Iron and Wine - Belated Promise Ring

Bonus cover version:
Lyrics:
Sunday morning, my Rebecca sleeping in with me again
There's a kid outside the church kicking a can
When the cedar branches twist she turns her collar to the wind
The weather can close the world within its hand

And my mother says Rebecca is as stubborn as they come
They both call to me with words I never knew
There's a bug inside the thimble, there's a band-aid on her thumb
And a pony in the river turning blue
They say, "Time may give you more than your poor bones could ever take"
My Rebecca says she never wants a boy
To be barefoot on the driveway as they wave and ride away
Then to run inside and curse the open door

I once gave to my Rebecca a belated promise ring
And she sold it to the waitress on a train
I may find her by the phone but with a fashion magazine
She may kiss me when her girlfriends leave again
They say, "Time may give you more than your poor bones could ever take"
I think I could never love another girl
To be free atop a tree stump and to look the other way
While she shines my mother's imitation pearls

Sunday evening my Rebecca's lost a book she never read
And the moon already fell into the sea
Saw the statues of our fathers in the courthouse flower bed
Now they blend with all the lightning-tattered trees
They say, "Time may give you more than your poor bones could ever take"
My Rebecca said she knew I'd want a boy
A dollar for my boardwalk red balloon, to float away
She would earn a pocketful to buy me more

This Weekend at the G8

The Chicago PD forgets the number one rule of good police work: Let someone else be the headline. Here come the truncheons.

Russian Bridge Climbing

Looks like a cure for a boring weekend.

Tom Hiddleston Rocks

Loki does impersonations of his fellow Avengers actors, recites Shakespearean soliloqies on request, and generally does what he wants.

Disruptive Tech Watch

By shifting from batch manufacturing to continuous production processes, drug production time can be cut from 12 months to 6 hours, according to Novartis's CEO, Joseph Jimenez.

Links for Later 5-9-12

1. David Graeber on debt, anarchy, neoliberalism and possibilities (via paperpools)
2. Paul Krugman excerpt from End This Depression Now
3. What should you do with a really great specialist library when you die?
4. Vinicius Vacanti quit private equity so he could experience failure (via lone gunman)
5. Military tribunals not working due to lack of solid precedent
6. Fred Savage is all growed up
7. Advice for young screenwriters
8. Open source intelligence, social graphs
9. WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing

So Long, Wild Thing

Maurice Sendak has gone to the wild rumpus in the sky. He was 83.

Peter Thiel's Class on Tech Investing

Blake Masters is taking notes on Peter Thiel's Stanford course, which includes a wealth of good information on how to approach and deal with VCs.

Joss Whedon, Bathroom Coach

Almost Picking Up Chicks

Watch carefully for pointers.

Links for Later 5-1-12

1. The Only Thing That Can Stop This Asteroid Is Your Liberal Arts Degree
2. More on venture capital vs. the S&P 500
3. This American Life returns to the scene of the crime with Mike Birbiglia, Joss Whedon and others
4. What it's like to go through a round of TPS/lean
5. Patricia Churchland, neurophilosopher, talks smack

Quote of the Day

The rulers of Byzantium were accustomed to blinding their rivals. With ornamental eye scoops, with daggers, with candelabras, kitchen knives, and tent pegs, with burning coals and boiling vinegar, with red-hot bowls held near the face and with bandages that left the eyes unharmed but were forbidden to be removed; sometimes it was sufficient merely to singe the eyelashes, for the victim to bellow and sigh like a lion as a trained executioner pantomimed the act. Sometimes cruelty was intended beyond the enucleation itself, as when the emperor Diogenes Romanus was deposed and “they permitted some unpracticed Jew to proceed in blinding the eyes” and “he lived several days in pain and exuding a bad odor.” In 797 the empress regnant Irene blinded her son Constantine VI and caused an eclipse that lasted seventeen days. Basil II blinded fifteen thousand Bulgarian soldiers, and every hundredth man he left with one eye to lead another ninety-nine, and when these men returned home to their king Samuel he looked upon them and died. Michael V blinded his uncle John the Master of Orphans. The iconoclasts blinded the eyes of the icons.

-from "Byzantium: Their Ears were Uncircumsized"

In Harper's April, 2012

Rafil Kroll-Zaidi

Charlie Stross is a Publishing Visionary

Last week, Charles Stross publihsed a blog post that talked about how publisher-mandated DRM was handing a big ol' hammer to Amazon by allowing it to lock users into the Kindle. This week, TOR announced that it's going DRM-free, and other major publishers are about to follow suit. Will this save traditional publishing? Not by itself, but it's a good next step. It looks like Charlie isn't just a good science fiction writer, he's also a savvy business strategist.

Is Venture Capital Broken?

Returns fell after the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, and now the industry average tracks the broader equity markets.  Here, Noah Smith discusses some of U Chicago Professor Steven Kaplan's research on the matter. The upshot: there's alpha to be found among the VC's, but it's really hard to be one of those positive alpha fund managers. The addition of more funds just results in lots of really bad funds with negative alpha. There's another possible reason, having to do with the rationalization and increased liquidity of the early stage tech market, but that wouldn't account for the persistently good returns of the top funds, so the alpha theory seems to have it.

