Wikileaks

The whole Wikileaks/Bradley Manning/Julian Assange imbroglio is reaching a state of high fluidity. Manning is under arrest, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is playing hide-and-seek with Pentagon assets, and may be in danger of "extreme sanctions" (or other John Le Carre-esque euphemisms), if Daniel "Pentagon Papers" is to be believed.



He's also trying to get his hands on the transcripts Adrian Lamo turned over to the feds, before the feds are able to prevent the release of a large number of leaked diplomatic cables.

Expect to see more in the headlines over the coming weeks, and in the meantime, have a look at this New Yorker profile of Assange, who seems to have had the kind of life where this week's troubles are par for the course. Hiding from cultists, safe houses in Reykjavik and motorcycling through Vietnam feature prominently.

I could swear I met him online in the 80's when he went by the handle Mendax...or maybe I should swear I've never heard of him.

Meet Alvin Greene

Keith Olbermann interview as dada performance.

Exoplanet

Beta Pictoris is ready for it's closeup.

(via @dmonzel)

Andrei Tarkovsky's Polaroids

Bottlerocketscience has a fondness for the real-time quality of Polaroids, and this sampling of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky from a Russian language photoblog shows exactly what can be done in the medium. Lyrical, haunting, and still immediate decades later.

Bonus Quote of the Day

Lawns are a form of television.

-Michael Pollan, Second Nature

Douglas Adams on Tail Risk

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.

(via Mark Thoma, via Paul Kedrosky, via Ezra Klein)

Prince Poppycock

The Coilhouse folks have taste, and they like Prince Poppycock (aka John Quale), therefore you and the rest of America will bow before the oncoming storm, as he performs on America's Got Talent. I can barely wait until the inevitable Poppycock/Gaga duet.

Perfume Gardens

Nice article about people formulating perfumes from their own gardens. Makes me want to grow a Chinese perfume tree and boil it up with some jojoba oil.

Jane Lynch vs. iPhone

Links for Later

Entoptic Forms: the way the embedded patterns of the visual nervous system inform paleolithic art.

Combing the countryside: expanding acceptance of racial types of Brazilian models.

Whatever, Dude: expanding acceptance of gays & lesbians among American men.

Barry Ritholtz takes down Art Laffer on the coming apocalypse over the Bush tax cuts sunset.

William Gibson's Book Expo Talk

The capital F Future "is gone":

Say it’s midway through the final year of the first decade of the 21st Century. Say that, last week, two things happened: scientists in China announced successful quantum teleportation over a distance of ten miles, while other scientists, in Maryland, announced the creation of an artificial, self-replicating genome. In this particular version of the 21st Century, which happens to be the one you’re living in, neither of these stories attracted a very great deal of attention.

Also worth reading for his explanation of his previous books, which are about, no surprise, the decades in which they were written.

Life on Titan?

Two new papers have come out, suggesing that there could be life on Titan that "breathes hydrogen, eats acetylene and excretes methylene". But, as Maggie Korth-Baker puts it on boingboing:

let's knock out one basic thing right off the bat: Nobody has discovered alien life. We have not found E.T. This is only a test of the emergency high-pitched happy squealing system.

That said, it probably wouldn't be remiss to clap your hands delightedly, like a little girl. As I said, nobody has found alien life, but they did find the sort of evidence that might suggest alien life is down there on the surface of Titan, waiting to be found. It's a little like walking up to a house and finding the front door open, and, inside, a T.V. stand that's missing a T.V. It's reasonable to assume the house might have been burglarized, but there are also other plausible explanations and you don't have enough evidence to know one way or the other.

The Art of Dennis Hopper

Michaelangelo, Neuroanatomist

More evidence that Michaelangelo hid detailed anatomical depictions of neuroanatomy in the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Cheeky devil, that Mike.

Kinder Than Necessary

"Be kinder than necessary, for everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle."

=James M. Barrie + Plato

Above, a portmanteau of a quote, said to be jointly developed from statements of the two distinguished gentlemen, according to a post in a discussion of the various kindnesses delivered by Mr. Keanu Reeves, "struggling musician", post-modern Messiah of several alternate timestreams and genuinely nice guy.

Images of the Week

Dennis Hopper, "Double Standard".

Harold Edgerton, "Stonehenge at Night" (1944). via BLDGBLOG

Unknown, "What the devil's for dinner?", via Design Observer

Gulf Pelicans in Oil, Telegraph.

Michael Chung, "Stare Game", Pictory showcases New York.

Unknown. via rcs.

Faran Krentcil, modified BP sign. via Siege.

