Nirvana vs. The Jackson 5

(via joe)

Links for Later

1. Stanley Seeger and Christopher Cone collect houses and goods. Come sit in Winston Churchill's armchair.

2. Eat, Pray, Love's Elizabeth Gilbert has a store in New Jersey.

3. Neal Pollack tussles with a Jivamukti yoga instructor.

James Franco 2, Son of Franco

In the recent New York Magazine profile of James Franco, writer Sam Anderson gets waved off partway through the article because "another magazine" is doing an article. Well, that other magazine is Esquire, and their article (plus videos, a short story, a poem and other Franco-related material) is out.

"I showed that last movie at NYU last month, at a faculty critique," Franco says, flinching a little. "It's a fairly confrontational piece, and it got a little ugly. One faculty member — she's always tough on me, but she flat-out called me an asshole. She jumped me. She was muttering it the whole time: What an asshole. What an asshole."

Also, Franco reads Twilight and gets a straight razor shave, apparently as part of the interview.

Previously: James Franco

Refuterating Keynesianism

Mulligan & Mankiw think they've refuted Keynesian Aggregate Demand weakness by pointing out that lots of teenagers are getting summer jobs, but all they've really discovered is the seasonal economic cycle, says Tim Duy.

And boom goes the theory.

Links for Later

1. Brad deLong's Macro course notes intro, Depression Economics

2. Rachel Maddow on DADT. Brilliant segment last night.

3. Why the GOP really wants to repeal the 14th Amendment: Hispanic Demographics

4. Eye Bench IV in New Orleans. I saw another edition of these benches in Pittsburgh.

5. Net Neutrality made simple.

6. xkcd on scheduling

7. "If the Bilderburg group weren't secret, no one would pay attention to it."

8. China Mieville on magic, JJ Abrams & Joss Whedon.

9. Chuck Palahniuk bio

10. Pat Tillman's Father's letter to the Army.

Your Great Grandfather Confucius

Mathematically speaking, you are the descendant of every person who has descendants and who lived more than a couple of thousand years ago (at the very earliest). Here's the math for you and your probable ancestor Confucius.

Slime Mold's got Smarts

Multinucleated mats of slime mold make the same (irrational) decisions as humans under certain conditions. Cool science.

(via Mark Thoma)

I Heard You Liked Cyberpunk...

...so I put a little cyberpunk on your cyberpunk. We are reminded again that we're all living in one of William Gibson's fever dreams. There's a reason that all of those guys are writing about the present now--it's because we're living in the future they wrote about, or maybe all of the futures simultaneously.

MBAs for Startups

Atypical MBA skills for startups.

Links for Later

1. Rand Paul, pot, secret societies and "Aqua Buddha".

2. The air attendant Super Bail.

3. How to scale a company.

4. Ray LaMontaigne album "Good Lord Willin and the Creek don't Rise" streamed on NPR

5. The "Frozin Chosin" battle, in which Chesty Puller advances to the rear, while demolishing Chinese battalions and carrying the wounded.

6. Tom Hardy's lived an interesting life.

7. Spinal cord regeneration via the PTEN/mTOR pathway. Don't get excited yet, it's just in mice. Anybody can get mice up and walking. Really.

8. Ed Stafford walks the length of the Amazon in two years.

9. The Books quote Gandhi

10. P=NP, or does it? Another view.

11. Ted Olson rules Fox.

Really Bad Climbing Experience

"How long until we can joke about this?"

(via Dangerous Minds)

Oh, Robert Gibbs, Robert Gibbs

Don't tangle with the base, you silly, silly man.

More: Nate Silver comments on the kerfluffle

I suspect that for most liberals, any real sense of progress has now been lost. Yes, the left got a good-but-not-great health care bill, a good-but-not-great stimulus package, a good-but-not-great financial reform plan: these are a formidable bounty, and Obama and the Democratic Congress worked hard for them. But they now read as a basically par-for-the-course result from a time when all the stars were aligned for the Democrats -- rather than anything predictive of a new direction, or of a more progressive future. In contrast, as should become emphatically clear on November 2nd, the reversion to the mean has been incredibly swift.

What liberals haven't had, in other words, is very many opportunities to feel good about themselves, or to feel good about the future. While the White House has achieved several wins, they have never been elegant or emphatic, instead coming amidst the small-ball banality of cloture vote after cloture vote, of compromise after compromise.

Meanwhile, the White House has had two incredibly cynical moments in the past several weeks -- Gibbs' rant today and the premature firing of Shirly Sherrod three weeks ago. Both reflected politics at its worst, the clumsiest possible efforts at "triangulation".

Even more: Obama and the Agent problem

Even yet still more: Yelling at liberals is one of the White House's few joys.

The Three Classes

According to Robert Grudin:

1. Upper Class (income > expenditures)
2. Lower Class (income <>Anxious Class (income ≅ expenditures)

It's a good rule from this excerpt on refurbishing a second hand table. Worth clicking through.

Quote of the Day

"Neurotics build castles in the sky. Psychotics live in them. Psychiatrists collect the rent."

