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.