Funny Looking

Yesterday, in the course of a quarter mile trip to return some videos to the library, no less than five people gave me looks of the kind of profound disgust you might give to someone with feces smeared on their face. It got to the point where I checked myself in the mirror--no feces. Checked the car for kittens stapled to the front fender--no kittens.

I'm stumped.

Links for Later

Keynesian Porn

John Underkoffer demonstrates Minority Report-style user interface.

Joshua Davis does some generative art about the BMW Z4.

Stephen Fry: What I Wish I'd Known When I was 18.

STEPHEN FRY: WHAT I WISH I'D KNOWN WHEN I WAS 18 from Peter Samuelson on Vimeo.

Happy Towel Day!

In honor of Douglas Adams, today is Towel Day. Don't forget your towel!

Dopamine as the Gateway to Working Memory

Zachary Burt, in a blog post on the Neuroscience of Buddhism:

it explained how dopamine is a gateway to the regulation of working memory. When dopamine levels are steady, the “doorway” of working memory is closed; when they are low, the “doorway” opens, when there is a spike, the “doorway” opens. Why is this?

When you are feeling bad, (low dopamine), your attention is scattered so you can find things in the environment that will spike your mood: you are going to be more likely to be able to find food, sight potential mates, etc. When there is a spike in dopamine, you need to open your attention to be alert to the new threat/opportunity. Otherwise you can let the contents of your working memory remain constant so you can work on whatever problems are currently on your mind.

via @ycombinator

Internet Famous

In which Mr. Schneier receives recognition from an unexpected quarter.

Happy Harvey Milk Day

On the Limits of Economic Justice

This week in economic justice:

Rand Paul falls into the error of unconstrained libertarianism.


Marginal Revolution on the limits of Benthamite utilitarianism.



In conversation: "We are wiser perhaps for worshipping at the altars of many small gods."

The Future Is Now, Vol. LXXXI: Synthetic Life

Craig Venter and friends just announced the continuous replication of a lifeform with a completely synthetic genome. In short, new life. This is a big one.

Caveat: existing cells are still required to house the novel genome.

For now, Igor, for now...

Quote(s) of the Day

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself in order to crush him; a vapor, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But when the universe crushes him, man is still more noble than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage that the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of of this.

-Blaise Pascal

Some people say, In this big universe, you're just a speck of dust.
You may be a speck of dust.
But oh, what a speck of dust.
In this speck of dust, the infinite and the finite are fused.
And you are the threshold of the two.
Here, the mortal being comes as close
as it possibly can to the immortal.
The same power that drives the universe breathes us.
We have been chosen to be the platform for life.

-Prem Rawat

(via Andrew & his readers)

It was a Very Good Year

Lone Gunman, one of the best blogs for business thinking on the web, reviews its second year. Lots of good stuff.

Stalker

BLDG BLOG's meditation on the "ghosts of the future", or how Roadside Picnic, later made into the film Stalker, prefigured the deadlylandscape around Chernobyl.

Ghost Messages

On the heels of the strangest sentence of the week, someone has been leaving mid-paragraph rants on my answering machine. One of these is replicated for you here by way of example:

"...San Francisco, or some of them other places. Yes, it's transferable. He's
been talking about that for a while. Yes, I'm sure that's true. Manageable. Only the finest cuts..."

Is this someone's cellphone dialing me by accident? A message from beyond the grave? What?

Strangest Sentence I've Uttered All Week

"I cannot recommend that you slap your customer's vagina after giving her a Brazilian."

The Joys of Teaching

Hoisted from facebook.

Structured Finance Explained

Alex Tabarrok writes a pretty good explanation of how CDOs restructure risk.

As he mentions in his post, models which underestimate the expected default rate will blow up the structure. I should also mention that underrepresenting the correlation among assets will likewise result in a structure that's prone to blow up, and that beyond a certain point, all correlations will move toward 1, meaning that the failure of enough mortgages in a pool will make it almost certain that the other mortgages will fail and that your model will have underestimated this fact.

In the recent meltdown, both of these things happened: the chances that the underlying mortgages would independently fail increased and the correlation among all of the mortgages increased. Moreover, there were a number of CDOs out there that appear to have been filled with lemons, where the odds of the underlying failing were known to be higher by the seller, but not the buyer.

Bret Easton Ellis Interview

Bret Easton Ellis talks to Vice about the ominous atmosphere in LA, why he's not Patrick Bateman or any of his other characters (despite the frequent confusion by his readers), his forthcoming novel Imperial Bedrooms and his screenplay The Golden Suicides, "about the lives and deaths of the artists Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan."

