According to independent cartographers I spoke with, the big mapmaking corporations of the world employ type-positioning software, placing their map labels (names of cities, rivers, etc.) according to an algorithm. For example, preferred placement for city labels is generally to the upper right of the dot that indicates location. But if this spot is already occupied—by the label for a river, say, or by a state boundary line—the city label might be shifted over a few millimeters. Sometimes a town might get deleted entirely in favor of a highway shield or a time zone marker. The result is a rough draft of label placement, still in need of human refinement. Post-computer editing decisions are frequently outsourced—sometimes to India, where teams of cheap workers will hunt for obvious errors and messy label overlaps. The overall goal is often a quick and dirty turnaround, with cost and speed trumping excellence and elegance.
By contrast, David Imus worked alone on his map seven days a week for two full years. Nearly 6,000 hours in total. It would be prohibitively expensive just to outsource that much work. But Imus—a 35-year veteran of cartography who’s designed every kind of map for every kind of client—did it all by himself. He used a computer (not a pencil and paper), but absolutely nothing was left to computer-assisted happenstance. Imus spent eons tweaking label positions. Slaving over font types, kerning, letter thicknesses. Scrutinizing levels of blackness. It’s the kind of personal cartographic touch you might only find these days on the hand-illustrated ski-trail maps available at posh mountain resorts.
(The best American wall map: David Imus’ “The Essential Geography of the United States of America” - Slate Magazine) (02 jan 2012)
“you’ll let us know when the shuttle lands.” (02 jan 2012)
- I want to make comedy no European will ever understand
(01 jan 2012)How do they do the announcements in eg hockey video games? (31 dec 2011)
Muir: "…to render myself more treewise and sequoiacal." (30 dec 2011)
When I was ten I would be transported by certain books—Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, Susan Cooper’s fantasy novels, Isaac Asimov—and burn to do to readers what had just been done to me. Sometimes that burning prompted me
(
Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 204, David Mitchell)
(29 dec 2011)The argument also, en passant, refutes the Turing test (28 dec 2011)
I should write for the New York Review of Books (28 dec 2011)
“First-world airlines are almost incomprehensibly safe,” he said, citing other research that reported a passenger would take a domestic flight every day for 36,000 years, on average, before dying in a crash. (Study finds unexplored link between airlines’ profitability and their accident rates) (28 dec 2011)
The obese and the fiercely obese: the guy who begins his order at ice-cream carts with, “We’re gonna need
(
The Believer - Funworld)
(28 dec 2011)the 447 conversation and p’s semantic stopsigns (28 dec 2011)
d’s misconception of JK Rowling as a “he” (27 dec 2011)
skimscription (27 dec 2011)
For all her high-minded business acumen, as an artist Swift is primarily interested in the emotional life of 15-year-olds: the time of dances and dates with guys you don’t like, humiliating crying jags about guys who don’t like you, and those few transcendent experiences when a girl’s and a boy’s feelings finally line up. You can’t go anywhere without your best friend. You still tell your mom everything. Real sexuality hasn’t kicked in yet. Swift won’t reveal anything on that topic herself. “I feel like whatever you say about whether you do or don’t, it makes people picture you naked,” she says, self-assuredly. “And as much as possible, I’m going to avoid that. It’s self-preservation, really.”
(
Vanessa Grigoriadis)
(23 dec 2011)
I would not have known how to defend this impression had I been forced to do so, and it seemed to me the sort of lazy notion I typically despised.
(
AGNI Online: A Beauty by Robert Boyers)
(23 dec 2011)
Plato invites us to believe that there is in fact such a thing as beauty
Writing like this (23 dec 2011)
Says Conley: “Within psychology, perspectives that draw upon adaptively evolved mechanisms are typically utilized to explain gender differences in sexuality. That is, the behaviors we see today are presumed to be relics of our evolutionary past. The research reviewed suggests that these gender differences are in fact rooted in much more mundane causes: stigma against women for expressing sexual desires; women’s socialization to attend to other’s needs rather than their own; and, more broadly, a double standard that dictates (different sets of) appropriate sexual behaviors for men and women.”
(
6 Common Sex And Dating Myths, Debunked | YourTango)
(23 dec 2011)
More than most players, enforcers gaze ahead on the schedule. They know that the game in Calgary will entail a rematch of a fight lost last time. That game against Edmonton will need an answer for the cheap shot laid on a star player.
“I’ve had times where, going into a game, I know I’m going to get into a fight,” the Chicago Blackhawks enforcer John Scott said. “Just the thought of getting into a fight, I just lay there, awake. ‘O.K., what am I going to do?’ I’m nervous. I’ve got butterflies in my stomach. I’ll probably get one hour of sleep. It’s exciting, nerve-racking and terrifying all at the same time.”
(
Derek Boogaard - Blood on the Ice - NYTimes.com)
(23 dec 2011)
He was huge and imposing, yet laughed easily and always knelt to talk to children.
(
Derek Boogaard - Blood on the Ice - NYTimes.com)
(23 dec 2011)
Such adoration is not unusual. The enforcer, sometimes mocked as a goon or euphemized as a tough guy, may be hockey’s favorite archetype. Enforcers are seen as working-class superheroes — understated types with an alter ego willing to do the sport’s most dangerous work to protect others. And they are underdogs, men who otherwise might have no business in the game.
(
Derek Boogaard - Blood on the Ice - NYTimes.com)
(23 dec 2011)jenny's usefully annoying way of continuing to ask questions, even if you think you've given a pretty well solid answer (22 dec 2011)
This overlooks much history and totally misconstrues the technology. The first cables carried telegraphy, which is as purely digital as anything that goes on inside your computer. The cables were designed that way because the hackers of a century and a half ago understood perfectly well why digital was better. A single bit of code passing down a wire from Porthcurno to the Azores was apt to be in sorry shape by the time it arrived, but precisely because it was a bit, it could easily be abstracted from the noise, then recognized, regenerated, and transmitted anew.
(
4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board)
(22 dec 2011)
Oddly enough, this debate comes at a time when stand-alone computers are seeming less and less significant and the Internet more so. Whether or not you agree that “the network is the computer,” a phrase Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems recently coined, you can’t dispute that moving information around seems to have much broader appeal than processing it. Many more people are interested in email and the Web than were interested in databases and spreadsheets.
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4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board)
(22 dec 2011)
One cannot merely pay the cable out at the same speed as the ship moves forward. If the bottom is sloping down and away from the ship as the ship proceeds, it is necessary to pay the cable out faster. If the bottom is sloping up toward the ship, the cable must come out more slowly . Such calculations are greatly complicated by the fact that the cable is stretched out far behind the ship - the distance between the ship and the cable’s contact point on the bottom of the ocean can be more than 30 kilometers, and the maximum depth at which (for example) KDD cable can be laid is 8,000 meters. Insofar as the shape of the bottom affects what the ship ought to be doing, it’s not the shape of the bottom directly below the ship that is relevant, but the shape of the bottom wherever the contact point happens to be located, which is by no means a straightforward calculation. Of course, the ship is heaving up and down on the ocean and probably being shoved around by wind and currents while all this is happening, and there is also the possibility of ocean currents that may move the cable to and fro during its descent.
It is not, in other words, a seat-of-the-pants kind of deal; the skipper can’t just sit up on the bridge, eyeballing a chart, and twiddling a few controls according to his intuition. In practice, the only way to ensure that the cable ends up where it is supposed to is to calculate the whole thing ahead of time. Just as aeronautical engineers create numerical simulations of hypothetical airplanes to test their coefficient of drag, so do the slack control wizards of Cable & Wireless Marine use numerical simulation techniques to model the catenary curve adopted by the cable as it stretches between ship and contact point. In combination with their detailed data on the shape of the ocean floor, this enables them to figure out, in advance, exactly what the ship should do when. All of it is boiled down into a set of instructions that is turned over to the master of the cable ship: at such and such a point, increase speed to x knots and reduce cable tension to y tons and change payout speed to z meters per second, and so on and so forth, all the way from Porthcurno to Miura.”
(
4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board)
(22 dec 2011)“What drives the housing cycle up, inevitably drives the market down as well. Builders in the multi-unit segment are currently responding to elevated home prices and robust pre-construction sales. Anecdotal evidence suggests the vast majority of pre-construction sales are to investors who intend to sell the units on completion or rent them out. As these condos in the construction pipeline are completed, this inventory of units will be dumped on to the rental and/or re-sale market just as sales momentum and housing demand ebbs. Our estimates indicate there will not be enough renters in Toronto to occupy these units as they are completed. As a result, some investors will be left holding vacant units. Since most investors are unlikely to hold onto negative-carry investments without a reasonable prospect of price appreciation; this will put downward pressure on home prices. We have already seen this dynamic play out in some smaller markets on Canada’s west coast where prices have corrected 15 per cent.” (Daily Mix - The Globe and Mail) (22 dec 2011)
Some wisdom from William James:
- The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund.
- For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.
- Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain. It is not in the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain.
- No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.
- As a final practical maxim, relative to these habits of the will, we may, then, offer something like this: Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and…
(21 dec 2011)
Then modems came along and turned the tables. Modems are a digital hack on an analog technology, of course; they take the digits from your computer and convert them into a complicated analog waveform that can be transmitted down existing wires. The roar of white noise that you hear when you listen in on a modem transmission is exactly what Bell was originally aiming for with his reeds. Modems, and everything that has ensued from them, like the World Wide Web, are just the latest example of a pattern that was established by Kelvin 140 years ago, namely, hacking existing wires by inventing new stuff to put on the ends of them.
(
4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board)
(18 dec 2011)
Electrical oscillations in a wire follow the same rules as acoustical ones in the air, so a wire can carry exactly the same kind of cacophony, with the same results. Instead of using piano strings, Bell and others were using a set of metal reeds like the ones in a harmonica, each tuned to vibrate at a different frequency. They electrified the reeds in such a way that they generated not only acoustical vibrations but corresponding electrical ones. They sought to combine the electrical vibrations of all these reeds into one complicated waveform and feed it into one end of a cable. At the far end of the cable, they would feed the signal into an identical set of reeds. Each reed would vibrate in sympathy only with its counterpart on the other end of the wire, and by recording the pattern of vibrations exhibited by that reed, one could extract a Morse code message independent of the other messages being transmitted on the other reeds. For the price of one wire, you could send many simultaneous coded messages and have them all sort themselves out on the other end.
To make a long story short, it didn’t work. But it did raise an interesting question. If you could take vibrations at one frequency and combine them with vibrations at another frequency, and another, and another, to make a complicated waveform, and if that waveform could be transmitted to the other end of a submarine cable intact, then there was no reason in principle why the complex waveform known as the human voice couldn’t be transmitted in the same way. The only difference would be that the waves in this case were merely literal representations of sound waves, rather than Morse code sequences transmitted at different frequencies. It was, in other words, an analog hack on a digital technology.
We have all been raised to think of the telephone as a vast improvement on the telegraph, as the steamship was to the sailing ship or the electric lightbulb to the candle, but from a hacker tourist’s point of view, it begins to seem like a lamentable wrong turn. Until Bell, all telegraphy was digital. The multiplexing system he worked on was purely digital in concept even if it did make use of some analog properties of matter (as indeed all digital equipment does). But when his multiplexing scheme went sour, he suddenly went analog on us.
(
4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board)
(18 dec 2011)
Bell was one of a few researchers pursuing a hack based on the phenomenon of resonance. If you open the lid of a grand piano, step on the sustain pedal, and sing a note into it, such as a middle C, the strings for the piano’s C keys will vibrate sympathetically, while the D strings will remain still. If you sing a D, the D strings vibrate and the C strings don’t. Each string resonates only at the frequency to which it has been tuned and is deaf to other frequencies.
If you were to hum out a Morse code pattern of dots and dashes, all at middle C, a deaf observer watching the strings would notice a corresponding pattern of vibrations. If, at the same time, a second person was standing next to you humming an entirely different sequence of dots and dashes, but all on the musical tone of D, then a second deaf observer, watching the D strings, would be able to read that message, and so on for all the other tones on the scale. There would be no interference between the messages; each would come through as clearly as if it were the only message being sent. But anyone who wasn’t deaf would hear a cacophony of noise as all the message senders sang in different rhythms, on different notes. If you took this to an extreme, built a special piano with strings tuned as close to each other as possible, and trained the message senders to hum Morse code as fast as possible, the sound would merge into an insane roar of white noise.
One of the better explanations in the piece (18 dec 2011)
As you may have figured out by this point, submarine cables are an incredible pain in the ass to build, install, and operate. Hooking stuff up to the ends of them is easy by comparison. So it has always been the case that cables get laid first and then people begin trying to think of new ways to use them. Once a cable is in place, it tends to be treated not as a technological artifact but almost as if it were some naturally occurring mineral formation that might be exploited in any number of different ways.
