Ashes to ashes, decompiling sky to deletion. The Matrix Online is reminding us all that it’s slowing coming undone as the system becomes more and more unstable with each passing day. Ashes raining from the sky, eyes being seen in the clouds, zombies, agents, angels, and demons all appearing out of the system’s corruption to wreak havoc across the Mega City.
I don’t think he was ever bored. He saw a dirty street and created a sanitation department. He saw a house on fire and created a fire department. He saw sick people and founded a hospital. He started our first lending library. He saw people needing an education and founded a university.
From John Gruber, an Apple booster, an essay on Microsoft’s Long, Slow Decline. And, is if in reply, an essay called Apple: Secrecy Does Not Scale from Anil Dash, Microsoft enthusiast. A perhaps unsubtle reply to both essays might be “I can’t hear you over the continual sounds of the cash register”…MS and Apple continue to be enormously profitable doing business the way they do.
Amazon’s mp3 store has another one of those deals today where you can get hours and hours of classical musics for pennies a song: 99 Bach masterpieces (8+ hours!) for $2.99. Even though Bach’s works preceded copyright protection, this is a good example of how our culture benefits from sensible copyright term limits: eight hours of some of the finest music ever composed for about the price of a Happy Meal. More good classical music mp3 deals here.
The authors compared the Nash equilibrium time to the socially optimal travel time, and dubbed the ratio between the two “the price of anarchy.” In their study of the Boston area, which looked at travel times from Harvard Square to Boston Common, the price of anarchy at peak traffic times made for a journey that is 30 percent longer.
But the price of anarchy drops if you close a few roads, because individual drivers are less able to selfishly optimize their routes. In their analysis, the authors identified six streets in Boston and Cambridge: By closing those streets, they say, the optimal collective travel time would decrease between the two points.
Indeed his response will mirror that of most other people who see this movie. Upon leaving the theater, James said, “That was a really good movie, Dad. (pause) Kind of makes you want to be a vegetarian. (pause) Kind of makes you not want to eat.”
The way our society addresses this problem has been about as effective as a parachute that opens on the second bounce. Clearly, state laws mandating a minimum drinking age of 21 haven’t eliminated drinking by young adults — they’ve simply driven it underground, where life and health are at greater risk.
Wonder no more what an animated Wes Anderson movie might look like: the trailer for Fantastic Mr. Fox is out. Scroll a bit for the HD links. This looks *great*. (thx, dain)
Today the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on food preparation (another four minutes cleaning up); that’s less than half the time that we spent cooking and cleaning up when Julia arrived on our television screens. It’s also less than half the time it takes to watch a single episode of “Top Chef” or “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star.” What this suggests is that a great many Americans are spending considerably more time watching images of cooking on television than they are cooking themselves — an increasingly archaic activity they will tell you they no longer have the time for.
One of the things that food/cooking shows do — particularly the dump-and-stir programs like Rachael Ray — is to give the viewer the impression that by watching, they have cooked a meal. (Mirror neurons, anyone?) Perhaps that’s a small factor contributing to cooking’s decline in the American home.
Perhaps most striking are the regional differences. “Peach and melon allergy is particularly common in the Mediterranean - in Spain and Greece,” says Fern’andez Rivas. Reports from clinics suggest that Iceland is a hotspot for fish allergy and Switzerland has a higher rate of celeriac allergy than elsewhere.
These regional variations are likely to be due in part to differences in eating habits, causing people to be exposed to different allergens. But that alone cannot explain a pronounced north-south divide in the type of apple allergy people experience. In northern Europe, people react to the uncooked flesh of apples, whereas in the south it’s the skin that sets them off, whether it’s cooked or not. What could be the cause of this strange invisible dividing line that skims across south-west France, cuts through Italy close to Florence, and continues eastwards through the middle of the Black Sea?
Significantly, this line marks the southern limit of the birch tree, a plant whose pollen is one of the causes of hay fever in northern Europe.
The film is set in St. Louis Park, Minnesota in the year 1967, and is intended in some ways to reflect the childhood of the Coen brothers as they recall it.
This is their first film in quite awhile with no big-name actors…Alan Adam Arkin is the only name I recognize among the cast. I wonder if that contributed to the filming wrapping “ahead of schedule and within budget”. (thx, david)
From an article by Philip Greenspun illustrating how the web allowed writers to find an audience for things that are too long for magazines yet too short for books, a simple and effective method for dieting developed by Steve Ward.