The Future Is Now, Vol. LXXXVII: Stem Cell Hair Regeneration

Scientists have grown human hair follicles on the back of a hairless mouse, using tissue engineered pelage and vibrissa cells from stem cells and differentiated tissue. I've always said that organ regeneration would be achieved by vanity before necessity, and that hair replacement techniques would finance the development of full organ stem cell techniques.

Nature Communications 3, 784. 17 April 2012 Fully functional hair follicle regeneration through the rearrangement of stem cells and their niches Koh-ei Toyoshima,  Kyosuke Asakawa,  Naoko Ishibashi,  Hiroshi Toki,  Miho Ogawa,  Tomoko Hasegawa,  Tarou Irié,  Tetsuhiko Tachikawa,  Akio Sato,  Akira Takeda  & Takashi Tsuji 

(via @gammacounter)

Links for Later 4-18-12

1. The disused platforms at the Wilson L Station explained
2. Twitter's latest idea: the Innovator's Patent Agreement
3. Thomas Friedman, Duncan Black's choice for Wanker of the Decade
4. If you complain loudly enough about military intelligence, they will put you in charge
5. The Tools Book trailer
6. CISPA=SOPA II
7. Death by swan
8. Tiger parents of Rome

Pulitzer

Among the deserving winners of this year's Pulitzer Prizes is Craig F. Walker, for his series of photographs of Scott Ostrom, an Iraq War veteran dealing with the symptoms of PTSD. The war is still with us.

Wind Map

This is one of those little web projects that everyone links to, because it's beautiful and informative. It's an animated map of the wind, using data from the National Weather Service and animated by a couple of Googlers.

(via mashable)

Dayna Kurtz - Invocation

Mama, let me come home. Buy her album American Standards here

Abigail Washburn - Nobody's Fault but Mine

Delicious banjo music in a rundown New York building.

Links for Later 4-4-12

• CISPA is SOPA, but for "cybersecurity" rather than "anti-piracy". Either way, it's no darn good, so get on the phone.
• Google has all your information for sale.
• John Crowley's favorite mural.
• Ernest Hemingway's 2012 interview
• DSGE's explained
• Courageous teenager
• How Israeli Intelligence built the US's domestic spying apparatus
• The Ryan Budget, graphed

NO FUTURE IS FUTURE

We're in the middle of a blind spot in time, and everyone's mad about it. Science fiction's move toward the present leaves a lack of inspiration for real-world innovators, as Neal Stephenson noticed. Russell Davies sees it in fashion, too, in all that military-derived heritage wear. NASA can't launch a man into space, let alone the moon, anymore. Neil DeGrasse Tyson weeps for the future. Is this a Great Stagnation, or are we just having an idea breather before coming up with the new New New Thing?

Well, Chairman Bruce thinks these New Aesthetic kids have caught onto something, with their See Like a Machine, pixellated reality follies. It's the opposite, or maybe just the next iteration of the blobject; it's the incursion of mobile screens into the 3D world. James Bridle is the theorist, or maybe just the blogger, behind the movement, but the core inspiration is Minecraft. Will we be wearing 8bit pixelpunk clothes to our New Aesthetic get-together at the next SXSW? Who knows. I just like the bright colors.

Sterling:

Look at those images objectively. Scarcely one of the real things in there would have made any sense to anyone in 1982, or even in 1992. People of those times would not have known what they were seeing with those New Aesthetic images. It’s the news, and it’s the truth...

It’s contemporary. It’s temporal rather than atemporal. Atemporality is all about cerebral, postulated, time-refuting design-fictions. Atemporality is for Zenlike gray-eminence historian-futurist types. The New Aesthetic is very hands-on, immediate, grainy and evidence-based. Its core is a catalogue of visible glitches in the here-and-now, for the here and for the now.

It requires close attention. If you want to engage with the New Aesthetic, then you must become involved with some contemporary, fast-moving technical phenomena. The New Aesthetic is inherently modish because it is ferociously attached to modish, passing objects and services that have short shelf-lives. There is no steampunk New Aesthetic and no remote-future New Aesthetic. The New Aesthetic has no hyphen-post, hyphen-neo or hyphen-retro. They don’t go there, because that’s not what they want.

Quote of the Day

We sense and experience that we are eternal. For the mind no less senses those things which it conceives in understanding that those which it has in memory. For the eyes of the mind by which it sees things and observes them are proofs. So although we do not remember that we existed before the body, we sense nevertheless that our mind in so far as in involves the essence of the body under a species of eternity is eternal and its existence cannot be defined by time or explained by duration.

-Baruch Spinoza,Ethics Part V, Prop. XXIII

Travel On, Aunt Sere

We miss you already, and always will.

Links for Later 3-22-12

1. Critique of Jonah Lehrer's Imagine
2. "The White Savior Industrial Complex"
3. Monks' marginalia
4. The Supreme Court upholds the laws of nature
5. Dan Savage responds to Rick Santorum "praying for him"
6. Just look at these pop art monstrosities
7. Top 10 lessons of the Iraq War (#1: We lost.)
8. Kony 2012 director diagnosed with "reactive psychosis", colloquially known as flipping out under stress
9. You'll get my Facebook password when you take it from my cold, dead hands
10. Mass Effect's deeply unsatisfying ending to be retconned
11. Stupid debate about reviving the draft
12. Mitt Romney's litigious, anti-gay, billionaire backer
13. Mark Leyner returns!
14. Dangerous Minds threw a heck of a party the other night
15. No, he's not really flying by flapping his arms
16. Giant polaroids of light from a giant prism
17. How Obama tried and failed to sell out the liberals last year
18. Kevin Smith's done making films, y'all
19. Ben McKenzie on Southland
20. "Questions No One Knows the Answers To"
21. China Mieville on monsters

What Does Karl Lagerfeld Do All Day?

