Soy Bomb

Whatever happened to Soy Bomb? He's running a salon in Brooklyn, creating imaginary betting tables & such.

"God is Coming, Msabu"

Low energy lightning surrounds the ash cloud from volcanic Mt. Chaiten. A large photo series by Carlos Gutierrez for UPI.

(via BLDG BLOG)

Steampunk

While sipping lychee tea at the eminently steampunk Pause coffeehouse

I read the raft of widely blogged articles on the steampunk aesthetic, including the New York Times article and Richard Morgan's original article on the subject. Of course, the subculture has been knocking around for a while now; the fact that the NYT is in on the game means that it's starting to go mainstream, or reach a tipping point, or be passe (or demode, as very steampunkish Karl Lagerfeld might say).

What's steampunk all about? Bespoke technology, the visual/tactile pleasure of brass fitted scientific instruments, waistcoats and petticoats and fitted leather, dandyism, being gothic without wearing black, zeppelins, anti-minimalism without rococo, and science fiction dialed back into history.

Grant Achatz's Miracle Tongue

Four stories on Alinea's Grant Achatz, his creations, his fight with cancer, and his recovery:

A Man of Taste

Slide Show: A Molecular Feast

Burned

From There to Alinea

NIN: the slip

Nine Inch Nails releases their latest album for free download under a share alike license. Ghosts I-IV made $1.6M, proving the value of direct release for established bands like NIN.

"(thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years - this one's on me)"

Eccentric roundup

23 of New York's finest eccentrics. Some of whom appear to have been profiled in the New York Magazine article on people who wear a single color of clothes.

Luminous

The 99

Christopher Dickey on the use of comics to oppose the appeal of terror:

Scott Atran is an anthropologist who studies the kids who keep Al Qaeda and its spinoffs going. They're young people like the ones who grew up to blow up trains in Madrid in 2004, carried out the slaughter on the London underground in 2005 and hoped to blast airliners out of the sky en route to the United States in 2006.

Atran has looked at whom they idolize, how they organize, what bonds them and what drives them. And he's reached an unconventional but, to me, convincing conclusion: what has inspired the "new wave" terrorists since 2001 is not so much the Qur'an as what Atran calls "jihadi cool." If you can discredit these kids' idols (most notably Osama bin Laden), give them new ones and reframe the way their families and friends see the United States and its allies, then you've got a good shot at killing the fad for terror and stopping the jihad altogether.

For Atran, a senior fellow at the Center on Terrorism at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, this is pretty much Public Diplomacy 101. But he's found that the battle of ideas is not just hard to win in the field, it's a very tough slog at home. In Washington last year he was briefing White House staffers on his findings when a young woman who worked for Vice President Dick Cheney said in the sternest tough-guy voice she could muster, "Don't these young people realize that the decisions they make are their responsibility, and that if they choose violence against us, we're going to bomb them?"

Atran was dumbfounded. "Bomb them?" he asked. "In Madrid? In London?"

So when Atran went back to Washington to brief National Security Council and Homeland Security staff in January this year, he went armed—with comic books. He wanted to show that nothing cooked up by the Bush administration's warmongers and spinmeisters comes close to delivering the kind of positive messages you can find in a commercial action adventure series called "The 99."

(via Cabinet of Wonders)

Link roundup

Sportsmanlike conduct:

Umpires confirmed that the only option available under the rules was to replace Tucholsky at first base with a pinch runner and have the hit recorded as a two-run single instead of a three-run home run. Any assistance from coaches or trainers while she was an active runner would result in an out. So without any choice, Knox prepared to make the substitution, taking both the run and the memory from Tucholsky.

"And right then," Knox said, "I heard, 'Excuse me, would it be OK if we carried her around and she touched each bag?'"

The voice belonged to Holtman, a four-year starter who owns just about every major offensive record there is to claim in Central Washington's record book. She also is staring down a pair of knee surgeries as soon as the season ends. Her knees ache after every game, but having already used a redshirt season earlier in her career, and ready to move on to graduate school and coaching at Central, she put the operations on hold so as to avoid missing any of her final season. Now, with her own
opportunity for a first postseason appearance very much hinging on the outcome
of the game -- her final game at home -- she stepped up to help a player she
knew only as an opponent for four years.

Saluting Generation X:

[Jeff] Gordinier, an editor at Details magazine, makes a convincing case that despite finding themselves ground between the two huge demographic boulders of the boomers and the boomers' kids, as well as being on the wrong side of nearly every economic trend, the wary, self-effacing members of Gen X have at least as much to be proud of as those bumptious generations for whom boastfulness comes more easily."

The Freedom of Movement

" I'm happy to see that the parkour generation is ever growing and my father would be proud of you. He lit the fire within me to illuminate my own path. Now you are the founders for what will follow. Be free and no matter what you do with parkour, do it well. Goodbye and good training to all of you."

-David Belle

" Je suis heureux de voir que la generation du parkour grandit toujours et mon pere serait fier de vous aussi. Il a allume mon flambeau pour eclairer ma route. Maintenant c'est vous les batisseurs pour la suite. Soyez libres et peu importe ce que vous ferez du parkour, mais faites le bien. Aurevoir et bon entrainement a tous!"

-David Belle

Omnipotent Pyrotechnics

Listen to one of the most memorable monologues from NYPD Blue. Commentary by the writer.

I will now commence my 4 years 7 months of silence.

You are the River

Interview with Ken Wilber on interiority and non-dual consciousness in Salon:

This raises a fundamental question about the whole mind-brain problem. Virtually all neuroscientists say the mind is nothing more than a 3-pound mass of firing neurons and electrochemical surges in the brain. Why do you think this view is wrong?
It reduces everything. And you can make no distinctions of value. There's no such thing as love is better than hate, or a moral impulse is better than an immoral impulse. All those value distinctions are erased.

But is that scientific view wrong?

