Motion & Emotion

The neuroscience of music.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

China's Ghost Cities

In China, there are millions of apartment buildings with 75% vacancy rates, empty cities and shopless shopping malls and more being built daily. Wow.
(via boingboing)

The Objectivist Tree

(via Andrew)

Inspirational

I'm off to drink a gallon of milk and eat a spoonfull of cinnamon.

Repair Week

Ted, my physical therapist said tonight, "It looks like all of your neck and shoulder muscles went on strike at the same time," after he'd spent the better part of an hour disentangling them from one another. I woke up at 3:30 AM a couple of nights ago with throbbing, shooting pain down my arm, the result of stress, overwork and unusual sleeping positions. Now, I'm getting my act together. Brian, my mechanic, got the starter on my car replaced in record time, after the old one finally gave up the ghost a couple of days after I'd had all the fluids in the car replaced. The old fluids came out mixed with something nasty that looked like tar, and possibly was. Taxes are up next. This promises to be equally fun.

Marcin Jakubowski's Civilization Starter Kit

50 open source devices with open source designs that can rebuild civilization.

Links for Later

1. A management consultant with a philosophy PhD talks smack about MBA's, and rightly so


2. Trying to biohack your way to a melamine detector. Compare to this list of existing methods


3. The new Humble Bundle is out. Go pick one up


4. Views from a Hudson River mansion


5. Brad Feld on building tech communities in smaller cities


6. Regular expression generator


7. Someday, you will buy an Alex Stoddard photo for big money


8. Is Barack Obama really that bad at negotiating?


9. Is a weekend with Tim Ferriss worth $10,000?


10. Library glamour shots

The Bridgewater Principles

Kevin Roose takes a look at Ray Dalio, who built hedge fund giant Bridgewater "like a cult" that favors "radical transparency" over "kindness and empathy." Would you choose to work there? More: Dalio's Principles online.

Google vs. Facebook

Chris Dixon has a good strategic rundown on how Google should face off against Facebook.

Where's Barack?

Paul Krugman notes the strange absence of the man we elected in '08:

More broadly, Mr. Obama is conspicuously failing to mount any kind of challenge to the philosophy now dominating Washington discussion — a philosophy that says the poor must accept big cuts in Medicaid and food stamps; the middle class must accept big cuts in Medicare (actually a dismantling of the whole program); and corporations and the rich must accept big cuts in the taxes they have to pay. Shared sacrifice! I’m not exaggerating. The House budget proposal that was unveiled last week — and was praised as “bold” and “serious” by all of Washington’s Very Serious People — includes savage cuts in Medicaid and other programs that help the neediest, which would among other things deprive 34 million Americans of health insurance. It includes a plan to privatize and defund Medicare that would leave many if not most seniors unable to afford health care. And it includes a plan to sharply cut taxes on corporations and to bring the tax rate on high earners down to its lowest level since 1931. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center puts the revenue loss from these tax cuts at $2.9 trillion over the next decade. House Republicans claim that the tax cuts can be made “revenue neutral” by “broadening the tax base” — that is, by closing loopholes and ending exemptions. But you’d need to close a lot of loopholes to close a $3 trillion gap; for example, even completely eliminating one of the biggest exemptions, the mortgage interest deduction, wouldn’t come close. And G.O.P. leaders have not, of course, called for anything that drastic. I haven’t seen them name any significant exemptions they would end.

You might have expected the president’s team not just to reject this proposal, but to see it as a big fat political target. But while the G.O.P. proposal has drawn fire from a number of Democrats — including a harsh condemnation from Senator Max Baucus, a centrist who has often worked with Republicans — the White House response was a statement from the press secretary expressing mild disapproval.

What’s going on here? Despite the ferocious opposition he has faced since the day he took office, Mr. Obama is clearly still clinging to his vision of himself as a figure who can transcend America’s partisan differences. And his political strategists seem to believe that he can win re-election by positioning himself as being conciliatory and reasonable, by always being willing to compromise.

But if you ask me, I’d say that the nation wants — and more important, the nation needs — a president who believes in something, and is willing to take a stand. And that’s not what we’re seeing. 

Now, a few years ago, the Agonist published a short post that no one really listened to, which said, essentially, that our current President had no fight in him, that he'd rather cave every time than fight, and that he was no friend of the liberal netroots. Most of us said that this was nonsense. It looks like we should have believed him.

