Saturday I wandered around the Old Town Art Fair(s) with Kirk, Karen and Kate. Too much sun, rather than too hot, resulting in the necessity of an extended afternoon nap. Read Full Circle in one sitting while listening to Joni Mitchell, who sounds like California and always will.

Sunday, up at 5AM to hear the wind howling past for half an hour, followed by a short burst of rain and cooler weather. Fall asleep on the couch and miss yoga. Long phone call with Mom & Dad for Father's Day.

The Quotable Me

"The first child resembles the father, the second child resembles the mother, and the third child resembles me."

Writers Interview Roundup

William Gibson interviewed by io9.

Douglas Coupland's descriptions of Vancouver circa City of Glass are closest to my sense of the place. It's hemmed in and separated from the rest of the world by an ocean, a border, mountains. And then there's the unknown and incomprehensible north. Vancouver sits there, insulated to some extent, but picking up influences from across the ocean and across the border. The signals seem to be amplified by those symbolic barriers. Psychogeographically, I identify with greater Vancouver more than I do with the rest of Canada, which I have a fondness for and good feelings for. Vancouver's peculiar culture feels like home.

I like it because I grew up in a really extreme monoculture in southwestern Virgina. I was surrounded by Southern white folks – this was in badass Appalachia, up in the hollers where my mother's family had been forever. Having that experience in a small town made me happiest in big cities. Especially in radically multicultural big cities – as far as you can get from monoculture. I'm happiest where people are generally not even of recognizable ethic derivations. I'm into hybrid vigor.

Canada is set up to run on steady immigration. It feels like a twenty first century country to me because it's not interested in power. It negotiates and does business. It gets along with other countries. The power part is very nineteenth century. 99 percent of ideology we have today is very nineteenth century. The twentieth century was about technology, and the nineteenth was ideology.

And Gore Vidal in the Independent on family, feuds and fame.

As a 10-year-old, Gore appeared in a Pathé newsreel, landing a light aircraft. How did that feel? "Great. I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936." He points to a dresser covered with small framed photographs. "There's a picture of my father."

"He looks like a film star."

"He was like a film star. He was the most famous college athlete in the history of the United States. A quarterback at West Point. He won a silver medal in the Olympic Games of 1924. In the 43 years that I knew him, we never quarrelled once, and we never agreed on anything."

His father's picture is towards the back of the display. Most prominently positioned is an image of a young woman with tousled hair, a mischievous grin, and great vitality: a tomboy with Katharine Hepburn cheekbones.

"Amelia Earhart," Vidal says.

"You can see courage in those eyes." "You can."

"Didn't she have a fling with your father?"

"She had more than that. I said to him, "Why didn't you marry her?' This was after she went down in the Pacific in 1936. They'd set up three airlines together." Even now, more than seven decades later, there is emotion in his voice. "He said: 'I have never really wanted to marry another boy.' And she was like a boy."

...He has recalled [his mother] telling him, for instance, that rage made her orgasmic ("I forgot to ask her if sex ever did") and remarking that she was born only "because my mother's douche bag broke". Nina also informed him how, on the way to their honeymoon, his father had told her: "'There's something very important I want you to know.' I was so excited. He's going to tell me he loves me. But he didn't. Instead, he said: 'I have three balls.'" According to Vidal, his father "was in all the medical books".

Sounding Rooms

The always great BLDG BLOG has a series of posts on hidden rooms, including this one, discussing Allen Fea's book. Nice set of comments as well. Apparently, the dream of finding new rooms in one's house is a common one, particularly among city dwellers. Likewise, the theosophists used to say that this was one of the first signs that you were doing some astral travel while lucid dreaming, and that the extra spaces were the result of the psychic space being a mirror of the physical or vice versa.

I used to have dreams about finding "extra" rooms behind the registers, and "extra" roads, usually dirt roads, lined by trees and elaborate, looming houses which appeared between existing hedgerows near my house.

