Links for Later

1. How Noelle does watercolor textures in Photoshop


2. Adam's one-legged backflips


3. Alex Shakar's wild publishing story


4. Obama embracing Hooverism


5. Allusions in The Magicians

Paris Picnic

“What’s going on?” a man asked. “Haven’t you heard?” joked my friend Aristide Luneau (who had invited me). “It’s the end of the world.”

Links for Later

1. Brad DeLong on the current liquidity trap


2. Frank Rich: the President's pragmatism puts his re-election in jeopardy


3. Millions' fall book list

They Might Be Giants Do Chumbawamba

They Might Be Giants covers Chumbawamba

(via Salon)

The Broship of the Ring

Noelle Stevenson is awesome. That is all.

Links for Later

1. Business model innovations in cleantech

Links for Later

1. Having been a consultant for some length of time, I have asked and/or answered more of these questions than I should probably admit. I would have scored the answers given by Giles Turnbull as "correct" in any interview I ran and probably hired the person on the spot, assuming that they came up with it on the spot.


2. Tibetan singing bowls


3. Metric & Caliber fonts (via kottke)

Quote of the Day

If you had a gun and a car and she'd come with you, in her sundress and blue suitcase

But instead you'll enlist in the Navy, like planned, and somewhere off the island of Okinawa, bright and young and shiny with sweat in the tropical sunshine, you'll drown.

-Unremitting Failure

"Good thing we're at war"

(via nevver)

Kings of Leon - Back Down South

Links for Later

1. Hollywood accounting: how Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix "lost" money


2. Archeological beer today (via boingboing)


3. Debate over whether Silver Lake will be punished for its Skype options policy. Felix says no, Primack and Wilson (among others) say yes

Neil Gaiman Sings about Joan of Arc

Oh my word, they're making Jeff Aylett's Lint into a movie.

In the restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin, Parisian actor and gourmand Yves Mirande would dazzle his juniors, French and American, by dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few langoustes and a turbot — and, of course, a fine civet made from the marcassin, or young wild boar, that the lover of the leading lady in his current production had sent up from his estate in the Sologne. “And while I think of it,” I once heard him say, "we haven't had any woodcock for days, or truffles baked in the ashes, and the cellar is becoming a disgrace — no more '34s and hardly any '37s. Last week, I had to offer my publisher a bottle that was far too good for him, simply because there was nothing between the insulting and the superlative."

-AJ Liebling

Between Meals

Links for Later

1. Ansel Adams' home


2. Skype and Silver Lake repossessing vested shares from ousted management. Wow, that's some hard dealing right there


3. These are good problems to have

Krokodil

"Krokodil" is a cheap, nasty substitute for heroin that's undergoing a wave of popularity in certain circles of junkies in Russia. The side effects include gaping ulcerous sores--great big ones. I remember the good old days when people took real drugs, instead of just injecting industrial waste into their veins. Sigh.

This is in the running for all-time most screwed up things ever. The article is accompanied by the kind of photo that Warren Ellis likes to mail to people to induce retinal scarring. You have been warned.

More: And of course, it took Warren about two minutes to latch onto this stuff. The iodine smell is a nice touch.

Bachman-Crazy Overdrive

Matt Taibbi gives Michelle Bachman the vampire squid treatment in the new issue of Rolling Stone:

In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you've always got a puncher's chance. And Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she's living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she's built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.

After that, he really gets going. I love the scene where she's crouched behind a shrubbery supposedly "resting her heels."

Price.

Less.

Bookstore Made of Books

(from loftylovin)

The Bosun's Library

Enterprise Dry Dock

The model for the original Enterprise NCC 1701 with its makers in Burbank, CA, 1964.

(via Tom Tomorrow)

Links for Later

1. Spices as a response to celiac disease (via marginal revolution)


2. Robert Nozick profiled in Slate


3. Daniel Tammett at TED


4. Sketchnotes: visual notetaking


5. Sean Tan interview without words


6. Patricia Churchland takes on Neuroethics

Evolution in a Nutshell

Daryl Cunningham draws you a picture, well, a whole bunch of pictures to explain evolution in simple, easy to understand form.

(via PZ Myers)

Memory Tapes - "Yes I Know"

Memory Tapes "Yes I Know" from Najork on Vimeo.

(via Devour)

Links for Later

1. Seven life lessons from the very wealthy


2. The Ryan Reynolds aging timeline. Time has been kind


3. How Ryan Reynolds works out, eats


4. The Obama Administration makes a fatal error on the legality of Libya


5. Hitchens disembowels Mamet


6. John Stewart disembowels Fox News


7. Paul Krugman picks 5 books


8. Swimming pool in a New York City apartment


9. Good to see that Lewis Hyde is still doing well. Sorry I almost altogether missed him at Kenyon


10. David Foster Wallace in The Nation


11. Baroness Park of Monmouth


12. My Daguerrotype Boyfriend

A Real Garden

I am particularly fond of the passage decribing "the mania for fighting" that so takes hold of Drumont that "Nature is nothing for him now but a setting for affairs of honor. When he took the lease on his house at Soisy, he exclaimed: 'Ah, now there's a real garden for a pistol duel.'"

-Geoff Dwyer in Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, quoting the Goncourt brothers' Journals, themselves partially quoting M. Drumont

Naming rights

Merlin Mann sez: "Go to Wikipedia and click 'random article'. This is the name of your genitals."

Mine: Sleeping Giant Wilderness Study Area

George Saunders' Writing Aphorisms

“The moment when things get complicated, that’s what we try to move towards.”