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4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board)
(18 dec 2011)
Evans is a thoroughly pleasant middle-aged fellow, a former merchant marine captain, who seemed just a bit taken aback that anyone would care about the minute details of what he and his staff do for a living. A large part of being a hacker tourist is convincing people that you are really interested in the nitty-gritty and not just looking for a quick, painless sound bite or two; once this is accomplished, they always warm to the task, and Captain Evans was no exception
(
4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board)
(18 dec 2011)
This feat is achieved by means of a collection of extremely precise analog machinery. The heart of the system is another polished box that contains a vibrating reed, electromagnetically driven, thrumming along at 30 cycles per second, generating the clock pulses that keep all the other machines turning over at the right pace. The reed is as precise as such a thing can be, but over time it is bound to drift and get out of sync with the other vibrating reeds in the other stations.
In order to control this tendency, a pair of identical pendulum clocks hang next to each other on the wall above. These clocks feed steady, one-second timing pulses into the box housing the reed. The reed, in turn, is driving a motor that is geared so that it should turn over at one revolution per second, generating a pulse with each revolution. If the frequency of the reed’s vibration begins to drift, the motor’s speed will drift along with it, and the pulse will come a bit too early or a bit too late. But these pulses are being compared with the steady one-second pulses generated by the double pendulum clock, and any difference between them is detected by a feedback system that can slightly speed up or slow down the vibration of the reed in order to correct the error. The result is a clock so steady that once one of them is set up in, say, London, and another is set up in, say, Cape Town, the machinery in those two cities will remain synched with each other indefinitely.
This is precisely the same function that is performed by the quartz clock chip at the heart of any modern computing device. The job performed by the regenerator/retransmitter is also perfectly recognizable to any modern digitally minded hacker tourist: it is an analog-to-digital converter. The analog voltages come down the cable into the device, the circuitry in the box decides whether the signal is a dot or a dash (or if you prefer, a 1 or a 0), and then an electromagnet physically moves one way or the other, depending on whether it’s a dot or a dash. At that moment, the device is strictly digital. The electromagnet, by moving, then closes a switch that generates a new pulse of analog voltage that moves on down the cable. The hacker tourist, who has spent much of his life messing around with invisible, ineffable bits, can hardly fail to be fascinated when staring into the guts of a machine built in 1927, steadily hammering out bits through an electromechanical process that can be seen and even touched.
As I started to realize, and as John Worrall and many other cable-industry professionals subsequently told me, there have been new technologies but no new ideas since the turn of the century. Alas for Internet chauvinists who sneer at older, “analog” technology, this rule applies to the transmission of digital bits down wires, across long distances. We’ve been doing it ever since Morse sent “What hath God wrought!” from Washington to Baltimore.
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4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board)
(18 dec 2011)
The question naturally arises: How does one go about manufacturing a hollow glass tube thinner than a hair? More to the point, how did they do it 100 years ago? After all, as Worrall pointed out, they needed to be able to repair these machines when they were posted out on Ascension Island. The answer is straightforward and technically sweet: you take a much thicker glass tube, heat it over a Bunsen burner until it glows and softens, and then pull sharply on both ends. It forms a long, thin tendril, like a string of melted cheese stretching away from a piece of pizza. Amazingly, it does not close up into a solid glass fiber, but remains a tube no matter how thin it gets.
Exactly the same trick is used to create the glass fibers that run down the center of FLAG and other modern submarine cables: an ingot of very pure glass is heated until it glows, and then it is stretched. The only difference is that these are solid fibers rather than tubes, and, of course, it’s all done using machines that assure a consistent result.
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4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board)
(17 dec 2011)"multifoliate" (17 dec 2011)
alex finds the hand-to-hand combat of mi4 "really muddy"… "and the only time I could really understand the geography of the fight…" (16 dec 2011)
imagine being a scientist and being tapped to work on the A-bomb; and giving the greatest demo in the history of the world (11 dec 2011)
Over long (intercontinental) distances, the difference averages out to about 1 percent, so you might need a 2,525-kilometer cable to go from Songkhla to Lan Tao. The extra 1 percent is slack, in the sense that if you grabbed the ends and pulled the cable infinitely tight (bar tight, as they say in the business), it would theoretically straighten out and you would have an extra 25 kilometers. This slack is ideally molded into the contour of the seafloor as tightly as a shadow, running straight and true along the surveyed course
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4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board)
(11 dec 2011)you know how I fix hiccups? I concentrate. (10 dec 2011)
the difference between ghostwriting and speechwriting — where in the latter case the performance, being what it is, earns the speaker the distinction of his own kind of authorship, where the other thing is a lie. (10 dec 2011)
drew’s idea of fun: Point Break and teddy grahams (10 dec 2011)
"who is also a valuable capital asset clues up about their" (08 dec 2011)
The first time a cable-savvy person uses the word slack in your presence, you’ll be tempted to assume he is using it in the loose, figurative way - as a layperson uses it. After the eightieth or ninetieth time, and after the cable guy has spent a while talking about the seemingly paradoxical notion of slack control and extolling the sophistication of his ship’s slack control systems and his computer’s slack numerical-simulation software, you begin to understand that slack plays as pivotal a role in a cable lay as, say, thrust does in a moon mission.
He who masters slack in all of its fiendish complexity stands astride the cable world like a colossus; he who is clueless about slack either snaps his cable in the middle of the ocean or piles it in a snarl on the ocean floor - which is precisely what early 19th-century cable layers spent most of their time doing.
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4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board)
(07 dec 2011)The talent wars actually play out on a much larger stage. The fight over the mind of a talented developer begins long before he or she even thinks about taking a paying job. Sometimes the fight begins in middle school. The reason is that the software industry, unlike almost any other, can get talent into its pipeline extremely early, by way of dominant programming languages, development environments, data and tools. A talented high-school kid who starts hacking away at an iPhone app at 14 is likely to stay in orbit around Apple for his/her entire career. A kid whose first programming stunt is a Google Maps mashup using other Google tools and APIs, is just as likely to stay in orbit around Google. A little known fact about Google, for instance, is that its investment in Python (one of the three languages the company uses for its work) was in part a strategic bet on an under-valued language, when it noticed that other companies were missing the growing talent pool in Python. (07 dec 2011)
In keeping with his general practice of using subtlety where moronic brute force had failed, Kelvin replaced the soggy rope with a piano wire, which in turn enabled him to replace the heavy weight with a much smaller one. This idea might seem obvious to us now, but it was apparently quite the brainstorm. The tension in the wire was so light that a single sailor could reel it in by turning a spoked wooden wheel.
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4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board)
(06 dec 2011)
At the time, depths were sounded by heaving a lead-weighted rope over the side of the ship and letting it pay out until it hit bottom. So far, so easy, but hauling thousands of meters of soggy rope, plus a lead weight, back onto the ship required the efforts of several sailors and took a long time. The US Navy ameliorated the problem by rigging it so that the weight could be detached and simply discarded on the bottom, but this only replaced one problem with another one in that a separate weight had to be carried for each sounding. Either way, the job was a mess and could be done only rarely. This probably explains why ships were constantly running aground in those days, leading to a relentless, ongoing massacre of crew and passengers compared to which today’s problem of bombs and airliners is like a Sunday stroll through Disney World.
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4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board)
(06 dec 2011)Second, the wealthy disproportionately consume certain specialized services like dermatological services. Very high demand for these services has increased compensation for them dramatically, which has drawn doctors away from becoming GPs and being more likely to practice in those areas. This creates a shortage of GPs, which drives up costs across the board. (06 dec 2011)
"workin" instead of "working", and DFW (05 dec 2011)
"How to Write a Good Admissions Essay (to Graduate School)" (05 dec 2011)
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. THOMAS MANN (03 dec 2011)
"Board games are found as artifacts of the earliest Egyptian dynasties, so they don't truly fall within the two-thousand-year limit, but they have undergone a rapid 'adaptive radiation' in the last millenium." (02 dec 2011)
The trick here is that the ritual does not energize his spirit with the soaring possibilities [and attendant responsibilities] of being a man in this society. Rather, the grim and pathetic spectacle of one’s own father getting drunk before us, less verbally and physically coherent until he shouts “leave me!” hilariously, it’s almost a mournful entree to adulthood – this is the world of adults, and this is the pathetic end – there is no wisdom, or effort passed, and the only ordeal is watching the old god die. The metaphor is that adulthood is watching our heroes self-immolate, or have them show us their true, pathetic, boozy colours – sapping the last of our youthful outlook and vitality. (Moccasin Telegraph) (02 dec 2011)
Suppose people
did employ strictly formal inferential rules, operating on substantive
premises. Then if we gave experimental subjects two problems which differ in
substance but can be solved by applying the same deductive rule, they should do
equally well at both problems; performance should be content-neutral. But it’s
easy to find pairs of problems where this isn’t the case, and to show that the
difference isn’t due to (say) one topic being more familiar and so easier to
apply known rules of logic to; the crucial difference seems to be the
subject-matter of the problems. For instance, people correctly apply the rule
of inference known as modus ponens to problems when they are couched
as being about catching people cheating on social conventions, even if the
conventions are very foreign to them, but flub logically-equivalent problems
about abstract rules. Pragmatic reasoning schemata, then, are a kind of hybrid
of formal and substantive information —- “If you’re looking for someone
cheating on rule thus-and-such, then do this-and-so” —- and their use would
explain why people are at once successful in negotiating daily life and bad at
reasoning abstractly or in unfamiliar contexts. This would also explain why
logic courses rarely do much to make people reason better, while training in
substantive areas does help people think straight —- about those subjects. (Holland, Holyoak, Nisbett and Thagard, Induction) (02 dec 2011)
"fair complected" (02 dec 2011)
but
then, it is precisely on this rock (if not before) that all treatises on method
run aground. (John Holland, Emergence) (02 dec 2011)
Or, as Ernest
Gellner put it in Legitimation of Belief, reductionism is “the
view that everything in this world is really something else, and that the
something else is always in the end unedifying. So lucidly formulated, one can
see that this is a luminously true and certain idea.” (John Holland, Emergence) (02 dec 2011)
The problem of emergence is, roughly speaking —- and half the trouble with
it is that everything we say about it is only rough —- the flip side of the
problem of building blocks. Instead of asking how we, or other creatures,
carve Nature at the joints, we ask why Nature has those particular joints, or
even has joints at all, and is not (to continue with the metaphor) a single
undifferentiated hunk of inharmoniously quivering meat, a fleshy compound of
chaos and ancient night. (John Holland, Emergence) (02 dec 2011)
this "write what you would want to read" business is complicated by the fact that you know more than your reader (02 dec 2011)
personal statements and the difference between sharm's and spohd's and the "basketball grad school" example, contrasting something like:
It's a fast-paced game that combines the cerebral and physical, and has this wonderful back-and-forth, and requires both individual performance and team chemistry, etc.
with:
When I'm in the low post and I'm trying to coordinate with the 3-man in the high post, and we've got a defender between us, and I have to model what the defender thinks I think my teammate is going to do… I have to be well-conditioned enough to win the offensive board if there's a shot and aware enough to know (from having practiced baby-hooks around the world every day at 6pm) where exactly the rim is behind my back, so that if I get the ball I can turn and shoot without giving up a tempo.
because the latter shows that you're a basketball player and you belong at basketball grad school. (30 nov 2011)
For the most part, the duct installation is a simple cut-and-cover operation, right down the median strip. But the median is crossed frequently by nicely paved, heavily trafficked U-turn routes. To cut or block one of these would be unthinkable, since no journey in Egypt is complete without numerous U-turns. It is therefore necessary to bore a horizontal tunnel under each one, run a 600-mm steel pipe down the tunnel, and finally thread the ducts through it. The tunnels are bored by laborers operating big manually powered augers. Under a sign reading Civil Works: Fiberoptic Link around the Globe, the men had left their street clothes carefully wrapped up in plastic bags, on the shoulder of the road. They had kicked off their shoes and changed into the traditional, loose, ankle-length garment. One by one, they disappeared into a tunnel barely big enough to lie down in, carrying empty baskets, then returned a few minutes later with baskets full of dirt, looking like extras in some new Hollywood costume drama: The Ten Commandments Meets the Great Escape.
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4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board)
(29 nov 2011)mw3's leveling system as a "genius way of tricking you up the learning curve" (making you play a certain amt & way before you can play with "your" configuration) (29 nov 2011)
this thing where a girl in a ponytail drinks a beer (28 nov 2011)
Euclid’s pons asinorum (fools bridge) — think about this in the context of those interactive programming tutors that start easy and then suddenly fall off a cliff (28 nov 2011)
"fixing the typos or clunkers" (27 nov 2011)
If you ask the league to see the footage that was taken from on high to show the entire field and what all 22 players did on every play, the response will be emphatic. “NO ONE gets that,” NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy wrote in an email. This footage, added fellow league spokesman Greg Aiello, “is regarded at this point as proprietary NFL coaching information.”
For decades, NFL TV broadcasts have relied most heavily on one view: the shot from a sideline camera that follows the progress of the ball. Anyone who wants to analyze the game, however, prefers to see the pulled-back camera angle known as the “All 22.”
While this shot makes the players look like stick figures, it allows students of the game to see things that are invisible to TV watchers: like what routes the receivers ran, how the defense aligned itself and who made blocks past the line of scrimmage.
By distributing this footage only to NFL teams, and rationing it out carefully to its TV partners and on its web site, the NFL has created a paradox. The most-watched sport in the U.S. is also arguably the least understood. “I don’t think you can get a full understanding without watching the entirety of the game,” says former head coach Bill Parcells. The zoomed-in footage on TV broadcasts, he says, only shows a “fragment” of what happens on the field.