Drink a lot of Diet Coke, apparently.

The Genius Greenhouse

Jonah Lehrer wonders how 5th century BCE Athens and 16th century Florence became such hotbeds of genius, and comes up with a three part plan: 1) people mixing, where lots of people and ideas are constantly on the move, 2) promote education and other "meta innovations" and 3) support risk-taking.

As T. S. Eliot once remarked, the great ages did not contain more talent. They wasted less.

Check out the rest of the article in Wired. He's got a forthcoming book on creativity as well. I've already pre-ordered my copy.

Links for Later 3-14-12

Hey, hey, it's Pi Day. Happy 3.14

1. Skyscraper competition
2. Tom McCarthy interview in Interview
3. Greg Smith quits Goldman Sachs via New York Times op-ed
4. GTD + Evernote = productivity
5. Travis Barker gets a head tattoo. This hurts just to see.
6. Fundamentalist atheists

Adam Swartzbaugh at Kenyon

Adam Swartzbaugh of the Genesis Network (and the US Army) stopped by Kenyon (and OSU) to talk about social entrepreneurship. He was a big hit with the students, in part because he talked about how his failures and setbacks motivated him to succeed, and in part because he put the responsibility for taking action on the audience.

Elsewhere: interviews with Adam in the Collegian before and after his visit.

ACTA Uncovered

Now you can see the secret ACTA treaty* online, thanks to Darrell Issa. Read it here. What a nasty piece of work it is, too. Similar to the SOPA/PIPA acts in intent, it's been pushed forward through closed international trade negotiations. No wonder they haven't let it hit the light of day until now.


*or It's-Not-a-Treaty-It's-an-Agreement, as the government seems to think. Good luck with that one, guys. It looks like a treaty to everybody else, acts like a treaty, and is therefore...a treaty.

UX Update

Paris is famous for having a large number of movie theaters. I'm more impressed by the number of underground ones I hear about. Underground as in covert, and underground as in literally subterranean. We've previously linked to stories about Parisian urban exploration group UX, and this month, Jon Lackman has a fascinating interview with them, published in Wired, in which, among other things, they are sued for surreptitiously restoring a 19th century clock belonging to the Pantheon:

As soon as it was done, in late summer 2006, UX told the Pantheon about the successful operation. They figured the administration would happily take credit for the restoration itself and that the staff would take over the job of maintaining the clock. They notified the director, Bernard Jeannot, by phone, then offered to elaborate in person. Four of them came—two men and two women, including Kunstmann and the restoration group’s leader, a woman in her forties who works as a photographer—and were startled when Jeannot refused to believe their story. They were even more shocked when, after they showed him their workshop (“I think I need to sit down,” he murmured), the administration later decided to sue UX, at one point seeking up to a year of jail time and 48,300 euros in damages. Jeannot’s then-deputy, Pascal Monnet, is now the Pantheon’s director, and he has gone so far as to hire a clockmaker to restore the clock to its previous condition by resabotaging it. But the clockmaker refused to do more than disengage a part—the escape wheel, the very part that had been sabotaged the first time. UX slipped in shortly thereafter to take the wheel into its own possession, for safekeeping, in the hope that someday a more enlightened administration will welcome its return.

Meanwhile, the government lost its lawsuit. It filed another, which it also lost. There is no law in France, it turns out, against the improvement of clocks. In court, one prosecutor characterized her own government’s charges against Untergunther as “stupid.” But the clock is still immobile today, its hands frozen at 10:51.

Links for Later 2-28-12

1. Predictions about Pakistan, ranging from the disturbing to the deeply disturbing.
2. What James Altucher learned from watching Shark Tank.
3. How to synthesize the nasal decongestant pseudephedrine from crystal meth, and other apocryphal science.
4. The case against the case against contraception
5. Varanasi
6. Davos
7. Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) speaks about the Prometheus mission at TED 2023
8. Notes on R Programming

Ruben Block - Sweet Dreams

Eurythmics cover, performed (one and a half times) on DWDD.

Links for Later 2-22-12

1. Third Frontier expands to new accelerator programs
2. How to do guilloche and other patterns in Illustrator
3. Gig poster graphics tutorial in Illustrator
4. The making of Thread's Not Dead, a book about making T-shirts
5. Crowdsourcing tools
6. Jeb Corliss hits Table Mountain
7. Jakprints
8. Bird skull necklace

Tycho (Scott Hansen) on KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic

If I had Tycho's album Dive on vinyl, I'd have played the grooves flat by now. Wonderful music to drive to.

John Green and Ransom Riggs went to Kenyon, became friends, and twelve years later are on the top of the bestseller list at the same time. Kenyon alumni everywhere are cheering and gnashing our teeth in envy like Oscar nominees who went up against Meryl Streep for best actress.