“A father and son in a bedroom doesn’t mean that something sexual has to happen.”

“Any monkey in a story had better be a dead monkey,”

“Aunts and uncles are best construed as the heliological equivalent of small-scale weather systems,”

“The number of rooms in a fictional house should be inversely proportional to the years during which the couple living in that house enjoyed true happiness.”

-George Saunders
in Bomblog

Quote of the Day

My room is situated at forty-five degrees latitude, according to the measurements of Father Beccaria. It runs from east to west, and forms a rectangle that is thirty-six paces around, keeping well nigh to the walls. My voyage, however, will encompass a great deal more; for I shall often walk across it lengthwise and breadthwise, and diagonally too, following no rule or method. I shall even zigzag this way and that and follow every line possible in geometry, if necessary. I do not care much for people who so control their steps and ideas, who say, “Today I will pay three visits, write four letters, and finish the piece I have begun.” My soul is so open to every manner of idea, taste, and sentiment, it avidly takes in everything that turns up! And why should it refuse any of the delights scattered along the difficult path of life? They are so rare, so few and far between, that one would have to be mad not to stop, indeed to stray from one’s path, to gather every one that is within reach. And there is none more enticing, in my opinion, than to follow the trail of one’s ideas—as the hunter stalks his quarry—without keeping to any one course.

-Xavier de Mestre
Voyage Around My Room

Prague Skywalkers

File under: people doing remarkable things. I disbelieved what I was seeing while watching this video.



And then I thought, I need to hop a flight to Prague.

Consciousness as Interaction

Neuroskeptic discusses an interesting paper on whether consciousness exists in a "me module" in the brain, or is rather a result of recurrent processing.

The Shelf-Pod: a House Made of Bookshelves

Something for your library. Core 77 reports on Kazuya Morita Architecture's project which designed and built a house for an avid collector entirely lined with prefabricated bookshelves. Books do furnish a room.

Shelf-Pod is a private residence and study building, located in Osaka prefecture, Japan. The client owns an extensive collection of books on the subject of Islamic history, so he requested that we create this building with the maximum capacity for its storage and exhibition.

In order to satisfy this demand effectively, we designed a lattice structure made from 25mm thick laminated pine-board which serve as book-shelves. The dimensions of each shelf are as follows: 360mm height, 300mm width and 300mm depth. All of the architectural elements in this space (stairs, windows, desks, chairs, etc) have been designed on the basis of this shelf scale, with the aim of achieving geometrical harmony which is comparable to Islamic Architecture. This innovative structural system affords not only large amount of book storage, but the possibility of flexible floor level which can be delivered from every height of bookshelf. Each space for different activity rise up helically, giving the impression of exploring a wooden jungle gym.

The original image of this structure is derived from the Japanese woodcraft of Kumiko. The structural integrity against an earthquake is provided by a panel of plywood board nailed on the shelf.

(via boingboing)

Omega Code Fan Art Poster 2

Bechira Sorin (--stress--origami-samurai)

(via MMMT)

Links for Later

1. The Guardian's list of 100 greatest non-fiction books


2. George Saunders on writing part 1 part 2


3. Steve Blank and Ben Horowitz debate the existence of a tech bubble


4. Personality seepage


5. The art of the feud

Links for Later

1. Technology Clusters


2. Pirate treasure


3. David Foster Wallace interview from Russia


4. Healthcare in 20 years


5. Mitt Romney's career at Bain Capital


6. Wingsuits over Chicago

Links for Later

1. Decorating the Farm

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor

The Guardian has one of those epic obits up for epic figures that only the British seem to do this well. It's the kind of obituary that makes you ask, "what's this person going to do next?" This time, it's traveler, author and adventurer "Paddy" Fermor:

Patrick Leigh Fermor, who has died aged 96, was an intrepid traveller, a heroic soldier and a writer with a unique prose style. His books, most of which were autobiographical, made surprisingly scant mention of his military exploits, drawing instead on remarkable geographical and scholarly explorations. To Paddy, as he was universally known, an acre of land in almost any corner of Europe was fertile ground for the study of language, history, song, dress, heraldry, military custom – anything to stimulate his momentous urge to speculate and extrapolate. If there is ever room for a patron saint of autodidacts, it has to be Paddy Leigh Fermor.

Poster Art

Look who's back. It's our friends from Bundaberg Rum, with a recommendation from the Think Tank.

Lion Tamer

"I have a whole series of shows planned in my head. I will pull an airplane with my teeth, and I will pull an airplane with my hair. I will also be run over by an airplane. In between each of these acts, there will be lion battles."

-Al Sayed al-Assaway, Lion Tamer

Professors' Club

He said, "You know, they drink a lot, and then they process round the table with a huge plaster-of-Paris penis. Women wouldn't like that. It wouldn't be the same."

-A.S. Byatt
"No Girls Allowed"

The PKD Method

Anyhow, dearly beloved, this is how PKD gets 55,000 words (the adequate mileage) out of his typewriter: by hav[ing] 3 persons, 3 levels, 2 themes (one outer or world-sized, the other inner or individual sized), with a melding of all, then, at last, a humane final note. This is, so to speak, my structure. ‘Nuf said.

-Philip K Dick
Letter to Ron Goulart
excerpted in Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K Dick by Lawrence Sutin
(via The Saturday Boy)

The Bike Lane

A Delphinium, Blue

I'm reading Derek Jarman's last journals, Smiling in Slow Motion, which is all about making art and love and life in the face of death. It reads sometimes like a letter from another world.