Having not known them, I could only guess. Maybe there was a mutual feeding of each other’s paranoia?
There was the paranoia. And I mean, I think she needed a narrative. She needed an explanation as to why she wasn’t making it in Hollywood. She’d made it before, in the video-game world, but I think she came out here and everyone expected her to be a star, this big moviemaker, and she didn’t realize that movies just aren’t getting made. It drove her crazy, and she couldn’t accept that defeat and so she had to build this narrative.

That’s where her theories about a Scientologist plot against her come into it.
The Scientologists. And then she began to build this huge narrative as to why she wasn’t successful in the film industry. I’m haunted by it. I don’t know why it resonated with me so much.

You explained it pretty well. It was the relationship that you’d been having, and your experience with The Informers. That could really put you in a place where the Blake-Duncan story would hit you hard.
And they were hot.

They were hot. Yeah.
Literally, this is how it sold with one of the producers, to get financing for it. “Who wants to see a movie about two people who kill themselves?” And then the other producer said, “Well, they were hot.”

Oh, fuck.
And he said, “Really? Well, where’s the pictures of them? Ah. Yeah.”

This was two producers talking to each other?
Yeah.

Literary Perfume

Concept art by Ah & Oh Studio, Poland.

(via The Dieline)

Links for Later

Saras Sarasvathy's theory of effectual reasoning & entrepreneurship.

Pogo: "Gardyn," a song for Mother's Day

Philip K. Dick's VALIS experience

(via disinfo)

Birth of a Spartan

Bungie's new trailer for Halo Reach deals with the ambivalence of becoming a cyborg in the game's increasingly grim meathook future.

The Obscene Supreme Court on Obscenity

De Onion kix az:

"I'm beginning to wonder if you really understand what 'abridging the freedom of speech' means at all," said Stevens, a 34-year veteran of the court known for his often-nuanced interpretations of the First Amendment. "I'm also wondering whether you and your fat-faced plaintiffs over there need to have some respect for constitutionally protected expression fucked into your empty hick skulls."

(via jwz)

Ignore Stephen Baldwin - Restore Joss Whedon

I'd donate.

(via Whedonesque)

Baige and Other xkcd Viewer-Identified Colors

Xkcd did a reader survey of display colors, with some interesting results from some interesting people. New color names included "baige"[sic] (popular among guys), "what I'm sure was once nice wallpaper before you stained it with your nicotine" and "gosh, thats blue".

Coilhouse recommends: Tornado Rider

Image of the Day

Thumb Switching

(via boingboing)

10 Years of Blogging

This blog is 10. Good heavens, what a long time that is in Internet years.

Quote of the Day

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

(via Ben)

Solar Beat

Whitevinyl's Solar Beat makes the music of the spheres. The web app uses the planetary years to build a set of sonic loops. As the guys say on Coolhunting, it's worth waiting the 248 earth years to hear Pluto chime.

Links for Later

Mark Thoma curates an article on Harvard's symposium on "Solving the Social Sciences' Hard Problems".

Mark Suster on why you should never hire a job hopper.

Paul Dix on why Mark Suster is wrong. As a job hopper myself, I tend to go with Paul on this one.

NYT on the Novogratzes, stars of my new favorite show, 9 on Design.

The Future Is Now, Vol LXXX: Laser Mass Spec Imaging

This is some really exciting stuff: take a confocal laser and scan a tissue slice, blasting off samples of its constituent molecules, and then shove those samples through a mass spec. Generate a fully 2D realized image of the chemical peaks coming off the sample, process the image in false color, based on whatever post-hoc data you'd like to suggest.

Crazy hot.

Signs of Protest

(two from Andrew 1, 2)

Quote of the Day

If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted – they have these wonderful things in their head but you’re not one of them, you’re just a normal sort of person, you could never do anything like that – then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind of like, where you say, well, I know that things come from nothing very much and start from unpromising beginnings. And I’m an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.

-Brian Eno

(Brian Eno, via Geeta Dyal, via Jones, via Warren)

Corrolary to this: I get a lot of my best results by asking, How can I find some Trouble today?

Shiny

Image: NASA, Solar Dynamics Observatory

Far ultraviolet false color image of the sun.

Palin: "Obama's Handling of Icelandic Volcano Helps the Terrorists"

A report from the Tea Party Lawyers' Association Dinner.

What do we really know about those Icelanders, with their volcanic weapons of mass airplane delayal anyway, also?

The Last Hitler Parody Video

In which the copyfight takes an ugly turn.

