Links for Later 7-16-12

1. Tattoos by Xoil
2. Joss Whedon interviewed at ComiCon
3. Donald Sobol, who wrote Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, died today
4. More on the Ingeborg Bachman prize

The Alchemists

John Cusack interviews Phil Stutz and Barry Michels about The Tools here, here and here.

The Ingeborg Bachman Prize

"Everyone is just waiting for someone to eat their manuscript again," said Doris Moser. 

German literary competitions are more lively than those of other countries. Discuss.

People cut themselves with razor blades, run from the stage, consume their books. Sounds like a fine old time.

 (via Bookslut)

Dark Galaxy

Scientists have directly observed starless dark galaxies for the first time, thanks to more powerful telescopes and one extremely bright quasar.

Links for Later 7-12-12

1. To Fly: Steve McCurry's photo essay on reading

Thought of the Day

James Altucher's resume may show a lot of wreckage, but it also shows that he gets out of bed every morning and gets in a fight. That's a good thing.

Steven Pressfield on overcoming Resistance

Overcome your Resistance (the inner distraction from the goal) by Turning Pro (do your work regardless). This applies to writer's block or any form of procraastination.

Eugene Gendlin on Focusing

Eugene Gendlin gives an introduction to focusing and the felt sense concept in 2000.

Shadow Work and the Writer's Block

"I can't write."

"I want you to write a page. Think you could do that for me?"

"Can it be bad?"

"I'd like it to be very bad."

-Ruby Sparks (2012)

You have a first world problem: you can't write.  People with anger management issues, who beat their family and kick their dog have bigger things to worry about. You, however, are a well-socialized person who plays well with others. This is why you have writer's block. Your internal editor has got the upper hand over your muse, the productive, creative part of yourself.

Alice Flaherty's research on creativity discusses this imbalance between the frontal lobe (executive functions and judgement) and temporal lobes (generation, association and creative impulses). In temporal lobe epilepsy and bipolar disorder cases, where the temporal lobe is unusually activated, there's a radical opening up of writing, resulting in endless pages of writing, sketches and other expression. In balance, writng happens in what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a flow state--naturally, pleasurably, continuously and without effort.

Under subclinical blocked conditions, the best advice seems to be Anne Lamotte's: write a shitty first draft, and turn down the volume on your inner critic. Write something intentionally bad, or lower your standards so that just writing is the success. Phil Stutz and Barry Michels take a similar approach with The Tools,  but with a Jungian angle; they recommend inviting your Shadow into the creative process with you.

In Jungian terms, the Shadow is that part of your self that has all the traits you'd like to do away with. It's the version of you that got picked last in dodgeball (everyone remembers being picked last, right up to the captain of the football team, the head cheerleader, the class president). This is the part of you that you try to hide, but it's also the part of you that generates the creativity--because it's the vulnerable part, and because it's the part that you yourself are criticizing. So, performing active visualization and personification on this part or version of yourself allows you to do several things: first, it makes this part more vividly real for you, drawing more attention and resources toward this aspect of yourself relative to the inner critic, producing stronger, better defined sensations and reactions around this inner component. Second, by seeing this part of you as a person, you are expanding the ways for you to relate to it--we have a lot of mental equipment for relating to other human beings, and for interpreting phenomena as if they were produced by a thinking being--so it is therefore easier to envision a broader variety of interactions with an inner component. Third, it allows us to recast our conscious mind as a Hero figure, protective of the Shadow, rather than critical of it. In myths and legends, when we make this shift to become an ally of the Shadow, it changes from being the ugly monster we're disgusted with, to being luminous and beautiful: the Shadow becomes the Muse, the creative spirit.

All of this may sound a bit woo-woo mystical, but as I said above, it's a personified version of dealing with the psychological structures that you, I and everyone else experience, however we experience them. If you'd rather deal with the situation as just inner sensations or biological processes, that works as well, but the language is more technical.