-Unknown

(via Siege)

Links for Later

1. Ben Casnocha's impressions of Brazil

2. Tom Coats's new presentation style

3. Matt Taibbi on Christie Romer's resignation

4. The Pentagon has no idea how the Internet works, demands Wikileaks "return the emails" and forbids soldiers from accessing publicly available secret documents

5. Tumblrs in everything: Fuckyeahtheoccult

6. Steig Larsson, the Man Behind the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

7. Abd El-Kader , one of those Victorian era larger than life figures. (via kottke)

Chicago Visit, Day 2

So enthused about being back in the city after a long absence that I walked from the South Loop all the way up to North Avenue in the early morning. The lakeshore looked like a piece of the Riviera--all gold and blue.

Brunch at Tweet le Soir with Dave, Lauren & Andrew. Had the crabcake, avocado, and bacon sandwich, which the waitress referred to as "the Holy Trinity". Followed up with red velvet cake. Tasty, tasty.

There are a lot of cops in Uptown these days, after a five day riot back in May. Somebody in my old apartment building got hauled off by federal marshalls for some kind of heavy-duty sex crime. The guy who makes cell phone calls without benefit of a cell phone is still on the corner. That neighborhood is so much more colorful than where I live now.

Bought some Gap selvage jeans at a massive discount with no sales tax due to the tax holiday.

Back to Lollapalooza. Lot of guys in lacrosse shirts this year. Watched Social Distortion, who I'd first seen over twenty years ago, and who still rock just as hard. Talked with a bunch of guys from Montreal, who had "driven 17 hours to be here" and who were impressed that I'd been to the first Lollapalooza back in '91, making me feel old but cool. They said the "marijuana situation" down here was a bummer, that pot up in Canada was "basically free" and that it was "even cheaper than that in Quebec". I apologized and told them "like so many other things, Canada is ahead of us in this area" and that I'd "see what we could do" about the problem. :-) Watched Green Day from the second row of people. They really understand how to entertain a crowd, and played a great show. Brought up a bunch of people who looked like they were having the time of their lives.

Image of the Week

As Amanda Palmer put it: "Pulitzer material". Photo: Moth Kingdom

As One Commenter Put It: "Yabba Dabba Do"

The best anti-Prop 8 ruling comments.

Some people appear to have been left in the wrong century. There are no words.

Chicago Visit

Flew to Chicago at a 25 degree leftward lean due to large lady in middle seat. Wolverine lookalike two rows up.

Barack Obama's motorcade blows through the Loop. I swear that man follows me everywhere.

Cocktails with Eric G at the W. We meet a cute blonde attorney from Virginia who got booted from her room and is staying with friends for the weekend. Good times.

Prop 9 Ruled Unconstitutional

The good guys win one.

Plaintiffs have demonstrated by overwhelming evidence that Proposition 8 violates their due process and equal protection rights and that they will continue to suffer these constitutional violations until state officials cease enforcement of Proposition 8. California is able to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, as it has already issued 18,000 marriage licenses to same sex couples and has not suffered any demonstrated harm as a result, see FF 64-66; moreover, California officials have chosen not to defend Proposition 8 in these proceedings. Because Proposition 8 is unconstitutional under both the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses, the court orders entry of judgment permanently enjoining its enforcement; prohibiting the official defendants from applying or enforcing Proposition 8 and directing the official defendants that all persons under their control or supervision shall not apply or enforce Proposition 8.

Links for Later

1. The Appeal of Austerity is Fading--Where Is Obama?

2. This guy doesn't believe in a fair trial for the alledged Wikileaks leaker, just wants him executed. What an asshole.

3. Harry Reid eviscerates the 14th Amendment repeal brigade.

4. Iran bans music. More assholes.

What Happens When You Burn a Confederate Flag at a Tea Party Event?

General JC Christian wants to find out on 9/12. What do you think will happen?

Not Just Affectionate

100 years of gay photos.

(via Americablog)

The Economy: Why it Sucks

Carl Hegelman in The Awl succinctly describes the flaw in layoff strategies:

Still, I often ask myself if they see the connection that's staring you right in the face: when is "the consumer" going to start spending again? Well, maybe when you stop firing him.

Links for Later

1. Images of Afghanistan

2. A List of Fantastic British Names

3. Those Ke$ha dancing Army guys

4. James Badge Dale talks about Rubicon, hair, emergence theory and eggs

Walker Library of the Human Imagination

Here's the actual video.

Links for Later

1. PZ Meyers comments on the Spiegel interview with Craig Venter, and ends with a snap.

2. High Frequency Trading ordering patterns.

3. Setting the price for a seed round.

4. Inception soundtrack based on time distorted Edith Piaf.

5. Glen O'Brien & Family at the Selby.

6. Medical crew chief on a very bad medivac flight.

7. Tour of the Webb Gallery in Texas. Outsider art, Masonic paraphenalia and curios. (via boingb oing.

8. Audwin P McGee, American Badass. More interesting than that Dos Equis guy.

Images of the Week

from the Good Blog, via boingboing

(via rcs)

Inception infographic by dehahs, via William Gibson

This is the Way It Is

And the Way It Is Going To Be in venture capital and entrepreneurship for a while, as explained by Dave McClure. Fast, flexible, and almost disposable companies with neat ideas. Not too much capital, or what I would call "vegetarian" companies. Startups from the Gospel of Paul Graham.

Who.

Matt Smith and Orbital play the Doctor Who theme at Glastonbury.

Sao Paolo

Perfect Layout

How to layout golden pages, using the techniques of early printers.