(NFL: The All-22 Football Footage the League Won’t Show You - WSJ.com) (24 nov 2011)
While one guiding principle of traditional journalism is to “comfort
the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” (Bloomberg’s Plan for World Domination - The Daily Beast) (22 nov 2011)
Lisa's birthday song was simultaneously a satire of sentimentality (think of the way the neighbors looked up wide-eyed at the sound) and sentimental itself, and that's why it worked (22 nov 2011)
Without those in themselves unamiable characteristics of unsociability from whence opposition springs-characteristics each man must find in his own selfish pretensions-all talents would remain hidden, unborn in an Arcadian shepherd’s life, with all its concord, contentment, and mutual affection. Men, good-natured as the sheep they herd, would hardly reach a higher worth than their beasts; they would not fill the empty place in creation by achieving their end, which is rational nature. Thanks be to Nature, then, for the incompatibility, for heartless competitive vanity, for the insatiable desire to possess and to rule! Without them, all the excellent natural capacities of humanity would forever sleep, undeveloped. Man wishes concord; but Nature knows better what is good for the race; she wills discord. He wishes to live comfortably and pleasantly; Nature wills that he should be plunged from sloth and passive contentment into labor and trouble, in order that he may find means of extricating himself from them. The natural urges to this, the sources of unsociableness and mutual opposition from which so many evils arise, drive men to new exertions of their forces and thus to the manifold development of their capacities. They thereby perhaps show the ordering of a wise Creator and not the hand of an evil spirit, who bungled in his great work or spoiled it out of envy. (22 nov 2011)
Great new phrase: here’s two cents from the cheap seats. (21 nov 2011)
The rule of thumb for calculating revenue loss works like this: for every penny per minute that the long distance market will bear on a particular route, the loss of revenue, should FLAG be severed on that route, is about $3,000 a minute. So if calls on that route are a dime a minute, the damage is $30,000 a minute, and if calls are a dollar a minute, the damage is almost a third of a million dollars for every minute the cable is down. Upcoming advances in fiber bandwidth may push this figure, for some cables, past the million-dollar-a-minute mark.
(
4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board)
(19 nov 2011)
In 1870, a new cable was laid between England and France, and Napoleon III used it to send a congratulatory message to Queen Victoria. Hours later, a French fisherman hauled the cable up into his boat, identified it as either the tail of a sea monster or a new species of gold-bearing seaweed, and cut off a chunk to take home. Thus was inaugurated an almost incredibly hostile relationship between the cable industry and fishermen.
(
4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board)
(19 nov 2011)That is to say, as long as the world lasts, the action and counteraction of wealth and poverty, the meeting, face to face, of rich and poor, is just as appointed and necessary a law of that world as the flow of stream to sea, or the interchange of power among the electric clouds: — “God is their maker.” (Unto this last: four essays on the first principles of political economy) (18 nov 2011)
And as into these two functions, requiring for their right exercise the highest intelligence, as well as patience, kindness, and tact, the merchant is bound to put all his energy, so for their just discharge he is bound, as soldier or physician is bound, to give up, if need be, his life, in such way as it may be demanded of him. Two main points he has in his providing function to maintain: first, his engagements (faithfulness to engagements being the real root of all possibilities, in commerce); and, secondly, the perfectness and purity of the thing provided; so that, rather than fail in any engagement, or consent to any deterioration, adulteration, or unjust and exorbitant price of that which he provides, he is bound to meet fearlessly any form of distress, poverty, or labour, which may, through maintenance of these points, come upon him. (Unto this last: four essays on the first principles of political economy) (18 nov 2011)
This they will find, eventually, they must give up doing. They must not cease to condemn selfishness; but they will have to discover a kind of commerce which is not exclusively selfish. Or, rather, they will have to discover that there never was, or can be, any other kind of commerce; that this which they have called commerce was not commerce at all, but cozening; and that a true merchant differs as much from a merchant according to laws of modern political economy, as the hero of the Excursion from Autolycus. They will find that commerce is an occupation which gentlemen will every day see more need to engage in, rather than in the businesses of talking to men, or slaying them; that, in true commerce, as in true preaching, or true fighting, it is necessary to admit the idea of occasional voluntary loss; — that sixpences have to be lost, as well as lives, under a sense of duty. that the market may have its martyrdoms as well as the pulpit; and trade its heroisms as well as war.
(Unto this last: four essays on the first principles of political economy) (18 nov 2011)
This inapplicability has been curiously manifested during the embarrassment caused by the late strikes of our workmen. Here occurs one of the simplest cases, in a pertinent and positive form, of the first vital problem which political economy has to deal with (the relation between employer and employed); and, at a severe crisis, when lives in multitudes and wealth in masses are at stake, the political economists are helpless — practically mute: no demonstrable solution of the difficulty can be given by them, such as may convince or calm the opposing parties. Obstinately the masters take one view of the matter. obstinately the operatives another; and no political science can set them at one.
(Unto this last: four essays on the first principles of political economy) (18 nov 2011)
Observe, I neither impugn nor doubt the conclusion of the science if its terms are accepted. I am simply uninterested in then, as I should be in those of a science of gymnastics which assumed that men had no skeletons. It might be shown, on that supposition, that it would be advantageous to roll the students up into pellets, flatten them into cakes, or stretch them into cables; and that when these results were effected, the re-insertion of the skeleton would be attended with various inconveniences to their constitution. The reasoning might be admirable, the conclusions true, and the science deficient only in applicability. Modern political economy stands on a precisely similar basis. Assuming, not that the human being has no skeleton, but that it is all skeleton, it founds an ossifiant theory of progress on this negation of a soul; and having shown the utmost that may be made of bones, and constructed a number of interesting geometrical figures with death’s-head and humeri, successfully proves the inconvenience of the reappearance of a soul among these corpuscular structures. I do not deny the truth of this theory: I simply deny its applicability to the present phase of the world.
(Unto this last: four essays on the first principles of political economy) (18 nov 2011)
"gamble on yourself" (18 nov 2011)
"My topic is the shift from 'architect' to 'gardener', where 'architect' stands for 'someone who carries a full picture of the work before it is made', to 'gardener' standing for 'someone who plants seeds and waits to see exactly what will come up'. I will argue that today's composer are more frequently 'gardeners' than 'architects' and, further, that the 'composer as architect' metaphor was a transitory historical blip." (17 nov 2011)
pairing and the mutual diffusion of responsibility
also how the "this is why we pair" stuff is a bit naive. how it doesn't recognize that it's near impossible for two people to engage a problem to the same degree. if it's hard enough, only one person will ever really be in the micro bits at a time. (17 nov 2011)
In 1967 Martin Luther King wrote: "If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you can't be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. Be be the best little shrub on the side of the hill." (15 nov 2011)
Bezos: I like to say, “Maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times.” For Amazon, that’s selection, speed of delivery, lower prices. (Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think | Magazine) (14 nov 2011)
Levy: Two years ago, you bought Zappos. Was that an attempt to absorb their so-called culture of happiness and customer service?
Bezos: No, no, no. We like their unique culture, but we don’t want that culture at Amazon. We like our culture, too. Our version of a perfect customer experience is one in which our customer doesn’t want to talk to us. Every time a customer contacts us, we see it as a defect. I’ve been saying for many, many years, people should talk to their friends, not their merchants. And so we use all of our customer service information to find the root cause of any customer contact. What went wrong? Why did that person have to call? Why aren’t they spending that time talking to their family instead of talking to us? How do we fix it? Zappos takes a completely different approach. You call them and ask them for a pizza, and they’ll get out the Yellow Pages for you.
Levy: So where’s the synergy?
Bezos: It’s on the back end. Amazon has a huge shoe business. Zappos has a huge shoe business. Zappos may have the size-8 customer, and we have the size-8 shoe. Having one set of fulfillment services for these two very different front ends, you get to satisfy more customers more often, because you’re more likely to have their size and style and color and so on.
(Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think | Magazine) (14 nov 2011)
Bezos: There are two ways to build a successful company. One is to work very, very hard to convince customers to pay high margins. The other is to work very, very hard to be able to afford to offer customers low margins. (Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think | Magazine) (14 nov 2011)
this "guy" stuff (13 nov 2011)
Eight years after Whitehouse fried the first, a second transatlantic cable was built to Lord Kelvin’s specifications with his patented mirror galvanometers at either end of it. He bought a 126-ton schooner yacht with the stupendous amount of money he made from his numerous cable-related patents, turned the ship into a floating luxury palace and laboratory for the invention of even more fantastically lucrative patents. He then spent the rest of his life tooling around the British Isles, Bay of Biscay, and western Mediterranean, frequently hosting Dukes and continental savants who all commented on the nerd-lord’s tendency to stop in the middle of polite conversation to scrawl out long skeins of equations on whatever piece of paper happened to be handy.
(
4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board)
(13 nov 2011)
The Victorian era was an age of superlatives and larger-than-life characters, and as far as that goes, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse fit right in: what Victoria was to monarchs, Dickens to novelists, Burton to explorers, Robert E. Lee to generals, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse was to assholes
(
4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board)
(13 nov 2011)He hadn't really known what to expect of America. But people here seem to do things—hangings included — with a blunt, blank efficiency that's admirable and disappointing at the same time. Like jumping fish, they go about difficult matters with bloodless ease. As if they were all born knowing things that other people must absorb, along with faery-tales and superstitions, from their families and villages. Maybe it is because most of them came over on ships. (12 nov 2011)
the psychology of reading a magazine article — how credibility flows from the lede (12 nov 2011)
seinfeld's halloween mask staple joke validates an observation that we didn't know was an observation (worthy of this kind of attention). that feeling of "yes!" (12 nov 2011)
where do cab drivers shit? (12 nov 2011)
it's the lack of feedback that makes speaking in those standup situations so tough (12 nov 2011)
how often people's code gets overwritten as a measure of contribution. or rather, since that would happen so often on a big project, focus on which code sticks around as a measure of excellence. (12 nov 2011)
what do I really mean by this "aesthetic grounds" business? (12 nov 2011)
mcphee's voiceless prose - prose you'd never be embarassed by (12 nov 2011)
how after a day of pairing I'll pick up the other guy's way of playing the keyboard (eg dg) (12 nov 2011)
About books I’m Quakerish, believing every creature eligible to commune face-to-face with the Light (LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS | My Disappointment Critic) (11 nov 2011)
"[at a party] everybody goes off, laughs and scratches for a bit, …" (10 nov 2011)
Within a day or two, the cable layers have established an official haunt: preferably a place equipped with a dartboard and a few other amenities very close to the waterfront so they can keep an eye on incoming traffic. There they can get a bite to eat or a drink and pay for it on the spot so that when their satellite phones ring or when a tugboat chugs into the bay, they can immediately dash off to work. These men work and play at completely erratic and unpredictable hours. They wear shorts and sandals and T-shirts and frequently sport tattoos and hence could easily be mistaken, at a glance, for vacationing sailors. But if you can get someone to turn down the volume on the jukebox, you can overhear them learnedly discoursing on flaw propagation in the crystalline structure of boron silicate glass or on seasonal variation of currents in the Pearl River estuary, or on what a pain in the ass it is to helm a large ship through the Suez Canal. Their conversation is filled with references to places like Tunisia, Diego Garcia, the North Sea, Porthcurno, and Penang.
(
4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board)
(09 nov 2011)
Sample conversation at Papa Doc’s:
Envious hacker tourist: “How much does one of those satellite phones cost, anyway?”
Leathery, veteran cable layer: “Who gives a shit?”
(
4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board)
(09 nov 2011)
One evening, after Handley and I had been buying each other drinks at Papa Doc’s for a while, he raised his glass and said, “To good times and great cable laying!” This toast, while no doubt uttered with a certain amount of irony, speaks volumes about cable professionals.
For most of them, good times and great cable laying are one and the same. They make their living doing the kind of work that automatically weeds out losers. Handley, for example, was a founding member of SEAL Team 2 who spent 59 months fighting in Vietnam, laid cables for the Navy for a few more years, and has done similar work in the civilian world ever since. In addition to being an expert diver, he has a master mariner’s license good up to 1,500 tons, which is not an easy thing to get or maintain. He does all his work on a laptop (he claims that it replaced 14 employees) and is as computer-literate as anyone I’ve known who isn’t a coder.
(
4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board)
(09 nov 2011)the hobos recycling all these bottles (09 nov 2011)
McPhee: Yes. It’s the whole book in the sense that I’ve reduced the notes to little things like airport codes. It means something to me and they relate to components of the story. On the 3-by-5 card there’s nothing more than one word, or half a word, but I know what it relates to. It relates to a whole body of stuff. Then I move the cards around to see where I’m going to find a good structure, a legitimate structure.
About that other point: There’s a big difference between riding a coal train through Kansas and Nebraska and trying to write. Writing is a suspension of life. I believe that so-called writer’s block is something that any writer is going to experience every day, but in a minor way. You break through some kind of membrane, and then you go into another world. Time really goes fast in there, but it is hard as can be to get there, and it frightens me. It frightens Joan Didion. She talks about the “low dread” she feels looking across the room at the door of her study. When she’s sitting somewhere, not writing, and she looks and sees that door, she experiences the low dread. Oh boy, do I know what that means. Getting past it is just a daily thing. It’s not there when you’re riding around in a train, but it sure is when you’re trying to write about riding around in a train.