At this point, you enter the philosophy of science, and the argument is endless. Is there nothing but physical stuff in the universe? Or is there some sort of interiority? We're not talking about ghosts and goblins and souls and all that kind of stuff. Just: Is there interiority? Is there an inside to the universe? And if there is interiority, then that is where consciousness resides.

You can't see it, but it's real. This is the claim that phenomenology makes. For example, you and I are attempting to reach mutual understanding right now. And we say, aha, I understand what you're saying. But you can't point to that understanding. Where does it exist? But if you take a phenomenology of our interior states, then you look at them as being real in themselves. And that's where values lie and meaning lies. If you try to reduce those to matter, you not only lose all those distinctions, but you can't even make the claim that some are right and some are wrong.

Monocle

Design autopsy on Monocle's first year as a multimedia effort.

I have a very different opinion of Monocle's first year; one that is closer to Adam Greenfield's. In short, what I wanted was the second coming of Wallpaper*, redone as a smarter, more in-depth Economist. Instead, Monocle ended up being a boring magazine, lacking the "essential" character it claimed to seek and giving poor value for the subscription price.

Curta

a la Pattern Recognition, from the Wired Most-Wanted Rare Tech Submissions

Link Roundup: Religion

Benedict and Young Catholics:

"Honestly, I think a lot of people are more excited to see Kelly Clarkson," admits 16 year-old Stephanie LaGumina, who will attend the rally along with 100 of her female classmates from The Ursuline School in New Rochelle, N.Y. In a group interview with four of them earlier this week, they spoke of a strong desire for Benedict to speak directly to young people but also a deep disconnect that many in their generation feel with the church, particularly with this pope. "It's important for him to see how the faith relates to us, and I'm not sure that he does," said 17-year-old Gianna Caiola. "We're the future of the faith, and if you lose us now, there will be nothing left." Added LaGumina, "I know a lot of guys who have said they would be more interested in going to seminary if John Paul was still pope."

I Want to Be Left Behind. Fundamentalists have websites that allow them to leave their Earthly possessions to non-Raptured friends, should the End Times begin anytime soon.

Cognitive Surplus: Here Comes Everybody

This is the truth: you can do a lot with the time you spend watching television. 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year, according to Clay Shirky. A shedload of World of Warcraft.

Several years ago, I wrote a novel with my spare time spent not watching television. People asked me "where did you find the time?" C'mon, people, it takes maybe an hour a day, tops, to write 1,000 words a day. If you can do that every day, you have the 1st draft of a 100-200,000 word novel in 3-6 months. It may well be crap, but you've got it laid down like a brick wall. Then, you just have to spend the rest of the year, an hour or so a day Photoshopping it to your liking.

Or, you can write articles about Pluto with your free time:

[S]he shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first--hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we're still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there's an interesting community over here, there's an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can't predict the outputs yet because there's so much complexity.

Update: aaaaand the video


(via boingboing)

City in the Fog

"Yeah, and 20 gigs more than the white"

From Radosh.net:

Bruce Sterling in Potsdam

The Viridian Cyberpunk Pope-Emperor Doktor Professor Bruce Sterling lays down some design rap.


Bruce Sterling from Innovationsforum on Vimeo

Karl Lagerfeld Watch

Ten Things Karl Lagerfeld Can Do Without, including:

• Meat
• Children
• Fat People
• People Who Touch Him
• Boring Things
• Traveling
• The 90's
• Diane von Furstenburg

These things are "boring" and/or "demode". That is all.

Hedging

N+1 interviews an anonymous hedge fund manager about the subprime meltdown. It's clear within 5 minutes of reading this article that this guy is competent, because he's willing to say what he doesn't know, because he's willing to go against consensus opinion because it's the consensus and is therefore fully realized news, and because he ditched the TVs set to CNBC.

He also makes a number of good points about why Bear Stearns sold out (Treasury probably strong armed the execs) and discusses the importance of speedy shake-outs of bad assets in avoiding a repeat of the Japanese zombie bank situation.

Previous interview with the same person.

Watched 8 hours of Petraeus testimony. Nothing will change in Iraq until this administration is replaced, and then everything will move quickly.

Made Vietnamese beef stew for dinner. Watched part of Casino Royale with Mark.

Moral Turpitude

Author Sebastian Horsley was denied entry to the US on the grounds of "moral turpitude".

Apparently, US Customs Googled him, read his book or checked his criminal record, featuring drugs and prostitution. Then again, it might have been his fashion sense they disapproved of: stovepipe hat, frock coat, freshly removed nail polish. All of this resulted in a six hour interrogation and a return flight to the UK. Welcome to America, Sebastian.

Previous adventures include a bout of crucifixion in the Philippines in 2002, consumption of 100,000 pounds each of drugs (e.g., heroin, cocaine, ecstasy), prostitutes (e.g., transvestite, elderly, grimy, amputee, part-time, as roommates, as purchased by girlfriend), and suits (sixty-seven at one count).

I've been recommending his autobiography to everyone I know.

Link to NYT article

If an Eeenteresting Pleading

... Can't Have an Eeenteresting Hairdo, I don't know what things are coming to.

Slate discusses the Florida Supreme Court's perplexity at a filing that:

took the form of a "children's picture book for adults" (below). This step was necessary, [the plaintiff] wrote, because of "the Court's inability to comprehend" his arguments. This pleading, the justices fumed, contained pictures of "swastikas, kangaroos in court, a reproduced dollar bill, cartoon squirrels, Paul Simon, Paul Newman, Ray Charles, [and] a handprint with the word 'SLAP!' written under it."

I fail to see what's so hard to understand. It seems the meaning is perfectly clear to anyone.

The Future Is Now, Vol. LXVI

MONTEREY (AFP) - A scientist who mapped his genome and the genetic diversity of the oceans said Thursday he is creating a life form that feeds on climate-ruining carbon dioxide to produce fuel.

Geneticist Craig Venter disclosed his potentially world-changing "fourth-generation fuel" project at an elite Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in Monterey, California.