(via gk)

The Prehistory of Digital Media

Bob Stein "talks about work­ing for Alan Kay, start­ing the Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion and Voy­ager on laserdisc, Hyper­card e-books, and inter­ac­tive CD-ROMs — essen­tially, the whole pre­his­tory of where we are now with just about all dig­i­tal media."

Cool bits about the Criterion Collection and the idea of doing the commentary tracks on DVDs.

Links for Later

1. Norman Spinrad can't get published? It's unbelievable. Here's why.

2. Elizabeth von Thurn und Taxis on the Hotel du Cap Eden Roc & summer on the Cote d'Azur.

3. Video tour of brs favorite location, Jay Walker's Library of the Human Imagination. I get book envy from this. Also here.

4. Generalization Error Bounds for State Space Models, a thesis.

5. RIP John Calllahan. I feel like we should all make jokes about quadroplegics in his honor

6. Out of the mouth of Paul Graham.

What makes human minds unique?

A Replicated Typo does a nice summary of recent reasearch in this area. Kudos on the bibliography, too. As mentioned in the article, not all of these faculties are actually going to prove to be unique to humans, but it's still an interesting list:

1. "We-perspective"
2. Symbolic, representational reasoning
3. Theory of mind
4. Shared perceptual and mental worlds
5. Mental time travel
6. Mental building blocks and the ability to interface these together

More: Part 1 of the article.

Green Lantern

Why Ryan Reynolds is seven kinds of awesome, a short vignette from ComicCon:

"In brightest day...
In blackest night...
No evil shall escape my sight.
Let those who worship evil's might
Beware my power... Green Lantern's light."

With those simple lines, Ryan Reynolds charmed 6500 people in Hall H and made a lifelong fan of one little boy. Contrary to many reports, the boy didn't actually ask Reynolds to recite the famous Green Lantern Oath when he got his turn at the mic during the audience Q&A at the Warner Bros. panel. He actually asked the question, "What does it feel like when you do the Green Lantern Oath?" Which is infinitely more interesting and charming than "Will you do the Green Lantern Oath?"

And what made Reynolds so likable in the moment was the genuine way he responded to the question. If you see the footage, you see him react first, an emotional beat, and then a decision. And just watching him make a decision, watching him slip into the Hal Jordan he's playing right now, and then say the Oath... not for us as an audience, because that's not the moment. He said it to that little boy. And just to him. And the look on that kid's face when the Comic-Con cameras cut to him after Reynolds finished...

Life. Changed.

More: at time 1:34

Links for Later

Interview with Founders Capital team on SpaceX, Tesla, photographic DNA sequencing, and others.

Staff Sgt. George Zubaty's personal narrative.

Tashi Mannox's Tibetan calligraphy.

Green Lantern posters at ComicCon.

Signal transduction through the PPAR pathway.

Rehab for sex addiction may involve someone telling you you're brain damaged and forcing you to break up with your girlfriend via speakerphone.

Seven people hold keys to restart the Internet.

Tom Hardy sorta-kinda comes out sorta-kinda bi.

Best Magazine Articles Ever

A list by Kevin Kelly and friends.

(via kottke)

Links for Later

Science is like building a pier in the ocean. (via mr)

Lost Ansel Adams glass negatives, bought for $45 at a garage sale, worth $200M.

Why Elizabeth Warren will be confirmed.

Why is the administration waffling about Elizabeth Warren's confirmation? Don't they want Democrats to win in November?

Eric's big battlefield ramble.

James Franco, as "Franco" on General Hospital, displaying an installation of films of himself playing Franco in earlier episodes, while being filmed by his own film crew, filming for an installation about his role on General Hospital. Very meta.

Etched brain slices on Etsy. (via Street Anatomy)

Convenient Optimism

Mark Thoma on the Obama Administration's inappropriately positive attitude and lassitude.

More here.

Anatomy of a Thug

Street Anatomy: "Every time I see a guy dressed like this (which is A LOT living in Chicago), I can’t help but smile as I stare at their little legs! With each bow-legged step I cheer in my head, LITTLE LEGS! LITTLE LEGS! GO LITTLE LEGS! Until they turn around…"

Weird. I've said the same thing for years. Now I know why.

Links for Later

WikiLeaks document dump of Afghanistan material

Critique of Julian Assange. Does anything in this critique degrade the intel in the WikiLeaks dump? No.

Charlatan, Martyr, Hustler--the geometry

Visiting the Ghibli museum

To read: The Devil is a Gentleman

General McChrystal's farewell

Squee! Avengers cast, director Joss Wheedon.

James Franco

A deeply weird and highly laudatory profile of James Franco, who seems to be doing the polymorphous, hyperenergetic artist thing. Working on four (or possibly six) graduate programs, while simultaneously starring in films, modeling for Gucci, making a lot of performance art (and whatever other art is now called--opposite art?), and generally running around the clock.

The next time I see Franco is at the Tribeca Film Festival, at an after-party for Saturday Night. The party is sponsored by Polaroid, which is using the occasion to promote its new Polaroid 300 camera so aggressively it feels almost like a satire of publicity: Everyone is taking photos, or photos of photos, or video of photographers taking photos of photos. It’s like Andy Warhol has thrown a surprise party for a Don DeLillo novel.

"My Work is a Collage"

Interview & encounters with David Hockney by Karen Wright.