Quote of the Day

Nothing Scales Like Stupidity: Yes, that would be the smart thing to do, but it won't scale. The stupid approach is better because it scales.

-Tim Cushing/John D. Cook

Links for Later 2-21-12

1. Get Started with iOS Programming
2. The $1000 home recording studio
3. Tycho (aka Scott Hansen, ISO50)'s recording studio, interview
4. Jonathan Coulton made $500k last year without a record label
5. There is no critical period: Neuroplasticity and the late in life guitarist
6. Building libraries in Indonesia
7. Trent Reznor's winning business model

Macoto Murayama's Flowers

Dissected, drawn, and reassembled using architectural design software, Macoto Murayama's flowers are things of beauty and a wonder to behold.

(via BLDGBLOG and The Scientist)

How to Write a Novel, by Nick Alderton, and the more advanced How to Write a Great Novel, as recommended by N. Gaiman.

Sandman One

Dave Mckean's construction for the cover of Sandman issue #1, from an off-angle. Amazing to see how this was put together.

(via Empire of Dust)

Eddie Colla

If you want to achieve greatness, stop asking permission.

-Eddie Colla

(via This Isn't Happiness)

The Future Is Now, Vol. LXXXVI: Your Pocket Gene Sequencer

For $900, you can buy Nanopore's USB-stick-sized gene sequencer, or for somewhat more you can buy an "array of desktop sized" machines that can sequence your genome in 15 minutes. Fun for the whole family.

The Litany of Tarski

If the box contains a diamond,
I desire to believe that the box contains a diamond;
If the box does not contain a diamond,
I desire to believe that the box does not contain a diamond;
Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.

—The Meditation on Curiosity

(via lesswrong) 

The Litany of Gendlin

What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.

—Eugene Gendlin

(via lesswrong)

Happy Valentine's Day

John Fugelsang tells the story of how his parents broke the habit and got married. Read the whole story in this NPR slideshow.

(via Americablog)

Links for Later

1. A bunch of talks & interviews with Samuel R Delany
2. Econ bloggers in a nutshell (via marginal revolution)
3. Aaron Swartz interviewed on the copyfight, SOPA
4. Angellist's Naval Ravikant interviewed about the new paradigm in startup funding
5. Ron Conway, Super Angel
6. How Obama lost the will to compromise

Why Digital Piracy is Lending, Not Theft

Neil Gaiman tweeted a link to this article, which reiterates and expands on a point that Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig, and many, many others have made before: people who download free copies of your books are typically finding something that they would not otherwise have found, and they end up buying your content if they like it. This means that "piracy" really looks a lot more like lending and/or advertising than it does like theft. In the embedded clip, Gaiman points out that when his publisher offered the digital version of one of his books for free, sales of the physical copies of the book went up by 300% the next month. That's a heck of a lift.

Mitt Romney, Super Consultant

I'm a consultant, many of my friends are consultants, and, as Reason Magazine notes, Mitt Romney is a consultant by experience and temperament, with all of the positives and negatives that implies. He's a really smart, flexible thinker with effective problem-solving skills, but he's also detached from the emotional and economic consequences of his decisions. For a good example, consider Romney's plan to balance the budget and set government spending at 17% of GDP, which would require greater than 50% cuts in domestic programs.

There's a certain narrowness of focus required to practice consulting at the highest level, because the client wants a particular problem solved, not the most interesting or beneficial problem solved. Plus, with today's GOP, he's got a basket case for a client; in the course of trying to make the base happy, he's going to have to be willing to do a lot of really foolish, damaging things to America.

If flip-flopping is Romney’s greatest weakness, his business experience is probably his greatest strength. But can the two be separated? Consultants don’t have ideology; they have strategy. Their job is to take their current client’s side, whatever it is, and put a good polish on it while restoring whatever’s underneath.

Think about what Romney actually did while running Bain Capital. Stephen Kaplan, the Chicago business professor, argues that he should get credit just for having run something. But former Bain Capital partner Eric Kriss, who also worked with Romney in the Massachusetts governor’s office, has warned people not to read too much into the gig. “Mitt ran a private equity firm, not a cement company,” Kriss told The New York Times in 2007. “He was not a businessman in the sense of running a company. He was a great presenter, a great spokesman, and a great salesman.”

Those who have worked with Romney cite his flexibility as a virtue. “He’s spent his entire life in a world that’s constantly changing, where he has had to modify his thinking in order to address problems,” says Scott Meadow, his friend and former business partner. “I think it demonstrates something that I’ve always seen: an ability to adapt and change, and a willingness to accept that his thinking evolves. And not being afraid to change his mind and go in a different direction because that seems like the appropriate thing to do.” Meadow says Romney is “loyal to success,” whatever form it takes. “He’s flexible because he’s had to be,” Meadow says.

More: How Mormon Economics Shape the GOP,

Wade Davis' Writer's Cave

Travis Price Architects built Wade Davis an enviable office, featuring its own library dome, The Kiva of Knowledge. You probably know Wade Davis as the author of The Serpent and the Rainbow and other books, or as National Geographic's Explorer in Residence.

Wade Davis has one of the most coveted jobs in America – Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. A cross between your favorite professor and a modern day Marco Polo, he spends of his time with his fingers in the dirt, traversing the globe as an anthropologist, ethnobotanist, photographer, and writer. When he’s home in Washington, he escapes to put pen to paper in his Travis Price-designed study, overflowing with books, manuscripts, artifacts, and inspiration.