"We have modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry and becoming a major source of energy," Venter told an audience that included global warming fighter Al Gore and Google co-founder Larry Page.

"We think we will have fourth-generation fuels in about 18 months, with CO2 as the fuel stock."

18 months to revolutionize the energy industry. At least he's not thinking small.

How Scott King would Sink American Vogue

After Anna Wintour leaves, guest editor, artist Scott King gives away Vogue for free and includes articles such as: Angry Scarlett Johanssen, 635 Poor People Upside Down, Karl Lagerfeld Discussing Various Cancers, and a budgie, "chillingly declaring that 'I am God'".

Hilarious.(via Creative Review via Kottke.org)

Beneath the Icy Floes

Lake Michigan in its pre-spring incarnation.

This looks like a picture taken from a thousand feet up, but was in fact taken from an altitude of about 6'0".

Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis

If this were April 1st, I wouldn't believe this:

DUBLIN (AFP) - An Irishman blinded by an explosion two years ago has had his sight restored after doctors inserted his son's tooth in his eye, he said on Wednesday.

Burial

Warren Ellis put me on to the new Burial album, Untrue.

Great interview with Burial in Wire:

Wire: Your music is very visual. I suppose that’s partly the influence of films? You’ve talked about that sound from ‘Alien’ being one of your favourite sounds.

Burial: The motion tracker, yeah, and the dropship, the sentry guns. My big brother would play that sound to me when I was little, and tell me the stories from the film. He recorded it on a tape. He would tell me about that motion tracker sound, and ‘Alien’ and ‘Aliens’ are some of the scariest films. But he would only show me the bit where they were loading up the weapons, but he’d say, ‘you’re too young, I won’t show you the rest, but I’ll tell you about it’. I love the sound of the motion tracker, you can feel the fear of the empty spaces ahead, it's like sonar. I like Blade Runner but I’m only obsessed with one scene in it, the bit where he’s sitting at those cafes in the rain. I love rain, like being out in it. Sometimes you just go out in the cold, there’s a light in the rain, and you’ve got this little haven, and you’re hanging round like a moth – I love moths too and that’s why I love that scene.

Freakangels

Warren Ellis's new weekly webcomic is up and running deliciously.

Yes We Can

Will.i.am and company's ultracool video for Barack:

The Future is Now, Vol. LXV

The three key components required for scifi level gene manipulation:

1. High speed gene sequencer, check.
2. In vivo gene transfer methodology, coming.
3. DNA fabricator, check.

The goal of being able to program biochemical reactions as precisely and easily as computers crunch numbers and process words has moved a giant step closer.
A group at the California Institute of Technology, led by biomolecular engineer Niles Pierce, has created a DNA-based fabricator.
This is a system that allows the team to specify a piece of DNA with a desired shape and function, and then execute a molecular program to assemble it in a test tube. As an example, they used their system to construct a piece of DNA that walks along another strip of DNA.

YouTube Invades the QuickieMart

Maybe a little too self-referential, maybe just really funny...

The Future is Now, Vol. LXIV

Anti-TNF treatment sparks "immediate improvement" in patient with established Alzheimer's dementia. Wow.

Happy New Year 2008

"The wildwood all a-frost with newfall'n snows
And all a-red the holly-berry glows..."


Margate Park, New Year's morning 2008

Happy 2007

"The wildwood all afrost with newfalln snows

And all a-red the holly"

Paul Laffoley Lecture at Esozone

From Gray Lodge

Bannerman's Castle

BLDGBLOG gets a lot of respect around the net these days because, well, they're awesome. And they're obsessives and experts in a very specific sense.

Consider, for example, this neat little article on Sean O'Boyle's photographic study of Bannerman's Isle:

The castle was Bannerman’s vision and his execution. It was creviced and encrusted with battlements, towers, turrets, crenellations, parapets, embrasures, casements, and corbelling. Huge iron baskets suspended from the castle corners held gas-fed lamps that burned in the night like ancient torches. By day Bannerman’s castle gave the river a fairyland aspect. By night it threw a brooding silhouette against the Hudson skyline.

It's doubly cool because the castle (renamed "Butterman's") was used as a setting in John Crowley's AEgypt books.

"This is probably the coolest fish around"

--Per Scott Taylor, who discovered and characterized a fish in Belize that can live out of water for months at a time.

The fish, whose scientific name is Rivulus marmoratus, can grow as large as three inches. They group together in logs hollowed out by insects and breathe air through their skin instead of their gills until they can find water again. ...

Surviving on land is not the only unusual behavior exhibited by the fish. They have both testes and ovaries and essentially clone themselves by laying their own, already fertilized eggs.

"This is probably the coolest fish around, not only do they have a very bizarre sex life, but they really don't meet standard behavioral criteria for fishes," said Taylor in a summary of his paper.

-Reuters

Michael Palin Diaries 1967-1977: The Python Years

Just finished Michael Palin's excellent diaries of his Monty Python years. The level of discipline is remarkable--I usually miss writing down the days that have the most going on. It's also remarkable for just how warm-hearted it seems; not surprising, though, to anyone who's seen Palin's rapport with people across the globe in his travel narratives. Everyone seems to respond well to someone who's genuinely nice.

Great little interview (from the BBC?):

Halstead Street Halloween Parade

Sometimes you have trouble figuring out whether these people are dressing up for Halloween or whether they usually look like this.





Fire! Fire!

Seattle

The overcast skies in Seattle over the weekend were offset by some wonderful color from the Japanese maples planted on balconies & yards.

View of dowtown looking north.

Banksyesque stencil on a pub wall. The city retained that nice early 90's indyrock vibe. It smelled like vinyl records and brewpubs.

More brightly-colored hair than I've seen all year in Chicago. Very DIY attitude.

Microterror

Ten tales just long enough to send a single shiver up your spine, or distract you for a moment while the killer approaches, written and read by Neil Gaiman and nine other writers.

Every Year Counts

A day is a tourist,
A year is a traveler.