Holy Rollers

Ian Winstanley's photoessay of the stylish sadhus of Kathmandu.

Stella Gibbons

In the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm, Lynne Truss describes Gibbons' father, Telford..."the household was dominated by the violent temper of her father, who drank and womanized, and occasionally threw knives" and apparently liked to threaten to commit suicide. "His own father had been a similarly tyrannical and adulterous paterfamilias: Grandfather Gibbons had even had firearms, and would shoot blank cartridges at the ceiling to quell the noise of his children in the nursery upstairs."

Your Charge for the Weekend (and the Fall Elections)

Links for Later

Why your brain is (probably not) a quantum computer, a la Penrose. (via @ycombinator)

She's an artist, he's a poet, now they're married goat farmers with very expensive liberal arts degrees.

Lesser known but cool data structures.

A Russian Sartorialist entry with scythe.

"Jesus, this is your line"

The politics behind the Oberammergau Passion Play in the 21st century.

"The former pastor asked me to pay him a visit when I became director for the first time," says Stückl. "I had cast a friend as Judas."

The friend was a Protestant.

The priest played various records, with music by Mendelssohn, Bach and Mozart. Which music did Christian like the most, he asked?

Bach, Stückl replied without hesitation. And that's exactly where the problem begins, the pastor replied. Bach, a Protestant, refused salvation. The music of Mendelssohn, a Jew, could offer no salvation. A true Catholic, the pastor said, could only love Mozart. Now that, he said, was the music of salvation.

Read the whole article. Not to be missed bits include the tale of Mad King Ludwig and the gift spoons.

Wine Barrel Floors

Well, now I know what my next remodeling projet will be.

Gormenghast Redux

Rokeby House is a huge 195-year old estate on the Hudson River populated by 10th, 11th and 12th generation descendants of the Astors and Livingstons who built the place. From the Times article:

Not many venture into the vast, shadowy front rooms, which are kept as a shrine to previous generations — a practice that irritates some members of the younger generation — and the French wallpaper is pocked with moisture stains and peeling off in sheets. In the shuttered, paneled Gothic library, Teddy Roosevelt’s photograph sits on a shelf thick with dust (Roosevelt was a pal of great-uncle Wintie Chanler); in a parlor, a bust of Julia Ward Howe, the abolitionist, author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and a great-aunt, is propped on a chipped radiator. A marble plaque in the front hall is “in memoriam” to Stanford White, a family friend, who orchestrated a series of additions to the house in 1894.

Real life occurs in the rabbit warren of kitchens, pantries and servants’ bedrooms, and the small village of outbuildings — barns, cottages and carriage houses — through which family members, friends and tenants career like characters in a French farce.

What a fascinating way to live, in a crumbling house on a vast estate with a rotating cast of relatives from a really, really extened family. It makes me want to write a novel about it, but didn't John Irving already do that?

Photos here.

Links for Later

Skidelsky on consolidation vs. stimulus.

Peter Daou: Obama is the most successful failure in a generation

Dennis Hopper interview at Interview

Illuminatiing

And now, Mike Jay on the birth of the Illuminati. As in the Bavarian ones who are behind all the other conspiracies and whatnot. Makes you wonder, why aren't there any electric cars?

(via boingboing)

What was Darwin Thinking?

Kamil Ahsan looks at the documentation to figure out Darwin's method as he developed the theory of natural selection. Ahsan's conclusion:

At some point it must be recognized that evolution by natural selection was not the result of years of observation in which Darwin had no working hypothesis, but instead years of observations geared towards designing proofs for a hypothesis based on little more than a hunch; a frantic search on ‘the species question’ that ensued as little more than a rat race with Alfred Russell Wallace."

I'm never convinced by these arguments that a particular person only used one mode of thought to get where they needed to go, but the conclusion ultimately reached here is precisely in agreement with that concept--that the search is one guided by both theory and observation.

Links for Later

Nassim Taleb on model error

Krugman: the Pundit Delusion

Richard Branson: 5 most important things in entrepreneurship (people, people, people, fun, love)

UX

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

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

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

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

More @ boingboing

Liberal Discontent

It appears that liberals haven't been missing the 11-dimensional chess moves of the Obama Administration. They're actually doing what we think they've been doing: screwing up in order to avoid fights with the right. Here's a scalding interview with David Obey, who's had a ringside seat for all of this:

The problem for Obama, he wasn’t as lucky as Roosevelt, because when Obama took over we were still in the middle of a free fall. So his Treasury people came in and his other economic people came in and said "Hey, we need a package of $1.4 trillion." We started sending suggestions down to OMB waiting for a call back. After two and a half weeks, we started getting feedback. We put together a package that by then the target had been trimmed to $1.2 trillion. And then [White House Chief of Staff] Rahm Emanuel said to me, "Geez, do you really think we can afford to come in with a package that big, isn’t it going to scare people?" I said, "Rahm, you will need that shock value so that people understand just how serious this problem is." They wanted to hold it to less than $1 trillion. Then [Pennsylvania Senator Arlen] Specter and the two crown princesses from Maine [Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins] took it down to less than $800 billion. Spread over two and a half years, that’s a hell of a lot of money, but spread over two and a half years in an economy this large, it doesn’t have a lot of fiscal power.

Gosh, what a mess we're in.

