Nihil est quod perstet in orbe.
There is nothing in the world that does not change.

Kevin Smith v. Grant Morrison

On Batman and how to gain enlightenment in this life.

Erased Advice for College Grads

This month, hundreds of thousands of new college graduates will be swamped with advice, from "plastics" to "follow your dreams", as well as some very nice engraved pens. Much of the advice is, as Garrison Keillor called it, "self-erasing", particularly that delivered by well-meaning relatives and commencement speakers. I've given and received my share of this advice, but there's one thing I forgot to say: right now, you're in the process of dumping not only the self-erasing platitudes, but also a lot of the knowledge and skills you've built up to this point. Instead, you should be thinking about how to store them more effectively. Somewhere in the confusion of starting in a real job, moving to a new city, getting a first real apartment, we regularly discard or ignore some big skills we've built up to this point. We lose the musical instruments we've played, the foreign language, the sport we lettered in.

I know a lot of thirty and forty year olds who used to play the piano, used to speak French fluently, used to be nationally ranked swimmers. Then, one day, the last recital, final exam, or swim meet happened, and they never used the skill again, only to miss it ten years later. It takes a lot of effort to recover at that point; the better course is to continue to do somewhat less practice of the skill, rather than none at all. Somewhat less doesn't seem like a particularly attractive option at first, but it's the option that keeps the skill alive and on backup without taking up huge amounts of time. It's also a good deal more fun to spend twenty minutes in the water than it is to have a full-on two hour practice with a coach, or twenty minutes playing pop songs rather than hours practicing scales. So, do somewhat less of the things you've been doing, because it's somewhat more than what you'll do if you try to keep going full bore on everything despite the pressures of life.

The second thing is, look over all the notes for all of your classes, and condense the greatest hits from them. If you've just finished college, the temptation is to pitch everything from your memory and from your dorm room so you don't have to ship it home. The smarter thing to do is to sort out the most useful things, dump them in some kind of word processor file or single notebook, and keep them organized for when they might be useful. Remember, you probably won't need all of this, but something is going to come in handy some time in the future. Write it up with one of those fancy pens they gave you, if it makes you happy.

Space Oddity - Chris Hadfield

Music video rom the International Space Station.

The New Unbanked

Medical marijuana dispensaries in Colorado and California cannot access banks (or American Express), and have to either pay taxes in cash, launder their money (legally) through a shell corporatioin, or use the owner's personal accounts.

Links for Later 5-9-13

1. The NSA's guide to searching the web.
2. Visualizing 0.5 seconds of high frequency trading.
3. US Dialect Map.
4. Brain boosting drugs.
5. Font guys Hoefler & Frere-Jones.
6. The astonishing life of Sadakichi Hartmann.
7. Free diving and attention deconcentration.
8. Shane Black, director of Iron Man 3, writes funny scripts. You should read them.
9. How to brand a "useless" degree.

Nimoy vs Quinto

An Audi commercial featuring smack talking, Spock playing, car driving actors.

Richie Havens - Freedom

Links for Later 4-11-13

1. Is grad school a cult? “In academia, perseverance is redefined as the ability to suffer silently or to survive on family wealth.”
2. CISPA is an idiotic intrusion on your privacy by people who have no idea about technology or civil rights.
3. Scott Turow also seems to have no idea about technology in publishing or the true scope of property rights.
4. Ten websites that will get you started on coding.
5. The real pivot.
6. Time series in big data.
7. Why funding science is always a good idea.

Sleeping Forest - Rise of Nature

Listening to this after hearing on Echoes.

Protips for Psychonauts

Lessons for those of you trying out those wacky new psychedelic molecules ginned up in offshore Chinese drug fabs or Idaho missile silos or wherever, according to the cover story in this week's New York Magazine:

1. Do not sell bulk quantities of esoteric drugs, much less LSD, to people who are described as "big fans of yours". This is a euphemism for "DEA agents". You will go to prison for a very long time.

2. Do not inject high doses of something called bromo-dragonFLY into your arm. It is evidently the strongest serotonin agonist known to humanity and will shut off your circulation, possibly causing you to lose that arm. That would be bad.

Transparent Brains

Kwanghun Chun and members of Karl Deisseroth's lab at Stanford have developed a technique for making preserved brains transparent, so an in-situ 3-D model can be seen. The process, called Clarity, allows for multiple rounds of staining and microscopic examination to occur. More at The New York Times.

Links for Later 4-5-13

1. Someone tries Modafanil as a cognitive/performance enhancer, gets mixed results.
2. BJ Fogg's Behavior Grid: 15 ways behavior can change.
3. Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain plays Wheetus' "Teenage Dirtbag".
4. Obama Administration makes another attempt to gut Social Security.
5. Another PhD begs you not to get one.
6. Tim Ferriss/Bittorrent explain why you should treat your book like a startup.
7. Tim Ferriss's Quantified Self notes, and his undergrad LSD cognitive enhancement study.
8. Massha Gessen explains how The Americans gets Russians right.