An example of a commercial made as an excuse for art. Like this one:



Or maybe I just like the twinkly music...

Samizdat

Summer of '07: someone brings back the classic rant-with-a photocopier method. These days nearly as extinct as an eight track. Note mixture of religious/ pro-marriage instructions with anti-China/ North "Koria" material. Also note photographs of models (?) included to attract attention.

OOPArt

Great Article from Wikipedia on Out Of Place Artifacts, including:The Saqqara Bird, the Baghdad Batteries,the Baigong Pipes, the Coso artifact, a geode which contains a spark plug from the 1920s, the Dendera Lamps and several artifacts that are supposed to predate humanity.

Fernworks

Fernworks makes great resin paintings of birds and skies and barbed wire, and great little "temples" of wood and translucent materials.

Quiet poetry for your house.

Decisions, decisions

Text and video from a masterclass by Daniel Kahneman, co-founder of behavioral economics. Even at the University of Chicago, where the economic actors are often assumed to be perfectly "rational", his research has made a big impact...yet for whatever reason, behavioral economics are not integrated into the curriculum from the start. Everyone still learns the neoclassical models, which have the great advantage of being straightforward, mathematically tractable, and very flexible, but which have the disadvantage of being wrong.

And by wrong I mean "out of line with the way human beings actually operate", which means in turn that they're going to give you incorrect predictions in a lot of cases. We knew this when we learned the models, but everyone "forgets" this fact in the effort to pass the classes. Since economic models correctly lead one to some fairly counterintuitive results, it's easy to think that all counterintuitive results are therefore correct, instead of thinking about the motivations underlying the decision.

Decisions, decisions

Text and video from a masterclass by Daniel Kahneman, co-founder of behavioral economics.

Decisions, decisions

Text and video from a masterclass by Daniel Kahneman, co-founder of behavioral economics.

On being a unicorn.

What if the Middle Ages Never Existed?

Fomenko's New Chronology. Amazing what you can find rooting around in Wikipedia's attics:

The "New Chronology" is radically shorter than the conventional chronology, because all of ancient Greek/Roman/Egyptian history is "folded" onto the Middle Ages and Antiquity, and the Early Middle Ages are eliminated. According to Fomenko, the history of humankind goes only as far back as AD 800, we have almost no information about events between AD 800-1000, and most historical events we know took place in AD 1000-1500.

These views are entirely rejected by mainstream scholarship.

Flat Earth

Prove the world isn't flat, earn $5,000. Maybe they'll even let you on the View. (Modern Mechanix, via boingboing)

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths...

I would spread the cloths beneath your feet.

Manhole at Hill & Wells just north of Walter Payton College Prep. I walk over this on my way to work but never noticed it before. The image is only really visible if you look at it directly--it shows up better in photos than to the naked eye.

Mystery Meteorite Illness

I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. Lovecraft:

Around midday Saturday, villagers were startled by an explosion and a
fireball that many were convinced was an airplane crashing near their remote
village, located in the high Andes department of Puno in the Desaguadero region,
near the border with Bolivia.


Residents complained of headaches and
vomiting brought on by a "strange odor," local health department official Jorge
Lopez told Peruvian radio RPP...

"Boiling water started coming out of the crater and particles of rock and
cinders were found nearby. Residents are very concerned," he said.

-AFP, via Yahoo!

But I am the Firestarter!

Prodigy--Voodoo People (Pendulum Remix)

Story of my life. Blindfolded and running full tilt.

Flying Fruit

Plans are underway to float a giant banana in geostationary orbit over Texas.

Why Texas? Why not?

Magnetic Fields at Carnegie Hall

Great concert by the Magnetic Fields from NPR. They should put this out as an album.

Meditations on Time

In a recent interview with Mary Beard at BLDG BLOG, a book about Pompeii is mentioned:

it’s easier to spot political motives a generation or two after the
event.

Another thing: one of the most famous excavations in Pompeii was the
excavation of the Villa of the Mysteries and its frieze, first published in the
1930s. These were fantastically lavish volumes – you know, more expensive that
you would ever imagine, in a fantastic vellum binding – which my library in
Cambridge managed to get a copy of. The book's got Mussolini's fasces on the
back cover, in gold emboss, and, instead of being dated 1938, it's dated Era
Fascista VII or something.

So we got a group of students together and we passed the book round, and we
said, "Do you notice anything about this book? Now, don’t think of the pictures
– look at it as a book. Do you notice anything about it?" And most of the
students said, "Well it’s lovely. It's really expensive, isn't it?" It took them
about a quarter of an hour before a single one of them said, "Oh, what’s this
here?" pointing to the fasces and the dating by Era Fascista.

And, had all gone according to plan, the world would have ended up in Era Fastista M, sometime around 2931 AD, and we would now be in EF LXXVIII. Happily, we never got much past EF XI, but I hear the book is very well produced.

o

In Ethiopia, they've just passed the year 2000 since they live according to the Julian calendar, as well as the Gregorian, in part depending on what language you're speaking. Addtionally, as one man in this story from NPR puts it, we have just finished the second day since the birth of Christ, since every day is a thousand years to God. 6AM is midnight, the start of the twelve daylight hours, and midnight is 6PM, halfway through the nighttime hours.

The story also features Muligieta, the most beautiful girl in Ethiopia and the Black Eyed Peas.

o

Update: The grim legend of the master clockmaker of Prague.

In the Last Breath of Summer...

...take a long look back.

Two Nosed Dog

I initially thought this description of a two-nosed dog might be an April Fool's item on the part of the BBC, with a bit of Photoshoppery, but this appears to be real:

Colonel Blashford-Snell first encountered a Double-Nosed Andean tiger hound called Bella in 2005 when he was carrying out reconnaissance for this year's expedition in the area near Ojaki.

He told Radio 4's Today programme: "While we were there, sitting by the fire one night, I saw an extraordinary-looking dog that appeared to have two noses.
"I was sober at the time, and then I remembered the story that the legendary explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett came back with in 1913 of seeing such strange dogs in the Amazon jungle.