The last words he wrote before he died were "HB true love"; HB is Kevin Collins, his partner. Reading it, you ask yourself what it must have felt like to be on the other side of that love story.

Here's the story of how they met.

Links for Later

1. Dennis McKenna interview
2. House collapsing under 350,000 books
3. Children of Russian oligarchs
4. Umberto Eco on the novel
5. A man who wants to fight lions with his bare hands
6. Andy Murray cracks a tooth on a baguette
7. Newt Gingrich's campaign staff quits while he's on a Greek cruise
8. Ryan Avent feels uneasy about Obama's economic policy
9. AS Byatt on men's clubs
10. Architectural toys to teach thinking
11. Green Lanterns of Glee
12. Cpl. Aaron Mankin after 50 reconstructive surgeries
13. More of Aaron Mankin
14. Erez Lieberman Aiden, "How to Become a Scientist Over and Over Again"
15. Updates on the whole Wikileaks/Manning situation

Weird Algo

Last night, someone's trading system reversed the buy/sell signals in the natural gas market in a play to either a) trigger a shedload of limit orders in the market, b) generate increased volatility and/or c) screw with people's heads.

Zero Hedge's Tyler Durden has three articles up on this:

Yesterday, just after 8 pm Eastern we presented a very curious move in NatGas trading on the NYMEX when under very light volume, the NG performed something akin to a sine wave expansion, with about 12 peaks and troughs with ever increasing amplitude, until ultimately it triggered a major sell off when it appeared to touch off an avalanche of limit orders about 3% from the prevailing price, leading to an almost instantaneous 8% drop in Natgas which was promptly recovered. We dubbed this a fractal pattern, and after a follow up with the trade forensics experts at Nanex, it appears this was a very spot on designation, as zooming into the pattern indicates increasing levels of self-similarity and complexity. Yet aesthetic observations aside, this latest algo appears to be nothing more than a limit order-busting market manipulation device, whose sole purpose is to destabilize and generate volatility for the creator of the algo.

Take a look at the market graphs in the linked article(s). There are some weird people programming these things. That or we're seeing rogue AI's, and Skynet really did go live.

Links for Later

1. Interview with Adapt author Tim Harford
2. Critique of Adapt at Whimsley: Trial and error ain't everything
3. Critique of The Great Stagnation: It's the redistribution, stupid
4. Geithner: Stimulus is 'sugar for the economy'. Putz.
5. Intertwingularity, the Noosphere and Idea-Sex
6. Android SDK homepage
7. Cesar Hidalgo's network map of exports and industries

Last Man Standing

Timothy Geithner is the last member of President Obama's original group of economic advisers, and I sincerely wish that wasn't so. Geithner's shaping up to be the second coming of Donald Rumsfeld; he's so utterly hapless at either comprehending the current situation or the actual solution that he thinks high unemployment is unsolvable and unprecedented. He's a man reading last year's news today.

He's also a fan of weak tea: that's why there hasn't been a single prosecution for bank fraud stemming from the crisis, and that's why every stimulus and jobs bill that's even proposed is "too big".

Do us all a favor and resign, Tim.

More: Andrew Leonard's take on the issue.

Taylor Conroy - How to Build a School in 3 Hours

(via Tim)

Hector Thunderstorm Project

Hector Thunderstorm Project from Murray Fredericks on Vimeo.

High def, high speed clouds. Can I have this as my screensaver?

Quote of the Day

How does someone even write a column titled "What's Up With the Jews?" without first suffering a psychotic break? Has anyone checked in on Stanley Fish lately, to see if he's wearing an aluminum foil hat?

-Jenna Crispin (Bookslut)

Crystallisation of Loss

Or consider the eponymous John Banvard, an American artist and showman, whose life, Collins says, was "the most perfect crystallisation of loss imaginable". In the mid-19th century he was the richest and most famous painter in the world because of his landscape dioramas, but of both man and his works virtually nothing remains today.

-Umberto Eco

"Spheres of Influence"

One, Ten, One Hundred

A great approach to experimentation, from a talk given at MakerFaire by the Mentos & Coke guys:

Two of the stars of the event were Stephen Voltz and Fritz Grobe who are famous for their viral Coke and Mentos videos. I enjoyed a talk they gave on their approach to innovation as it applies to performance art. Their method follows the 1-10-100 principle. It takes one experiment to spark a concept. By experiment 10 one should have fleshed things out and have defined a direction. By experiment 100 one hopes to have found something that is sublime… The four rules that they espouse are: 1) seek variation – explore the possibilities. 2) be obsessive – keep focused until one finds something special.3) be stubborn – don’t give up until you work through the problems. 4) set limits and work within them – unconstrained innovation meanders and wonders, only by setting limits does it force one to dive into the depths of a concept. Their thoughts are somewhat reminiscent of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, where the key idea is to have an obsession with quality and to always have a good pot of coffee close at hand.

Links for Later

1. Sentences, student teachers and Adam's Apples
2. The un-New York city (via bruce sterling)
3. 100 great cinematic threats (via andrew sullivan)
4. What to say to a cancer patient
5. Rafael Nadal, an appreciation
6. Michael Fassbinder was great in X Men First Class
7. How Magneto Got His Hat
8. "Were-Gay"
9. John Banvard

Links for Later

1. Urban legends of the 17th century
2. Vintage lesbians
3. Teach the Controversy T-shirts
4. Dealing with large data sets
5. Acid house comes to London
6. Umberto Eco on mad scientists and hollow Earths

Idiocy

Eric Alterman says the patently obvious, but unsayable:

One aspect of American politics that receives insufficient attention is that a significant percentage of self-identified Republicans—around half—are complete idiots. And the candidates who wish to be elected by them must pander to them, either by being idiots themselves—see “Bachmann, Michele”—or pretending to be. Nobody in the MSM is empowered to say this aloud. Indeed, the very act of pointing it out brands one a “liberal elitist” who is biased against proud, patriotic conservatives.