I am the all singing, all dancing...

Apparently, I write like Chuck.

I write like
Chuck Palahniuk

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Your Superhuman Brain

Infographic by Smarter.org

(via boingboing)

Quote of the Day

"Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be."

—Clementine Paddleford

(as seen at boingboing today)

On my Tombstone

Genius,
Humanitarian,
Underwear Model.

Links for Later

Felix Salmon on tail risk strategies, difficulties thereof.

Garry Tan's geographical guide for SF startups. (via @venturehacks)

Brad DeLong on the current and long term deficit outlooks. Remember, PAYGO is your friend.

Clay Shirky

Russell Davies did his "blog the dog-ears" thing on a set of Clay Shirky interviews, and pulled out a number of gems.

On optimism:

"The final thing I'd say about optimism is this. If we took the loopiest, most moonbeam-addled Californian utopian internet bullshit, and held it up against the most cynical, realpolitik-inflected scepticism, the Californian bullshit would still be a better predictor of the future. Which is to say that, if in 1994 you'd wanted to understand what our lives would be like right now, you'd still be better off reading a single copy of Wired magazine published in that year than all of the sceptical literature published ever since."

On publishing:

"I think someone will make the imprint that bypasses the traditional distribution networks. Right now the big bottleneck is the head buyer at Barnes & Noble. That’s the seawall holding back the flood in publishing. Someone’s going to say, “I can do a business book or a vampire book or a romance novel, whatever, that might sell 60% of the units it would sell if I had full distribution and a multimillion dollar marketing campaign—but I can do it for 1% percent of the cost.” It has already happened a couple of times with specialty books. The moment of tip happens when enough things get joined up to create their own feedback loop, and the feedback loop in publishing changes when someone at Barnes & Noble says: “We can’t afford not to stock this particular book or series from an independent publisher.” It could be on Lulu, or iUniverse, whatever. And, I feel pretty confident saying it’s going to happen in the next five years."

Fragrance Review: Comme des Garcons Wonderwood

Comme des Garcons built their latest perfume entirely around woody notes. The result is a perfume that feels like the inside of a box at the opera or a Brabus Maybach: tightly crafted, luxurious and polished obsessively smooth.

Luckyscent identifies the following notes: Madagascan pepper, bergamot, Somalian incense, nutmeg, Cristalon, Cashmeran, guaiac wood, cedarwood, caraway seeds, Javanol, sandalwood, vetiver, oud

It's one of the few perfumes I've tried that actually gets louder over time. It begins very light, with a very subtle cedar and then moves into the heart notes dominated by the sandalwood and Cashmeran, coupled with a note like a wooden version of a lemon that is neither citrusy, nor herbal (as lemongrass), nor synthetic (as found in polishes). Late progression turns a little bit nasty (in a cool way) as the oud and patchouli come to the fore.

I tend to like perfumes that have a little more flourish, but this one is undeniably well made. Really strong structure and a smooth progression throughout the entire experience. High marks all around.

Vienna Teng

Harbor

Quote of the Day

"The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create."

-Chuck Palahniuk

(via JC)

Links for Later

David Galbraith on what comes after lofts and suburbs. Possibly posted here before, but search isn't picking it up.

Antibodies that kill 91% of AIDS virus.

Harlan Ellison's reluctant book sale.

"Ultra Batteries" comprised of XeF2, that

In its ultra-dense state, the mechanical energy transmitted to the metallized XeF2 is now stored in the substance itself as a kind of chemical energy. All it takes to release it is a perturbation of a single atom in the crystal, which will cause the entire metallized substance to spontaneously "unzip," says Yoo.

The reaction would be, quite literally, explosive. In an instant the XeF2 would turn its stored energy into thermal energy with almost 100% efficiency. The XeF2 stores about 1 kilajoule of energy per gram, or "about 10% of the energy stored in a rocket fuel of liquid H2 and O2 mixtures, or about 20% of [the energy stored in] one of the most powerful explosives, HMX," says Yoo. When viewed as a potential energy storage medium, this discovery qualifies as "a new class of energetic molecules or solid fuels," he adds.

Benoit Mandelbrot at TED

Grigua's prayer

"Poor Keynes often sits with me at night after a good dinner and we rail against the world and the coming flood. And I tell him that this is the time for Grigua’s prayer (the Lord to come himself and not to send his Son, as this is not a time for children). And then we laugh, and behind the laughter is [Herbert] Hoover’s horrible picture of thirty million people who must die unless there is some great intervention. But then again we think that things are never really as bad as that; and something will turn up, and the worst will never be. And somehow all these phases of feeling are true and right in some sense..."

-South African politician Jan Christian Smuts on the atmosphere at Versailles

as quoted in Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes

(via DeLong)

It seems that we are at this point again, or nearly so. When we need more economic stimulus, the austerity crowd seems to be carrying the day. Look for a collapse in the economy this fall if this problem is not rectified. It's time to do a minimum of three things:

1. Extend unemployment insurance until unemployment drops to ~5%. Put the unemployment level trigger in the legislation so we don't have to go through this every few months.
2. Shove through a jobs bill for teachers, police, firemen and other state workers.
3. Keep dumping R&D money into renewable energy

These are the three highest return programs in ARRA, and the economic arguments for doing so are very basic and very clear. In concert with the further fiscal programs, the Fed needs to further expand its monetary policy by any means possible. The pain and austerity crowd must not carry the argument and the day, or we are all in for a world of trouble.