"Nobody believed him, they laughed him out of court."

Gibsonian

A few years ago, I saw William Gibson give a reading of Pattern Recognition in the St. James Cathedral in Chicago. With the gold leaf and religious imagery overlaid by a network of tech equipment and halogen lights, it seemed like a fitting locale for the author of Neuromancer. I wanted to suggest to him that he visit Jaume Plensa's Crown Fountain in Millennium Park, another Gibsonian location, but didn't get the chance.

On Monday, I went to his reading of Spook Country, held in the much less Gibsonian Borders on Michigan Avenue. Attended by a large contingent of hackers and ninjas of a wide variety of age groups, the biggest surprise was the predominance of oddly named people (Cinchel, Aramigosta, 9Jane) and people from unusual countries (Latvia, Belarus) getting their books signed, often with really long notes appended, until his hand gave out.

It is seemingly hard to ask concrete questions of the man. I for one drew a complete blank. He had some useful advice for writers, though, beginning with Damon Knight's dictum on writing: "Alice in Wonderland good, Alice in weird Wonderland good, weird Alice in weird Wonderland bad". He also had a great story about his first writing teacher who had spent several years writing specifications for the military and whose idea of a good writing assignment was, "give me 500 words describing this pencil in great detail...wait, since you're a beginner, just do the eraser, or maybe that metal bit that goes around the eraser here at the end." This resulted in him being able to do great descriptions of little machines "like a particular kind of switchblade" but left gaps in the early novels that he can detect now.

Reason #54: It's fun

237 reasons to have sex, a comprehensive list from a University of Texas study. One must assume that not all reasons appeared with equal popularity. Somehow, one is also reminded of other stupendously long lists, such as the fictitious 548 facial expressions, and of long lists of possible sins in Medieval church manuscripts (which can now be used as lists of suggestions of possible ways to have sex which one has decided to have for one of the 237 reasons, much as one used to use the purity test list of questions as a compendium of ways to while away the winter evenings when one was in college).

YouTubery

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVx9D7nMcqs
"This party is like...H'orgy, like horgy." -Terence Stamp on Fellini
I would quite willingly listen to Terence Stamp recite grocery lists and the ingredients insert of cereal boxes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=589YFCHu4Ag
"I love you, David"-Love and Human Remains (in ten parts)
This movie had a big impact on me. I wish they would put it out on DVD.

Volunteers

Fascinating profile of 11 post-9/11 veterans from Good Magazine.

Harry Potter 7 short review

Finished a couple of hours ago.

Summary judgement: She knocked that one out of the park. It pays off like the finale of the biggest fireworks show on earth and leaves the reader completely satisfied.

Harry Potter 7 Speculations & Spoilers

A large number of possible leaks and spoilers have gone up and down the Intertubes today in preparation for Saturday's release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Many of the big ones seem implausible given the narrative direction and texture of the first six books. If J.K. Rowling follows some sort of classic plot structure, there are three reasonale outcomes for the books, all of which follow from Harry defeating Voldemort:

1. Harry lives happily ever after. He goes on to become Hogwart's Headmaster, Minister of Magic or Quidditch world champion. Most likely, he marries Ginny Weasley, they have children who go off to Hogwarts and the cycle starts again.
2. Harry dies in the process of killing Voldemort or at the hands of someone else. I think this is unlikely to happen, especially due to JKR's large number of hints that this might happen; if she really wants closure, the worst way to go about it in this postmodern age is to kill the character off. (see also: Superman, Buffy Summers, Sherlock Holmes)
3. Harry lives, but somehow loses all of his powers, either because they're linked to Voldemort's, because he somehow "burns them out" or because he gets put into a situation where exposure to magic is deadly to him in the future. This is a fine classical ending, parallel to Prospero breaking his staff at the end of the Tempest.

Other predictions:

• Snape turns out to be good after all (come on, you have to have seen this one coming)
• Draco does something to redeem himself and/or gets saved by Harry
• It turns out that Dumbledore had been using Nicholas Flamel's Sorcerer's Stone to extend his own life until the end of Book 1, when his supply started to run short and he had just enough to "put his affairs in order"
• Who lives? The main three characters, McGonagle, the Weasleys, Luna, Neville.
• Who dies? Voldemort, one more baddie (Peter Pettigrew, maybe?), plus one of the remaining good guys (could be Harry, probably one of the Phoenix people, maybe Snape)

Strategy roundup

Possibly the best article on strategy in the global counterinsurgency effort to date. Some very sharp people are running around in the basement of the Pentagon. Sadly, they are way down in the basement until at least 2008.

The Heart is Deceitful

From the Washington Post:

If they ever make a movie of the life of Laura Albert -- and for reasons
we'll get to, that now seems unlikely -- the scene Wednesday in a Manhattan
courtroom would make a killer denouement...

For fans and onlookers, the unmasking of Albert, which happened in 2005,
was like finding out that John Updike is a robot. But it was a more serious
matter for the owner of Antidote Films, an indie-movie company in Manhattan,
which had acquired the film rights to "Sarah" back when everyone assumed that
LeRoy was flesh and blood.

A woman runs past me on Franklin St, wearing a black leather purse as headgear.
Is this the new fashion?

Diary of Indignities

Is what my memoirs should have been called but this man beat me to it.

Gutsy

Great song dedicated to YouTube and Shortbus guy Jay Brannan by the talented Matt Woolfrey.

The Origins of Minimalism

Short profile of Richard Serra, who had a "remarkably supportive mother".

In a chewy interview in the show’s catalogue with MOMA’s Kynaston McShine(who co-curated the show with Lynne Cooke, of the Dia Art Foundation), Serra tells of his mother’s first visit, in the sixties, to his loft on Greenwich Street. “It was barren, there was nothing in it but a mattress on the floor, I was living on maybe $75 a month. . . . She looked out the window at the Hudson River and said, Richard, this is marvelous.”