Well, so be it. A quarter of Republicans questioned profess to believe that ACORN is definitely planning to steal the 2012 election while another 32 percent think it might be. These numbers are admittedly lower than the 52 percent who, in 2009, went on record accusing ACORN of having stolen the election for Obama, but this should strike a person with normal mental faculties as a mite surprising, given that the organization no longer exists.

The question is: is there a cure, other than for the Democrats to hold every office in the nation indefinitely until the madness passes?

Xerxes and Artaboanos on Risk

49. Then he made answer and said: "O king, neither with this army would any one who has understanding find fault, nor with the number of the ships; and indeed if thou shalt assemble more, the two things of which I speak will be made thereby yet more hostile: and these two things are--the land and the sea. For neither in the sea is there, as I suppose, a harbour anywhere large enough to receive this fleet of thine, if a storm should arise, and to ensure the safety of the ships till it be over; and yet not one alone ought this harbour to be, but there should be such harbours along the whole coast of the continent by which thou sailest; and if there are not harbours to receive thy ships, know that accidents will rule men and not men the accidents. Now having told thee of one of the two things, I am about to tell thee of the other. The land, I say, becomes hostile to thee in this way:--if nothing shall come to oppose thee, the land is hostile to thee by so much the more in proportion as thou shalt advance more, ever stealing on further and further, for there is no satiety of good fortune felt by men: and this I say, that with no one to stand against thee the country traversed, growing more and more as time goes on, will produce for thee famine. Man, however, will be in the best condition, if when he is taking counsel he feels fear, reckoning to suffer everything that can possibly come, but in doing the deed he is bold."

50. Xerxes made answer in these words: "Artabanos, reasonably dost thou set forth these matters; but do not thou fear everything nor reckon equally for everything: for if thou shouldest set thyself with regard to all matters which come on at any time, to reckon for everything equally, thou wouldest never perform any deed. It is better to have good courage about everything and to suffer half the evils which threaten, than to have fear beforehand about everything and not to suffer any evil at all: and if, while contending against everything which is said, thou omit to declare the course which is safe, thou dost incur in these matters the reproach of failure equally with him who says the opposite to this. This then, I say, is evenly balanced: but how should one who is but man know the course which is safe? I think, in no way. To those then who choose to act, for the most part gain is wont to come; but to those who reckon for everything and shrink back, it is not much wont to come. Thou seest the power of the Persians, to what great might it has advanced: if then those who came to be kings before me had had opinions like to thine, or, though not having such opinions, had had such counsellors as thou, thou wouldest never have seen it brought forward to this point. As it is however, by running risks they conducted it on to this: for great power is in general gained by running great risks. We therefore, following their example, are making our march now during the fairest season of the year; and after we have subdued all Europe we shall return back home, neither having met with famine anywhere nor having suffered any other thing which is unpleasant. For first we march bearing with us ourselves great store of food, and secondly we shall possess the corn-crops of all the peoples to whose land and nation we come; and we are making a march now against men who plough the soil, and not against nomad tribes."

49. [1] ὃ δ᾽ ἀμείβετο λέγων «ὦ βασιλεῦ, οὔτε στρατὸν τοῦτον, ὅστις γε σύνεσιν ἔχει, μέμφοιτ᾽ ἂν οὔτε τῶν νεῶν τὸ πλῆθος· ἢν δὲ πλεῦνας συλλέξῃς, τὰ δύο τοι τὰ λέγω πολλῷ ἔτι πολεμιώτερα γίνεται. τὰ δὲ δύο ταῦτα ἐστὶ γῆ τε καὶ θάλασσα. [2] οὔτε γὰρ τῆς θαλάσσης ἐστὶ λιμὴν τοσοῦτος οὐδαμόθι, ὡς ἐγὼ εἰκάζω, ὅστις ἐγειρομένου χειμῶνος δεξάμενός σευ τοῦτο τὸ ναυτικὸν φερέγγυος ἔσται διασῶσαι τὰς νέας. καίτοι οὐκὶ ἕνα αὐτὸν δεῖ εἶναι τὸν λιμένα, ἀλλὰ παρὰ πᾶσαν τὴν ἤπειρον παρ᾽ ἣν δὴ κομίζεαι. [3] οὔκων δὴ ἐόντων τοι λιμένων ὑποδεξίων, μάθε ὅτι αἱ συμφοραὶ τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἄρχουσι καὶ οὐκὶ ὥνθρωποι τῶν συμφορέων. καὶ δὴ τῶν δύο τοι τοῦ ἑτέρου εἰρημένου τὸ ἕτερον ἔρχομαι ἐρέων. [4] γῆ δὲ πολεμίη τῇδέ τοι κατίσταται· εἰ θέλει τοι μηδὲν ἀντίξοον καταστῆναι, τοσούτῳ τοι γίνεται πολεμιωτέρη ὅσῳ ἂν προβαίνῃς ἑκαστέρω, τὸ πρόσω αἰεὶ κλεπτόμενος· εὐπρηξίης δὲ οὐκ ἔστι ἀνθρώποισι οὐδεμία πληθώρη. [5] καὶ δή τοι, ὡς οὐδενὸς ἐναντιευμένου, λέγω τὴν χώρην πλεῦνα ἐν πλέονι χρόνῳ γινομένην λιμὸν τέξεσθαι. ἀνὴρ δὲ οὕτω ἂν εἴη ἄριστος, εἰ βουλευόμενος μὲν ἀρρωδέοι, πᾶν ἐπιλεγόμενος πείσεσθαι χρῆμα, ἐν δὲ τῷ ἔργῳ θρασὺς εἴη.»