“All that you need for my diet is graph paper, a ruler, and a pencil,” Steve would explain. “The horizontal axis is time, one line per day. The vertical axis is weight in lbs. You plot your current weight on the left side of the paper. You plot your desired weight on a desired date towards the right side, making sure that you’ve left the correct number of lines in between (one per day). You draw a line from the current weight/date to the desired weight/date. Every morning you weigh yourself and plot the result. If the point is below the line, you eat whatever you want all day. If the point is above the line, you eat nothing but broccoli or some other low-calorie food.”
The resulting graph would look something like this:
The mother of an 11-year-old girl who died of undiagnosed diabetes as the family prayed for her to get better testified Tuesday that she believes sickness is caused by sin and can be cured by God.
Leilani Neumann told the jury in her husband’s trial that she thought her daughter’s March 2008 illness was a test of her religious faith and she didn’t take the girl to a doctor because that would have been “complete disobedience to what we believe.”
There isn’t enough hard drive space on my server to record all the Fuck Yous I’d love to direct at Mrs. Naumann and her husband in this post. I hope the judge’s god is telling him to sentence these two monsters to forever in prison. (via cyn-c)
Sam Anderson wins the 2009 award for the best paragraph of a book review with his opening to a review of William T. Vollmann’s 1300-page book, Imperial.
I was sitting on the train one day chipping away at William T. Vollmann’s latest slab of obsessional nonfiction when my friend Tsia, who incidentally is not an underage Thai street whore, offered to save me time with a blurby one-sentence review based entirely on the book’s cover and my synopsis of its first 50 pages. “Just write that it’s like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker,” she said, “but with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz.” This struck me as good advice, and I was all set to take it, but as I worked my way through the book’s final 1,250 pages, I found I had to modify it, slightly, to read as follows: Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote seance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange. (Viking has my full blessing to use that as a blurb.)
Wow. And if you gave me a thousand chances to draw Vollmann’s portrait, I wouldn’t have come up with anything close to reality. (via more intelligent life)
Our brains have Oprah neurons, Aniston neurons, Eiffel Tower neurons, and Saddam neurons that fire when we see pictures or hear the names of these people and places.
Yet “Oprah neuron” might be a misnomer. The same neuron also fired, albeit much more weakly, to Whoopi Goldberg in one patient. Similarly, Luke Skywalker neurons also responded to Yoda, and those famous Jennifer Aniston neurons flashed to her former Friends co-star Lisa Kudrow. Such connections could explain how our brain relates two abstract concepts, Quian Quiroga says.
And then the Skywalker neurons said, “these aren’t the memories you’re looking for”. Ba doomp.
In 1980, Boeing employee Loren Carpenter presented a film called Vol Libre at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference. It was the world’s first film using fractals to generate the graphics. Even now it’s impressive to watch:
That must have been absolutely mindblowing in 1980. The audience went nuts and Carpenter, the Boeing engineer from out of nowhere, was offered a job at Lucasfilm on the spot. He accepted immediately. This account comes from Droidmaker, a fascinating-looking book about George Lucas, Lucasfilm, and Pixar:
Fournier gave his talk on fractal math, and Loren gave his talk on all the different algorithms there were for generating fractals, and how some were better than others for making lightning bolts or boundaries. “All pretty technical stuff,” recalled Carpenter. “Then I showed the film.”
He stood before the thousand engineers crammed into the conference hall, all of whom had seen the image on the cover of the conference proceedings, many of whom had a hunch something cool was going to happen. He introduced his little film that would demonstrate that these algorithms were real. The hall darkened. And the Beatles began.
Vol Libre soared over rocky mountains with snowy peaks, banking and diving like a glider. It was utterly realistic, certainly more so than anything ever before created by a computer. After a minute there was a small interlude demonstrating some surrealistic floating objects, spheres with lightning bolts electrifying their insides. And then it ended with a climatic zooming flight through the landscape, finally coming to rest on a tiny teapot, Martin Newell’s infamous creation, sitting on the mountainside.
The audience erupted. The entire hall was on their feet and hollering. They wanted to see it again. “There had never been anything like it,” recalled Ed Catmull. Loren was beaming.