(
john-mcphee)
(08 nov 2011)
Audience question: You do such a great job capturing people’s voices. I’ve always wondered: do you take notes by hand as you’re talking with them, or do you have recorders? How do you get such great phrases out of them?
McPhee: I’m just listening. Tons of stuff streams by, and I’m obviously not using 100 percent of it, but I do use a tape recorder if I have to. I never try to remember later what they said. There have been writers writing non-fiction who claim that they went home at night and wrote it down. I don’t do that. I scribble constantly. If I’m climbing up the North Cascades, I have a notebook in my hand, trying to keep my balance, and I’m scribbling, scribbling, because I much prefer to scribble in the notebooks than to transcribe endless tape.
But if you have 15 Appalachian geologists of the first rank standing around some outcrop, arguing about exotic terrains in Vermont, the language is unbelievable. I take out a tape recorder and put it on the outcrop. And then I go through the whole process with the thing with the foot treadle and all that to type up the taped stuff. But my first go is a notebook.
(
john-mcphee)
(08 nov 2011)
McPhee: I had a teacher in Princeton High School, Mrs. McKee, who had us write three pieces of writing a week. She had us get up and read them to the other kids, who would wad up paper and throw it at us when we were doing our reading.
We had a lot of fun in that class. We could write anything, fiction, non-fiction, poetry. Whatever it was, the structure had to be defended. You had to turn in, with each piece, a structural presentation, an outline, or a doodle of some sort that showed that you were thinking about the anatomy of the piece when you were writing it. And so, every single Princeton kid that I’ve ever taught has turned in every piece with a structural outline. But I picked that up in 10th grade, or 9th grade. She was a very influential teacher.
(
john-mcphee)
(08 nov 2011)
McPhee: What my work has in common is that it’s about real people in real places. I look for real people who are interesting that I can describe, and the places where they live and work, and so forth, and try to do a sketch of that. It’s led me into all kinds of different areas, but absolutely all of it has that in common. I had to label my course when I started teaching, and so it’s called creative non-fiction. What’s creative about non-fiction? Well, you can make a list of the things that, within the legitimacy of fact, you can do: You can arrange the structure, you can do flashbacks, you can do things that I feel are legitimate in factual writing. That’s what I try to get across to the students.
(
john-mcphee)
(08 nov 2011)
[Reads] “This pretty little stream is being disassembled in the name of gold. The result of the summer season of moving 40,000 cubic yards of material through a box, of varying 200,000 feet of bed rock, of scraping off the tundra and stuffing it up a hill, of making a muck-and-gravel hash out of what are now stream-side meadows of blue bells and lupine, daisies and arctic forget-me-nots, yellow poppies, and saxifrage, will be a peanut butter jar filled with flaky gold. Probably no one will actually use it. Investors will draw it into their world and lock it in an armored cellar while up here in these untraveled mountains, a machine-made moonscape will tell the tale.
“Am I disgusted? Manifestly not. Not from here, from now, from this perspective. I am too warmly, too subjectively caught up in what the Gelvins are doing. In the ecomilitia, bust me to private. This mine is a cork on the sea. Meanwhile (and, possibly, more seriously), the relationship between this father and son is as attractive as anything I’ve seen in Alaska — both of them self-reliant beyond the usual reach of the term, the characteristic formed by this country. Whatever they are doing, whether it is mining or something else, they do for themselves what no one else is here to do for them. Their kind is more endangered every year.
(
john-mcphee)
(08 nov 2011)
I got the title off a wall at the University of Wyoming. I was walking across a lawn there one day, and I saw that on a wall of the engineering school: “Strive on. The control of nature is won, not given.” I thought, “There’s a good title, because it is perfectly bilateral. It cuts two ways precisely.” So, that’s probably why I wrote this whole thing
(
john-mcphee)
(08 nov 2011)
We were out in the Atchafalaya Swamp. The struggle down there between the Mississippi River and the Corps of Engineers is epic. The Mississippi wants to take a right in upper Louisiana and go down the Atchafalaya River. Across the past 5,000 years and more, the Mississippi River has been like one hand playing on a piano back and forth as the main channels switch. And this spread like this has built the entire southern part of Louisiana, the lower half.
(
john-mcphee)
(08 nov 2011)
Sometimes I’ve had pieces not work out at all because they just didn’t gel. But usually you get together with somebody who has a certain expertise and you follow them through their work. You sort of fade into the background and watch them, and it usually works out.
(
john-mcphee)
(08 nov 2011)
Daily and Wall preside over this operation, which is Western at the top and pure Thai at the ground level, with a gradual shading of cultures in between. FLAG has dealings in many countries, and the arrangement is different in each one. Here, the top level is a 50-50 partnership between FLAG and Thailand’s CAT. They bid the project out to two different large contractors, each of whom hired subcontractors with particular specialties who work through sub-sub-contractors who hire the workers, get them to the site, and make things happen. The incentives are shaped at each level so that the contractors will get the job done without having to be micromanaged, and the roads seem to be crawling with inspectors representing various levels of the project who make sure that the work is being done according to spec (at the height of this operation, 50 percent of the traffic on some of these roads was FLAG-related).
(
4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board)
(08 nov 2011)
Since these two, and many of the others we will meet on this journey, have much in common with one another, this is as good a place as any to write a general description. They tend to come from the US or the British Commonwealth countries but spend very little time living there. They are cheerful and outgoing, rudely humorous, and frequently have long-term marriages to adaptable wives. They tend to be absolutely straight shooters even when they are talking to a hacker tourist about whom they know nothing. Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today. On the other hand, if I had an unlimited amount of money and woke up tomorrow morning with a burning desire to see a 2,000-hole golf course erected on the surface of Mars, I would probably call men like Daily and Wall, do a handshake deal with them, send them a blank check, and not worry about it.
(
4.12: Mother Earth Mother Board)
(08 nov 2011)the way the trans-word "…famously…" operates (06 nov 2011)
sad like tourists in a new city going to a familiar restaurant (06 nov 2011)
In 1979 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, but his humor remained. A friend told him, “I’m so glad to see you.” Smiling, Cornfield replied, “That’s nothing compared to how happy I am to be able to see you.” As he lay dying, he called to his two daughters and told them: “You spend your whole life practicing humor for the times when you really need it.”
(
A History of Bayes' Theorem - Less Wrong)
(06 nov 2011)
“I don’t have a plan for the book that I’m working on, I just accrue pages. After a while I see that they do belong together.”
(
Life after ‘Nemesis’ - FT.com)
(06 nov 2011)
But Roth is disinclined to talk in terms of metaphor. In a New Yorker interview, he indicated that allegory was a form he disliked and, during our conversation, he more than once says of a work we are discussing: “Well, it’s about what it’s about.”
(
Life after ‘Nemesis’ - FT.com)
(06 nov 2011)
Basically, this sounds kind of primitive, but the basic endpoint used in anesthesia is that when a surgeon cuts the patient, they don’t move. I’m serious. It’s very, very crude, but it’s the coin of the realm. The bottom line is that when you do something that ought to hurt the animal, it doesn’t respond. In a tadpole that means trying to elicit a startle reflex by tapping their dish, or tapping the tadpole itself. If it doesn’t do anything, it’s considered anesthetized.
(
Going Under: What we don’t know about anesthetics – Boing Boing)
(06 nov 2011)
we’re talking about interactions with as many as 10, 20, or even 50 different protein targets. That constellation of small effects disrupts the extraordinarily well-timed signaling in the central nervous system to produce the final common pathway of unconsciousness.
(
Going Under: What we don’t know about anesthetics – Boing Boing)
(06 nov 2011)
Much has changed. Silicon Valley now belongs to the world. In a typical nerd cabal you will find recently arrived Indians, Chinese, Brits, Israelis and Russians. What is strangest in the recent waves of young arrivals in Silicon Valley is that they tend no longer to be downtrodden geniuses rejected in the playing of social status games, but sterling alpha males. Legions of perfect specimens seem to have grown up in manicured childhoods, nothing scrappy about them. When children started to be raised perfectly in the 1990s, chauffeured from one play date to the next, I wondered what world they would want as adults. Socialism? Facebook and similar designs seem to me continuations of the artificial order we gave children during the boom years.
(
New Statesman - The suburb that changed the world)
(05 nov 2011)
The overlap between the late stages of hippie bohemia and the early incarnations of Silicon Valley was often endearing. There was a sense of justice in the way that males who had been at the bottom of the social ladder in high school were on track to run the world. Greasy cottages with futons on the floor, with dustings of pot and cookie crumbles rubbed into cheap oriental rugs, a carnage of forgotten dirty clothes in the corner, empty refrigerators and tangles of thick grey cables leading to the huge computer monitors and the hot metal cabinets where the silicon chips crunched. Asymmetrical, patchy beards, shirts part tucked, prescriptions for glasses powerful enough to find life on a distant planet
(
New Statesman - The suburb that changed the world)
(05 nov 2011)The King’s Speech is the Best Mov Mov Mov Mov Motion Picture Ever, say stuttering, doddering monarchists (Moccasin Telegraph) (04 nov 2011)
And the fact is that none of the products we have would cost what they cost if there weren’t these factories filled with robots. There’s no human being that can assemble a hard drive. No human being can assemble an iPod, much less all the components that go into the iPod. All the stuff that we own has robot fingerprints all over it, whether you know it or not – whether it came from China or whether it’s domestic.
(
Daniel H Wilson on Robotics | FiveBooks | The Browser)
(04 nov 2011)
One thing is that if you put these things on, they basically anticipate where your legs and arms are going to move – and their goal is to get out of your way. The whole interface goal of the machine is that you’re not supposed to feel like you’re wearing anything. You just move and it has joints that are very similar to yours and it moves too, and so you’re just walking around inside it. The only difference is that whenever you pick something up all that weight is transferred all the way down to the ground through the frame of the exoskeleton and you don’t feel a thing.
(
Daniel H Wilson on Robotics | FiveBooks | The Browser)
(03 nov 2011)
What’s interesting to me from a roboticist’s perspective is that it’s just a problem like any other – killing people. You can program a machine to learn how to do that optimally. What’s really fascinating is that the optimal form that this robot has chosen to kill human beings is another human being. That’s just a really, really cool concept to me; it’s a powerful message.
(
Daniel H Wilson on Robotics | FiveBooks | The Browser)
(03 nov 2011)
They wrote to carry the reader into vicarious lives that were worth living.
(
Orson Scott Card on Science Fiction | FiveBooks | The Browser)
(03 nov 2011)this direct intentional self-imitation — well, it might not be a definite evil but god is it early (03 nov 2011)
It is vastly to Fitzgerald‘s credit that he appears to have taken their caveats seriously and pondered them to good effect. In The Great Gatsby the highly agreeable fruits of that ponderingare visible. The story, for all its basic triviality, has a fine texture, a careful and brilliant finish. The obvious phrase is simply not in it. The sentences roll along smoothly, sparklingly, variously. There is evidence in every line of hard and intelligent effort. It is a quite new Fitzgerald who emerges from this little book and the qualities that he shows are dignified and solid. This Side of Paradise, after all, might have been merely a lucky accident. But The Great Gatsby, a far inferior story at bottom, is plainly the product of a sound and stable talent, conjured into being by hard work.
I make much of this improvement because it is of an order not often witnessed in American writers, and seldom indeed in those who start off with a popular success. The usual progression, indeed, is in the opposite direction. Every year first books of great promise are published—and every year a great deal of stale drivel is printed by the promising authors of year before last. The rewards of literary success in this country are so vast that, when they come early, they are not unnaturally somewhat demoralizing. The average author yields to them readily. Having struck the bull‘s-eye once, he is too proud to learn new tricks. Above all, he is too proud to tackle hard work. The result is a gradual degeneration of whatever talent he had at the beginning. He begins to imitate himself. He peters out.
(The Great Gatsby by Mencken) (02 nov 2011)
Islamist terrorists ask these questions, too. In their view, the West is engaged in a massive assault on Muslim societies and has been for generations, long preceding 9/11. This assault involves military invasions, political domination, economic dependence, and cultural decadence — and, they believe, it is reaching new heights of aggression each year. Islamists offer a solution: the establishment of Islamic government. Revolutionary Islamists offer a strategy to achieve Islamic government: armed insurrection. Terrorist revolutionaries offer a tactic to trigger insurrection: attacks on civilians. These attacks are intended to demoralize the enemy, build Muslims’ self-confidence, and escalate conflict, leading Muslims to realize that armed insurrection is the sole path to defend Islam.