Below is a roundtable discussion about disorders of writing (hyper- and hypo-graphia) held at the Philoctetus Center with Alice Flaherty, Jonathan Lethem, Pedro Reyes, and others:

____________

Flaherty, AW "Frontotemporal and Dopaminergic Control of Idea Generation and Creative Drive." Journal of Comparative Neurology. 2005 December 5; 493(1): 147–153.

Flaherty, AW The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain. 2004, Mariner Books.

Stutz, P and Michels B The Tools: Transform Your Problems into Courage, Confidence, and Creativity 2012, Spiegel & Grau.

Links for Later 7-9-12

1. Not enough scientists, and not enough science jobs
2. How the failure of ACTA is impacting the copyfight
3. Almost 10% of Pennsylvania voters disenfranchised by new law
4. How to teach entrepreneurship
5. Dave McClure, late bloomer or loser?
6. Noahpinion thinks Zero Hedge is a behavioral finance sockpuppet
7. Doctor gets leukemia, sequences own genome with help from a few friends, finds effective treatment.
8. How to scale a wall

Desire and Fear

Ken Bradshaw surfed the largest wave in history. In 2011, William Langwische interviewed him for Vanity Fair.

Bradshaw told me about meeting Noll many years later. He said, “Noll asked me, ‘Do you ever close your eyes?’

“I said, ‘Excuse me?’

“‘At the top of the wave.’

“I said, ‘No! I always want to know where I’m going!’ Then I realized, that’s how he did it. He’d get to some point where it was scary, then just close his eyes and keep going. Because his desire was greater than his fear.”

(via longreads)

Barry Michels and the Flowing Shadow

Count Robert de La Rochefoucauld

His wife told them, "Don't try to lock him up. He escapes, you know."

Count Robert de La Rochefoucauld passed away at 88 this week, leaving behind a possible winning entry for best obituary ever. If you never fought in the French Resistance, don't even try to compete. Just read the whole thing.

Ficino on Honey

It is pleasant to remind you again how Democritus, when he was at the point of death, to gratify the wishes of his friends retained his spirit for four days by the smell of hot loaves; he would have kept his spirit even longer if only it had pleased him to do so. There are also those who say that he did this by the smell of honey. I think that if he used honey at all, he poured it, liquefied with white wine, into the hot loaves. For the odor of honey is not to be scorned; for it is the flower of flowers; it nourishes considerably by its very sweetness; moreover, by its quality things are kept for a long time whole from putrefecation. And so if anyone knows how to eat honey, even as a food, so as not to fill up his passages with too much sweetness nor to augment choler with its heat, he will possess a sure support for a longer life.

-Marsilio Ficino

De Vita Libri Tres

Three Books on Life

Book II.XVIII

as translated by Kaske & Clark

Bad Camo

After $5M and who knows how many lives wasted, the Army is dumping a useless pixellated camouflage it adopted to copy the Marines. What they should have done, and what the Marines did, is go to Home Depot:

The Army’s camouflage researchers say the story of the universal pattern’s origins begins when they helped develop a similarly pixilated camouflage now worn by the Marine Corps. That pattern, known as MARPAT, first appeared in 2002 after being selected from among dozens of candidates and receiving plenty of input from Marines on the ground at the sniper school in Quantico, Va. The Marines even found one of the baseline colors themselves, an earth tone now called Coyote Brown.

“They went to Home Depot, looked at paint swatches, and said, ‘We want that color,’ ” said Anabelle Dugas, a textile technologist at Natick who helped develop the pattern. That particular hue, she added, was part of a paint series then sold by Ralph Lauren.