“There was strategy in this,” said Loren, “because I knew that Ed and Alvy were going to be in the front row of the room when I was giving this talk.” Everyone at Siggraph knew about Ed and Alvy and the aggregation at Lucasfilm. They were already rock stars. Ed and Alvy walked up to Loren Carpenter after the film and asked if he could start in October.
Carpenter’s fractal technique was used by the computer graphics department at ILM (a subsidiary of Lucasfilm) for their first feature film sequence and the first film sequence to be completely computer generated: the Genesis effect in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The sequence was intended to act as a commerical of sorts for the computer graphics group, aimed at an audience outside the company and for George Lucas himself. Lucas, it seems, wasn’t up to speed on what the ILM CG people were capable of. Again, from Droidmaker:
It was important to Alvy that the effects support the story, and not eclipse it. “No gratuitous 3-D graphics,” he told the team in their first production meeting. “This is our chance to tell George Lucas what it is we do.”
The commercial worked on Lucas but a few years later, the computer graphics group at ILM was sold by Lucas to Steve Jobs for $5 million and became Pixar. Loren Carpenter is still at Pixar today; he’s the company’s Chief Scientist. (via binary bonsai)
“The more test materials are promulgated widely, the more possibility there is to game it,” said Bruce L. Smith, a psychologist and president of the International Society of the Rorschach and Projective Methods, who has posted under the user name SPAdoc. He quickly added that he did not mean that a coached subject could fool the person giving the test into making the wrong diagnosis, but rather “render the results meaningless.”
To psychologists, to render the Rorschach test meaningless would be a particularly painful development because there has been so much research conducted - tens of thousands of papers, by Dr. Smith’s estimate - to try to link a patient’s responses to certain psychological conditions. Yes, new inkblots could be used, these advocates concede, but those blots would not have had the research - “the normative data,” in the language of researchers - that allows the answers to be put into a larger context.
I was not aware that the inkblot tests were even in use anymore…seems like an antiquated technique.
Due to blinking, viewers of a 2.5 hour-long film like the latest Harry Potter will have their eyes shut for up to 15 minutes. But researchers have found that movie goers synchronize their blinks:
The synchronised blinks occurred at “non-critical” points during the silent movie — at the conclusion of an action sequence or when the main character had disappeared from view. “We all commonly find implicit breaks for blinking while viewing a video story,” Nakano says.
In In the Blink of an Eye, film editor Walter Murch wrote about the blink as a natural place to cut between scenes, a marker of the boundary between two ideas.
Flarf is a form of poetry made by combining together phrases from random web searches. Here’s an early example:
“Yeah, mm-hmm, it’s true big birds make big doo! I got fire inside my ‘huppa’-chimp(TM) gonna be agreessive, greasy aw yeah god wanna DOOT! DOOT! Pffffffffffffffffffffffffft! hey!”
Flarf started off as a joke but then these joke poems that people were coming up with “evolved from ‘bad’ to ‘sort of great’”.
Edge Books publisher Rod Smith, a poet himself, says he feels the [Flarf] collective is prompting a bit of anarchy in the poetry world by widening the vocabulary of what is permissible. “Aesthetic judgments about what’s bad in a very hierarchal society are usually serving upper-class people with a certain amount of privilege,” he says. “So for a bunch of poets who are very well schooled in a variety of traditions of American poetry to take what’s considered bad and throw that at people is a very interesting maneuver. It’s not simply bad poetry; it’s quote-unquote bad poetry written by people who know how to write poetry.”
It is the U.S. Constitution, and not some competitive agglomeration of communities or constituencies, that makes a citizen the sovereign of his own home and privacy. There is absolutely no legal requirement to be polite in the defense of this right.
This research has important practical implications. It suggests that there are several simple steps we can all take to increase creativity, such as traveling to faraway places (or even just thinking about such places), thinking about the distant future, communicating with people who are dissimilar to us, and considering unlikely alternatives to reality. Perhaps the modern environment, with its increased access to people, sights, music, and food from faraway places, helps us become more creative not only by exposing us to a variety of styles and ideas, but also by allowing us to think more abstractly.
Drei Klavierstücke op. 11 is a set of pieces written for the piano by Arnold Schoenberg in 1909, some of the first western music to written in an atonal style. Cory Arcangel took a bunch of YouTube videos of cats playing the piano and fused them together into a performance of op. 11.