More: Ezra Klein lays out the permutations of stimulus now/balanced budgets later, and finds the Alesina case for austerity to be unconvincing.

Augmented Reality 2010

The Augmented Reality Event: Bruce Sterling's keynote from Ori Inbar on Vimeo.

Exhausting Art

Snatched from Shalizi's excellent statistical takedown of Martindale's Clockwork Muse, in which it is shown that smoothed white noise can be fitted with a parabolic curve better than Martindale's data.

I quote this because he points to the very same mechanism — demand for novelty plus restrictions of a style leading to certain kinds of elaboration and content — decades before Martindale (Hodgson died, with this part of his book complete, in 1968), and with no pretense that he was making an original argument, as opposed to rehearsing a familiar one.

But there are obvious problems with turning this mechanism into the Universal Scientific Law of Artistic Change, as Martindale wants to do. Or rather problems which should be obvious, many of which were well put by Joseph (Abu Thomas) Levenson in Confucian China and Its Modern Fate:

Historians of the arts have sometimes led their subjects out of the world of men into a world of their own, where the principles of change seem interior to the art rather than governed by decisions of the artist. Thus, we have been assured that seventeenth-century Dutch landscape bears no resemblance to Breughel because by the seventeenth century Breughel's tradition of mannerist landscape had been exhausted. Or we are treated to tautologies, according to wich art is "doomed to become moribund" when it "reaches the limit of its idiom", and in "yielding its final flowers" shows that "nothing more can be done with it" — hece the passing of the grand manner of the eighteenth entury in Europe and the romantic movement of the nineteenth.

How do aesthetic valuies really come to be superseded? This sort of thing, purporting to be a revelation of cause, an answer to a question, leaves the question still to be asked. For Chinese painting, well before the middle of the Ch'ing period, with its enshrinement of eclectic virtuosi and connoisseurs, had, by any "internal" criteria, reached the limit of its idiom and yielded its final flowers. And yet the values of the past persisted for generations, and the fear of imitation, the feeling that creativity demanded freshness in the artist's purposes, remained unfamiliar to Chinese minds. Wang Hui was happy to write on a landscape he painted in 1692 that it was a copy of a copy of a Sung original; while his colleague, Yün Shou-p'ing, the flower-painter, was described approvingly by a Chi'ing compiler as having gone back to the "boneless" painting of Hsü Ch'ung-ssu, of the eleventh century, and made his work one with it. (Yün had often, in fact, inscribed "Hsü Ch'ung-ssu boneless flower picture" on his own productions.) And Tsou I-kuei, another flower-painter, committed to finding a traditional sanction for his art, began a treatise with the following apologia:

When the ancients discussed painting they treated landscape in detail but slighted flowering plants. This does not imply a comparison of their merits. Flower painting flourished in the northern Sung, but Hsü [Hsi] and Huang [Ch'üan] could not express themselves theoretically, and therefore their methods were not transmitted.

The lesson taught by this Chinese experience is that an art-form is "exhausted"when its practitioners think it is. And a circular explanation will not hold — they think so not when some hypothetically objective exhaustion occurs in the art itself, but when outer circumstances, beyond the realm of purely aesthetic content, has changed their subjective criteria; otherwise, how account for the varying lengths of time it takes for different publics to leave behind their worked-out forms? [pp. 40–41]

Martindale seems to be completely innocent of such considerations. What he brings to this long-running discussion is, supposedly, quantitative evidence, and skill in its analysis. But this is precisely what he lacks. I have only gone over one of his analyses here, but I claim that the level of incompetence displayed here is actually entirely typical of the rest of the book.

Happy Fourth

That's Americana.
Got a big dog? You're in the parade.
Got an old car? You're in the parade.
Dressed up funny? Part of a group?
Have a talent? Just outgoing? You're in.


The only bad parades are the ones right after a war starts, when the drumbeat's still going, and the price is still in the future.

This one was one of the nice ones, on the best day of the year to be in Upper Arlington.

Hot Koalas

Sent to me by a reader: "At 120 degrees in Australia, it was so hot... that koalas were asking people for water. It's never been seen before." From last summer (January 2009)

Why Austerity Will Strangle Growth

Here's a breakdown by the Dallas Fed of the drivers of the current recovery. Inventory adjustments represent an unusually large proportion of the total improvement, and now end sales are catching up with the reduced inventory backlog. As Mark Thoma notes:

Given this worrisome short-run outlook for GDP growth, and hence for employment, why do some people think cutting stimulus, which is what cuts to the deficit do, is the way to enhance the recovery?

Output can be written as Y = C + I + G + NX (output = consumption + investment + government spending + net exports). If we cut the deficit through reductions in spending and increases in taxes, we know G will go down (as spending falls) and that C and I will also fall (from tax increases on consumers and businesses). But somehow, the story goes, as GDP and employment are falling, confidence will go up so much that C, I, and perhaps NX will go up more than enough to compensate for the fall, and then some. However, if the confidence effect doesn't appear and generate very strong effects, and it's unlikely that it will despite the wishful thinking from some, deficit reduction makes things worse in the short-run, not better.