This was probabaly touched off in part due to the fact that there was an entire extra row of lots that ran behind one of my friends' houses, one of which contained the single spookiest house in the neighborhood. Made of nasty, rotted-looking brown wood, abandoned and half ruined, surounded by burnt out grass and weeds. We could just see into the property whilst perched in a crabapple tree at the edge of my friend's back yard, with the partial obscurity offered by the branches adding to the uncanny feeling, as if we were stalking the house through the savannah. We used to take turns telling each other hair-raising stories about the place (axe murderers, Amityville-style demonic possession, crazed drug-fiend cultists and bloodthirsty ghosts made star appearances). The object was to make someone completely freak out and lose their nerve for staring at the place.

After a few years, someone knocked the thing down and landscaped it into a backyard garden with azaleas and a water feature, completely oblivious to the fact that they were planting their ground cover on top of a gateway to HELL!!!

I think every neighborhood should be furnished with a derelict building vibrating with the uncanny for the purpose of edification and atmospheric enhancement for the young people.

Dr. Chemex

I feel cheap and tawdry when I use links from boingboing or kottke, but sometimes they're too good to pass up, like this article from Gourmet Magazine on the inventor of the Chemex coffee maker.

“He loved to drink and he loved to eat,” says Roy Doty, a cartoonist who was a friend of the late inventor, “so going out for dinner with Dr. Schlumbohm was a horrifying experience.” Guests were treated to epic all-night food crawls in his huge Cadillac Coupe De Ville, which he pimped out with built-in shades and a solid-gold Chemex coffee maker bolted to the driver’s door. (When he traded in his car every two years, he removed the golden amulet and set it on the newer, larger model.) Like many German immigrants, Schlumbohm felt at home in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood, once a stronghold of German restaurants and coffee shops. He drove his guests up into the 80s, handed anyone loitering near the area a ten-dollar bill to watch the car, and then marched in for his first course. Soon, they all piled back into the car and moved on to the next joint. “Eventually,” says Doty, “you’d be somewhere eating streusel with him and by that time it was two or three in the morning.” But three in the morning was nothing to Schlumbohm, who surrounded himself with fellow night owls and often made calls around that time to discuss his newest ideas.

When he did return home, it was, unsurprisingly, to a bachelor penthouse on 5th Avenue—a peeping Tom’s paradise overlooking Greenwich Village, with thousands of dollars worth of binoculars dangling from the windows, and ice buckets stocked with perpetually chilling German beers and wines at the front door for visitors. “He loved women, Dr. S., and women loved him,” says Doty.

The Puzzle Box Apartment

Eric Clough and a team of (sometimes unpaid) artists and artisans built a luxury apartment embedded with secrets:

[S]ome of that furniture and some of those walls conceal secrets — messages, games and treasures — that make up a Rube Goldberg maze of systems and contraptions conceived by a young architectural designer named Eric Clough,
whose ideas about space and domestic living derive more from Buckminster Fuller than Peter Marino.

The apartment even comes with its own book, part of which is a fictional narrative that recalls “The Da Vinci Code” (without the funky religion or buckets of blood) and “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,” the children’s classic by E. L. Konigsburg about a brother and a sister who run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and discover — and solve — a mystery surrounding a Renaissance sculpture. It has its own soundtrack, too, with contributions by Kate Fenner, a young Canadian singer and songwriter...

Photos Here

And also Here, in case the NYT loses its mind.

Habeas Corpus: Back from the Dead

Despite the best efforts of the Bush Administration, Habeas Corpus is back. The Guantanamo Bay terror suspects have constitutional rights, and should have their day in court. A Supreme Court ruling is the best way for this right to be affirmed--it confirms its place in the Constitution, which a repeal of the previous terror law would not have done. All in all, a good day for the American system of justice.



Still, as a 5-4 ruling, this points out the importance of getting some youthful liberal (or at least centrist) types on the Court. Subtext: Obama'd better win.