This project fuses a few different things I have been interested in lately, mainly “cats”, copy & paste net junk, and youtube’s tendency in the past few years to host videos that are as good and many times similar to my favorite video artworks. I think all this is somehow related.
Cory’s no-bullshit statements about his art are just as entertaining as the work itself:
So, I probably made this video the most backwards and bone headed way possible, but I am a hacker in the traditional definition of someone who glues together ugly code and not a programmer. For this project I used some programs to help me save time in finding the right cats. Anyway, first I downloaded every video of a cat playing piano I could find on Youtube. I ended up with about 170 videos…
High Glitz is Susan Anderson’s portrait series depicting “the extravagant world of child beauty pageants”.
Hours of preparation are spent on each child’s appearance, and her camera records it all in graphic detail. Children’s pageants are a fascinating subculture, but more than anything they represent a strange microcosm of America itself. Our own values of beauty, success and glamour reflected in the dreams of thousands of young girls…
Sweet Jesus, I’m gonna have some nightmares tonight. Can’t sleep, clown’ll eat me, can’t sleep, clown’ll eat me… (via conscientious)
My mom recently sent me a copy of a small town newspaper from near where I grew up. Here is a sampling from the police log section of calls made to the local police dispatch center. The writer’s combination of straightforward recording of facts and colloquial embellishment is awesome.
1:38 am: Caller wants to speak to officer about being assaulted by a piece of paper thrown at caller by landlord, who is evicting him. Dispatcher ascertained no injuries and will log for information.
2:44 am: Guy is trying to get vomiting drunk woman into her vehicle. Officer advised.
3:02 am: Officer is en route to jail with above drunken driver who said people in high places will get her off and that she’s talking to the media.
10:05 am: Officer checked on report of moaning coming from area which turned out to be pigeons in vacant building.
11:44 am: Caller’s wife is throwing things around the house. Officer responded and the two are going their separate ways for now and will see how that works.
12:34 pm: 911 call from baby. Called back and mom will lock the numbers.
5:33 pm: Officer is responding to report of belligerent hitchhiker at Hwys. O and 53.
5:44 pm: Above officer reports that belligerent hitchhiker will be moving along.
8:12 pm: Hitchhiker is lying in ditch by car dealer and roundabout. Officer drove by, and formerly belligerent hitchhiker waved at him, is fine and is just resting.
9:16 pm: Trees on fire at Bone Avenue and Humbird Street. Officer responded and reports that trees were lit tiki torches.
9:45 pm: Caller suspects tenents were smoking marijuana, sprayed air freshener and now are coughing. Officer responded and reports negative for marijuana.
As the decades roll by the excuses wear thin. Islam has not prevented democracy from taking root in the Muslim countries of Asia. Even after its recent flawed election, Iran, a supposed theocracy, shows greater democratic vitality than most Arab countries. As for outside intrusion, some of the more robust Arab elections of recent years have been held by Palestinians, under Israeli occupation, and by Iraqis after America’s invasion. When they are given a chance to take part in genuine elections — as, lately, the Lebanese were — Arabs have no difficulty understanding what is at stake and they turn out to vote in large numbers. By and large it is their own leaders who have chosen to prevent, rig or disregard elections, for fear that if Arabs had a say most would vote to throw the rascals out.
An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite’s career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite’s coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. “The CBS Evening News” overtook “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents’ reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of “The CBS Evening News” in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International.
Pick out a suit, light a cigarette, slick back your hair, and download the result as a Twitter icon or desktop wallpaper: Mad Men Yourself. Here’s what I would look like as a Sterling Cooper junior account executive.
For 14 months, we at Azure Capital tried to invest in companies but could not reach an agreement with entrepreneurs and existing investors on valuation and terms — the gap was too great. Despite meeting with hundreds of companies and reaching the point of discussing terms with a few, we did not make a single new investment.
That gap no longer exists. We recently invested in a company called BlogHer in May. It is an exciting company, whose team and investors were wise enough to realize that taking money now would give them a competitive advantage. And last week we invested in SlideRocket, our second new investment in less than two months.
It is as if the venture-funding environment has finally hit the reset button.
Translation: Now that money is tight, venture capital firms are able to fully dictate the terms of their investments. Entrepreneurs, prepare to part with more of your companies than you wanted to and receive less for the pleasure. Lester goes on to hand-wavingly assert that this is a good thing for entrepreneurs.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Information-Assimilation - how to find, consume, and comprehend information and identify what’s most important in the face of a problem or challenge. A person who is highly skilled in Information-Assimilation is able to process information quickly and apply it to the situation at hand, with consistently high levels of comprehension and retention.