Update: More Serra
Update: Even more Serra
Update: Still more Serra

The Challengers

Our office did the Chicago Corporate Challenge...well, half of us did.

I think these pictures make us look like one of those third-rate superhero teams.

Nice flexing, Min.

Nice banana, Ethan.

The Profit Calculator

New York Magazine does a really good article on how various businesses from a yoga studio to Goldman Sachs make their money.

It shows further anecdotal support for the rule of thumb that an average, well run business is one that generates about 10% profit. High profit businesses are of two types: a) high risk, "winner take most" businesses where superstars rule (e.g., Goldman Sachs trading business, Nobu), or b) ones in early stage markets where risk and return are not yet well priced.

Hunt Slonem

Gawker reviews a NYT profile of Hunt Slonem:

At first blush, the article reads like an exquisite corpse.

"People come and go in the homes of the painter Hunt Slonem, both the quick and the dead... Lunch is Louisiana takeout: boudin sausage, pecan pie, a local desert called ooey gooey. The talk is of a portrait, just hung, of Catherine of Aragon... Then
Mr. Slonem's caretaker calls with word of an interloper: a voodoo head, or
something that looks like one, has been found in the third-floor ceiling earlier
in the week and tucked away in a kitchen cabinet. Mr. Slonem goes at once to
retrieve the head, a mud-colored walnut-size carving of a skull, with a tiny
straw hat and pointy appendages. Then he retreats to make a call."

As the intrepid reader continues, he realizes Slonem is completely insane—equal parts James Merrill, Liberace, Valentino, Lou Reed, Bert Sugar, Keith Haring, and Scarlett O'Hara. Also he owns five houses. Not only the Louisiana plantation that is the focus of the article but another one a hundred miles away. He also owns an 89-room New York studio, and it really is awesome.

Love the parrot.

My friend Lance is always telling me that if he decides to stay in Toledo, rather than running off to Dubai, he's going to become both a)filthy rich and b)completely bizzare. He's got some work cut out for him if he's going to move from the gifted amateur eccentric category into the professional leagues.

Yonge and Bloor

William Gibson, poet of cities (Chiba, New York Sprawl, Moscow, Naughties London) dreams of phantom Toronto:

It consisted largely, I found, of the most amiable sort of repurposed
semi-ruins. A vast Victorian colonial seashell of blackened brick, shot through
with big, grim grey bones of earnest civic Modernism. I marvelled that such an
odd place could have existed without my having heard of it. North of New
England, all this baroque, mad brick; sandstone gargoyles, red trams, the
Queen's portrait everywhere.

New-found friends, often as not, rented high-ceilinged rooms in crumbling townhouses, their slate rooflines fenced with rusting traceries of cast-iron, curlicues I'd only seen in Charles Addams cartoons. Everything painted a uniform dead green, like the face of a corpse in those same Addams cartoons. If you took a penknife and scraped a little of the green away, you discovered marvels: brown marble shot with paler veins, ornate bronze fixtures, carved oak. In the more stygian reaches of cellar, in such places, there were still to be found fully connected gaslight fixtures, forgotten, protruding from dank plaster like fairy pipes, each with a little flowered twist-key to stop the gas.

This was mid-town, walking distance in various directions from Yonge and Bloor.

In my twenties, it always seemed that my friends lived in exactly these sorts of townhouses around Columbus (German Village, Victorian Village, Grandview). Grand, decaying, repurposed, sublet. Ornamental stairways made for midnight conversations, grubby marble bathrooms with eccentric plumbing. They're the Great Lakes version of loft apartments.

I seem to remember going to a lot of parties at these houses, talking to strangers (friends of friends of friends). Girls in black kilts & cat eye glasses and dudes in rock band t-shirts & week-old shaves. Home-dyed hair and beastie boots. The smell of old vinyl and cardboard from childhood record collections. Cigarettes and multicolored candles in big ceramic ashtrays.

How many of those parties did I actually go to? How many more do I just remember because someone told me about them? That was my Bohemia.

Great use of flash on this site: http://www.commonrotation.com/index.htm

The Super Troopers atop Pride Mountain

...with a BIG bottle. Sadly empty before I ever laid hands on it.

The Super Troopers

(SOO-pah TROO-pahs)
Intrepid aerialists in midflight

Hansel and Gretel

...are aliive and well/And living in Berlin.

We're back on the air, people, without converting to the New Blogger (TM).

Photos from the Napa trip and the visit to the Surgical Museum coming shortly.

Perge Mondo, Ms. Pleasant, and Ms. Disarray

Drama in the Whole Foods checkout line.

Mach 20

If a sperm were the size of a whale, however...

Why, Thank You!

It is cold enough for me.

Walking to the bus stop is like entering a Jack London story. I hope the tinder works, or I'll have to gut a dog to warm my hands inside.

Also, my sewage line froze due to global climate change, so I am taking showers in an apartment down the hall. The water lines for the hot tub situated over my apartment froze as well, so I have a plastic tent suspended from my ceiling. It's all very chic in a postapocalyptic sort of way.

New Year Me

Harold & Maudeland

The thing I love about the Bay Area is that you walk through bits of literature and history. Like the Sutler Baths, which burned down 30-40 years ago, and which were used to shoot a scene in the movie Harold and Maude. Elsewhere, you wander through the land of the Beats in the North Beach neighborhood around City Lights, see the literary ghost of Steve McQueen pitch down Nob Hill streets, and come across the settings of Tales of the City. You end up with a feeling that's the opposite of nostalgia--the feeling that if something happened here, and here, and here, you might be about to step into the middle of a story of your own at any moment.

The corollary of this idea, or maybe just its twin, is the sense you get from everyone you talk to that their career is just something to pay the rent; they're really in the middle of the story that's happening right at the moment you're talking to them.

Pacific

Somehow, the Pacific sounds more like an ocean should than the Atlantic. Maybe it helps that I was up near the Cliff House, where the rip tides and sharp rocks make a midnight winter swim an exciting experience.