Joshua Radin - Brand New Day

Biodigital Jazz

Josh Nimoy describes his work on Tron: Legacy. Perlin noise generating isosurfaces, exponential functions used to animate slurpy graphics, and similar mathematical/computer graphical goodness abounds. Beautiful work.

(via core 77)

Self Help

Maria Bustillos takes a ramble through David Foster Wallace's self-help library, part of a 300 book collection of heavily annotated books in repository at the University of Texas. If you take Bustillos's gloss on the self-help books, it tells a very sad story indeed. It's also definitively the story of Hal Incandenza from Infinite Jest. The question is, though, how much of this is also DFW's story? It's tempting to say that it's exactly his story, what with the depression, the substance abuse, the florid displays of brilliance in DFW's life. The opposite is also true: it may just be his story (as we'd like to tell it), and not his life.

Wallace's notes in Bradshaw On: The Family and especially in Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child reveal a person who felt himself to be messed up totally and permanently. He felt particularly nailed and revealed to himself by the latter book, one in which he blames his mother for quite a lot of his suffering. To say that Wallace took The Drama of the Gifted Child to heart is to put it very mildly indeed. He returned to it over and over again; his notes were made at many different times, in wildly differing sizes and styles of penmanship, states of mind. Here are the markers I could more or less identify:

Red sharpie, thin Pink, thinner, like a faded red Rolling Writer? Blue thinner Rolling Writer-type Pencil Dark blue felt-tip, thin Black fine felt-tip Furious blue Sharpie, a thick one Black ball-point

This is another book that made a big splash when it appeared; Wallace's copy is an eighteenth printing, from 1993. The thesis of The Drama of the Gifted Child is that particularly high-achieving children are damaged because their mothers did not allow them to be themselves, but instead through their own insecurities gave their children the impression that only achievement could win them love. That any deviation from right behavior was unlovable, that they would be rejected unless they performed well.

So Alice Miller says the gifted child has to perform all the time, perform even to himself, and is thereby sundered from himself profoundly. "Narcissistically disturbed" is her phrase of choice for this condition. Because the child doesn't feel free to own his feelings candidly, but instead must censor and control himself ceaselessly and let only the good things about himself become manifest, all the bad feelings like jealousy, rage, envy, are driven underground and fester there and make the child secretly, existentially miserable, and in a special way, "divided" in rather the way R.D. Laing describes in The Divided Self. Miller's gifted child splits into two: one is the grandiose child, who is a super-achieving, obedient, reliable and "good" child, and the other a depressed child who never was loved, never was allowed to be a child, who was forced to perform and excel from such an early age that he has become irrecoverably lost to himself.

Images of the Week

Yoann Lemoine, Still from "Iron" Page Tsou

Stingray skeleton X-ray

Woodkid - Iron

Yoann Lemoine wrote and performed the music for this as Woodkid and directed the video as himself, I guess.

Woodkid - Iron from WOODKID on Vimeo.

(via Siege)

Links for Later

1. The smart way to cut the deficit


2. Paul Ryan is lying to you about Medicare & Medicaid

Sometimes it Wiggles, Sometimes it Jumps

Kevin Dowd and colleagues do some Excel and Matlab work to come up with the fact that, assuming normality, a 25-sigma event like the ones claimed to have happened in August 2007 to several of the world's largest financial companies should occur less than once in the entire history of the universe given its apparent age. So, if Kevin Viniar's claim is that a 30% decline on several days running is a >25-sigma event according to Goldman Sach's models, then the models are wrong with a certainty approaching p=1. This is the way a financial economist would look at it, anyway. An experimental psychologist or other scientist would instead say that Something Happened in August of 2007 that was not caused by random chance. Something Happens all the time in experimental science, or at least we hope it does. The distribution moves because something moved it further than can be explained by the white noise of all of the small motive causes that make everything jitter around to form a statistical distribution. Getting overly excited about which statistical distribution it is misses the point. The probability that Something really big is going to Happen again is not dependent on the shape of the distribution, and is not calculable within the distribution. It's dependent on when the conditions are right for Something to Happen again, and relovate the distribution somewhere else. That's what a "25-sigma" event tells you.

Monty Python - Interesting People

"This is Tibbles...she flies across the studio into a bucket of water."

Rick Genest Interview