Sebastian in High Style

"It's better to live your life like an open book...sometimes it's open to the wrong page"

Friday, out to the MCA with Ed, Gina and Mark for the Jeff Koons exhibit and First Fridays. Then, off to Luxbar in the Viagra Triangle for some Urban Cougar observation, take some time to glue myself together, then off to Minibar where I run into Jarrod and Bryan on their last day before Google, rejoin the MCA crowd, and end up at Sidetrack

Saturday, too wiped out for Bluesfest. Recover, head out to Jason's B-day tour at Cocktail, then Minibar again. Am described as "really solid".

Erland Ellisunk

Speaking of the AV Club, they've got a new interview up with Harlan Ellison (the man the myth the legend). I love the fact that Harlan made a cameo in Gay Talese's Frank Sinatra has a Cold, and almost gets the shit beaten out of him.

Update: Part 2 now available

More on The Fall

The Onion AV Club has a lengthy interview with Tarsem on The Fall:

So I said that to the actors, the moment I met them on the set. I just said, "Here, I am your puppet. I will create the best atmosphere for you, and you tell me if anything is intrusive. You'll never get a situation like this, except when—" What [David] Fincher calls very lazy filmmaking, and I agree, is when you just put lights out there, go telephoto, shoot 10 cameras, throw it together—actors love that, 'cause they can be natural from far away. I had unfortunately chosen a style in which the camera was in your face. It was very Yasujiro Ozu, it was very static. I just said, "Nothing should move. Nothing should come and save me. If the situation's not working, I want to be screwed."


Unfortunately, the handheld, really gritty-shitty look is perceived as realism. In that style, I find that you can make a cupboard act. You shoot an ad and the actor is dreadful, so you just pick up the camera and shake it around, and then suddenly it looks like the actor can act. It separates boys from men, when people are sitting in the camera stand just observing. Instead, I picked a worst-case scenario by putting the camera up close.

On the other hand, I said "The moment we go on location, you will be my puppets."

There were a lot of unique talents on this movie. For one, Lee Pace delivers multiple performances simultaneously, including convincing cast and crew that he was actually a paralyzed actor playing a bedridden stuntman. He did this so effectively that he wasn't recognized when he walked around at the gym off set.

For another, Eiko Ishioka delivers amazing, operatic costumes for the fantasy seqences, as she did for The Cell. The costumes together with the sets and the props? art installations? by art director Ged Clarke to build the fantasy sequences of the film.

Thirdly, the lab that printed the film did an amazing job, producing Baraka-like levels of color saturation:

there's a guy called Lionel Kopp who used to run a lab in France that I absolutely adore. And he has a lot to do with this particular one. Because I went in with specific paintings, pigmented early color photographs from Russia, and blah blah and say "There's an aesthetic and a technique that has to get in here." If it was easy to do this kind of stuff, hey, everyone would hire relatives. It's not. And this guy really has an aesthetic that I absolutely adore and trust. So I was in Paris with him all the time. And when we had to set the look, I would just tell him stuff and he'd achieve it. It was difficult technically sometimes. But aesthetically, you know, I had a look in mind and had to achieve it.

The Same People

Anna Quindlen on the California Gay Marriage Decision: Love Won

(and soon it won't be a big deal, at all)

Lotsa Things Could Happen

Fafblog calls it: "By the time a the Democratic National Convention only one delegate still supports Hillary Clinton. His name? Jesus."

Chicago: City of the Year

According to Fast Company:

The real Chicago isn't so easy to keep up with. It's constantly reinventing itself. Jumpy. Agitated. Impatient. It's as if the place is trembling. Move aside. Don't linger. And if you're going to dawdle, get out of the way. But what any Chicagoan will also tell you is that the past is very much present. It doesn't go away. It shouldn't. In fact, that's Chicago's lure and its beauty: its ability to take what was and figure out what could be.

Chicago has given America social investing and the stories of Stuart Dybek and Aleksander Hemon. It has been greening itself since long before it became trendy, and it has been dancing, too -- this is the home of house music, Wilco, and Lupe Fiasco. Here, in the birthplace of the American skyscraper, Santiago Calatrava is redefining the form with his Spire, while at the Art Institute, Renzo Piano is building a $300 million addition. The economy is growing faster than New York's or L.A.'s. And one of Chicago's own, who arrived in the 1980s and, in the tradition of the great rabble-rouser Saul Alinsky, took a job community organizing, has made a shockingly viable run for president, despite everyone telling him he was too inexperienced. Early in his campaign, Barack Obama told supporters, "I try to explain to people, I may be skinny but I'm tough. I'm from Chicago."