“Travis did a studio on M Street in Georgetown for me,” Davis says, noting that in his current home, zoning prohibited a detached building. While many need light-filled rooms for inspiration, he wanted to avoid large windows opening onto a residential neighborhood and sought a cave-like atmosphere to disappear into his work. Subtle light was brought in by other means when the architect built a dome above his client’s desk (which Price describes as similar to the rotunda of the oracle’s temple at Delphi) and filled it with the books he uses the most. Davis whimsically calls the space his “Navajo kiva of knowledge.”

-Karin Tanabe,Washington Life Magazine

(via boingboing & bookshelf)

Previously: Best Thing of the Week: Wade Davis and the shit knife

Links for Later 2-9-12

1. How to deal with digital piracy (hint: better, cheaper products) (via Bruce Schneier)
2. Prop8 repeal wins at appellate level
3. Profile of Maggie Gallagher
4. Obama and the contraceptives decision
5. Egypt's Parliament getting off to a lively start
6. Obama is the most "moderate" Democratic President since WWII, still ticks off Repubs
7. Tau protein spreading in Alzheimer's. I don't know about this one, so more research, please.
8. Svante Paabo strikes again: Human ancestor's genome sequenced from fossilized remain
9. Why Chicago is great for startups

OK GO - Needing/Getting

Some bands have all the fun.

Karl Lagerfeld Interviews Himself

Why do I like Karl Lagerfeld? Because he's always impatient. And funny.





(via HuffPo)

Ferriss Bueller's Superbowl Commercial

OK, I admit I squealed with glee when I saw the teaser for this.

Links for Later 1-27-12

1. Shannon Larratt's recommendation for Spoonflower custom printed fabric
2. How To Build a TARDIS
3. Trying to fix Pakistan's schools
4. StatSilk World Bank lets you do geographic comparisons of global macroeconomic indicators
5. Typography in Illustrator by Smashing Mag
6. New, hi-rez images of the Earth from satellite
7. Freud in the Adirondacks
8. Great one-handed catch by a ballboy at the Australian Open
9. Elsevier's economic case is hollow
10. Blade Runner Blues cover
11. Morgellon's disease update
12. Effects of a media diet
13. How right-handed sugars emerged from left-handed amino acids in the early organic environment
14. Fans willen Edwin Bouwhuis terug
15. Chris Dodd and MPAA in trouble over SOPA/PIPA

Stop SOPA/PIPA

If you can read this, the Internet isn't dead yet. It's under immediate threat from a pair of bills currently working their way through Congress. Both SOPA, the House version, and PIPA, the Senate version, were bills written by Big Entertainment under the cover of "anti-piracy" efforts. What they are instead is anti-competitive, anti-free speech and anti-public use. Take the time to find out more at the Electronic Freedom Foundation, read the bills, and contact your Senators and Congressman to tell them to take their hands off the Internet.

If you enjoy reading this blog, and thousands of other sites across the web, you owe it to yourself to take action today.

Thanks.

Links for Later 1-11-12

1. Rev. Roger Williams, the foundation of Rhode Island, and the foundation of the separation of church and state in America
2. Creating guilloche patterns in Illustrator
3. Wes Anderson style stationery, movie festival marketing

The Future is Now, Vol. LXXXV: The Skin Cell Gun

Jörg Gerlach's skin cell gun is supposed to be able to replace burned skin within four days. One of the most amazing cell culture applications I've ever seen:

Opportunities

Every time you want to make any important decision, there are two possible courses of action. You can look at the array of choices that present themselves, pick the best available option and try to make it fit. Or, you can do what the true entrepreneur does: Figure out the best conceivable option and then make it available.

-Jon Burgstone and Bill Murphy

Breakthrough Entrepreneurship

as quoted by Eric Schurenberg in

"What's an Entrepreur? The Best Definition Ever"

The Anti-SOPA Ad

Reddit is doing an anti-SOPA boycott on the 18th, and there are rumors that Google, Twitter and Facebook may do so as well.

Trouble is the Essence of Entrepreneurship

Colbert’s co-conspirator in those days was the director and playwright Dexter Bullard, who would call him up and say, “Do you want to get in trouble?” Getting in trouble meant hiring a hall, inviting some critics and then picking a play — something by Havel, say, whom they had barely heard of — and learning it and putting it on in a week or so.

-Charles McGrath

"How Many Stephen Colberts are There?"

Michel Thomas, The Language Master

Michel Thomas created a novel method of language instruction, in which students are instructed to relax and to make no effort to remember any of what they learn. The result is supposed to be effective learning of the language in hours or days rather than years.

In Nigel Levy's documentary for BBC2, Thomas teaches a group of London secondary school students to speak conversational French in five days.


This past week, I used Michel Thomas' recordings to learn Italian. After two hours, I certainly seemeed to learn something. I seem to have picked up a fine bit of Italian, and unexpectedly also found I was able to read in French with greater ease.