The Post-Kick Ass World

After you get home from seeing the excellent Kick Ass and decide to become a home brew superhero, maybe you need a place to kick it, like these guys. Impressive design work. I mean, I've got a Green Lantern shirt that every geek loves, but where do you find a spandex costume designer for something like this? It's also cool that there's now a sub-sub-culture for everyone.

Quote of the Day

The architects of the bailout have been trying to cure insolvency by treating it as illiquidity.

The SEC may be trying to cure unethical behavior by treating it as illegality.

-Emanuel Derman

Elderly Gay Couple Robbed, Imprisoned by County Officials

This makes me spitting mad:

Clay and his partner of 20 years, Harold, lived in California. Clay and Harold made diligent efforts to protect their legal rights, and had their legal paperwork in place—wills, powers of attorney, and medical directives, all naming each other. Harold was 88 years old and in frail medical condition, but still living at home with Clay, 77, who was in good health.

One evening, Harold fell down the front steps of their home and was taken to the hospital. Based on their medical directives alone, Clay should have been consulted in Harold’s care from the first moment. Tragically, county and health care workers instead refused to allow Clay to see Harold in the hospital. The county then ultimately went one step further by isolating the couple from each other, placing the men in separate nursing homes. Ignoring Clay’s significant role in Harold’s life, the county continued to treat Harold like he had no family and went to court seeking the power to make financial decisions on his behalf. Outrageously, the county represented to the judge that Clay was merely Harold’s “roommate.” The court denied their efforts, but did grant the county limited access to one of Harold’s bank accounts to pay for his care.

What happened next is even more chilling: without authority, without determining the value of Clay and Harold’s possessions accumulated over the course of their 20 years together or making any effort to determine which items belonged to whom, the county took everything Harold and Clay owned and auctioned off all of their belongings. Adding further insult to grave injury, the county removed Clay from his home and confined him to a nursing home against his will. The county workers then terminated Clay and Harold's lease and surrendered the home they had shared for many years to the landlord.

Three months after he was hospitalized, Harold died in the nursing home. Because of the county’s actions, Clay missed the final months he should have had with his partner of 20 years. Compounding this tragedy, Clay has literally nothing left of the home he had shared with Harold or the life he was living up until the day that Harold fell, because he has been unable to recover any of his property.

Who did those officials think they were to do such a thing? Disgusting. Dan Savage has more.

Update: Sonoma County responds with allegations of domestic abuse.

Here Be Dragons?

Cryptomundo takes a look at dragon sitings over the past few hundred years, and wonders if there could be large cryptid reptiles in the British Isles, or if it's all just made up.

Some dragon sightings are much closer to home. In the early 19th century folklorist Mary Trevelyan interviewed many elderly people living in the Glamorgan area of Wales. They recounted memories from their youth (early 19th century) of a race of winged serpents said to inhabit the forest around Penllyne Castle. They had crested heads and feathery wings. The serpents were brightly coloured and sparkled as if covered with jewels. They rested coiled on the ground but if threatened would attack by swooping down at their aggressors.The snakes killed poultry and were described as “the terrors of farmyards and coverts” many were shot for their depreditations of livestock. One woman recalled that her grandfather shot one after it attacked him. Its skin had hung for years on the wall at his farm. Tragically it was discarded after his death. This would make any modern day cryptozoologist wince.

We are the droids we've been looking for.

Owen Pallett & Final Fantasy

Owen Pallett & Final Fantasy

Every Painting in MOMA

The quick tour of MOMA, April 10, 2010, photographed by chrspck. Solid selection of mid-20th work, unsurprisingly.

(via Andrew)

Restructuring Prep for Your Capital Raise

Mark Suster, entrepreneur and VC, calls this process by its true and better name: "cleaning up your own shite". It's amazing how many prohibitive terms and conditions find their way into early rounds. A lot of otherwise solid companies find themselves unexpectedly up against the wall because of this problem, and the more experience (read: more rounds) the company has under its belt, the worse this gets. If this is you, go check out his article.

Sometimes I check my own blog to see if I've put up anything interesting since the last time I was online.

Brazilian Steampunk

What could be better?

Albert Hirschman

Albert Hirschman tured 94 today. Discussion of Exit, Voice and Loyalty, an extended meditation on repairable economic missteps.

A Response to the Transplant List

The Transplant List thought experiment works the other way, too. Someone once asked me about the Bucket of Warm Spit List, or the List of People You Wouldn't Piss on if They Were on Fire List. YMMV.