50. [1] ἀμείβεται Ξέρξης τοῖσιδε. «Ἀρτάβανε, οἰκότως μὲν σύ γε τούτων ἕκαστα διαιρέαι· ἀτὰρ μήτε πάντα φοβέο μήτε πᾶν ὁμοίως ἐπιλέγεο. εἰ γὰρ δὴ βούλοιο ἐπὶ τῷ αἰεὶ ἐπεσφερομένῳ πρήγματι τὸ πᾶν ὁμοίως ἐπιλέγεσθαι, ποιήσειας ἂν οὐδαμὰ οὐδέν· κρέσσον δὲ πάντα θαρσέοντα ἥμισυ τῶν δεινῶν πάσχειν μᾶλλον ἢ πᾶν χρῆμα προδειμαίνοντα μηδαμὰ μηδὲν παθεῖν. [2] εἰ δὲ ἐρίξων πρὸς πᾶν τὸ λεγόμενον μὴ τὸ βέβαιον ἀποδέξεις, σφάλλεσθαι ὀφείλεις ἐν αὐτοῖσι ὁμοίως καὶ ὁ ὑπεναντία τούτοισι λέξας. τοῦτο μέν νυν ἐπ᾽ ἴσης ἔχει· εἰδέναι δὲ ἄνθρωπον ἐόντα κῶς χρὴ τὸ βέβαιον; δοκέω μὲν οὐδαμῶς. τοῖσι τοίνυν βουλομένοισι ποιέειν ὡς τὸ ἐπίπαν φιλέει γίνεσθαι τὰ κέρδεα, τοῖσι δὲ ἐπιλεγομένοισί τε πάντα καὶ ὀκνέουσι οὐ μάλα ἐθέλει. [3] ὁρᾷς τὰ Περσέων πρήγματα ἐς ὃ δυνάμιος προκεχώρηκε. εἰ τοίνυν ἐκεῖνοι οἱ πρὸ ἐμεῦ γενόμενοι βασιλέες γνώμῃσι ἐχρέωντο ὁμοίῃσι καὶ σύ, ἢ μὴ χρεώμενοι γνώμῃσι τοιαύτῃσι ἄλλους συμβούλους εἶχον τοιούτους, οὐκ ἄν κοτε εἶδες αὐτὰ ἐς τοῦτο προελθόντα· νῦν δὲ κινδύνους ἀναρριπτέοντες ἐς τοῦτο σφέα προηγάγοντο. μεγάλα γὰρ πρήγματα μεγάλοισι κινδύνοισι ἐθέλει καταιρέεσθαι. [4] ἡμεῖς τοίνυν ὁμοιεύμενοι ἐκείνοισι ὥρην τε τοῦ ἔτεος καλλίστην πορευόμεθα, καὶ καταστρεψάμενοι πᾶσαν τὴν Εὐρώπην νοστήσομεν ὀπίσω, οὔτε λιμῷ ἐντυχόντες οὐδαμόθι οὔτε ἄλλο ἄχαρι οὐδὲν παθόντες. τοῦτο μὲν γὰρ αὐτοὶ πολλὴν φορβὴν φερόμενοι πορευόμεθα, τοῦτο δέ, τῶν ἄν κου ἐπιβέωμεν γῆν καὶ ἔθνος, τούτων τὸν σῖτον ἕξομεν· ἐπ᾽ ἀροτῆρας δὲ καὶ οὐ νομάδας στρατευόμεθα ἄνδρας.»

-Herodotus

The Histories VII 49-50

Writers' Advice

Steve Silberman is in the middle of writing a book about neurodiversity, and collected advice from 23 other writers on how to get a book done effectively. The most common advice seemed to be 1) work at a consistent pace, 2) just get the writing on the page and 3) buy Scrivener. I was particularly taken with part Sylvia Boorsteins' take on the subject:

5. I do not write from the beginning to the end. I write in the order that particular parts take form in my mind and I enjoy mulling them over… I mull and mull and imagine I am explaining them to someone and then I write them down. I have the order in mind, so I write whatever part is bubbling energetically in my mind, print it out (always) and begin a stack on THE BOOK on a corner of my desk into which I can add pieces (in their proper order) as they get written and so I have a visible proof at all times that something is happening.

I think the importance of this mulling process is commonly overlooked because there's no sharply focused concept that can be used to describe it, no better verb for the mulling verb. It's a nonlinear process that resembles digestion, it's absolutely critical to creative thought, and I have no idea how one might translate it into a neurological correlate because the manipulation of the underlying representations is so vague.

Gary Shteyngart's Book Trailer

Mmm Hmmm Hmmm Hmm. From the chest.

Halcyon Documentary

A short documentary on one my favorite Net personalities, John Halcyon Styn.

Links for Later

1. What if healthcare costs could drop by 90% next year?

2. Terrence Malick

3. The Big Kahuna, examined

Tyler Cowen's TEDx Great Stagnantion Lecture

Also, Steve Denning critiques The Great Stagnation.

Etruscan Head

From John Hawks's entertaining trip to Rome. Money quote, "I'm an anthropologist. It's not my first crypt." Also worth checking out: his post on the Vatican, if only for Artemis of the Ephesians and St. Christopher and the baby Dalai Lama painting.

