Two Great Entrepreneurship Quotes

From a post by Mark Suster: “9 women can't make a baby in a month” Also, attributed to Bruce Dunlevie of Benchmark Capital: “Good judgment comes from experience, but experience comes from bad judgment”

Links for Later

1. Econophysical effects: light speed limits to the worldwide trading network result in optimal sites for trading, spaced across the surface of the Earth


2. Jim Messina is a bad, bad man


3. Robert Lowell, "Waking in the Blue"

Strahov Monastery Library

Photo: Evan Rail/Wired

Jeffrey Martin photographed Strahov Monastery's 43,000 volume library in 40 Gigapixel panoramic view, stitched together from a series of nearly 2,500 photos from a Canon 550D. If digital storage of the image file takes up 283 Gb, is that greater or less than the content of the actual books in the photo?

Links for Later

1. Hacking the London Underground (via Alice Taylor)


2. Man with a tiny hat glued to his head


3. Collection of strange old photos


4. Collection of strange stock photos


5. Selection of strange fairy tale photos


6. Startup fantasy vs. reality

"Houston, this is Mercury"

The first image of Mercury from the orbiting Messenger spacecraft. (via boingboing)

Patrick Rothfuss, Interviewed

Patrick Rothfuss interview re: Wise Man's Fear


Patrick Rothfuss Interview by SFLTV

Links for Later

1. Sarbanes-Oxley and Tech IPO's


2. The downside of companies staying private

Goodbye, Liz

Elizabeth Taylor passed away this morning at 79.

Links for Later

1. EBook pricing power undermined by perceived value
2. Scenes from the Tea Party caucus meeting
3. Michael Fay's drawings of soldiers
4. Related: idealized vs. realistic portraiture over time
5. Startup weekend
6. Top 10 signs Silicon Valley is on tilt again. #10 really is the kicker

Muse

In this interview with Lee Carter at Hint Magazine, Nicola Formichetti talks about how (and why) he got Rick Genest (Zombie Boy) to be the face of Mugler.

You changed the whole collection?
Well, I added more, by taking stuff from him, making it a bit darker and gothicy. So basically I Facebooked him and was like, "You know, I'm doing this thing in Paris and I would love you to be there in two weeks." He emailed me back straightaway and he was like, "Yeah, sure, I would love to, but I don’t have a passport." And then I start thinking how the fuck is he going to get a passport in time?

I mean, it's unusual to have a tattoo on your face, but is it a crime? What did you do?
I had no idea what to do. I was calling my lawyers, saying we have to get this guy to Paris. But then I thought, maybe he doesn’t need to be there physically. Maybe I can do a film or a picture. So I told him I would go to him in two days. I called my friend Mariano [Vivanco, photographer] and my manager. We got together the first week after the holidays as I was about to leave for Paris to work on the last bit of the collection. I remember thinking I have to do this, I just have a gut feeling, I have to work with this guy. Everyone said he's a freak, why would I want to do that to a luxury brand? Anyway, I didn’t listen to anyone and just went. I brought some clothes, a couple of suits, and I actually made lots of clothes the night before I left New York. I had pieces sent from Paris and was just making stuff in my house, and then took everything to Montreal and we did a photo shoot and video. The photos are the ones we just launched as a visual campaign.

(via tr)

The Lonely Forest

"Turn Off This Song And Go Outside"



Turn Off This Song and Go Outside

The Seven Sects Speech

Brad DeLong conducts a magisterial smackdown of macroeconomic errors in this multipart lecture series. (Part I, II)

Let me briefly review the right explanation for our Great Recession: the explanation that I been pushing in the past several weeks of the course, since we finished the "economic growth" section of the course. The right explanation of our Great Recession is that the downturn had three sources. First comes irrational exuberance in housing markets. Irrational exuberance in housing markets led to a substantial number of mortgage loans being made that should not have been made. These loans would not have been a problem if you had had capital market arrangements like we had in the late 1990s during the dot-com boom. The dot-com boom also saw irrational exuberance, much more irrational exuberance, in fact, than we saw in the subprime mortgage bubble.

But irrational exuberance in the dot-com boom was not accompanied by overleverage. The venture capital firms that created and issued the securities of the dot-com boom sold them off to unleveraged primary investors, rather than leveraging up and holding on to them by financing their positions with borrowed money. When the dot-com crash came, high-net-worth individuals lost their wealth. But there were no large money-center banks whose solvency was thrown into doubt by the crash.

Bruce Sterling SXSW Keynote 2011

I still miss the parties he used to throw, back when SXSW was tiny, even though I never got to go to any of them.

Links for Later

1. Danny Hillis talks about Richard Feynman
2. Stanley Kubrick photographs Chicago
3. "Sergeant Slaughter, My Big Brother" short film with Tom Hardy
4. What can't be solved with money?
5. The difficulty of making new discoveries, discussed here
6. Barry Michaels, the screenwriter's therapist
7. Not Cornell boxes, but lovely all the same

VS Ramachandran on Consciousness, Qualia and Neuroscience

Links for Later

1. The role of public sector jobs in maintaining the middle class in Gallipolis, OH
2. Alexa Sinclair's mythical royal potraits: kings, queens (a dozen of each)
3. Growing up with seven adults as a child in a big Hudson River house sounds like the premise of a great American novel

House Porn 20: The House that Blues Clues Bought

Steve Burns (Steve of Blues' Clues, and also a sometime rock god) had Eric Lifkin of Mesh Architects refurbish a former woodworking shop into a cool Brooklyn modern residence, featuring something called TheSpecialWall.

Ebben? Ne Andro Lontana

From La Wally. In this case, also from Diva.

Links for Later

1. How to be a good cavalry officer
2. Aerotropolis: a pair of conversations between BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaugh and Greg Lindsey & John Kasarda, authors of Aerotropolis.
3. The Conversation
4. John Kasich's dismal poll numbers, thanks to the anti-union bill and similar nonsense

RIP Owsley "Bear" Stanley

LSD chemist and meat eater Owsley Stanley died in a car crash in Australia today.

More: 2007 Rolling Stone Profile, NYT Obit