The Transplant List

A method for thinking about how rich you are in relationships. I used this today with my freshman bio class, following a discussion of the ethics of organ transplant criteria:

I want you to think of a number of people for each of these questions, the number of people you'd put on the list, and then I want you to think about who they are and why they're there.

1. The Blood List: This list contains everyone who you'd donate a pint of blood to, if they needed it. How many people could call you up and ask for a pint of blood, which costs you a pinprick, an hour of your time and a recoverable amount of blood?
2. The Bone Marrow List: To get the bone marrow, the doctors are going to take a large needle and drive it through your pelvic bone, twenty five times on each side. You'll be sedated, but you'll no doubt be sore for a while. How big is this list? Shorter than the Blood List, to be sure. Who's dropped off?
3. The Kidney List: A shorter list still. You don't really need two kidneys, but you're not going to get another one in this lifetime. How many people would cause you to jump in the car to get tested for a match? Most people are down to immediate family and dear friends at this point.
4. The Heart List: You find out that this person needs a heart transplant, and you start scheming up ways to become brain dead so they can have yours. How many people are on this list? One? Two? In your whole life, is there anyone?

Whose lists are you on? Who would give up a piece of themselves to save your life? At the risk of sounding maudlin and cheap, go find someone on your list, or someone who has you on theirs, and do something kind for them today.

Quote of the Day

I wonder whether a bitter enemy would be jealous if he discovered that I hated someone else.

-Nassim N Taleb

Collapse of Complex Business Models

Clay Shirky writes a hell of an essay on the difficulties involved in doing things just a bit more simply, and why Big Media won't be pulling out of its death spiral any day soon, with side trips to 1990's AT&T and the fall of the Maya.

Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:

“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”

Dhalgren

Samuel R. Delany's novel returns as a play. And what a play it would have to be to live up to the book:

Buildings burn, then repair themselves, then burn again. The smoke clears, occasionally, to reveal celestial impossibilities: two moons, a giant swollen sun. To top it off, this craziness trickles down to us through the consciousness of a character who is, himself, very likely crazy: a disoriented outsider who arrives in Bellona with no memory of his name, wearing only one sandal, and who proceeds to spend most of his time either having graphic sex with fellow refugees or writing inscrutable poems in a notebook—a notebook that also happens to contain actual passages of Dhalgren itself. The book forms a Finnegans Wake–style loop—its opening and closing sentences feed into one another—so the whole thing just keeps going and going forever. It’s like Gertrude Stein: Beyond Thunderdome. It seems to have been written by an insane person in a tantric blurt of automatic writing.

When I mention this to Delany, he is pleased. It is, he says, exactly the effect he was going for. And yet, he tells me, the actual writing process was deliberate and precise. “I wrote out hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sentences at the top of notebook pages,” he remembers. “Then I would work my way down the page, revising the sentence, again and again. When I got to the bottom I’d copy the sentence out to see if I wanted it. Then I’d put them back together again. It was a very long, slow process.” It took him five years—not long by epic-novel standards, but a lifetime for an author who once wrote a book in eleven days to fund a trip to Europe.

Can We Know What We Know?

There's a really interesting debate on the nature of scientific knowledge and the impact on efficacy of knowledge under theistic vs. evolutionary worldviews going on across several web sites, collected here.

For Your Political & Spelling Delight & Delectation

Look at This Fucking Teabagger



Also:

Judge Invalidates Gene Patents

Breast cancer diagnosis expected to become 90% cheaper on the decision. This a large percentage of the biotech patents up in the air, until further notice.

The Future Is Now, Vol LXXIX: RNA Origami

John Rinn studies large intervening non coding RNA, transcribed from the "junk" part of the genome in between the protein-coding segments. He says that among other things, it manages the conformational structure of the DNA, determining the differentiation of cells. He also skateboards.

What are you reading now?

Good to Great by Jim Collins. I was hooked by the sentence: “The enemy of great is good.” Other than that, perhaps most of my nonscientific reading occurs perusing snowboarding and skateboarding magazines with a cup of coffee at a bookstore. The way these athletes push boundaries inspires me scientifically.

Before finding science I was actually focused on a snowboarding and skateboarding career, and academics took a backseat to those loves at that time. But several severe injuries, an influential book, and a consequent shift in perspective changed that path dramatically. I now see risk-taking science as similar to skating or boarding. “Go big, or get hurt,” as we say. Practicing tricks over and over is like an experiment. Moreover, connecting a series of tricks down a mountain or while skateboarding for a beautiful run is a metaphor to me for connecting various lines of experimental results.

Willy Wonka Remix

As performed by Christopher Walken and Jack Nicholson

(via Andrew Sullivan)

The Alphabet of Awesomeness.