Van Gogh's Ten

Epic Mugshot

Here's Randon Reed, arrested for shooting at an airplane while driving drunk. What says the jury, based on the mugshot only?

Cui Bono?

I wonder if the Republicans who are pushing against raising the debt ceiling might have been talking to bond traders who are short Treasuries or long interest rates.

Several members of Congress have been told by unnamed "traders and economists" that default wouldn't be that bad a thing. These unnamed traders could, I suppose, be imbeciles. That's within the realm of the possible. The other, more creepy and more interesting alternative, is that they're not imbeciles, they're someone with a big position that will pay off if interest rates skyrocket. I can think of four or five ways off the top of my head that would give a handsome return to anyone betting against the house.

I have no evidence that this is the case, mind you, but if the Republicans don't back down on the debt ceiling (either on bad advice or any other reason), this country's in for a world of hurt. If Wall Street isn't telling them in no uncertain terms not to push this too far, we're really screwed.

Like a Pumpkin Vine Makes Pumpkins

I thought of this phrase in Italo Calvino's If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. ‘She said that...she feels the need to see someone who makes books the way a pumpkin vine makes pumpkins --- that's how she put it...’ That's exactly the kind of writer I most enjoy being. Like Elmore Leonard or Phil Dick or even Updike, a book every year or two. Another pumpkin getting orange in the Fall sun. That's the ticket. Barry's that kind of painter, for that matter, growing them like a pumpkin vine grows pumpkins.”
I love, that, making books the way a pumpkin vine makes pumpkins. Another quote from If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler: “The novel I would most like to read at this moment...should have as its driving force only the desire to narrate, to pile stories upon stories, without trying to impose a philosophy of life on you, simply allowing you to observe its own growth, like a tree, an entangling, as of branches and leaves...” The desire to narrate, yes.

-Rudy Rucker

Spaceland Notes

Good advice from Tyler Cowen

Bloomberg has a nice profile of economist Tyler Cowen up today. Among the excellent pieces of advice are:

• Read early (start when you're three)


• Read a lot


• Visit the library and bookstores for serindipity


• Be willing to quit boring books, films, etc, rather than waste time


• Order the weirdest thing on the menu


• Marry well


• Be a little bit autistic

Links for Later

1. story of a lost e e cummings poem
2. Garance Dore at the AmFar benefit
3. Halcyon comes up with Altly, an alternative to Facebook
4. Loft from Loftylovin
5. Bradley Cooper: "Since Limitless opened, my agent calls me every morning and asks, 'Do you feel any different?' And I'm like, 'Nope. Do you feel any different?'"

Links for Later

1. The Suda, an encyclopedia made a thousand years ago in Byzantium.
2. Over The Rhine neighborhood sees a rebirth
3. What a cover letter should look like
4. Dawdlr
5. The Israeli perspective that Obama doesn't understand

Quote of the Day

Irra­tional­ity lies not in fail­ing to con­form to some pre­con­ceived notion of how we should behave, but in per­sist­ing with a course of action that does not work. Some­times in mod­ern eco­nom­ics and polit­i­cal life, there is a big difference.

-John Kay

"A Bird in the Hand Can Make a Lot of Sense"
(via lonegunman)

The Sloth

Ad Series for Alfa Romeo.

Links for Later

1. Dave and Toph Eggers interviewed
2. Econonomic Hit Man confessions continue
3. What's driving the debt?
4. 3-d rendered fuselage desk
5. Why Stephen Colbert is really founding a Super PAC
6. The Purity Test
7. Republican governors Walker, Kasich, Scott plunging in polls
8. Repeal petition for Ohio's union busting bill at 95% after only 30 days
9. Superman goes to England

Quote of the Day

It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested.

-Seneca the Younger

Joni Mitchell - Love Puts on a New Face

Swaptions are Sexy

James Somers makes trading sound like the most compelling human activity ever invented. It is, if you've got the right personality for it. For the rest of us, sex and/or good conversation might take the prize.

This place, on the other hand, feels like something closer to an active battleship.

I'm starting to think it has something to do with the computers. From far away each station looks like one of those extravagantly immersive arcade games -- like something you get into rather than sit down at. That's probably why I keep calling them "stations."

My friend's has six distinct screens. They're arranged as a row of two above a row of four in a bowed-out fan pattern that looks basically like a robotic sail. I'm told that this array is driven by three machines, each with a preposterous eight CPU cores. Maybe he needs them -- at the moment he has forty-four windows open. These include a Bloomberg terminal with prices, news, charts, and analytics that all update or redraw themselves more than once per second; several small forms for buying and selling different kinds of securities; some PDFs ridden with legalese; e-mails with long, redundant subject lines and laconic bodies; a bare bones programming IDE; a dashboard that shows his "book," or set of open market positions, with stats regarding risk and the like; some very intimidating spreadsheets; chat rooms, IM conversations, and the occasional video conference; a custom program to query internal databases; and miscellaneous browser windows. It all runs snappily.

Beneath the screens he has something called a turret, which is like a regular human telephone except that it has sixty active lines and a button density close to what you see on studio sound boards. Among other things it includes the option to broadcast its user's voice over the room's loudspeaker; this feature has apparently been used of late (though not by my friend) to share Rebecca Black's "Friday" with the entire floor.

The all-in costs for a setup like this -- hardware, software, and data subscriptions -- come to about $200,000 per year.