Oh, the Places You'll Go at Burning Man

Dr. Seuss meets the Burners. Wheeeeeeee!
(via boingboing)

Links for Later 1-6-12

1. How to make a model of your house from a photo and put it in a snowglobe (via boingboing)
2. Lamar Smith chooses the "Lie & Deny" strategy to defend SOPA

State of the World

Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowski are back for the 2012 State of the World discussion, and they're spinning memes at a furious pace. A sample:

The "Caste." Since Italy has had a very low birthrate for a very long time, it's dawning on people that everybody in power is amazingly old and that young people can't get a job or a house. Since the guys at the top of the heap never really leave power or change their policies, they are increasingly decried as the "Caste." Unfortunately for the young, old people vote very regularly and aren't gonna vote against themselves. Japan suffers a similar political helplessness; there's just not enough fresh blood to renew the state. It's gerontocracy in action and it's getting worse. Italy now has a "technocratic" emergency government, but they're all old guys.

It's all good. Go now and join in over on the WELL.

Haut Nerd Home Design

Author Christopher Paolini lives with his family, collects swords and makes chainmail in his spare time. In short, he's a champion fantasy author and he lives it. Good for him.

Here's his house, dragon sculptures and all.

Livraria Lello & Irmão

Beautiful bookstore in Oporto. That staircase alone is worth a trip. (via @magsarty)

Links for Later 1-3-12

1. Tim Ferriss Accelerated Learning at the Long Now
2. Leadership and solitude
3. Marvelous sentences: "Actor Peter Dinklage, who plays a dwarf on the show, has become the poster child for sodomy among the nation's youths."
4. Yes, that last link is satire, people.

Links for Later 1-2-12

1. Henry Rollins shows vacation slides of Afghanistan, Iran, Burma and other unlikely places from his new book of photography
2. Who knew that fracking could cause earthquakes? WHO KNEW?
3. Hey, girl, Ryan Gosling talks about rhetoric
4. Ricardianomics Roundup
5. More Ricardianoid Throwdown with Noah Smith, who says 'tis not Say's Law, but dY/dG=0 at the heart of the matter
6. John Cochrane hath a blog, sure to make Paul Krugman dance for joy

Larry Lessig on the Lost Republic

Thesis: The Republic after the meaning of the founders has been distorted by corruption. It is no longer brown bag corruption, as it was in earlier times; it is now a corrupt system with ostensibly honest people inside.

Here's his interview with On Point, in which he discusses this same corrupting system of money, politics and influence. As a sidenote, this talk is a good example of the fast-slide PowerPoint method Lessig uses, which requires careful synchronization of his talk with his slides.

Mike DeStefano - Uneasy Rider

A story about living while dying. The NYT/This American Life version can be read here.

The Power of Ideas

Before it was a Bomb, the Bomb was an Idea. Superman, however, was a Faster, Stronger, Better Idea.

-Grant Morrison

Supergods

Quote of the Day

“Should we trust models or observations?” In reply we note that if we had observations of the future, we obviously would trust them more than models, but unfortunately observations of the future are not available at this time.

-Knutson and Tuleya, Journal of Climate, 2005

from the lesswrong list of rationality quotes

List of Best of Lists 2011

A non-exhaustive, highly idiosyncratic list that will be expanded as new lists are encountered:

1. Best of The Morning News
2. Top 10 Longreads
3. Marginal Revolution's most popular posts
4. Kirkus Review's best books
5. Tom Eisenmann's favorite posts on running startups
6. Mark Morford's favorite albums
7. lesswrong's rationality quotes
8. The Jon Swift Memorial Roundup of best blog posts
9. Everything is Miscellaneous' Top Ten Top Ten Top Ten Lists

The Year in Reading 2011

Since 2006, I've been keeping a list of all the books I've read. I don't know whether I want to keep doing this, as it makes me feel like I'm reading less rather than more, trying to finish books that might just as well be left aside, and leaving aside critical books that really ought to be read immediately. The quality of reading takes a backseat to the quantity. Meh.

On the other hand, it's great to look back on the list itself for surprises and reminders. Can it really be that I hadn't read Patrick Rothfuss's Name of the Wind and Wise Man's Fear or Helen DeWitt's amazing book The Last Samurai until this year? (If you haven't read these yet, go get them.) Other highly recommended fiction includes Lev Grossman's The Magician King, Eleanor Henderson's Ten Thousand Saints, and Neal Stephenson's Reamde.

This was also the year when I read Tim Ferriss's two books, and tried a lot of the self-help methods described in The Four Hour Body. Most of his recommendations still sound like hucksterism but actually work, as opposed to most books on similar topics, which sound reasonable but turn out to be bushwah. Also, Ferriss makes you want to get up and do something about your life. Other excellent books that made me want to get up and move were The Chairs are Where the People Go by Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti, a book about a man who teaches people how to play charades and how to get your neighbor's bar to be quiet, or something like that; and Steven Pressfield's The War of Art, on how to stop procrastinating (become a professional) and start writing.

Speaking of procrastination and other low-level personality issues, and also speaking of writing, check out Alice Flaherty (The Midnight Disease), Kay Redfield Jamison (Touched by Fire, Exuberance), and John Gartner (The Hypomanic Edge) on how hypomania, temporal lobe epilepsy, and other disorders made writers, scientists and entrepreneurs a bit more of what they are, and will make you wish you were a tiny bit mad. For the film version of this, go see Limitless. Grant Morrison's Supergods is a hypomanic book as well.