(
Why Is It So Hard to Find a Suicide Bomber These Days? - By Charles Kurzman | Foreign Policy)
(02 nov 2011)Related to this is the ‘snuggle theory’ – the idea that viewing horror films may be a rite of passage for young people, providing them with an opportunity to fulfil their traditional gender roles. A paper from the late 1980s by Dolf Zillmann, Norbert Mundorf and others found that male undergrads paired with a female partner (unbeknown to them, a research assistant), enjoyed a 14-minute clip from Friday the 13th Part III almost twice as much if she showed distress during the film. Female undergrads, by contrast, said they enjoyed the film more if their male companion appeared calm and unmoved. Moreover, men who were initially considered unattractive were later judged more appealing if they displayed courage during the film viewing. ‘Scary movies and monsters are just the ticket for girls to scream and hold on to a date for dear life and for the date (male or female) to be there to reassure, protect, defend and, if need be, destroy the monster,’ says Fischoff. ‘Both are playing gender roles prescribed by a culture.’ (01 nov 2011)
the squamous eldritch horrors and political satire. (01 nov 2011)
a musician who baked a song into his whole discography (30 oct 2011)
people look good when they come in from the cold (29 oct 2011)
the smell of the woodsy cold (23 oct 2011)
Question: what's going on with the data on your coax connection when your TV is turned off? What happens in the moment that you turn it on? (23 oct 2011)
We can so shape transparent substances, and so arrange them with respect to our sight and objects, that rays can be broken and bent as we please; and thus from an incredible distance we may read the smallest letters and number the grains of dust and sand, on account of the greatness of the angle under which we see them; and we may manage so as hardly to see bodies when near to us, on account of the smallness of the angle under which we cause them to be seen; for vision of this sort is not a consequence of distance, except as that affects the magnitude of the angle. And thus a boy may seem a giant, and a man a mountain. (22 oct 2011)
Take the telescope. Just think about how strange it is that you take a piece of material, stick it into a tube, and suddenly can see the moon in close-up detail. (22 oct 2011)
What was it getting with GOOG-411? It soon became clear that what it was getting were demands for pizza spoken in every accent in the continental United States, along with questions about plumbers in Detroit and countless variations on the pronunciations of ‘Schenectady’, ‘Okefenokee’ and ‘Boca Raton’. GOOG-411, a Google researcher later wrote, was a phoneme-gathering operation, a way of improving voice recognition technology through massive data collection. (22 oct 2011)
To reinforce just how wrong a simple-minded application of Bayes’s rule can
go, I invite you to consider the saga of
the Phantom of
Heilbronn. The combined police forces of Europe spent years searching for
a criminal known from high-quality forensic evidence (DNA) left at more 40
crime scenes across a wide swathe of Europe. In the end, it turned out that
the reason all these different crime scenes turned up the same DNA, is that the
swabs used to collect the DNA from the scenes all came from the same factory,
and had been contaminated by DNA from a worker there. (22 oct 2011)
"I still got penitentiary ways about myself" (22 oct 2011)
does it feel like public speaking to make an announcement on the pa as a pilot? (21 oct 2011)
"the unity of apparent opposites" (21 oct 2011)
"and it's like, which part of the kabuki dance did I leave out?" (21 oct 2011)
why do dates feel like track meets? (21 oct 2011)
"Self-service parameterized operational reporting" (21 oct 2011)
guy peeling the price tag off a bottle of wine on the steps of a brownstone (21 oct 2011)
“the wrong answer” radio game, taboo, stroop, and priming (21 oct 2011)
- “Bulldozer code” that gives the appearance of refactoring by breaking out chunks into subroutines, but that are impossible to reuse in another context (very high cohesion)
(Signs that you’re a bad programmer - Software Engineering Tips) (19 oct 2011)
How a simple CMD-T (without scoring) might work:
- Start out with a list of strings.
- For each character you type,
- => find the first instance of that character in the string.
- => if none, nil out the string.
- => if you find it, cut the string from there to the end of it.
- => compact your list of strings.
- => repeat with next character.
(18 oct 2011)on Doctor Who: “It’s a romp, for lack of a better term. It’s a joke that you’re in on.” (17 oct 2011)
A computer program is said to learn from experience E with
respect to some task T and some performance measure P if its
performance on T, as measured by P, improves with experience E. (Machine Learning) (16 oct 2011)
“it looks like the money they spent is on the screen” (16 oct 2011)
aaron sorkin and the way real men talk (16 oct 2011)
going down into the subway for once, busting that silly mental block (14 oct 2011)
no high like the high that follows a bout of bad health (14 oct 2011)
the disappointment of a restaurant owner on a rainy night, looking out his window onto the street (14 oct 2011)
"Anybody can not fuck up for a day" (13 oct 2011)
and at another, when writing about Letald of St-Mesmin-de-Micy’s attack on chants which mix their modes (Letald calls them “snake-tressed monstrous phantoms”),
(
The Invention of Our Music)
(12 oct 2011)salinger’s minute remembered moments (08 oct 2011)
You have to learn the Capybara API instead of regular expressions, and you will take more advantage of the snippets Cucumber prints for undefined steps. This also means you have to think in terms of the domain and not the user interface when you write scenarios (The training wheels came off | Aslak Hellesøy) (07 oct 2011)
Clicking links and buttons or filling in text fields has nothing to do with the domain.
Cucumber scenarios that consist of 10 or so steps that click links, fill in fields, push buttons and look for text are going to bore your stakeholders to death.
(The training wheels came off | Aslak Hellesøy) (07 oct 2011)
"A guy with an ugly girlfriend has no confidence." (07 oct 2011)
It’s a very good, perceptive review which fastens unerringly (Memex 1.1» Blog Archive» Twain’s attic) (06 oct 2011)
could it be remade as a program that operates on and outputs text? what would such a program look like? (06 oct 2011)
Hope you’ve got solid rubber tires, because if the agency gets a lock on your direction of flight, you’re getting spiked - and if you hit spikes, you’re hosed. You’ll drive for a while, because spike strips are designed to puncture tires so they slowly deflate as opposed to blowing out. But once they’re flat, driving on them will make them disintegrate; then you’re driving on rims. Now you’re limited to fifteen to twenty miles per hour, and you’re in danger of your vehicle catching fire from the spraying sparks. Meanwhile, the agency is moving the K-9 unit to point position so when you shoulder your smoldering jalopy and make a run for it, Cujo’s got less ground to cover before he eats your forearm. (What’s the best way to escape the police in a high-speed car chase? - Quora) (05 oct 2011)
the barber's crotch on your upper arm (30 sep 2011)
realizing that the lion king broadway musical was based on the disney movie as one of those moments where I expected the world to run according to foreigner rules (30 sep 2011)
my instinct to ask of that girl, "why are you working?" (30 sep 2011)
"bebop subtlefucker" (30 sep 2011)
"it's really bevels and chamfers in there" (30 sep 2011)
a guy, a tremendously bright guy, who plays with a plastic dinosaur when he's solving a problem (30 sep 2011)
those goddamn gym backpacks (30 sep 2011)
american guys into "football" (30 sep 2011)
the word "peloton" more generally, or metonymically (30 sep 2011)
how I turn and watch as a guy runs to catch the subway, eager to find out whether he made it — and how that relates to our natural storytelling instinct, and vonnegut's dictum that "everybody must want something, even if it's only a glass of water" (28 sep 2011)
how the neat thing about kids is that for about ten years at least they hang on your every word, and your word exclusively. If you liked teaching, and pontificating, one can hardly imagine a better audience. Especially since you have a strong interest in their biding your advice — so you’d give them the best stuff and really care that they’re learning. (28 sep 2011)
"the throbbing garumps of a Jewish lothario" (28 sep 2011)
the worrisome poopy implications of someone washing their hands too thoroughly (28 sep 2011)
“Publishing a first novel is a down,” he said.
I don’t know whether I was more surprised by the sentiment or by the ’60s locution. We’d known each other back in the hippie days.
“Really?” I said. The past 10 years of hard work had been for nothing?
“You’ve spent your whole life thinking that if you can finally publish a book, everything will change,” he said. “You’ll suddenly be good looking and everybody will love you, the world will throw itself at your feet. Then you publish the damn thing and nothing happens. You’re the same social misfit and compulsive masturbator you always were.”
(
Ardent Spirit, Generous Friend: an article by David Guy | The American Scholar)
(26 sep 2011)
Reddit: What are the “rules” that a crossword has to obey? I read some of them once, I thought: diagonal symmetry, no more than some percent black spaces, etc.
Quigley: Odd number of squares on a side, grid should have 180 degree symmetry, no more than 1/6th of the grid is black square, word count something like 78 words for a 15x, 72 words if there’s no theme, no repeated words—even in the clues.
Reddit: Why those specifics?
Quigley: The first crossword editor, Margaret Farrar, came up with these rules to help her sift through the slush pile faster. She felt that anything else would be too easy to make and too simple to solve. Despite all the changes that the crossword has gone through, all of her rules stuck.
(
A New York Times Crossword Writer Explains His Craft - National - The Atlantic Wire)
(26 sep 2011)
Reddit: How do you go about filling in the words? I would assume you do the longer words first, followed by theme words?
Quigley: You start with the longest entries first, then you put in the entries that span the longest entries, then you work simultaneously across and down until you hit a corner.
(
A New York Times Crossword Writer Explains His Craft - National - The Atlantic Wire)
(26 sep 2011)
“Overeating is the addiction choice of carers, and that’s why it’s come to be regarded as the lowest-ranking of all the addictions. It’s a way of fucking yourself up whilst still remaining fully functional, because you have to. Fat people aren’t indulging in the ‘luxury’ of their addiction making them useless, chaotic or a burden. Instead, they are slowly self-destructing in a way that doesn’t inconvenience anyone. And that’s why it’s so often a woman’s addiction of choice. All the quietly eating mums. All the KitKats in office drawers. All the unhappy moments, late at night, caught only in the fridge-light.”
(
m.guardian.co.uk)
(26 sep 2011)routine size, testing, and rube goldberg machines (think of a submachine failing vs. a pulley). no need to factor out pulleys, because the failure mode of a pulley isn't very interesting. related: what was that game with the gizmos? (26 sep 2011)
* A study of upper-level computer-science students found that students’ comprehension of a program that was super-modularized into routines about 10 lines long was no better than their comprehension of a program that had no routines at all (Conte, Dunsmore, and Shen 1986). When the program was broken into routines of moderate length (about 25 lines), however, students scored 65% better on a test of comprehension.
(Hacker News | Size is the best predictor of code quality) (26 sep 2011)
ster·ic/ˈsterik/
Adjective: Of or relating to the spatial arrangement of atoms in a molecule, esp. as it affects chemical reactions.
(define steric - Google Search) (25 sep 2011)
The essential fact of folding, however, remains that the amino acid sequence of each protein contains the information that specifies both the native structure and the pathway to attain that state. (Protein folding - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) (25 sep 2011)
Tiger had a birdie in his pocket, unless he jerked it over the flock of genuine American coots and dunked it into the designer pond in front of the green. All he had to do was lay it up, pitch the ball close and sink his short putt. That was the safe play. That was what he should have done.
Tiger took a wood out of his bag.
The gallery erupted.
It had been a long time since any golf gallery cheered someone for removing a club from his bag. The ovation was not about redemption or about inspiration. It was not about the metaphysical maundering of theological dilettantes. It was about courage and risk and athletic daring. Its ultimate source was irrelevant, but I do not believe this golden moment was foreordained by God while Earl Woods was stumbling around Indochina trying not to get his ass shot off.
(
The Man. Amen.: Profiles: GQ)
(25 sep 2011)Why is the bishop pair so valuable? One explanation is that the bishop is really a more valuable piece than the knight due to its greater average mobility, but unless you have both bishops the opponent can play so as to take advantage of the fact that the bishop can only attack squares of one color. In my opinion, another reason is that any other pair of pieces suffers from redundancy. Two knights, two rooks, bishop and knight, or major plus minor piece are all capable of guarding the same squares, and therefore there is apt to be some duplication of function. (25 sep 2011)
Let me try for a wider explanation, because this is all coming very close to what I’ll call the Andy Grove Fallacy. The single biggest difference between the two types of R&D is this: McLaren is trying to optimize a technology that was discovered and developed by humans. GSK is trying to optimize against one that was not. Really, really not human, not done with human motives or with human understanding in mind. Living systems, I believe, are the only such technology we’ve ever encountered, and it’s something to see. Billions of years of evolutionary tinkering have lead to something so complex and so strange that it can make the highest human-designed technology look like something built with sticks. To give Andy Grove a tiny break, the devices we’ve built in the IT industry (and the software used to run them) are the closest approximations, but they’re really not very close, because we made them, and what human ingenuity can make, human ingenuity can understand. The body-temperature water-based molecular nanotechnology that’s running us (and every other living thing on the planet) is something else again. And it comes with no documentation at all, other than what we can puzzle out ourselves, a process still very much incomplete. (25 sep 2011)
When James, the squadron commander, spoke, he started by citing all the forward operating bases in eastern Afghanistan that had been named for SEALs killed in combat. “Everything we have done for the last ten years prepared us for this,” he told Obama. The President was “in awe of these guys,” Ben Rhodes, the deputy national-security adviser, who travelled with Obama, said. “It was an extraordinary base visit,” he added. “They knew he had staked his Presidency on this. He knew they staked their lives on it.”