San Francisco by Night

Chad invited me to a party at Dan and Donnan's place. Even with the address, the taxi driver couldn't figure out where the party was...he should have just looked for the crowd of guys standing around smoking and looking for something to blog.

As soon as I said hi, the crowd introduced me as "that blogger from Chicago" and themselves as "DanChrisMichaelChrisDaveandNick". They fed me on red wine and chocolate mousse, while Donnan sang holiday songs from Hedwig. Chad showed up just as I was leaving, so unfortunately, we didn't get to chat as much as I'd have liked. Still, I got to meet his cousin Scott, also from Chicago, and a number of SF's most interesting people.

I'd love to say that we all hit the Endup after capturing all their URLs and becoming BFF with each and every one of them, but jet lag got the better of me, and I collapsed until the morning.

San Francisco: the View

From the St. Francis Hotel overlooking Union Square and points east.

San Francisco, Day 1

Got up early in the morning after a late night flight to SFO. I decided to charge up the side of Telegraph Hill first thing off the bat, bundled up in a wool sweater, jeans and scarf. Appropriate for Chicago weather, nearly fatal in 58 degree, high humidity San Francisco conditions after going up 45 degree streets. By the time I reached the top, I was completely drenched.

On the way back down, I stopped in Cafe Zoetrope, and told the bartender, "I just climbed Telegraph Hill."

"Yeah," she said, "that's what it looks like."

Later in the day, I stopped in at Mea Cinis ("my ashes"), a newly-opened store that specializes in new hand made jewelry and Southeast Asian Antiquities. The store featured Chad's Venetian plastering job and the hand-strung pigskin hangings that looked like dreadlocks, as well as a kick-ass selection of art objects.

Dan, the owner, showed me around the place. When I mentioned that Chad's blog led me to visit, Dan shouted, and Chad appeared from the back, wearing a Geek Squad t-shirt. He seemed very surprised that anyone reads his blog...false modesty, judging from his site stats.

We started chatting about blogging and plastering and whatnot, and Dan showed me his twin brother's collection of 12th century bronze Khmer mirrors. A guy came in, wearing a massive pair of green galoshes, and started ooh-ing and aah-ing over everything, until he came to the mirrors, and gasped.

"Those are 14th century Khmer bronze mirrors," he said.

"No," replied Dan with a touch of pride, "they're 12th century Khmer bronze mirrors."

Just a standard day in North Beach. Always nice when you can find the one place where two people would come to argue over the dating of nine hundred year old art.

A bald woman came in next. I couldn't tell if she was bbald because of some ailment, or for religious reasons, or just as a fashion statement, but clearly, being bald worked for her. Dan went off to show her the bracelets made from something that looked like the mating between human bone and high-grade fractal rendering software.

Chad said, "look, since you don't know anyone in San Francisco...now you do. A friend of mine is throwing a party tonight, and I'd love it if you would come."

Despite jetlag and tired legs from the morning climb, how could I say no?

Weirdness Roundup

Well, with 2006 nearly done, it's time to bottle up as much of the weirdness as possible before it all floats away.

The 10 most bizarre people on earth (via kottke (via mr) (UPDATED LINK)
Including the guy with the mutated twin lodged in his abdomen and the guy who ate a Cessna. I was briefly disappointed not to be included in this list, but as a friend once told me, "Scott, you're a nice amateur eccentric, but we have professionals here to handle the heavy lifting."

Dominionist Christians in the Pentagon, and the People who Hate Them
A classic political rant. I recommend that y'all give this guy whatever it is he needs to take care of the problem, or we may be living in a Left Behind book in no time flat.

The fugue state of the Bishop of Southwark (via Neil)

What happened to the Bishop of Southwark last Tuesday night? Was he mugged on the way home to Tooting from a pre-Christmas party at the Irish embassy? Or was he found wandering in a confused state in Crucifix Lane, near his cathedral, having supped not wisely, but too well?

The Rt Rev Tom Butler, 66, one of the Church of England's most senior bishops and a pillar of Thought for the Day on the BBC Today programme, says he has no idea. Others say he was seen sitting in the back of a Mercedes chucking children's toys out of the window and announcing: I'm the Bishop of Southwark. It's what I do."

And of course, the Russian Spy Polonium Sushi Caper.
As Bruce Sterling likes to say, this one is fractally weird. As the press boys like to say, this one's got legs. This particular little article highlights the victim's dining companion. Nice reading.

Kick Ass Movie Pitches

What if the Internet turned into a Were-wolf? and other great ideas.

Lunaryuna & Magic Fly Paula's Star Diary

Ooh, aah.

More.

Bloody swimming pools

I give you...the Abode of Chaos

Crashed aircraft, fire-blackened walls, a swimming pool of blood and portraits
of Tony Blair and Osama bin Laden adorn a sprawling “shrine to chaos”
...
Demeure du Chaos (Abode of Chaos) includes a swimming pool of blood, top,
alongside a display of twisted metal, charred walls, burnt-out cars and
battlefield debris.

M Ehrmann’s celebration of the apocalypse, inspired
by his experiences in the Middle East and by the events of September 11, 2001,
has enraged residents, who are offended by its charred walls, twisted metal,
burnt-out cars and battlefield debris. A mock oil platform sits on one roof amid
camouflage netting. The garden includes a sculpture re-creating the remains of
the World Trade Centre.

“I have to pass by it every day. It’s morbid.
It’s horrible,” Monique Nietto, a neighbour, told Le Parisien. “M Ehrmann has
completely destroyed a magnificent property.”
The locals call the site “

Edward Tufte Lecture Notes

Edward Tufte Lecture 10/2/06: SG Notes
Presenting Data and Information

Use high-density data
· Allow audience to read. People can read 2-4 times faster than you can talk.

