arabian Nights collection. Amazing and almost certainly unwearable (via Bruce)

6. First fights over the separation of church and state: the Anti-Federalists lost big time.

UX

It turns out that the Perforated Mexicans were a subset of a larger group of Parisian urban explorers, called UX.

In time, the officers’ lights found the PA system. They found the stereo, with guard-dog yowls burned onto a CD. They found three thousand square feet of subterranean galleries, strung with lights, wired for phones, live with pirated electricity. The officers uncovered a bar, lounge, workshop, dining corner, and small screening area. The cinema’s seats had been carved into the stone itself, with room for twenty people to sit in the cool and chomp on popcorn.
On the floor of one cavern, officers discovered an ominous metal container. The object was fat, festooned with wires. The police called in the bomb squad, they evacuated the surface, they asked themselves, What have we found?
They had found a couscous maker.

It is, their spokesman says, about freedom...

“We don’t seek out the forbidden,” Kunstmann murmurs over radio-pop. “We just repudiate any notion of authorization.”

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