(
Planning & Executing the Mission to Get Bin Laden : The New Yorker)
(24 sep 2011)
Brian invited James, the commander of DEVGRU’s Red Squadron, and Mark, the master chief petty officer, to join him at C.I.A. headquarters. They spent the next two and a half weeks considering ways to get inside bin Laden’s house. One option entailed flying helicopters to a spot outside Abbottabad and letting the team sneak into the city on foot. The risk of detection was high, however, and the SEALs would be tired by a long run to the compound. The planners had contemplated tunnelling in—or, at least, the possibility that bin Laden might tunnel out. But images provided by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency showed that there was standing water in the vicinity, suggesting that the compound sat in a flood basin. The water table was probably just below the surface, making tunnels highly unlikely. Eventually, the planners agreed that it made the most sense to fly directly into the compound. “Special operations is about doing what’s not expected, and probably the least expected thing here was that a helicopter would come in, drop guys on the roof, and land in the yard,” the special-operations officer said.
(
Planning & Executing the Mission to Get Bin Laden : The New Yorker)
(24 sep 2011)
During the next four minutes, the interior of the Black Hawks rustled alive with the metallic cough of rounds being chambered.
(
Planning & Executing the Mission to Get Bin Laden : The New Yorker)
(24 sep 2011)A male employee, Ken, walks into the copy room and sees a female employee, Barb, making copies. Barb looks up and says, "Hello." Ken asks, "Hello." Ken asks, "Reproducing, eh? Can I help?" (22 sep 2011)
"I need someone here working, not out welping a pup" (22 sep 2011)
Some men learn all they know from
books; others from life; both kinds are narrow. The first are all
theory; the second are all practice. It’s the fellow who knows enough
about practice to test his theories for blow-holes that gives the world
a shove ahead, and finds a fair margin of profit in shoving it. (The Project Gutenberg eBook of Letters from A Self-Made Merchant To His Son, by George Horace Lorimer.) (21 sep 2011)
Now I know you’ll say that I don’t understand how it is; that you’ve got
to do as the other fellows do; and that things have changed since I was
a boy. There’s nothing in it. Adam invented all the different ways in
which a young man can make a fool of himself (The Project Gutenberg eBook of Letters from A Self-Made Merchant To His Son, by George Horace Lorimer.) (21 sep 2011)
and then shipped him to Oxford
to soak in a little “atmosphere,” as he put it. I never could quite lay
hold of that atmosphere dodge by the tail, but so far as I could make
out, the idea was[Pg 010] that there was something in the air of the Oxford
ham-house that gave a fellow an extra fancy smoke. (The Project Gutenberg eBook of Letters from A Self-Made Merchant To His Son, by George Horace Lorimer.) (21 sep 2011)
After a square meal of roast beef and vegetables, and mince pie
and watermelon, you can’t say just which ingredient is going into muscle,
but you don’t have to be very bright to figure out which one started the
demand for painkiller in your insides, or to guess, next morning, which
one made you believe in a personal devil the night before. And so, while
a fellow can’t figure out to an ounce whether it’s Latin or algebra or
history or [Pg 006] what among the solids that is building him up in this place
or that, he can go right along feeding them in and betting that they’re
not the things that turn his tongue fuzzy. It’s down among the sweets,
among his amusements and recreations, that he’s going to find his
stomach-ache, and it’s there that he wants to go slow and to pick and
choose. (The Project Gutenberg eBook of Letters from A Self-Made Merchant To His Son, by George Horace Lorimer.) (21 sep 2011)
The first thing that any education ought to give a man is character, and
the second thing is education. That is where I’m a little skittish about
this college business. I’m not starting in to preach to you, because I
know a young fellow with the right sort of stuff in him preaches to
himself harder than any one else can, and that he’s mighty often
switched off the right path by having it pointed out to him in the wrong
way.
(The Project Gutenberg eBook of Letters from A Self-Made Merchant To His Son, by George Horace Lorimer.) (21 sep 2011)
Dear Pierrepont: Your Ma got back safe this morning and she wants me
to be sure to tell you not to over-study, and I want to tell you to be
sure not to under-study. What we’re really sending you to Harvard for is
to get a little of the education that’s so good and plenty there. When
it’s passed around you don’t want to be bashful, but reach right out and
take a big helping every time, for I want you to get your share. You’ll
find that education’s about the only thing lying around loose in this
world, and that it’s about the only thing a fellow can have as much of
as he’s willing to haul away. Everything else is screwed down tight and
the screw-driver lost. (The Project Gutenberg eBook of Letters from A Self-Made Merchant To His Son, by George Horace Lorimer.) (21 sep 2011)
The Supreme Court in Santosky further noted that “Since the factfinding phase of a permanent neglect proceeding is an adversary contest between the State and the natural parents, the relevant question is whether a preponderance standard fairly allocates the risk of an erroneous factfinding between these two parties.” Id, at 761. The Supreme Court found, in the context of a termination of parental rights proceeding, that such an evidentiary standard did not fairly allocate these risks. Id, at 758. Its reasoning is equally applicable to abuse and neglect proceedings:
The State’s ability to assemble its case almost inevitably dwarfs the parents’ ability to mount a defense. No predetermined limits restrict the sums an agency may spend in prosecuting a given termination proceeding. The State’s attorney usually will be expert on the issues contested and the procedures employed at the factfinding hearing, and enjoys full access to all public records concerning the family. The State may call on experts in family relations, psychology, and medicine to bolster its case. Furthermore, the primary witnesses at the hearing will be the agency’s own professional caseworkers, whom the State has empowered both to investigate the family situation and to testify against the parents…. A standard of proof that, by its very terms, demands consideration of the quantity, rather than the quality, of the evidence may misdirect the factfinder in the marginal case.
Id, at 763-64.
(Is the “Preponderance of the Evidence” Evidentiary Standard in an Abuse and Neglect Proceeding Unconstitutional? (November 2005) | Gregory Forman, Attorney at Law - Charleston Divorce, Custody, Family Law, and Support) (20 sep 2011)
The United States Supreme Court “has mandated an intermediate standard of proof — ‘clear and convincing evidence’ — when the individual interests at stake in a state proceeding are both ‘particularly important’ and ‘more substantial than mere loss of money.’”Santosky v. Kramer, 455 U.S. 745, 756 (1982). For example, in the context of a termination of parental rights case, a clear and convincing evidentiary standard is required. Id, at 758. (Is the “Preponderance of the Evidence” Evidentiary Standard in an Abuse and Neglect Proceeding Unconstitutional? (November 2005) | Gregory Forman, Attorney at Law - Charleston Divorce, Custody, Family Law, and Support) (20 sep 2011)
Or had they purchased it from Zlob’s authors (believed to be East European criminal hackers) on the exploit black market, where zero-days can sell for as high as $50,000 to $500,000?
(
How Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet, the Most Menacing Malware in History | Threat Level | Wired.com)
(20 sep 2011)The wagoneer hardly hears you. “Of course!” he shouts. “It’s all so obvious in retrospect! Wood is simply the wrong material for building wagons! This is the dawn of a new era - the nonwood era - of wheels, axles, carts all made from nonwood! Not only that, instead of taking apples to market, we’ll take nonapples! There’s a huge market for nonapples - people buy far more nonapples than apples - we should have no trouble selling them! It will be the era of the nouvelle wagon!”
The set “apples” is much narrower than the set “not apples”. Apples form a compact cluster in thingspace, but nonapples vary much more widely in price, and size, and use. When you say to build a wagon using “wood”, you’re giving much more concrete advice than when you say “not wood”. There are different kinds of wood, of course - but even so, when you say “wood”, you’ve narrowed down the range of possible building materials a whole lot more than when you say “not wood”.
In the same fashion, “asynchronous” - literally “not synchronous” - is a much larger design space than “synchronous”. If one considers the space of all communicating processes, then synchrony is a very strong constraint on those processes. If you toss out synchrony, then you have to pick some other method for preventing communicating processes from stepping on each other - synchrony is one way of doing that, a specific answer to the question.
(Selling Nonapples - Less Wrong) (20 sep 2011)
The Law of Demeter (LoD) or Principle of Least Knowledge is a design guideline for developing software, particularly object-oriented programs. In its general form, the LoD is a specific case of loose coupling. The guideline was invented at Northeastern University towards the end of 1987, and can be succinctly summarized in one of the following ways:
- Each unit should have only limited knowledge about other units: only units “closely” related to the current unit.
- Each unit should only talk to its friends; don’t talk to strangers.
- Only talk to your immediate friends.
The fundamental notion is that a given object should assume as little as possible about the structure or properties of anything else (including its subcomponents).
(Law of Demeter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) (19 sep 2011)
the idea of only reading primary sources, or deep-dive books, both for sluyteresque reasons and because that's the stuff that'll stick
like dissertations, conference proceedings, interviews, manuals, etc. (19 sep 2011)
what of that senior year feeling of owning the place? (19 sep 2011)
While the reasons for this ubiquitous male vulnerability remain debated, there are several compelling reasons why men are more likely than women to die under the extreme conditions the Donner Party faced. First, men are bigger than women. Typical body weights for the world as a whole are about 140 pounds for men and only 120 pounds for women. Hence, even while lying down and doing nothing, men need more food to support their basal metabolism. They also need more energy than women do for equivalent physical activity. Even for sedentary people, the typical metabolic rate for an average-size woman is 25 percent lower than an average-size man’s. Under conditions of cold temperatures and heavy physical activity, such as were faced by the Donner Party men when doing the backbreaking work of cutting the wagon road or hunting for food, men’s metabolic rates can be double those of women. To top it all off, women have more fat reserves than men: fat makes up 22 percent of the body weight of an average nonobese, well- nourished woman, but only 16 percent of a similar man. More of the man’s weight is instead made up of muscle, which gets burned up much more quickly than does fat. Thus, when there simply was no more food left, the Donner Party men burned up their body reserves much faster than did the women. Furthermore, much of women’s fat is distributed under the skin and acts as heat insulation, so that they can withstand cold temperatures better than men can. Women don’t have to raise their metabolic rate to stay warm as soon as men do.
(
Living Through the Donner Party | Human Origins | DISCOVER Magazine)
(19 sep 2011)
abies have special problems. Per pound of body weight a baby has twice an adult’s surface area, which means double the area across which body heat can escape. To maintain body temperature, babies have to increase their metabolic rate when air temperature drops only a few degrees below body temperature, whereas adults don’t have to do so until a drop of 20 to 35 degrees. At cold temperatures the factor by which babies must increase their metabolism to stay warm is several times that for adults. These considerations place even well-fed babies at risk under cold conditions. And the Donner Party babies were at a crippling further disadvantage because they had so little food to fuel their metabolism. They literally froze to death.
(
Living Through the Donner Party | Human Origins | DISCOVER Magazine)
(19 sep 2011)
The fourth and last rescue team reached the lake on April 17 to find Keseberg alone, surrounded by indescribable filth and mutilated corpses. George Donner’s body lay with his skull split open to permit the extraction of his brains. Three frozen ox legs lay in plain view almost uneaten beside a kettle of cut-up human flesh. Near Keseberg sat two kettles of blood and a large pan full of fresh human liver and lungs. He alleged that his four companions had died natural deaths, but he was frank about having eaten them. As to why he had not eaten ox leg instead, he explained that it was too dry: human liver and lungs tasted better, and human brains made a good soup.
(
Living Through the Donner Party | Human Origins | DISCOVER Magazine)
(19 sep 2011)
When William Eddy and William Foster, who had gotten out with the snowshoers, reached the lake with the third rescue team on March 13, they found that Keseberg had eaten their sons.
(
Living Through the Donner Party | Human Origins | DISCOVER Magazine)
(19 sep 2011)Bogin had another innovation: classes were videotaped. This was not a vestige of Soviet surveillance. Rather, he wanted to critique how teachers interacted with — and nurtured relations between — children. Bogin and his staff often worked late into the night, reviewing footage and discussing methodology. (My Family’s Experiment in Extreme Schooling - NYTimes.com) (19 sep 2011)
But Bogin added courses like antimanipulation, which was intended to give children tools to decipher commercial or political messages. (My Family’s Experiment in Extreme Schooling - NYTimes.com) (19 sep 2011)
After performing an unaccustomed eccentric exercise and exhibiting severe soreness, the muscle rapidly adapts to reduce further damage from the same exercise. This is called the “repeated-bout effect”.[9]
(Delayed onset muscle soreness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) (18 sep 2011)
There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day.
