Links for Later 1-25-14

1. The NSA broke the Internet, a summary.
2. Patti Smith interview.

Tintypes

I'm a sucker for alternative and historical photographic processes, so Victoria Will's photographs of celebrities at Sundance are visual catnip. I have a tintype of my great grandfather where he looked like Flea in the picture above. Same piercing blue eyes. The process itself is unretouched and the photographs taken in harsh lighting conditions, so you end up with a very detailed and unforgiving photograph.

(via Esquire and kottke)

Links for Later 1-21-14

1. Will Wilkinson on liberalism, libertarianism and the surveillance state.
2. Lawrence Freedman at Google Authors on Strategy: A History.
3. Rory Stewart believes that the anti-conspiracy theory of history is true with regard to the 21st century UK. "The secret of modern Britain is there is no power anywhere."
4. Oxfam reports: Richest 85 people have as much wealth as poorest 50% of the world, top 1% has 65 times as much as bottom 50%.

Philosophy and Magic

New post up over at DeUmbrisIdearum.com on Philosophy and Magic. Multiple readings of both the term "magic" and the role of "magical" material are discussed.

Yuna - Here Comes the Sun Again

from the Savages soundtrack.

MIA - YALA

John McPhee's Structural Diagrams

In the latest installment of The Writing Life column in The New Yorker, John McPhee discusses his method of collecting and arranging notes for each of the essays he's writing. The essays are then organized by some interesting and useful structure, a technique he learned in high school composition from his teacher, Olive McKee, who had her students write three essays a week, submitted with a structural diagram.

 

 

Links for Later 1-7-14

1. Mapping emotions to the body
2. David Papineau on Choking, the Yips, and Not Having Your Mind Right
3. GetYourShitTogether.org, a checklist for setting up wills, living wills, and all the other things you've been putting off because they make you anxious about death.
4. Valproate may be able to reset the nervous system's critical period, enable rapid & effective learning of skills like perfect pitch.

Wheels

There's a new post up over at the De Umbris Idearum site.

Includes notes on the combinatoric wheels in Bruno's memory system: why they're there, where he took them from, and what some potential additional functions they might have.

Some Notes on 60 Minutes, the NSA and Snowden

1. The NSA's credibility is so bad at this point that you can't help them by defending them. You can only ruin your own credibility by trying.
2. Sending a former DNI staffer to interview NSA staffers on national TV is an ironic choice.
3. If Edward Snowden passed the hacker test by hacking the test, overriding the administrator's permissions, and setting his own score, it's pretty clear that he deserves to pass the hacker test.
4. If he can do all of that as a high school drop out, he gets bonus points.
5. If he's coding at home with a towel over his head, maybe you should think about asking your other coders to do the same thing. Evidently, Ed Snowden has better opsec than the rest of your guys.
6. He's also got a clearer concept of the legality & constitutionality of this business than most of the senior management over there. 
7. Maybe you should put him in charge instead of trying to prosecute him.

Elsewhere: Boingboing has a nice little critique over here.

The Year in Reading 2013

In the next two weeks, I should be finishing 2013 with around 80 books read, excluding rereads, book-length online reading and books discarded midway through. This is roughly flat in comparison to last year.

As with previous years, I spent a lot of time binge reading specific authors. This year, I read most of Iain [M] Banks' writing, following his cancer diagnosis and before his death. Most recommended of the Culture novels: Look to Windward, Excession, Surface Detail. Best of the non-SF novels: The Steep Approach to Garbadale, about the family dynamics of an extended Scottish clan descended from the inventor of a Risklike game.

Seth Godin's books also popped up a lot. TryThis might Work, or Whatcha Gonna Do with that Duck? which samples his blog posts over the years. Good insights arrive through accumulation of small ideas.

Anne Carson wrote Red Doc> her second volume in the magnificently sad & funny poetic cycle about red, winged Geryon and Hercules (now called Sad But Great) & their friends and families. I kept going back and dipping into the book for a little reread at bedtime. It produced strange dreams.