Minimize graphic flair
· Allows more space for explanatory material.
· Eliminate boxes on org charts when 2-D location of text already describes relationships inside organization
· Eliminate chartjunk (e.g., explosions; cf FEMA chart)

Annotate
· Explain what’s going on

Show causality
· Differentiate links/relationships
· Use whatever evidence is important
· Multiple levels of information in one exhibit
· Allow users to tell their own little stories

Presentation Methods
1. Don’t get it original, get it right
2. Model: NYT/WSJ
o News stories
o Sports page
o Weather page
o Stock page
3. This is a solved problem
4. NYT/WSJ are:
o High density
o Conventionally designed—designs that have worked
o Despite complexity of data, millions of people can read the sports page, get lots of information, so don’t underestimate the capability of your audience to understand

Two main problems in Information Display:
1. Multivariate problems
Subproblem: how to display in 2-D/ on paper
2. Information Resolution

Put your name on your work. Work is not done by organizations, it is done by people. Putting your name on it is a sign of pride in craftsmanship, and allows users to direct questions/criticisms back to the author.

Label data directly. Avoid legends & distant labels.

2-D workaround example: Euclid, 1st edition, 1570
· Use of 3-D popups, still functional in book copy almost 500 years later

The Grand Principles of Analytic Design
1. Use comparisons
Rulers, scale, normal ranges, etc
2. Show causality
3. Show many dimensions/levels of data
4. Completely integrate words, numbers and images
“The evidence is indifferent to the mode of production”
5. Document everything and tell people about it
This adds credibility and reasons to believe
Also enables further study
Show all of your data—don’t cherry pick
6. Content counts most of all
Serious presentations stand or fall on the quality, relevance and content of
information
7. Adjacent in space, not stacked in time
Don’t make users turn the page to see next result. It is easier to compare
adjacent things
8. Use small multiples (cf Galileo sunspot diagrams)
9. Put everything on a universal grid
How big is it?
Where is it?
What is its context?
These are the commonalities among all humans, regardless of time, culture

Low resolution of screens vs. paper
· Computer screen uses ~1/500th of human eye-brain capacity
· 1 glance = ~150Mb data
· 16 bit color (up to 20 bit for artists/designers)
· Paper 10-12 times better than screen for resolution

Aside: p.162 of Galileo’s Demonstrations features the only direct reference he made in print to the movement of the earth: “dal meuimento anno della Terra”. (“The annual movement of the Earth”) The church asked him not to repeat this.

Credibility:
You know what you’re talking about
You aren’t cherry picking

Give lots of handouts
· Lets people use their own cognitive style. People not paying attention to the speaker in order to read the handout is a sign the audience is awake

Respect the audience. Contempt leaks through.
To clarify, add detail
· Sounds paradoxical, but is true

To see best variation, scale average slope of data to 45°
· Avoids ceiling & floor effects
· Most useful for cyclic data; allows best detection of variation
· You want lumpy, not spiky or flat graphs

Use sparklines: intense, simple, word-sized graphics inline with text
· Software: Sparkline—shareware office plug-in
· Other software:
Stats program: SAS, SPSS, “anything that costs more than $500”
Design program: Illustrator
Page layout software

Resolution of words=Resolution of sparkline graphics

Usability tests: do people use something similar

John Tukey: “Better to be approximately right than exactly wrong”

Project management:
· Best to do wallchart
· Make it large, updated regularly
· Readable 2-3’ away

When reading a PPT presentation, ask:
· What’s the story?
· Does it establish credibility
· What’s the scope? Two problems:
o Overreaching
o Irrelevant Domain

PowerPoint Flaws:
· Low Resolution: 4 sheets of paper=50-250 PPT slides
· Chops all info into slide-sized pieces
· Encourages fake hierarchies (bullets)
· Encourages clipped jargon, non-English
· Discourages non-findings
· Encourages pitching, rather than reporting

Pitching out corrupts within (cf Iraq evidence)

Solution: use technical reports, built in word processor, instead of decks

Technical Report:
11”x17” paper, folded once, written on both sides

Start with 200 word intro:
What the problem is
Who cares (what’s the relevance)
What your solution is

Model is article in Science or Nature

Meant to be read through
High resolution data dump
Followed by discussion
If someone derails talk, at least you got through the 200 word summary

One handout means
50-250 slides of average density
1000-2000 words or
500-1000 sparklines

General presentations:
· Worry about content, rather than production values
· Practice, practice, practice
· Video of self reveals: verbal & gestural tics, placeholders, other annoying quirks
· Show up early
1 time in 20, this heads off a serious problem (double booking, etc)
1 time in 20, allows a quiet opportunity to prepare, talk to/greet audience
20 times in 20, you are not late

Presentation
Start with 200 word, 3 part summary from report
Never apologize (Don’t waste time talking about you, talk about the data)

For presenting complicated data/data display:
PGP=Particular, General, Particular
Give an example, then orient to whole of data, then give another specific example

Give everybody a piece of paper

Don’t condescend to your audience. Instead of “Knowing your audience,” which leads to underestimation: Respect your audience, Know your content.

Use body language

Finish early.

__________
Key readings:
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Introduction and Ch. 1
Envisioning Information, Introduction and Ch. 2
Beautiful Evidence, Introduction and pp. 12-45

Bed Jump

Meme of the moment:

1. Jump on hotel bed.
2. Take photo so it looks like you're levitating.

Hey Ya!

The sad but inevitable sound of summer receding. Magical and true.

Obadiah Parker covering Outkast's Hey Ya!

audio version

via Jonathan Carroll

Leverage: My Hero

Guy Gabaldon, died at age 80 this week.

He grew up as part of a "multiethnic gang", moved in with a Japanese-American family subsequently interned in Alaska, and fought in WWII. Using a mixture of rudimentary Japanese and cigarettes, he successfully captured over 1,500 Japanese soldiers on the island of Saipan, earning himself the nickname of "Pied Piper" and winning a Navy Cross Medal in the process.

(Wikipedia Entry)

Double dipping

A second code has been found in DNA, controlling the positioning of nucleosomes.