Links for Later 6-22-12

1. WB Yeats' magical obsession
2. Covers and digital books
3. Mark Morford's perpetual summer reading list
4. Roy Christopher's friends' summer reading list
5. 10 lesser known natural wonders (a bit linkbaitish, but I'd still like to see all of these)
6. 21 pictures that will restore your faith in humanity (love the birthday cake)
7. Most startup accelerators will never launch anyone
8. Gideon Lewis-Kraus on Berlin, pilgrimages
9. Fawning article about rich teenaged brothers with good vocabulary, wardrobes
10. The Zone
11. Ai WeiWei: "To live in fear is worse than losing your freedom"
12. Patrick Rothfuss Lolcats
13. Alex Dimitrov online chapbook

Greg Laswell - Come Back Down

What I'm listening to right now, on continuous loop:

Texting as Hypergraphia

The Neurocritic has a nice little post up about a recent case of a woman whose texting went up by 1,333% during a manic period, to about 200 a day.

I often feel like I could use a little hypergraphia. I've got a pair of books I'm working on, but my ability to not write is without limit.

Links for Later 6-11-12

1. First objects in the universe spotted, not identified
2. Prometheus from an archeological perspective (funny)
3. Advice for foreign tourists in America (be on time, tip 20%, use utensils sometimes but not always)
4. The final final
5. Laura Jane Grace rocking harder than ever
6. Courage: LGBT Pride events in Iran
7. Peter Thiel's startup class: startup founders are extreme people (the U-shaped distribution)
8. Bowe Bergdahl is still a POW
9. Busted via Twitter
10. Heinz Kohut's final days
11. Death among the Buddhist yogis
12. Death among the snake-handling Christians
13. More snake-handlers
14. Military-grade face transplants
15. There is no best place to advertise; try things and track results

People Being Awesome

Oh, sure, that's easy.
(via Devour)

Transit of Venus

Image credit: NASA/SDO

See you at the next one in 105 years. Some of you, anyway. Lots more images here.

Dropping Keys

That's some good poetry by Hafiz:

The small man builds cages for everyone he knows,  

While the sage who has to duck his head when the moon is low,

Keeps dropping keys for the Beautiful Rowdy Prisoners.

As quoted by Chris Guillebeau in this talk at Carnegie Mellon:

What Saves You

You know, I just wanted to say something at this point and it's about the reason I've been talking about all of these dead people. And the reason for this is a trip that I took recently to Tibet. And I went there to look at a lake way up in the Himalayas. And this lake is in an extremely remote part of Tibet. And, when the Dalai Lama dies, a lot of lamas travel to this lake to look at it, because, written in code on the surface of the water, somehow, are instructions for finding the new Dalai Lama. For example, there would be a certain sign on the water for the word "west" and another for the word "gate," and another for "dusty road." And so, that's how they would find the new Dalai Lama. They would look in western Tibet and they would find a gate and at the end of this dusty road there would be a little boy playing and this would be the incarnation of the Dalai Lama. Now, being a somewhat suspicious person, I wanted to see this lake and get a look at the huge xenon projectors hidden around on the hermit caves that might explain this phenomenon. So, there were 12 of us trekking, plus 8 sherpas and 27 yaks. And, we set off into the mountains and we got really lost. And we weren't really prepared for how far it was going to be or how cold it was going to be. And, so, we would get up every morning and we would drink this coffee with yak butter, you know, it was snowing and freezing and we would start to walk. And, then, at about 22,000 feet I got altitude sickness that just wouldn't go away. And for days I had a fever of 104, you know, 20 Advil a day. And I was convinced that my head had been sliced open. And, so, when the other trekkers tried to help me, you know, rummaging around in the oxygen equipment, I kept thinking, how nice of them to be pretending to look for something to help me and not even mentioning that my head has been sliced wide open. So, anyway, finally, these headaches went away. And all I heard for days were bells and the horizon was doing some great pulsating gold patterns and then wild stripes. And, we finally reached the lake. But by that point, I couldn't really see much of anything except these gold lights. And that night, because I found out later, the leader had gotten a group together and said, we have to be prepared for the fact that she's going to die tonight, meaning me. So, that night, they sent me down in a body bag, strapped to a donkey, with a sherpa guide and another American trekker and some oxygen equipment. And I just kept slipping in and out of consciousness. So, I said to this other trekker, you know, listen, can you just keep talking to me because I just keep, you know, going away. And this trekker was a really strong guy but very shy. He hardly said anything the whole trip. But he started to talk and he talked non-stop for 3 days. You know, look at the gorse over there, look at the frozen yak turds, look at the stars. And I remember that voice pulling on me like it was a long, thin line. Just a single voice. And, that's how I held on. His voice was a rope, repelling me down. And, that's why I'm telling you this because maybe you know what it's like to be saved this way. Just by the sound of another person's voice. And, so, that's what happened to me and I just thought I should explain it to you.