In the process of putting together De Umbris Idearum, I spent a lot of time in the 16th and 17th centuries. Stephen Clucas' collection of articles Magic, Memory and Natural Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, James Connor's Kepler's Witch and Lawrence Principe's latest book on the actual chemistry behind alchemy helped situate Bruno's mix of science, philosophy and magic in the context of the period, as did Michael Flynn's online serialized article "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown", about Galileo and his contemporaries' roles in the heliocentrism debate, which, though not in book form, deserves mention here as one of the best long-form web works of the year.

Rounding out the list are three uncanny slipstream books. First: Kathleen Davis' Duplex, which was recommended to me so much that I hestated to read it. Boy, am I glad I did. Second, Voice of the Whale by Sjon: totally unique voice from a great Icelandic author. Third, Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, a tour of del Toro's home and notebooks that provides a window into creativity.

I should also send out a cheer for two of my friends who published books for the first time this year: Matthew Alan, with One Degree and The Hero, and David Day, with The Tearstone. All three works are available for Kindle or paperback. You should buy copies for all the people on your Christmas list, and give some away to stranger on the street. They will thank you for it, and Matt and David will write more for you.

I'm writing more for you, too. In 2014, you should expect to see Startup Geometry, which has all my best tricks for starting and growing businesses, and Seeing the Forest, about strategy, wisdom and neuroscience. I'm a powerfully slow writer, which means that Geometry should be done already, but is not, and Forest still exists mostly as a really big PowerPoint deck, and waits conversion once Geometry is done.

Links for Later 12-7-13

1. "Why Life Does Not Exist". tl;dr: Life is a porously bordered concept of arbitrarily defined complexity.
2. "Is Growth Getting Harder?" Brad Delong quibbles with the Great Stagnationists
3. Econometrics and Big Data
4. Third Way tries to knock Elizabeth Warren down a peg, becuase they don't like the fact that she's appearing on magazine covers. It doesn't go well for them.
5. Most of the deficit in economic opportunity in the US results from faulty government policies. That's good news.

Glenn Greenwald on HardTalk BBC

It does no good for your reputation to be a reporter who is reflexively prostrate to government statements. It does you no good to get in a slanging match with Glenn Greenwald. He's better at debating than you are.

Links for Later 11-19-13

1. Topological modification of network data for AI applications.
2. Archaic humans interbred with Neanderthals, Denisovians, and some other close neighbor hominids we havn't identified yet.
3. Krugman on Cochrane on Keynesian economics. More here.
4. Krugman on Summers on the "permanent slump".
5. The current state of risk management and financial forecasting. 30 potential risk measures surveyed.
6. Analysis of the recently leaked sections of the TPP.

Night of the Doctor

Well, well, well, Paul McGann back as the Eighth Doctor for a brief prelude to Day of the Doctor.

Dr. Keynes Revisited

In which University of Chicago professor and asset pricing guru Dr. John Cochrane criticizes the traditional Keynsian view that government spending has a positive multiplier at the zero lower bound, only to be refuted by Drs. DeLong and Krugman, and the question "Does anyone believe this stuff anymore?"is answered.

On Memory Palaces

New content up on DeUmbrisIdearum.com: a short post containing the basics of the memory palace system, according to Giordano Bruno.

Links for Later 11-1-13

1. What is Ender's Game really about? Terrible choices in war, or child abuse?
2. The Donna Minkowitz/Orson Scott Card interview referenced in (1). Jawdropping.
3. Michael Flynn's marvelous series of articles on Galileo's role in the Copernican controversy of the 1600's begins here. Read the whole thing. One of the most fun and informative articles on the history of science in the late Renaissance/Early Modern period I've ever read.
4. Brad DeLong's scenario analysis of the US economy going forward.
5. Edward Snowden may be invited to testify on NSA spying in Germany.

Links for Later 10-16-13

1. The Roman Empire as seen by a 2nd c. Chinese historian.
2. Daniel Radcliffe is a normal person with a weird sense of humor.
3. Neil Gaiman on the worth of libraries.
4. The "Northampton Clown" is unmasked as student Alex Powell. He'd been getting death threats from people who took his act a bit too seriously.
5. I do not have a working theory of mind on Eugene Fama for his views on the macroeconomy.

Fruit Flies of Finance

Excellent interview with Richard Thaler on behavioral finance issues, including the imperfections in the EMH, how nudging should be done, and why he and Gene Fama have offices on opposite sides of the building.