Laurie Anderson on NPR

iPhone vs. HTC Evo

(via Joe)

Links for Later

Why no GARCH in Basel III? 'Cause GARCH blew up, and now nobody knows what to use.

Passing or coming out? bi guys

Paul Krugman: Learned Helplessness in Macro, or Why Zombie Theories are Back

Bruce Sterling on Anna Chapman, web 2.0 user and alleged Russian spy.

Warm Waves

Download here

Aaah. I can feel my muscles relax.

(via Warren Ellis)

The Two Children Problem Reconsidered

People have threatened to punch me for bringing up the Monty Hall Problem at parties, despite the fact that the people I brought it up to were quants (who presumably enjoy such things), and despite the fact that I don't otherwise make people do party games. I feed them, I talk with them, but I don't make them play Pictionary, 'cause that's just mean.

In the mean time, here's another troublesome problem, the Two Children Problem, posed by Gary Foshee

Gary Foshee, a collector and designer of puzzles from Issaquah near Seattle walked to the lectern to present his talk. It consisted of the following three sentences: "I have two children. One is a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability I have two boys?"

Now, the answer we arrive at might be any of the following: 1/2, 1/3, or 13/27, depending on the method used to arrive at the answer. But what actually determines the correct answer is why you told us about the boy being born on Tuesday.

So why does intuition seem to lead us so astray? Both the intuitive and the mathematically informed guesses are wrong. Are human brains just badly wired for computing probabilities?

Not so fast, says probabilist Yuval Peres of Microsoft Research. That naïve answer of 1/2? In real life, he says, that will usually be the most reasonable one.

Everything depends, he points out, on why I decided to tell you about the Tuesday-birthday-boy. If I specifically selected him because he was a boy born on Tuesday (and if I would have kept quiet had neither of my children qualified), then the 13/27 probability is correct. But if I randomly chose one of my two children to describe and then reported the child’s sex and birthday, and he just happened to be a boy born on Tuesday, then intuition prevails: The probability that the other child will be a boy will indeed be 1/2. The child’s sex and birthday are just information offered after the selection is made, which doesn’t affect the probability in the slightest.

...Peres says that we shouldn’t despair about our probabilistic intuition, as long as we apply it to familiar situations. The difficulty of these problems is rooted in their artificiality: In real life, we almost always know why the information was selected, whereas these problems have been devised to eliminate that knowledge. “The intuition develops,” he points out, “to handle situations that actually occur.”

Thomas Edison's To-Do List

When I was in third grade, I wrote a spectacular paper on Thomas Edison that got an A, becoming the foundation of much later scholarship, if I may say so. My father refers to this paper (and everything else I write) as "Thomas Edison and His Toads and Frogs", or occasionally as "Black Holes, Toads, Frogs, Thomas Edison, and What I Did for Summer Vacation". Thanks, Dad.

Below, you can see one of Mr. Edison's to-do lists for January 3rd, 1888. List items include "Deaf Apparatus", "Electrical Piano" and "Ink for Blind". The list goes on for a number of pages—I was
initially concerned that this was the list for the day, but another subsequent list appears in the same book for April of that year, so I assume he got through the several hundred inventions in about three months, a comparatively leisurely pace. This particular page is also notable for the legible handwriting, which declines as we move through the notebook; it's a relief that old Thomas Alva may have been a workaholic genius, but also had poor penmanship.

image from the Rutgers collection of Thomas Edison's papers
Click to embiggen.

Department of the Silly Military

(via jmg)

Links for Later

Photos of waves from underneath (via rcs)

The Girl Who Fixed the Umlaut

Messrs Malthus, Say and Mill on Keynesian Economics (or not)

The big Chinese genomics mill

RIP Tobias Wong

Designer and artist Tobias Wong hanged himself last month, possibly while sleepwalking. There was no suicide note, no sign of depression, rather an upswing in his career and personal life.

He was best known for his "paraconceptual" art pieces, like the silver cold pills:

Allan Chochinov, the editor in chief of Core 77, a design Web site, remembered the first time he met Mr. Wong. It was the late ’90s, and he was walking down Prince Street when he ran across the boyish designer standing next to a folding table selling capsules — the sort cold medicine comes in — filled with silver leaf.

“I picked one up and said, ‘So you eat these?’ He was like, ‘uh huh.’ ‘And it turns your poop silver?’ And he said, ‘yep.’ ” Mr. Chochinov recalled.

The New York Times article is fascinating.

Quote of the Day

On the point

What is the point. That is what must be borne in mind. Sometimes the point is really who wants what. Sometimes the point is what is right or kind. Sometimes the point is a momentum, a fact, a quality, a voice, an intimation, a thing said or unsaid. Sometimes it’s who’s at fault, or what will happen if you do not move at once. The point changes and goes out. You cannot be forever watching for the point, or you lose the simplest thing: being a major character in your own life.

—Renata Adler, “Brownstone”

Links for Later

GOALIE: an algorithm for determining time coordination patterns in biological systems.

Interview with Julian Assange. Very soft spoken gentleman.