-"Trip to Tibet"

 by Laurie Anderson

from Stories from the Nerve Bible

Tortured

In 2004, Eric Fair was an interrogator in Iraq who used government-approved torture methods ("strong interrogation") at Abu Ghraib and Fallujah. In 2012, Eric Fair is studying to be a Presbyterian minister, and has expressed his remorse to government representatives, The Washington Post, Amnesty International, victims of other torture regimes, and the readers of the Doonesbury Sandbox. Now that he's published an editorial against torture and confessing his role, people send him emails and letters recommending suicide.

The real question is: what do you do with the rest of your life, once you've done evil and recognized that you've done evil? How should others treat you? How do you forgive the unforgivable, especially if you're the one who needs to forgive yourself?
My God, it's harrowing. Read the whole Sandbox post.

Applying upaya to business

How OK strategy can lead to good strategy.

William Butler Yeats - Fergus and the Druid

{Fergus} This whole day have I followed in the rocks,
And you have changed and flowed from shape to shape,
First as a raven on whose ancient wings
Scarcely a feather lingered, then you seemed
A weasel moving on from stone to stone,
And now at last you wear a human shape,
A thin grey man half lost in gathering night.

{Druid} What would you, king of the proud Red Branch kings?

{Fergus} This would I say, most wise of living souls:
Young subtle Conchubar sat close by me
When I gave judgment, and his words were wise,
And what to me was burden without end,
To him seemed easy, So I laid the crown
Upon his head to cast away my sorrow.

{Druid} What would you, king of the proud Red Branch kings?

{Fergus} A king and proud! and that is my despair.
I feast amid my people on the hill,
And pace the woods, and drive my chariot-wheels
In the white border of the murmuring sea;
And still I feel the crown upon my head.

{Druid} What would you, Fergus?

{Fergus} Be no more a king
But learn the dreaming wisdom that is yours.

{Druid} Look on my thin grey hair and hollow cheeks
And on these hands that may not lift the sword,
This body trembling like a wind-blown reed.
No woman's loved me, no man sought my help.

{Fergus} A king is but a foolish labourer
Who wastes his blood to be another's dream.

{Druid} Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams;
Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.

{Fergus} I See my life go drifting like a river
From change to change; I have been many things --
A green drop in the surge, a gleam of light
Upon a sword, a fir-tree on a hill,
An old slave grinding at a heavy quern,
A king sitting upon a chair of gold --
And all these things were wonderful and great;
But now I have grown nothing, knowing all.
Ah! Druid, Druid, how great webs of sorrow
Lay hidden in the small slate-coloured thing!

Links for Later 5-22-12

1. DC brothel longread
2. Lesson plans for $700,000, Alex
3. Branson: Dress like a human
4. Seal / signet rings from the classical revival
5. How to support R&D&D&D (Research & Development & Demonstration & Deployment) or, When the Military-Industrial Complex was a Good Thing
6. The story of the transition of Laura Jane Grace, nee Tom Gabel, of Against Me!
7. How to improve expert prediction

Make Good Art

Neil Gaiman delivered some excellent advice in his commencement address to the graduates of Philadelphia's University of the Arts, including some useful Freelancer Secret Knowledge:

You get work however you get work.

People keep working, in a freelance world, and more and more of today's world is freelance, because their work is good, and because they are easy to get along with, and because they deliver the work on time. And you don't even need all three. Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. They'll forgive the lateness of the work if it's good, and if they like you. And you don't have to be as good as the others if you're on time and it's always a pleasure to hear from you.

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.