Waking in the Blue

by Robert Lowell

The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,
rouses from the mare's-nest of his drowsy head
propped on The Meaning of Meaning.
He catwalks down our corridor.
Azure day
makes my agonized blue window bleaker.
Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.
Absence! My hearts grows tense
as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.
(This is the house for the "mentally ill.")

What use is my sense of humor?
I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,
once a Harvard all-American fullback,
(if such were possible!)
still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,
as he soaks, a ramrod
with a muscle of a seal
in his long tub,
vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.
A kingly granite profile in a crimson gold-cap,
worn all day, all night,
he thinks only of his figure,
of slimming on sherbet and ginger ale--
more cut off from words than a seal.
This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean's;
the hooded night lights bring out "Bobbie,"
Porcellian '29,
a replica of Louis XVI
without the wig--
redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale,
as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit
and horses at chairs.

These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.

In between the limits of day,
hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts
and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle
of the Roman Catholic attendants.
(There are no Mayflower
screwballs in the Catholic Church.)

After a hearty New England breakfast,
I weigh two hundred pounds
this morning. Cock of the walk,
I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor's jersey
before the metal shaving mirrors,
and see the shaky future grow familiar
in the pinched, indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.

Vegan Black Metal Chef Makes Pad Thai

Devilishly delicious.

(via Devour)

Death Cab for Cutie - You are a Tourist

The World Will End in 1.82625x(10^12) Days!

Stephen Hawking has foretold it!

Vegan Black Metal Chef Makes Pad Thai

Devilishly delicious.

(via Devour)

Links for Later

1. Novak Djokovic goes on gluten free diet, wins a lot of tournaments


2. Michelle Bachmann thinks the government can't (or shouldn't) regulate it's own expenditures


3. Edward Tufte profile

Sometimes it Wiggles, Sometimes it Jumps

Tim Harford looks at how to fund scientific research that produces the most bang for the buck. The answer: follow Kauffman & Holland's advice of selecting for both incremental, continuous projects and really high-risk ones that give you a big leap.

The World Will End in 1.82625x(10^12) Days!

Stephen Hawking has foretold it!

Links for Later

1. Paul Krugman on the debt standoff




2. Marginal Revolution on Paul Krugman on the debt ceiling standoff




3. Nassim Taleb at Wharton




4. Percolation theory




5. Q. How many words a day do writers write? A. 250-300 at the terse end, 1000-1500 for average writers, 2500+ for unusually fast/fluid writers who have practiced a lot, and 5000-10000 for short periods or among mutant outliers




6. Who's a psychopath in your life?




7. 28 years in solitary confinement




8. Witstream: Twitter jokes




9. "Go the Fuck to Sleep" goes viral, #1 on Amazon




10. The Cunning Men of Essex
    



11. Profile of Edward Tufte

Marianne Faithfull / Derek Jarman - Broken English

Marianne Faithfull "Broken English" from Ivan Blatny on Vimeo.

(via Dangerous Minds)

Nic Jones - The Humpbacked Whale

Links for Later

1. Unmade movies: Jodorowsky's Dune


2. What does hitting the debt ceiling mean?


3. Flat pack shoe


4. The annual Edge Question, 2011: "What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit?"


5. The LA School District uses its attorneys to interrogate librarians who would like to keep their jobs. Disgraceful.


6. Ian McKellen hath a photostream


7. Grapheme and the fabric of space-time


8. Gaussian copula function tattoo

The past four days' worth of posts were eaten by Blogger and restored from backup, thus the new date/time stamps and [possibly] odd formatting.

The World Will End in 1.82625x(10^12) Days!

Stephen Hawking has foretold it!

Swaptions are Sexy

James Somers makes trading sound like the most compelling human activity ever invented. It is, if you've got the right personality for it. For the rest of us, sex and/or good conversation might take the prize

This place, on the other hand, feels like something closer to an active battleship.

I'm starting to think it has something to do with the computers. From far away each station looks like one of those extravagantly immersive arcade games -- like something you get into rather than sit down at. That's probably why I keep calling them "stations."

My friend's has six distinct screens. They're arranged as a row of two above a row of four in a bowed-out fan pattern that looks basically like a robotic sail. I'm told that this array is driven by three machines, each with a preposterous eight CPU cores. Maybe he needs them -- at the moment he has forty-four windows open. These include a Bloomberg terminal with prices, news, charts, and analytics that all update or redraw themselves more than once per second; several small forms for buying and selling different kinds of securities; some PDFs ridden with legalese; e-mails with long, redundant subject lines and laconic bodies; a bare bones programming IDE; a dashboard that shows his "book," or set of open market positions, with stats regarding risk and the like; some very intimidating spreadsheets; chat rooms, IM conversations, and the occasional video conference; a custom program to query internal databases; and miscellaneous browser windows. It all runs snappily.

Beneath the screens he has something called a turret, which is like a regular human telephone except that it has sixty active lines and a button density close to what you see on studio sound boards. Among other things it includes the option to broadcast its user's voice over the room's loudspeaker; this feature has apparently been used of late (though not by my friend) to share Rebecca Black's "Friday" with the entire floor.

The all-in costs for a setup like this -- hardware, software, and data subscriptions -- come to about $200,000 per year.

Links for Later

1. Nassim Taleb's favorite books (or books worth rereading)
2. Photos of Moscow, 1909
3. Dr. Livingstone presumed a lot
4. Don't dig a giant hole in the sand & jump in
5. Phil Kirkland's surrealist illustrations from the 70's
6. Wig out on the NYC subway

Waking in the Blue

by Robert Lowell

The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,
rouses from the mare's-nest of his drowsy head
propped on The Meaning of Meaning.
He catwalks down our corridor.
Azure day
makes my agonized blue window bleaker.
Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.
Absence! My hearts grows tense
as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.
(This is the house for the "mentally ill.")