The Alphabet of Awesomeness. So much geekery put into this.

Quote of the Day

"And, irrespective of what one might assume, in the life of a science, problems do not arise by themselves. It is precisely this that marks out a problem as being of the true scientific spirit: all knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself. Nothing is given. All is constructed."

-Gaston Bachelard

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World Trailer

Seems forthright enough.

Gerald Blanchard, Master Thief

This is a movie. Or maybe ten movies. Geeky Canadian kid parachutes into a castle to steal a princess's jewel, robs banks, travels internationally to complete numerous jobs and then gets caught by a pair of Winnepeg policemen.

“Never in policing does the bad guy tell you, ‘Here’s how I did it, down to the last detail,’” McCormick says. “And that’s what he did.”

After spending so much time chasing Blanchard — and then talking to him — McCormick and Levasseur developed a grudging regard for his abilities. And Blanchard grew to admire their relentless investigation. Like a cornered hacker who trades his black hat for white, Blanchard took on a new challenge: working the system from the inside. He provided such good information that McCormick and Levasseur were able to put together an eight-hour presentation for law enforcement and banking professionals. “When those guys hear what Blanchard told us,” McCormick says, “you can hear their assholes pucker shut.”

Update: One of our Gentle Readers expressed the opinion that the link at the top of this post, coupled with the blockquote above, were insufficient citation for the source article. Far be it from me to undercite or to make you actually click on a link to find out what's on the other end of it, so here's the Full Monty:

Bearman, Joshua (2010) "Art of the Steal: on the Trail of the World's Most Ingenious Thief." Wired, 18.4, April. Conde Nast, New York, NY. Online: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/03/ff_masterthief_blanchard/all/1 Accessed March 24,2010

Christopher Alexander

Katarxis No. 3 has a treasure trove of interviews and articles about uber-architectural theorist and Pattern Language author Christopher Alexander, including a great review of his four part opus, The Nature of Order, and a good interview:

But the trouble is that even the people that I think are the most far-sighted and the most intelligent in dealing with that stuff are completely, I'd say almost 100 percent trapped in the notion of combinations. Of recombination and recombination of components.

MM: The reductive technology in the early industrial period which still very much grips us? Pulling things apart and putting them together in little bitty pieces instead of trying to create wholes?

CA: Right. And of course what happens in the biological world is that the wholes come about by differentiation - not by assembly. And that's an entirely different class of things.

MM: That's a crucial point, isn't it?

CA: Yes, very very - absolutely crucial. And probably - it's probably the single most serious issue, because without that you just cannot get there. And yet so much of the definition of an architect, the definition of a contractor and of a subcontractor, and all these things - they're all virtually assumed to be playing some role in the assembly process. And the idea that all these folks might be playing roles in a differentiation process, and that it really and truly was that, is just I think almost out of reach at the moment. And I think it's one of my biggest aims in the Nature of Order is to show what this means, that it is feasible, to set it up as a model of our profession, what we must do.

Christopher Alexander

Katarxis No. 3 has a treasure trove of interviews and articles about

Library Porn, Renaissance Edition

When at home, I a little more frequent my library, whence I overlook at once all the concerns of my family. ‘Tis situated at the entrance into my house, and I thence see under me my garden, court, and base-court, and almost all parts of the building. There I turn over now one book, and then another, on various subjects, without method or design. One while I meditate, another I record and dictate, as I walk to and fro, such whimsies as these I present to you here. ‘Tis in the third storey of a tower, of which the ground-room is my chapel, the second storey a chamber with a withdrawing-room and closet, where I often lie, to be more retired; and above is a great wardrobe. This formerly was the most useless part of the house. I there pass away both most of the days of my life and most of the hours of those days. In the night I am never there. There is by the side of it a cabinet handsome enough, with a fireplace very commodiously contrived, and plenty of light; and were I not more afraid of the trouble than the expense—the trouble that frights me from all business—I could very easily adjoin on either side, and on the same floor, a gallery of an hundred paces long and twelve broad, having found walls already raised for some other design to the requisite height. Every place of retirement requires a walk: my thoughts sleep if I sit still: my fancy does not go by itself, as when my legs move it: and all those who study without a book are in the same condition. The figure of my study is round, and there is no more open wall than what is taken up by my table and my chair, so that the remaining parts of the circle present me a view of all my books at once, ranged upon five rows of shelves round about me. It has three noble and free prospects, and is sixteen paces in diameter. I am not so continually there in winter; for my house is built upon an eminence, as its name imports, and no part of it is so much exposed to the wind and weather as this, which pleases me the better, as being of more difficult access and a little remote, as well upon the account of exercise, as also being there more retired from the crowd. ‘Tis there that I am in my kingdom, and there I endeavour to make myself an absolute monarch, and to sequester this one corner from all society, conjugal, filial, and civil; elsewhere I have but verbal authority only, and of a confused essence. That man, in my opinion, is very miserable, who has not at home where to be by himself, where to entertain himself alone, or to conceal himself from others. Ambition sufficiently plagues her proselytes, by keeping them always in show, like the statue of a public, square:

“Magna servitus est magna fortuna.”