Other notable books on economics, psychology and entrepreneurship: James Gleick The Information, Daniel Kahneman Thinking Fast and Slow, which may well be the most important book of the year, Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants, Steven Johnson's The Innovator's Cookbook.

Four tremendous books on people: Edmund DeWaal The Hare with Amber Eyes, Alexander Theroux The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, which I haven't seen in anyone else's Best Of list, but which quite frankly belongs on everyone's, and Derek Jarman's diaries from the end of his life: Smiling in Slow Motion. If you want to read someone's thoughts on living and loving while dying, all in lapidary prose and great good humor, this one is the book for you.

Kelly Link & Gavin Grant

Two very good interviews with Small Beer Press's Kelly Link & Gavin Grant have surfaced lately: one from 2010 on some of Kelly's writing methods that she's adopted from other writers (ask your subconscious for ideas, put in things you like from other stories, write a lot of first sentences and select the best), and the other from author Alma Katsu (endpaper notes) with both Grant and Kelly about how to run a small press ("odd-shaped books" that others won't publish, but that match your taste are a good bet [if you've got good taste].)

I really like the list of things to put in stories: "fraught family dynamics", "people who make things", "electrical outages". The fifty first lines idea reminds me of the pottery class described by Malcolm Gladwell where the professor grades by the number of pots made, rather than the quality, and ends up with better results.

I also think that Small Beer is one of the most interesting publishers in America, both from the standpoint of the many great books they've brought onto the market, but also in their overall business model as an indie publisher. They produce quite a lot for their size, seem to be profitable, and have a good reputation with both customers and authors.

More: I don't remember whether I have already posted this interview with Link called "All Books are Weird"from Weird Fiction Review.

The Incense Game

Now there is a perfume I’m working on that’s inspired by The Tale of Genji that will be made from extremely rare ingredients. It will be fabulously expensive because they’re incredibly hard to get. Much of it has to do with the Japanese ritual of burning incense. There are two words for it: one’s the ritual of burning incense and the other is a game where incense is burned and people are asked either to identify or they’ll burn various things and try to combine a smoke that’s really beautiful. Or people will talk about poetry or literature or what the smell the smoke inspires in them. That was very popular at the time that The Tale of Genji was written.

-Christopher Brosius

in an interview with Bookriot

about his perfume "In the Library"

Winter is Coming

(via rcs)

Hello, Old Sexy!

She's wearing a TARDIS.

(via f-yeah Grant Morrison)

Links for Later 12-27-11

1. China Mieville on hauntology
2. Freeman Dyson is no psychologist
3. Twinless twins
4. Giordano Bruno On the Composition of Images, Signs and Ideas
5. "Two Lectures on the Size, Shape and Location of Dante's Inferno By Galileo"

DJ Earworm - United State of Pop 2011 (World Go Boom)

Mashup king DJ Earworm presents the year of pop music, compressed, remixed and summarized.

Terry Gilliam's Christmas Card

(via Dangerous Minds)

Links for Later 12-21-11

1. The Power of Living in Truth: a Vaclav Havel appreciation
2. Mark Thoma: The Economic Divide Makes Everyone Poorer
3. Adam Savage on SOPA/PIPA
4. Al Jazeera on Bradley Manning
5. How hard does James Franco work at Yale?
6. Neal Pollack knew Christopher Hitchens better than you
7. More on the Egyptian library fire
8. Yet more

1% Feeling Put-Upon

Max Abelson reports some solipsistic quotes from members of the 1% who are quite unhappy with their lot in life. Income inequality will do that to a person, especially at the top. The more you make, the more insecure you are that you're going to be able to keep making it--your income volatility goes through the roof, and small changes in your relative ranking have big impacts on how well you do.

Nassim Taleb's fragility of the power law hits hard no matter where you sit. Joshua Brown (Reformed Broker) sees this other side of inequality. Being smart about investing (or anything) is no longer any guarantee of success. The market will eat your lunch.

This common problem of the rich and poor under conditions of high inequality is an idea I'll be working with over the coming year.

Egyptian Scientific Institute Burns Down

In a bizarre modern reinactment of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, the Egyptian Army and police fired on protestors who attempted to rescue some of the 198,000 volumes contained at Egypt's largest library as the library building burned down. Other protestors had previously thorwn Molotov cocktails onto the neighboring Shura Council building.

Photo: unknown, citation wanted.

A Very Calvin & Hobbes Christmas

"We miss you, Bill." Jim Frohmmeyer and Teague Chrystie discuss the snowman recreation process here.

Looking Toward 2012

I really don't like that my choices in the upcoming election will be between one candidate who will betray the things I believe in, civil liberties, progressive taxation, etc., etc., etc., and a crazy person from the other side (take your pick) who will be even worse.

-Mark Thoma

on the Caver in Chief

also: This.