Book publishers have been in talks with Apple and are optimistic about being included in the computer, which could provide an alternative to Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s Reader and a forthcoming device from Plastic Logic, recently allied with Barnes & Noble.
And if it runs apps from the App Store (“yes” seems to be the general consensus), you’ll be able to read books in the Apple tablet format *and* in Amazon’s Kindle format (with the Kindle app), which can’t be happy news for Amazon, hardware-wise.
When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
As a freelancer, I get lots of requests to “grab coffee” (as Graham describes) with folks who are just interested in seeing if working together is a possibility. Whenever that happens, my heart sinks. If I’m on deadline or deep in a programming project, grabbing coffee midday with someone I don’t know and might not have any good business reason to talk to changes the tenor of the entire day. When I can, I usually I turn down these types of speculative meetings because the costs are too high-but I always feel bad about it, and never know how to word my response. (Generally I say, “Sorry I’m just too busy.”)
A common misconception about freelancers is that they can do whatever they want whenever they want, but that’s not actually true if you want to get anything done. Large chunks of uninterrupted time is the only thing that works.
Programming such a computer is no easy task, however. The researchers coded a simplified version of the problem, using just three cities, by modifying the DNA of Escherichia coli bacteria. The cities were represented by a combination of genes causing the bacteria to glow red or green, and the possible routes between the cities were explored by the random shuffling of DNA. Bacteria producing the correct answer glowed both colours, turning them yellow.
But just as vacuum tube and silicon chip-based computers became capable of more abstract calculations, perhaps the bacteria computer will follow the same developmental trajectory.
I’m retiring from this space in ESPN The Magazine after seven happy years. Like my father and his superintendency, The Magazine was never an ideal match for me — I hate advance deadlines and word counts — and yet, I couldn’t be happier with how it all turned out. It’s just time for me to try some new things, that’s all. And you have to know when it’s time. I learned that from my father.
Since the days of radical printer-pamphleteers, design and designers have a long history of fighting for what’s right and working to transform society. The rise of the literary form of the manifesto also parallels the rise of modernity and the spread of letterpress printing.
Since the rate of these explosions of innovation can be varied to some degree by applying money or laws, their trend lines cannot be fully inherent in the material itself. At the same time, since these curves begin and advance independent of our awareness, and do not waver from a straight line under enormous competition and investment pressures, their course must in some way be bound to the materials.
The only slightly disappointing aspect of the article is that he stops short of speculating about what it is about these materials that generates Moore’s Law-like growth…the geometry, chemistry, and physics involved.
Over the course of my life, I’ve probably seen 10,000+ people die, right in front of me. Ok, sure, they all died on TV & movie screens — never in real life. But after you’ve seen so much fake dying, you start to wonder: how realistic are these deaths? Hence my interest in this report from a Dr Beaurieux who witnessed the execution by decapitation of a man named Languille in 1905. The article and excerpt below are graphic, so tread lightly if you’re bothered by that sort of thing.
It was then that I called in a strong, sharp voice: “Languille!” I saw the eyelids slowly lift up, without any spasmodic contractions — I insist advisedly on this peculiarity — but with an even movement, quite distinct and normal, such as happens in everyday life, with people awakened or torn from their thoughts. Next Languille’s eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves. I was not, then, dealing with the sort of vague dull look without any expression, that can be observed any day in dying people to whom one speaks: I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me.
The result is a computer that is far more reliable, cheaper, and more compact — the entire thing, believe it or not, is about the size of a Frisbee…
But we’re still struggling with battery life.
A long, sticklike lithium battery, bent into a doughnut and installed in the periphery of the computer, will run it for a couple of weeks. But fresh power is as close as the charging cradle on the nearest wall, which resembles the one for today’s cordless or cellular phones.
Manhattan is the national capital of disparate subcultures of the skinny: Aspiring models. Nightclubbing hipsters. Gay men with the time and money to chisel their physiques at the gym. Park Avenue society matrons who remain preternaturally slender into their 70s, the “social X-rays” satirized by Tom Wolfe.
When 2/3 of the American population is considered outside the normal range when it comes to their BMI, how long will it be before the standards are modified to reflect the new norms?
Socials & More