Alec Baldwin Interviews Lewis Lapham

This Lewis Lapham interview from last December is fascinating throughout, as Lapham's Quarterly is:

Lewis Lapham: Right. On the other hand by the time grandfather got to be Mayor of San Francisco in 1942 he ran as an Independent. He was very open. I mean he would pick hitchhikers up. He never had a bodyguard, he never had tinted windows –

Alec Baldwin: He was more genuine. 

Lewis Lapham: – he used to like to go into the saloons in San Francisco late at night and the – he wanted to get a bond issue passed to replace the street cars on Market Street with busses, and there was some resistance about that, so he put it to a bet. He said, ‘Okay, there will be a race. I will race from the Ferry building to City Hall. I will ride an elephant against a trolley car, and if the elephant beats the trolley car we have the bond issue. If not, not.’

But he was a gambling man so he insisted on a handicap, and the handicap was that the elephant would be allowed to go through red lights. The elephant won. The bond issue passed.

Links for Later 4-1-13

1. The anti-rentier agenda.
2. Network theory reveals altitude sickness is actually two (or more) separate diseases.
3. How Kickstarter worked on Craig Mod's republishing effort.
4. Microsoft fails to listen to its user base, continues Modern push.
5. Adam Grant on the importance of helping and giving.
6. Mapping with dollars.
7. Anne Carson profiled in the NYT
8. Effects of vasoactive intestinal peptide on the response properties of cells in area 17 of the cat visual cortex. My go-to reference for attention at the cellular/molecular level.

Aleksandar Hemon Interviewed in Guernica

Sasha Hemon knows writing is nonlinear:

In writing class, it’s easy to fall into the trap of saying, “Oh, this draft is a little better than that one. Anything can be incrementally improved.” But there’s a very simple rule of writing: it’s all shit, until it isn’t. Steady, incremental improvement does not work in art. Some people wake up one morning and they write a fucking great book. Or they write shit for twenty years and somehow, miraculously, one day, because they have made all the mistakes they could have made writing shit, they write something that contains no mistakes. It’s fucking perfect. I’d written shit for many years. Then I came here and looking through what I’d written in Bosnia, I found a paragraph, randomly, that was not shit, and I thought, “That’s how I want to write.” 
 

I used to live down the block from Hemon, and a couple of blocks away from Studs Terkel. You never knew who was going to be out for a walk on a Saturday.

Hemon's new book, The Book of my Lives, looks like a heck of a read.

Bruce Sterling's "Closing Benediction" for SXSW 2013

Now let's all head over to his house with a keg and our Google goggles.

Links for Later 3-19-13

1. Kirtsaeng v. Wiley decided: first sale is first sale, even if publisher wishes it were otherwise. Heinlein's pre-comment.
2. More good decisions: Why the EFF won on the National Security Letter issue.
3. Urban Explorer Bradley Garrett profiled.
4. Anne Carson talks about Red Doc>.
5. Elon Musk at TED.

Thomas Nagel Mind and Cosmos Roundup

I'm going to end up reading that Thomas Nagel book that has everyone atwitter, even though the reviews of it so far make me think that his alternative theory of non-reductionist, non-materialist reality is like watching Kirk Cameron explain Christianity, in that it's so poorly done that it encourages you to believe the exact opposite, due to the sloppy thinking exhibited in the argument. Though I'm a christian, Cameron makes a stronger argument for atheism that Hitchens ever did. Though I'm sympathetic to critiques of the materialist worldview, I think Nagel makes a stronger case for why the physical world is all there is than most materialists.

Reviews of Mind and Cosmos:

Jennifer Slusser, New York Times
H Allen Orr, NYRB
Andrew Ferguson, The Weekly Standard
Brad DeLong's comments from his blog
Leiter Reports, also here, here
Leiter & Weissberg, The Nation

On the Limits of Empiricism

Those in the world who speak of the regularities underlying the phenomena, it seems, manage to apprehend their crude traces. But these regularities have their very subtle aspect, which those who rely on mathematical astronomy cannot know of. Still even these are nothing more than traces. As for the spiritual processes described in the [Book of Changes] that "when they are stimulated, penetrate every situation in the realm," mere traces have nothing to do with them. This spiritual state by which foreknowledge is attained can hardly be sought through changes, of which in any case only the cruder sort are attainable. What I have called the subtlest aspect of these traces, those who discuss the celestial bodies attempt to know by depending on mathematical astronomy; but astronomy is nothing more than the outcome of conjecture.

-Shen Kuo