What use is my sense of humor?
I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,
once a Harvard all-American fullback,
(if such were possible!)
still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,
as he soaks, a ramrod
with a muscle of a seal
in his long tub,
vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.
A kingly granite profile in a crimson gold-cap,
worn all day, all night,
he thinks only of his figure,
of slimming on sherbet and ginger ale--
more cut off from words than a seal.
This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean's;
the hooded night lights bring out "Bobbie,"
Porcellian '29,
a replica of Louis XVI
without the wig--
redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale,
as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit
and horses at chairs.

These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.

In between the limits of day,
hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts
and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle
of the Roman Catholic attendants.
(There are no Mayflower
screwballs in the Catholic Church.)

After a hearty New England breakfast,
I weigh two hundred pounds
this morning. Cock of the walk,
I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor's jersey
before the metal shaving mirrors,
and see the shaky future grow familiar
in the pinched, indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.

Vegan Black Metal Chef Makes Pad Thai

 

Devilishly delicious.

(via Devour)

Links for Later

1. Nassim Taleb's favorite books (or books worth rereading)


2. Photos of Moscow, 1909


3. Dr. Livingstone presumed a lot


4. Don't dig a giant hole in the sand & jump in


5. Phil Kirkland's surrealist illustrations from the 70's


6. Wig out on the NYC subway

The greatness that is xkcd

Zombie Marie Curie

Links for Later

1. "Man these folks are spangled to the gills": Rolling and Tizzing on Whiffle Dust


2. Also, "Fiorucci made me hardcore"


3. Shit My Students Write


4. The IMF argued for Ireland. Ireland argued for the banks, not itself.


5. Scott Jeffrey uses psychology for the purposes of marketing


6. Bruce Robinson interview


7. The Blog of "Unnecesary" Quotation Marks


8. Cornell boxes


9. Because the Origami

Russian Literary Awards

The Russian literary scene is a really funny place. Michael Idov, who won a GQ award for his novel Ground Up, writes:

There are two kinds of serious novel in Russia right now: “extreme” and phantasmagoric. The first kind deals with the most wretched dregs of the society, which by implication stand in for the society as a whole. The reader, trained by decades of Aesopian Soviet satire, knows that if the novel’s action takes place in a mental ward, that mental ward is Russia; if it’s a prison, the prison is Russia; if it’s a tiny Siberian village populated by, say, cannibals, the village is Russia and the cannibals are the government.

The second kind is a conspiracy fable, devoted to the thesis that the world is run by shadowy magic forces. Supernatural cabals figure in a staggering percentage of Russian highbrow prose—Pavel Krusanov’s Angel’s Bite, Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice, and just about everything by the bestselling Viktor Pelevin, whose 1999 satire Generation P (published in the U.S. as Homo Zapiens) explained that the world leaders are CGI cartoons. In Pelevin's three subsequent novels, the world government is revealed to be, respectively, a gay mafia, werewolves, and vampires. This mode of thinking has a rather touching teenage tinge. Earlier this week, when the culture portal OpenSpace.ru asked prominent Russian intellectuals to respond to bin Laden's death, half dutifully answered that bin Laden had never really existed, or was a projection of "naively dualist American consciousness."

You could literally write a novel about the novelists, filmmakers and media people who showed up for the awards cermony. One wrote an enormously popular novel in which the main character dies from eating someone else's fingernail. Another says that her thing is "black bogs of despair". One of the presenters kisses Idov, releasing a torrent of tabloid attention.

Go read it.

Michael Stipe

Five or six of the best years of my life were basically wallpapered in REM, so this interview with Michael Stipe in Interview is particularly satisfying. There's a whole dimension of Stipe's story that's dependent on the serendipity of hanging around; this is a contrast to the goal-directed behavior of today's media-managed stars.

Someone referred to Rene Ricard's "Radiant Child" essay yesterday, and it reminded me of that late 80's-early 90's vibe, where a lot more art was a lot more urgent in a way that made it also more extemporaneous. There's that same feel to early REM, and to Stipe's recounting of how he came to be involved in music--the sense of both immanent (and eminent) apocalypse, but also the feeling of a lazy summer day--that you'd better get your living in, because this might be your last perfect day.

*

Also, I should point out the great little anecdote about Michael Stipe's worst stage experience ever, located at the end of the interview.

The Alan Turing Movie

You are reading these words because of Alan Turing.

Links for Later

1. Tim Heatherington and Chris Hondros memorial at the Photography Post
2. The scene in the situation room. Closeup of Obama's face.
3. The liberals' stealth budget looks better than anything else out there.
4. Silly Bin Laden & Obama photoshoppery.
5. 100 rules for being an entrepreneur
6. The press conference from last night
7. How to get a job in VC
8. Tech company infographic
9. Cool house
10. What's Obama thinking about the economic recovery?
11. Zombie Boy before the tattoos
12. NYT on the day's events
13. Another cool house

The Situation

Official White House Photo:

The scene in the White House situation room during the mission against Osama Bin Laden. Look at the faces close up.

11th Blogiversary

My goodness, I feel old. This blog started out over on Worldnet, eleven years ago. This year has been busier than ever, and I look forward to year twelve and beyond.

Sorry it's been a quiet day. I've been spending most of my online time over on Twitter, making and reading inappropriate Osama Bin Laden jokes.