(
Mr. X [longform.org])
(17 sep 2011)Indian at a bagel store: “they’re giving away lakhs at the bagel store” (16 sep 2011)
"College boys will say a college girl who had brothers tends to have an appealing sort of winking lack of seriousness" (16 sep 2011)
The towers are not located at the center a circle. The cells are usually hexagons and one tower with a tri-dimensional antenna sits at the vertex of three cells. More on this in subsequent posts. (16 sep 2011)
It is hard enough translating from animal models to humans with compounds, but worse yet to rely on genetic ablation, reduction by siRNA or other (Targets to Avoid (Or That We Wish We Had). In the Pipeline:) (16 sep 2011)
Last, but surely not least, Rylands’ articulation of strict liability as a general idea is an essential part of the formative moment of modern tort law (16 sep 2011)
After excavating the basis and nature of strict liability in Rylands, (16 sep 2011)
you know it’s like there’s a fifth wall in that room when drew’s playing (16 sep 2011)
is there a way you have to move a laser pointer before a cat becomes interested in it? (or is there a way to move it so the cat isn't interested?) (15 sep 2011)
how bittorrent is like costco in that the merchandise mostly comes in bulk, and how this is probably because seeders wouldn't suit up for the extra niche-y stuff (15 sep 2011)
The main things that Amos Tversky and I worked with are cases in which similarity is used instead of probability. Our most famous example is a lady named “Linda”. I don’t know how many of you have heard of Linda. Linda studied philosophy in college, and most people think she was at Berkeley. She participated in anti-nuclear marches, she was very active, she’s very bright, and ten years have passed, and what is she now? Is she an accountant? No. Is she a bank teller? No. Is she a feminist? Yes. Is she a feminist bank teller? Yes. You can see what happens. She a feminist bank teller because, in terms of similarity, it’s perfect to say that she’s more like a feminist bank teller than she is like a bank teller. In terms of probability, it doesn’t work. But what happens is when you’re asked to compute probability, probability is hard, similarity is immediate; it’s a natural assessment. It will come in first, and it will preempt the correct calculation.
(
The Marvels And The Flaws Of Intuitive Thinking Edge master Class 2011 | Conversation | Edge)
(15 sep 2011)
The confidence that people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence, it is not a judgment of the quality of the evidence but it is a judgment of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct.
(
The Marvels And The Flaws Of Intuitive Thinking Edge master Class 2011 | Conversation | Edge)
(15 sep 2011)“A politician knows that more important than the bill that is proposed is the law that is passed. A politician knows that his friends are not always his allies, and that his adversaries are not his enemies. A politician knows how to make the process of democracy work, and loves the intricate workings of the democratic system. A politician knows not only how to count votes, but how to make his vote count. A politician knows that his words are his weapons, but that his word is his bond. A politician knows that only if he leaves room for discussion and room for concession can he gain room for maneuver. A politician knows that the best way to be a winner is to make the other side feel it does not have to be a loser.”
(15 sep 2011)Per capita electricity shot up from about 4,000 kilowatt-hours per US resident to over 13,000 kilowatt-hours by the 2000s. (15 sep 2011)
if someone asked you to realistically cast a new york subway car, could you do it? (15 sep 2011)
“Except for these fiddles, not one single object on this earth works better than it did 200 years ago,” he says insistently. “Stradivari is the ultimate icon of Western civilization. I mean, what finer thing exists?”
(
This Violin is Worth $3.5 Million--Why? by Jon Gertner | Byliner)
(14 sep 2011)“Tower’s stories [have] the kind of torque that’s so damnably rare these days in American short fiction, where the payoff tends to be the faint, jewel-box click of epiphany, the small tilting of a life. Tower’s ambition is greater and brawnier than that.” (14 sep 2011)
My favorite the ory of the day. That the rea son Euro pean drag ons and Chi nese drag ons may look dif fer ent is that Europe had ter adactyls (bird like with wings) fos sils and Chi nese had sauro pod fos sils (long).
(
Dinosaurs, the inspiration for dragons and forefathers of the chicken | Jennifer 8. Lee)
(13 sep 2011)
I’m reminded of the odd practice in cigar factories of appointing a lector, or reader. Factory managers hired a lector with a good, strong voice to read to their workers, keeping their minds occupied while their skilled hands wrapped tobacco leaves in tight rolls. Although the lector was paid by the owners, he was able to suggest his own readings - and the selection was typically left to a vote of the workers themselves. Novels, newspapers, political tracts - the selections were eclectic. But the results were striking - manual laborers receiving all the fruits of an education they never would have been able to afford
(
That Ghetto University... - Ta-Nehisi Coates - Personal - The Atlantic)
(13 sep 2011)Logos are like containers of dreams for the business to be. That's why they seem so important to new founders. They're meant to graphically represent the vision, attitude, and grounding spirit of the enterprise. So they have to look a certain way. All the curves and graphical choices have to stand for something.
It's like these paragraphs underneath paintings in an exhibition. The prose does more work, in terms of conveying what the piece is meant to "say," than the piece itself. Isn't the more valid reaction the one that a person has when the painting is presented bare?
These pitches, then, that go into the crafting and selling of a particular logo, are a joke, because the impact of the thing will really come down to bare aesthetics — what does it look like? Is it poorly colored? — and, of course, the associations it evokes. None of which come from inside the logo. What matters is the operation of the business and its branding. The signifier is arbitrary. (11 sep 2011)
"Amazing how much they can talk about medicine without talking about patients." (11 sep 2011)
To be imprinted falsely regarding one's looks. (11 sep 2011)
They left sugar-filled petri dishes out overnight at a remote Egyptian date farm, to capture wild airborne yeast cells, then mailed the samples to a Belgian lab, where the organisms were isolated and grown in large quantities.
(
The Beer Archaeologist | History & Archaeology | Smithsonian Magazine)
(11 sep 2011)
As a boy, John Seo learned everything he could about the Titanic. “It was considered unsinkable because it had a hull of 16 chambers,” he says. The chambers were stacked back to front. If the ship hit something head on, the object might puncture the front chamber, but it would likely have to puncture at least three more to sink the ship. “They probably said, What are the odds of four chambers going?” he says. “There might have been a one-in-a-hundred chance of puncturing a single chamber, but the odds of puncturing four chambers, they probably thought of as one in a million. That’s because they thought of them as independent chambers. And the chambers might have been independent if the first officer hadn’t gambled at the last minute and swerved. By swerving, the iceberg went down the side of the ship. If the officer had taken it head on, he might have killed a passenger or two, but the ship might not have sunk. The mistake was to turn. Often people associate action with lowering risk or controlling risk,
(
New Orleans - Hurricane Katrina - Housing - Insurance - Natural Disasters and Storms - Real Estate - New York Times)
(11 sep 2011)And a smile — ah, I would get me a smile. I’m still working on that smile. It is to combine the best qualities of a hotel manager, an experienced old social weasel, a headmaster on visitors’ day, a colored elevator man, a pansy pulling a profile, a producer getting stuff at half its market value, a trained nurse coming on a new job, a body-vender in her first rotogravure, a hopeful extra swept near the camera, a ballet dancer with an infected toe, and of course the great beam of loving kindness common to all those from Washington to Beverly Hills who must exist by virtue of the contorted pan.
(Print - The Crack-Up - Esquire) (11 sep 2011)
So, since I could no longer fulfill the obligations that life had set for me or that I had set for myself, why not slay the empty shell who had been posturing at it for four years? I must continue to be a writer because that was my only way of life, but I would cease any attempts to be a person — to be kind, just, or generous. There were plenty of counterfeit coins around that would pass instead of these and I knew where I could get them at a nickel on the dollar. In thirty-nine years an observant eye has learned to detect where the milk is watered and the sugar is sanded, the rhinestone passed for diamond and the stucco for stone. (Print - The Crack-Up - Esquire) (11 sep 2011)
I told of the succeeding period of desolation and of the necessity of going on, but without the benefit of Henley’s familiar heroics, “my head is bloody but unbowed. (Print - The Crack-Up - Esquire) (11 sep 2011)
(1) That I had done very little thinking, save within the problems of my craft. For twenty years a certain man had been my intellectual conscience. That was Edmund Wilson.
(2) That another man represented my sense of the “good life,” though I saw him once in a decade, and since then he might have been hung. He is in the fur business in the Northwest and wouldn’t like his name set down here. But in difficult situations I have tried to think what he would have thought, how he would have acted.
(3) That a third contemporary had been an artistic conscience to me — I had not imitated his infectious style, because my own style, such as it is, was formed before he published anything, but there was an awful pull toward him when I was on a spot.
(4) That a fourth man had come to dictate my relations with other people when these relations were successful: how to do, what to say. How to make people at least momentarily happy (in opposition to Mrs. Post’s theories of how to make everyone thoroughly uncomfortable with a sort of systemized vulgarity). This always confused me and made me want to go out and get drunk, but this man had seen the game, analyzed it, and beaten it, and his word was good enough for me.
(5) That my political conscience had scarcely existed for ten years save as an element of irony in my stuff. When I became again concerned with the system I should function under, it was a man much younger than myself who brought it to me, with a mixture of passion and fresh air.
So there was not an “I” anymore — not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect — save my limitless capacity for toil that it seemed I possessed no more. It was strange to have no self — to be like a little boy left along in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do —
(Print - The Crack-Up - Esquire) (11 sep 2011)
Well, when I had reached this period of silence, I was forced into a measure that no one ever adopts voluntarily: I was impelled to think. God, was it difficult! The moving about of great secret trunks. (Print - The Crack-Up - Esquire) (11 sep 2011)
I set that down as an example of what haunted me during the long night — this was something I could neither accept nor struggle against, something which tended to make my efforts obsolescent, as the chain stores have crippled the small merchant, an exterior force, unbeatable —
(I have the sense of lecturing now, looking at a watch on the desk before me and seeing how many more minutes — )
(Print - The Crack-Up - Esquire) (11 sep 2011)
where personality was worn down to the inevitable low gear of collaboration. (Print - The Crack-Up - Esquire) (11 sep 2011)
a feeling that I was standing at twilight on a deserted range, with an empty rifle in my hands and the targets down. (Print - The Crack-Up - Esquire) (11 sep 2011)
Print - The Crack-Up - Esquire
Originally published as a three-part series in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of Esquire
Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work — the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside — the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within — that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick — the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.
Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation — the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the “impossible,” come true. Life was something you dominated if you were any good. Life yielded easily to intelligence and effort, or to what proportion could be mustered of both. It seemed a romantic business to be a successful literary man — you were not ever going to be as famous as a movie star but what note you had was probably longer-lived; you were never going to have the power of a man of strong political or religious convictions but you were certainly more independent. Of course within the practice of your trade you were forever unsatisfied — but I, for one, would not have chosen any other.
As the Twenties passed, with my own twenties marching a little ahead of them, my two juvenile regrets — at not being big enough (or good enough) to play football in college, and at not getting overseas during the war — resolved themselves into childish waking dreams of imaginary heroism that were good enough to go to sleep on in restless nights. The big problems of life seemed to solve themselves, and if the business of fixing them was difficult, it made one too tired to think of more general problems.
Life, ten years ago, was largely a personal matter. I must hold in balance the sense of futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to “succeed” — and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills — domestic, professional, and personal — then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last.
For seventeen years, with a year of deliberate loafing and resting out in the center — things went on like that, with a new chore only a nice prospect for he next day. I was living hard, too, but: “Up to forty-nine it’ll be all right,” I said. “I can count on that. For a man who’s lived as I have, that’s all you could ask.”
— And then, ten years this side of forty-nine, I suddenly realized I had prematurely cracked.
Now a man can crack in many ways — can crack in the head, in which case the power of decision is taken from you by others; or in the body, when one can but submit to the white hospital world; or in the nerves. William Seabrook in an unsympathetic book tells, with some pride and a movie ending, of how he became a public charge. What led to his alcoholism, or was bound up with it, was a collapse of his nervous system. Though the present writer was not so entangled — having at the time not tasted so much as a glass of beer for six months — it was his nervous reflexes that were giving way — too much anger and too many tears.
Moreover, to go back to my thesis that life has a varying offensive, the realization of having cracked was not simultaneous with a blow, but with a reprieve.
Not long before, I had sat in the office of a great doctor and listened to a grave sentence. With what, in retrospect, seems some equanimity, I had gone on about my affairs in the city where I was then living, not caring much, not thinking how much had been left undone, or what would become of this and that responsibility, like people do in books; I was well insured and anyhow I had been only a mediocre caretaker of most of the things left in my hands, even of my talent.
But I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn’t want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life — I was an average mixer, but more than average in a tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those of all classes that came in contact with. I was always saving or being saved — in a single morning I would go through the emotions ascribable to Wellington at Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable friends and supporters.
But now I wanted to be absolutely alone and so arranged a certain insulation from ordinary cares.
It was not an unhappy time. I went away and there were fewer people. I found I was good-and-tired. I could lie around and was glad to, sleeping or dozing sometimes twenty hours a day and in the intervals trying resolutely not to think — instead I made lists — made lists and tore them up, hundreds of lists: of cavalry leaders and football players and cities, and popular tunes and pitchers, and happy times, and hobbies and houses lived in and how many suits since I left the army and how many pairs of shoes (I didn’t count the suit I bought in Sorrento that shrank, nor the pumps and dress shirt and collar that I carried around for years and never wore, because the pumps got damp and grainy and the shirt and collar got yellow and starch-rotted). And lists of women I’d liked, and of the times I had let myself be snubbed by people who had not been my betters in character or ability.
— And then suddenly, surprisingly, I got better.
— And cracked like an old plate as soon as I heard the news.
That is the real end of this story. What was to be done about it will have to rest in what used to be called the “womb of time.” Suffice to say that after about an hour of solitary pillow-hugging, I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt. What was the small gift of life given back in comparison to that? — when there had once been a pride of direction and a confidence in enduring independence.