I agree, it's the energy of the place that really makes Chicago different. You come back afraid that you missed something while you were away.

The Road to Gambier

Off to my college reunion this weekend, driving a cherry red Mustang convertable in the first bloom of summer. Does life get any better?

James Madison's Pistols

This pair of pistols were a gift to President Madison, supposedly forged from iron from a fallen metorite at Campo del Cielo, and chased with Argentine silver. Results from a recent detailed analysis contradict this story on several important points.

(via Grinding)

Tarsem's The Fall

This is either going to be brilliant or an appalling disaster. Possibly both.



A story improvised by a five year old Romanian actress, based on photographs taken over a fourteen year period, featuring an actor who pretended to be a paraplegic throughout much of the film's production.

It will be many things. It will not, however, be mediocre.

Slideshow of related images: here.

Magic

Profile of industrial designer John Gaughan, one of the world's top manufacturers of effects for magicians, including some nice pictures of his collection of 18th and 19th century stage magic props.

House Porn 2

Alberto Manguel's 30,000 volume library, collected over six decades, gathered in a 15th century French country house.

In at least one instance, his absence saved the books:

I left my books behind when I set off for Europe in 1969, some time before the military dictatorship. I was 21 years old and wanted to see the world I had read about, the London of Dickens, the Paris of Marcel Aymé. My books, I thought, would faithfully wait in my parents’ house for me to come back one day. I could not have imagined that, had I stayed, like so many of my friends, I would have had to destroy my library for fear of the police, since in those terrible days one could be accused of subversion merely for being seen with a book that looked suspicious (someone I knew was arrested as a communist for carrying with him “The Red and the Black.”) Argentine plumbers found an unprecedented call for their services, since many readers tried to burn their books in their toilet bowls, causing the porcelain to crack.

House Porn

New York magazine's issue on home design includes a set of six amazingly constructed houses. The amazing part comes in part from the heavy DIY component, where palatial interiors have been constructed with glue guns, plywood and secondhand furniture.



Kohle Yohannon refurbished an 18 room Yonkers mansion "single-handedly", and now rents it out as a site for films.

(photos: Jason Schmidt)

I'm particularly fond of the Observatory Room, "like something out of Around the World in 80 Days" with walls covered in mica, copper and Moroccan rivets, and featuring church furniture and scientific apparatus.

Update: from an earlier interview with Kohle Yohannon

Mr. Yohannan is no less colorful. He tools around Yonkers on a Ducati motorcycle or in a secondhand Bentley. Born in San Francisco to parents of Iranian and French extraction, he grew up in a rambling Beaux-Arts house that his family had restored on a shoestring budget. "My dad was a mechanic, but my mom had really great taste," he said. "Our neighbors were doctors and lawyers who drove Mercedes, and we were the grease monkeys who fixed their cars."

At 16 he abandoned a fledgling career cleaning spark plugs for 25 cents apiece to become a fashion model, strutting his stuff down the catwalks of Barcelona and New York, where he also enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology and learned to make dresses. When he was 22 — during his sophomore year at Columbia University — he became the fourth husband of Mary McFadden, the fashion designer, who was 51; the relationship ended 22 months later in well-publicized recriminations. (In court papers, Mr. Yohannan described Ms. McFadden as an "older, selfish, willful" woman who demanded "rough sexual treatment" and "group sex sessions." She called him a "toy boy" and a "flake." He left the marriage with a settlement of $110,000 and the couple's pet cockatoo, Socrates Zinzar Big Bux.)

Karl Lagerfeld is Never Happy Anyway

More Steampunk

Once the media gets a hold on the Zeitgeist, articles like these pop up like fairy circles. From the Phoenix.

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)