[“A great fortune is a great slavery.”
—Seneca, De Consol. ad. Polyb., c. 26.]

They cannot so much as be private in the watercloset. I have thought nothing so severe in the austerity of life that our monks affect, as what I have observed in some of their communities; namely, by rule, to have a perpetual society of place, and numerous persons present in every action whatever; and think it much more supportable to be always alone than never to be so.

-Michel de Montaigne
"Of Three Forms of Commerce"
Essays, Book III, Part 96
Cotton Translation.

"Use all your powers..."

The harrowing technical challenge of remastering The Godfather trilogy.

Links for Later

Jan Willem van de Wetering bio, obituary, summary of work, review of Alexandra David-Neel biography. I hadn't heard that he'd passed a year or so ago.

A little house porn entry, of a guy who keeps a lot of religious artifacts, and at one time collected jobs (39?) and names(44?). More here.

"This isn't about health care." Tea Partiers shout n-word, f-word at members of Congress, threaten violence, revolution.

Kohle Yohannan interview. I wish he'd do a book on home restoration about Greystone Court.

Alex Chilton

Reading assignment for the day: go read Joshua Ellis' excellent essay, "Children by the Millions Wait for Alex Chilton" in Coilhouse. If you grew up at a time and in a cultural subgroup when liking the Smiths was a sign of election and finding obscure albums by 4AD bands required going to the record store with the scary looking staff, this essay's for you.

Karl Lagerfeld vs. Bruce LaBruce

Lengthy Karl Lagerfeld interview in Vice Magazine. I get booklust overthe man's library.

Your relationship to technology is kind of interesting.
Well, I hate telephones. I prefer faxes because I like to write.

Who are you faxing? Nobody faxes anymore. You’re like the only person with a fax machine.
People I’m really friendly with have faxes. Anna Wintour has one. We speak via fax. And in Paris I send letters to people.

That’s a lost art.
I have somebody to deliver letters all over every day.

You send a note over.
Yes, I send notes.

That’s very Victorian.
Yes, but there’s not one bit bad about the Victorian. Civilized living for me is like this. I’m not a chambermaid whom you can ring at every moment. Today, you know, most people act like they work at a switchboard in a hotel.

The whole culture of cell phones, texting, and instant messaging is very impersonal and also very distracting.
I’m not working at a switchboard. I have to concentrate on what I’m doing. The few people I have in my telephone are already too much. When I’m on the phone I talk, but I really want to be alone to sketch, to work, and to read. I am reading like a madman because I want to know everything.

I think that you might have Asperger syndrome. Do you know what that is? It’s a kind of autism. It’s like an idiot savant.
That’s exactly what I am. As a child I wanted to be a grown-up. I wanted to know everything—not that I like to talk about it. I hate intellectual conversation with intellectuals because I only care about my opinion, but I like to read very abstract constructions of the mind. It’s very strange.

That’s quite Asperger’s. There’s a boy who’s 20 years old; you can see him on YouTube. He’d never seen Paris from the air before and they flew him over Paris in a helicopter. Then they took him to a studio and he drew the entire city. Building by building, street by street.
I can do that with the antique Greek world.

That’s what I’ve heard.
If I had to make another choice I would have studied languages and antique civilizations.

Did you study Latin at all?
Yes, but for someone who speaks German it’s easy. It’s the same grammar and it’s pronounced the same way. For French speakers it’s much more difficult. When I was 10 or 12 years old I could speak Latin like I speak English. But I cannot speak Latin with French people. I don’t understand the way they pronounce it. For me, they don’t pronounce it right. But I love dead languages. Homer was one of the first books I read when I was starting to read. I think the Iliad is still one of the greatest books in the world.

There's also a really good piece in this issue in which someone interviews a modern Viking about Viking fashion.

Red and blue were signs of wealth because they were the most difficult colors to make. For example, the only way to make blue stick to fabric was to mix it with urine from a man who had been partying for three days.

Ew.