Interview with witch house act,†‡†

Anosognostic, Part 2

Victor Niederhoffer is a very bright, very nice guy who blew up his hedge fund, twice. Here, he talks with Kathryn Schulz about error, and why one doesn't see one's own mistakes:

Niederhoffer's e-mails suggested a man already obsessed with wrongness. In them, he referenced the statistical concept of path dependence; shared a series of proverbs about the game of checkers (of 5,000 such proverbs, he hazarded, about 250 concerned error); meditated on the difference between Type One mistakes (excessive credulity) and Type Two mistakes (excessive skepticism) (he himself is much more prone to Type One, he says: "I'm tremendously gullible"); observed that "one should be careful of multitasking or multiromancing"; sent me the citations for hoodoo in the Oxford English Dictionary (a hoodoo is something or someone that brings bad luck); and noted that the harpooner in Moby Dick would have made a great interview subject for this series. Finally, he pointed out that the word error has no antonym. "In retrospect," he wrote, "I know much too much about errors and much too little about the opposite, whatever it is."

The best bits of the interview include the insight that he played squash too perfectly (and safely), while playing the market without enough safety, advice on avoiding "hoodoos" (people who will bring you bad luck sooner or later), and "taking out the canes":

When the public is most frightened, only the strong are left, and that's when the market is in the best possible hands. I call it taking out the canes. Whenever disaster strikes, the very sagacious wealthy people take their canes, and they hobble down from their stately mansions on Fifth Avenue, and they buy stocks to the extent of their bank balances, and then a week or two later, the market rises, they deposit the overplus in their accounts, invest it in blue-chip real estate, and retire back to their stately mansions. That's probably the best way of making money, to be a specialist in panics. Whenever there's panic hanging in the air, that's a great time to invest.

Anosognosic

This five part series of interviews by Errol Morris deals with the fact that we believe we know more than we do, are self-deceptive, confabulate, and generally get things wrong. This set of articles could make a fine book all by themselves. Neuroscientists, biographers, Donald Rumsfeld and Woodrow Wilson make appearances, alongside a very confused bank robber:

Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight. What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise. The surveillance tapes were key to his arrest. There he is with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money. Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving. “But I wore the juice,” he said. Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras.

It's a phenomenon that affects both the fool and the genius. We don't notice when we're screwing up. The best answer I've heard for why this is the case is that if we were realistic about our knowledge and capabilities, we'd never do anything.

The Endless Game

Today, John Isner and Nicolas Mahut will resume playing the longest match in the history of tennis, after reaching a score of 59-59 in the fifth set before nightfall yesterday.

John Isner of Tampa, Fla., and Nicolas Mahut of France were tied at 59-59 in the fifth set at Wimbledon after exactly 10 hours of action when play was suspended because of darkness Wednesday night. It is by far the longest match in terms of games or time in the century-plus history of tennis...The 23rd-seeded Isner and the 148th-ranked Mahut, who needed to qualify to get into the tournament, shared a court for 7 hours, 6 minutes in Wednesday’s fifth set alone, enough to break the full-match record of 6:33, set at the 2004 French Open. Never before in the history of Wimbledon, which first was contested in 1877, had any match — singles or doubles, men or women — lasted more than 112 games, a mark set in 1969. Isner and Mahut played more games than that in just the fifth set, and still did not determine a victor, although the American came close: He had four match points — four chances to end things by winning the next point — but Mahut saved each one.

(via tr)

Update: Isner wins 70-68 in the 5th, two days after the match began.

Update: check out this commentator

Best Headline of the Year

via @forteantimes

Links for Later

Rajiv Sethi on Minsky's evolutionary perspective on market instability. Additional information.

Paul Krugman: "the facts have a well-known Keynesian bias".

Steve Waldman: "Austerity is stupid..."

Bryan Caplan on trembling hand perfectionism.

RIP Sebastian Horsley

It seems that the heroin finally caught up with Sebastian. Based on the comments of those who knew him (or just encountered him), it seems he was a very nice man who went to great lengths to make others believe that he was terrible.

Photo credit: Steve Forrest

Aerator

For those of you who want to get me something for Christmas, may I suggest this preposterous piece of wine apparatus?

Someone broke into my car, stacked all of my CDs neatly in the driver seat and stole only $1.37 in nickles*. I am bemused.

*give or take $0.02

Update on Wikileaks

Greenwald interviews Lamo, notes some inconsistencies in the overall story.

The Indiana Jones of Interior Decorating

For when you absolutely have to have that Indonesian temple roof, send one of these guys:

Keenen Ivory Wayans, Mr. Finton said, once told him, “One day we’re going to see you on one of those CNN things, blindfolded and saying, ‘I’m just here for the limestone.’ ”

Oil Spill Humor

I'm surprised no one has resurrected this classic bit yet: "The Front Fell Off". Only marginally sillier than the real thing.

The National

Bloodbuzz Ohio

The Quotable DeLong on Appropriate Macro Policy

The only thing that you needed to know to understand the Principles of Animalism in Animal Farm was "four legs good, two legs bad"[1].

Similarly, the only thing you needed to know to understand the macroeconomic policy line of the Obama administration--or, rather, what the macroeconomic policy line should be--is "short-run deficit spending to speed short-term recovery, long-run budget balance to enable long-term growth."

That is the right economic policy for the country.

-Brad DeLong

Where Fun Goes to Die

Those crazy kids down at the BRS alma mater University of Chicago have resurrected latin-named, R rated magazine Vita Exlocatur, featuring what used to be called artistic pictures of undergrads and friends. Hot nerd alert!

Ellsberg, Assange, Personal Democracy Forum