Links for Later 12-16-11

1. A sampling of Japanese kamon (family crests)
2. A selection of Christopher Hitchens articles and talks from The Browser
3. Slate's collection of Hitchens articles
4. Hitchens' Mark Daily memorial article
5. A short Kelly Link interview
6. SOPA markup delayed indefinitely
7. SOPA only supported by astroturfers and industry flacks?
8. Bradley Manning pre-trial hearing begins
9. Gingrich proposes abolishing Article III of Constitution to save America from having judges

RIP Christopher Hitchens

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Year in Film

Links for Later 12-11-11

1. Kay Nielsen's fairy tale illustrations are beautiful
2. Basquiat's hair 
3. Charlie Hoehn on working for free to work the way you need to
4. Growing frankincense
5. Update on the Bradley Manning trial: military objects to 38 of 48 proposed witnesses, tries to select "embedded" journalists. Who's running the prosecution of this thing, Vladimir Putin?
6. "Full Unconcealed Panic"
7. SOPA and Protect IP Act explained again
8. LAPD acts illegally against Occupy LA

Quote of the Day

The Socratic method, of which the Platonic dialogues are the chief example, is unsurpassed as a discipline for correcting the errors, and clearing up the confusions incident to the intellectus sibi permissus, the understanding which has made up all its bundles of associations under the guidance of popular phraseology. The close, searching elenchus by which the man of vague generalities is constrained either to express his meaning to himself in definite terms, or to confess that he does not know what he is talking about; the perpetual testing of all general statements by particular instances; the siege in from which is laid to the meaning of large abstract terms, by fixing upon some still larger class-name which includes that and more, and dividing down to the thing sought -- marking out its limits and definition by a series of accurately drawn distinctions between it and each of the cognate objects which are successively parted off from it -- all this, as an education for precise thinking, is inestimable, and all this, even at that age, took such hold of me that it became part of my own mind. I have felt ever since that the title of Platonist belongs by far better right to those who have been nourished in, and have endeavoured to practise Plato's mode of investigation, than to those who are distinguished only by the adoption of certain dogmatical conclusions, drawn mostly from the least intelligible of his works, and which the character of his mind and writings makes it uncertain whether he himself regarded as anything more than poetic fancies, or philosophic conjectures.    

-JS Mill

Autobiography

Your Christmas Shopping List

"Eye removal kit, daddy butter, caramel yak, Fancy Boy lip glitter"
Wonderfully silly--I laughed until I cried. Still, I think the pre-made toast could be a big seller.
(via boingboing)

Chairman Bruce

Two talks from Bruce Sterling. STRP 2011:
Bruce Sterling - Symposium Playful Post Digital Culture (STRP 2011) from STRP Festival on Vimeo.
2011 Arts & Entertainment Conference

Foster the People - Helena Beat

Oooweeowooo.

Just passed the 2000th post on this blog since moving to the new platform. I know you're as thrilled about this as I am.

A Modest Proposal

Any member of Congress who votes to lock up American citizens without charges or trial should themselves be locked up without charges or trial under the terms of the law, as they are clearly terrorists intending to subvert the American way of life.

By extension: any member of Congress who votes for any prima facie unconstitutional measure should be immediately subjected to the penalties for such a measure.

Links for Later

1. What Tim Tebow can't do
2. Cutbacks demolishing the New York Public Library
3. Lunch with Stewart Lee
4. Any member of Congress who votes to lock up American citizens without charges or trial should themselves be locked up without charges or trial
5. Time for me to fly
6. SOPA compromise in the wings?
7. Matt Damon talks about water.org
8. Lululemon lives to regret those stupid John Galt bags
9. Automating your startup with Wicked Start
10. Your smartphone is tracking your every move. Lawsuits pending
11. Military spending multiplier < Domestic spending multiplier
12. Mohawk Movember with Kellan Lutz

Asset Diversification Fail

Since 2000, according to a Morgan Stanley review, excess return of hedge funds (alpha) has dropped from 16% to -1%, while correlation of hedge funds with stock indices has gone from ~0.5 to ~0.9 (from moderately to highly correlated). In other words, except for global macro funds, hedge funds are no longer beating index funds, and in fact are no longer really hedging much of anything.

We always used to joke that "hedge fund" wasn't really a separate class of assets, but just a marketing strategy that allowed managers to extract 2 and 20 from their customers. With numbers like these, those extracting days are numbered.

Utilitarianism Revisited

This new Sam Harris interview of Daniel Kahneman about Thinking Fast and Slow has a high density of good material for such a short sample. All of it is worth reading. Of particular interest is the impact of "the experiencing self and the remembering self" on conceptions of utility and the good life.

Some conceptions of the good life take the Aristotelian view to the extreme of denying altogether the relevance of subjective well-being. For those who do not want to go that far, the distinction between experienced happiness and life satisfaction raises serious problems. In particular, there appears to be little hope for any unitary concept of subjective well-being. I used to hold a unitary view, in which I proposed that only experienced happiness matters, and that life satisfaction is a fallible estimate of true happiness. I eventually concluded that this view is not tenable, for one simple reason: people seem to be much more concerned with the satisfaction of their goals than with the achievement of experienced happiness. A definition of subjective well-being that ignores people’s goals is not tenable. On the other hand, an exclusive focus on satisfaction is not tenable either. If two people are equally satisfied (or unsatisfied) with their lives but one of them is almost always smiling happily and the other is mostly miserable, will we ignore that in assessing their well-being?

I love this. It gets at the root of a very long argument in a new way by looking at the texture of thought and consciousness. The Thinking book (and Kahneman's body of research) is full of exactly this sort of insight, and is one of the few books I've read on the subject that treats with decision-making and strategy while avoiding beginners mistakes in understanding general psychology. One of the best books of the year.