Ha. Yes, you had to cook the fabric in it. I have friends who’ve tried it and apparently it smelled so bad they had to evacuate the house and leave the windows open for two days. Cooked male urine does not smell good.

The Future of Publishing

Watch all the way through.

(via boingboing)

Straight and Crooked Wisdom

From an amazon.com review of La Rochefoucauld's Maxims by someone usernamed "tepi", part of a longer essay:

The famous Indian classic, Kautilya's 'Arthasastra,' a treatise which deals with the attainment of worldly ends, distinguishes between two kinds of wisdom - Straight and Crooked. To the former belong (to use Western examples) such works as 'The Imitation of Christ' by Thomas a Kempis, a work which teaches how, ideally, the virtuous should live, while overlooking the fact that often it would be extremely impractical and socially disastrous to live in such a way.

The second class of books, those which teach the art of 'Crooked Wisdom,' is exemplified in the East by Kautilya's 'Arthasastra' itself, and in the West by such works as Balthasar Gracian's 'The Art of Worldly Wisdom,' Francesco Guicciardini's 'Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman' (Ricordi), and by the present collection of Maxims by La Rochefoucauld.

These books are both highly realistic and extremely practical, for they depict, not man as he is supposed to be, but man as he is with all his selfishness, stupidity, ambition, arrogance, malice, laziness and other imperfections, and they teach the art of how, not merely to survive, but even to thrive in the midst of our far from perfect fellow men and women. And, certainly in the case of La Rochefoucauld, this teaching is done with great precision and wit.

'Crooked Wisdom,' then, should not be understood as the product of a crooked mind, but as the clear-sighted wisdom one needs to survive in a world teeming with such minds, a world, as Tancock says, involved in a "sordid struggle of self-interests, a scramble for power, position, and influence in which the foulest motives and methods [are] decked with labels such as duty, honor, patriotism, and glory."

Meme Recursion Alert

Eduard Khil, better known as "Mr. Trololo", views and comments on YouTube tributes to his own video...on YouTube.

Goodbye McQueen, Part 2

Alexander McQueen's last show features masterpieces printed on cloth embroidered with gold, and dresses made of feathers coated in gold leaf--formal wear for future ecclesiastics.

More: New Yorker review of the show.
More: Showstudio review of the show.

House Porn 13: The Treehouse

The Wilkinson residence in Portland, Oregon is an example of a house purpose built to be non-fungible. The architect Robert Harvey Orchatz built it around the clients pastimes: the viola, choral singing, friends who enjoy gourmet cooking, and a desire to make ice cream on a large deck.

Apparently, it was constructed largely with intern labor.

Often, these organic buildings look too hippy-dippy or overly conceptual to be really comfortable, but I could imagine living here.

Links for Later

DeLong on Little on Rawls on Marx on whether capitalism is just.

Jason Kuznicki: Reasoning with Alcibiades. A discussion of Plato's Symposium.

The Bromosexuals. This constant tribalization post-metrosexual reminds me of 90's britpop, where there was a newly named musical school every six weeks. For the record, I'm an übersexual, pronounced with an extra ümlaut.

Goal directed vs. stimulus driven attention.

The Eclipse at Varanasi 2009

Brilliant BBC coverage of last year's total eclipse. Watch in full screen.

Two More from Kottke

Make sure to check out David Foster Wallace's papers going to the University of Texas and the rediscovery of the cure for scurvy.

Oh, heck, just read his whole blog. Like boingboing, he posts most of what's great about the net first.

Tron Legacy Trailer

To quote Jason Kottke: "Fuck. Yes."

What's it like being a VC?

Mark Suster has found a great job, and describes its pleasures well.

I'm envious. As he says, "you have to be a pretty big baby to complain about being a VC."

The Magritte Book Pro

Casemod for a MacBook Pro by the Programmist. More here, including a related desk mod.

Dream Journal

Spend a lot of time making flajacks with the roadies from Wayne's World. They hide some of the pancakes in backpacks & make a huge mess with dozens of waffle irons and crepe makers all plugged into the same wall outlet. Later, we go searching for my father's childhood pajamas, which are made of blue and yellow Chinese silk. Neil Gaiman stops by and tells us that there are "short, perfectly round men disguised as Fester Addams working as cabbies and showroom touts all over London".

OK Go: This Too Shall Pass

Rube Goldberg would be proud.

Jamie Oliver Teaches Kids about Food

Jamie Oliver sorts out people murdered by food, 350-pound 16 year olds, and first graders who don't recognize a potato. Entire school lunch programs are redesigned for $6500.

Proportional Design Technique

from david kadavy