I realized that in those two years, in order to preserve something — an inner hush maybe, maybe not — I had weaned myself from all the things I used to love — that every act of life from the morning toothbrush to the friend at dinner had become an effort. I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking. I saw that even my love for those closest to me had become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations — with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend, were only what I remembered I should do, from other days. All in the same month I became bitter about such things as the sound of the radio, the advertisements in the magazines, the screech of tracks, the dead silence of the country — contemptuous at human softness, immediately (if secretively) quarrelsome toward hardness — hating the night when I couldn’t sleep and hating the day because it went toward night. I slept on the heart side now because I knew that the sooner I could tire that out, even a little, the sooner would come that blessed hour of nightmare which, like a catharsis, would enable me to better meet the new day.
There were certain spots, certain faces I could look at. Like most midwesterners, I have never had any but the vaguest race prejudices — I always had a secret yen for the lovely Scandinavian blondes who sat on porches in St. Paul but hadn’t emerged enough economically to be part of what was then society. They were too nice to be “chickens” and too quickly off the farmlands to seize a place in the sun, but I remember going round blocks to catch a single glimpse of shining hair — the bright shock of a girl I’d never know. This is urban, unpopular talk. It strays afield from the fact that in these latter days I couldn’t stand the sight of Celts, English, Politicians, Strangers, Virginians, Negroes (light or dark), Hunting People, or retail clerks, and middlemen in general, all writers (I avoided writers carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can) — and all the classes as classes and most of them as members of their class…
Trying to cling to something, I liked doctors and girl children up to the age of about thirteen and well-brought-up boy children from about eight years old on. I could have peace and happiness with these few categories of people. I forgot to add that I liked old men — men over seventy, sometimes over sixty if their faces looked seasoned. I liked Katherine Hepburn’s face on the screen, no matter what was said about her pretentiousness, and Miriam Hopkins’s face, and old friends if I only saw them once a year and could remember their ghosts.
All rather inhuman and undernourished, isn’t it? Well, that, children, is the true sign of cracking up.
It is not a pretty picture. Inevitably it was carted here and there within its frame and exposed to various critics. One of them can only be described as a person whose life makes other people’s lives seem like death — even this time when she was cast in the unusually unappealing role of Job’s comforter. In spite of the fact that this story is over, let me append our conversation as a sort of postscript:
“Instead of being so sorry for yourself, listen — “she said. (She always says “Listen,” because she thinks while she talks — really thinks.) So she said: “Listen. Suppose this wasn’t a crack in you — suppose it was a crack in the Grand Canyon.”
“The crack’s in me,” I said heroically.
“Listen! The world only exists in your eyes — your conception of it. You can make it as big or as small as you want to. And you’re trying to be a little puny individual. By God, if I ever cracked, I’d try to make the world crack with me. Listen! The world only exists through your apprehension of it, and so it’s much better to say that it’s not you that’s cracked — it’s the Grand Canyon.”
“Baby, et up all her Spinoza?”
“I don’t know anything about Spinoza. I know — “ She spoke, then, of old woes of her own, that seemed, in telling, to have been more dolorous than mine, and how she had met them, overridden them, beaten them.
I felt a certain reaction to what she said, but I am a slow-thinking man, and it occurred to me simultaneously that of all natural forces, vitality is the incommunicable one. In days when juice came into one as an article without duty, one tried to distribute it — but always without success; to further mix metaphors, vitality never “takes.” You have it or you haven’t it, like health or brown eyes or honor or a baritone voice. I might have asked some of it from her, neatly wrapped and ready for home cooking and digestion, but I could never have got it — not if I’d waited around for a thousand hours with the tin cup of self-pity. I could walk from her door, holding myself very carefully like cracked crockery, and go away into the world of bitterness, where I was making a home with such materials as are found there — and quote to myself after I left her door:
“Ye are the salt of the earth. But if the salt hath lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?”
Matthew 5:13
(
Print - The Crack-Up - Esquire)
(11 sep 2011)
but I remember going round blocks to catch a single glimpse of shining hair — the bright shock of a girl I’d never know.
(
Print - The Crack-Up - Esquire)
(11 sep 2011)
Life, ten years ago, was largely a personal matter. I must hold in balance the sense of futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to “succeed” — and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future.
(
Print - The Crack-Up - Esquire)
(11 sep 2011)
Life, ten years ago, was largely a personal matter. I must hold in balance the sense of futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to “succeed” — and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills — domestic, professional, and personal — then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last.
(
Print - The Crack-Up - Esquire)
(11 sep 2011)
Many organizations repeat this mantra without really understanding it and in practice honor it only in the breach.
(
OUPblog » Blog Archive » 5 habits of highly effective terrorist organizations)
(11 sep 2011)
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, Have always known, know that we can’t escape, Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go. Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
(
Aubade - Philip Larkin)
(10 sep 2011)“As a result of these developments in method, Ford’s cars came off the line in three minute intervals. This was much faster than previous methods, increasing production by eight to one (requiring 12.5 man-hours before, 1 hour 33 minutes after), while using less manpower.[2] It was so successful, paint became a bottleneck. Only japan black would dry fast enough, forcing the company to drop the variety of colors available before 1914, until fast-drying Duco lacquer was developed in 1926.[2] In 1914, an assembly line worker could buy a Model T with four months’ pay.[2] (09 sep 2011)
“I feel like this year’s fibonacci conference will be as big as the last two combined!” (09 sep 2011)
The requests (which are just URLs, and any postdata/cookies if applicable) are sent to my server via SMS.
The responses are sent back to the phone via MMS, in up to 5 (I think?) segments. I download the webpage along with all resources (stylesheets, images, etc.) and put everything in a zip file. I encode the zip file as a PNG (each RGB pixel is 3 bytes of the zip file) and send the PNG in the MMS.
(Hacker News | Show HN: Smozzy (for Android/T-Mobile) - browse the web without a data plan) (09 sep 2011)
What does it say about us that we keep cats and dogs as pets — that we had the urge to in the first place? (09 sep 2011)
One initially thinks that Jim Carey in Liar Liar could say something like "P does not equal NP" and be a hero, because if it weren't true, he wouldn't be able to say it.
But the "truth" that his son's wish was after wasn't truth in the mathematical sense, but truth in the sense of saying what you believe. If Jim were unable to say "P does not equal NP" it wouldn't mean that the statement is false (and therefore that P = NP), but rather that Jim doesn't believe that P does not equal NP. He would be misrepresenting what he thinks, which is what the wish forbids.
In The Invention of Lying the implied epistemology is the obverse. (09 sep 2011)
Unlike many books that are strong on analysis, the prescription isn’t bad because it is an anemic afterthought shoved into a last chapter (08 sep 2011)
"T.G.I.F's" inspired blend of Taylor Swiftian teen aspiration - which is a kind of humility - and relish in the impure vices - which is not - even manifests, and crisply at that, in the difference between the raw audio track and its video. (08 sep 2011)
"I don't like the word 'stress'. It's a Madison Avenue word, it's something that can be cured with flavored coffee and bath bubbles." (07 sep 2011)
(Gaining a leg up in the transfer grab, Northwestern sent “conditional admittance” letters to a bunch of students denied initial admission, informing them that they will be admitted as transfers if they meet a specified class rank in their first year elsewhere. ) (06 sep 2011)
namely his prejudiced (in the exact meaning of that term—pre-judged) (06 sep 2011)
It might be a good idea to rip through my Reader shares and collect the "greatest hits", or the best ones, especially ones that might have been missed. I could put them on a page on jsomers.net somewhere, for instance. (05 sep 2011)
My little brother, quoting a noted SC personality: when you’re ahead, get more ahead. It is probably the most important strategic lesson in the game: if you have a temporary 5 pct material advantage, you can still easily get outplayed if you force a fight. Better to turn that into a 10 pct material advantage, etc, and force a fight only after you’ve already won. (Hacker News | Game theory article from a professional Starcraft player/caster.) (05 sep 2011)
does c overrely on the idea of a long tail? (05 sep 2011)
AI parsing and A not getting R's "She made those for Valentine's Day." Does "those" refer to those very chipwiches, or just the type of chipwich? (05 sep 2011)
"So did you end up going to computer camp, after all that criticism from your brothers?"… "ZEEEEERRRROOOOOO!" (05 sep 2011)
You could not say a word and still be thought a great conversationalist if your interlocutor somehow trusts you with their best stuff, thinks that with you they can operate at full bandwidth — basically if they like what they imagine you're thinking as they talk. (05 sep 2011)
Harder steels for cutting edges were developed[3] which allowed steel rather than iron to be used for parts, eliminating the problem of warping and dimensional changes associated with heat treatment hardening of iron parts after machining.[1] Modern cutting edges use materials such as tungsten carbide. Other innovations were drop forging and stamped steel parts, which reduced or eliminated the amount of machining.
(Interchangeable parts - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) (04 sep 2011)
Interchangeability of parts was achieved by combining a number of innovations and improvements in machining operations and machine tools. These innovations included invention of new machine tools, jigs for guiding the machine tools, fixtures for holding the workpiece in the proper position, and blocks and gauges to check the accuracy of the finished parts.[1]Electrification allowed individual machine tools to be powered by electric motors, eliminating line shaft drives from steam engines or water power and allowing higher speeds, making modern large scale manufacturing possible.[2] Modern machines tools often have numerical control (NC) which evolved into CNC (computerized numeric control) when microprocessors became available.
(Interchangeable parts - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) (04 sep 2011)
A line shaft is a power transmission system used extensively during the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the widespread use of electric motors small enough to be connected directly to each piece of machinery, line shafting was used to distribute power from a large central power source to machinery throughout an industrial complex. The central power source could be a water wheel or turbine, animal power, a stationary steam engine, a steam traction engine, a portable engine, or, in later years, a single large electric motor. Power was distributed from the shaft to the machinery by a system of belts,and pulleys. (Line shaft - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) (04 sep 2011)
In Norway, government-funded construction projects exceeding a certain cost are required to include some kind of art work. (Svalbard Global Seed Vault - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) (04 sep 2011)
Understanding what soldiers perceive as they scan is also important. The ability to distinguish animal from other organic and mechanical motion “is hard-coded in our brain,” Merlo told me. “It’s evolutionarily advantageous to know that a moving tree branch is not nearly as dangerous as a moving tiger.” Disguising joint movement is especially critical. Breaking up a soldier’s pattern at the elbows, knees, hips, and shoulders can help deflect an enemy’s attention. “Ultimately,” said Merlo, “we’re trying to confuse the way that you detect targets out in nature.”
(
Invisible, Inc. - Magazine - The Atlantic)
(03 sep 2011)“the sovereign means for believing what one likes in psychology, and for turning what might become a science into a tumbling-ground for whimsies.” () (03 sep 2011)
Dumont and its neighboring towns happen to be a gold mine for prescription-fillings. For every square half-mile in the area, residents are filling more than 80,000 prescriptions per year. In Dumont alone, that means there are at least 320,000 prescriptions filled annually. Eighty thousand is a magic number for national pharmacies — it’s the bare minimum required before entering a market. There are eight pharmacies within two miles of Dumont, but the area’s annual prescription demand suggests it could support four or five more. This battle will rage on.
(The New Tech Helping Retailers Pick the Right Spot - John Cantwell - Technology - The Atlantic) (03 sep 2011)
The point at which an entire family was doomed was when its last mobile member became too weak to queue for rations. Heads of households — usually mothers — were thus faced with a heartbreaking dilemma: whether to eat more food themselves, so as to stay on their feet, or whether to give more to the family’s sickest member — usually a grandparent or child — and risk the lives of all. That many or most prioritised their children is indicated by the large numbers of orphans they left behind. The lucky ones were put into children’s homes; the unlucky had their cards stolen by neighbours, took to thieving on the streets or simply died alone.
(02 sep 2011)So there’s something that we call the law of diminishing returns in our cooking. That’s why the steak is only two ounces, because by your fifth bite you’re really, you’re done. You’re done with that steak. You know what it’s going to taste like. The actual flavor starts to deaden on the palate.
If we were to make you take 10 more bites, by the time you got to bite 15, the steak’s just not that compelling anymore. So if we have a series of 23 small courses, where it’s a burst of flavor on the palate, and then you move on to something completely different and then completely different, that helps us set up a more exciting meal, and it’s something that is easier to kind of be compelled to go through a 23-course menu. (Managerial Econ: America’s top chef uses marginal analysis) (02 sep 2011)
The eleven billion paper clips used each year in this country are made largely in the United States, perhaps because there are 100%+ tariffs on the import of paper clips from abroad. Yet ACCO, the number one American clip maker, reports that paper clips account for less than one percent of their sales. Some of ACCO’s 38 paper clip-making machines are more than fifty years old. One rival company claims it does not understand how Americans use so many paper clips, namely 35 per American. (01 sep 2011)
- Don’t keep your cards close to your chest. Share your sincere probabilities with your readers. Don’t just tell them what you can “prove.” Tell them anything interesting that you’re willing to bet on - and at what odds.
(Seven Guidelines for Writing Worthy Works of Non-Fiction, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty)
(01 sep 2011)- Keep telling yourself: “Once I perfect the organization of my book, it will practically write itself.” If you’re deviating from your own plan, either stop or change your plan. Related hypothesis: The main cause of non-fiction writer’s block is lack of a clear chapter structure.
(Seven Guidelines for Writing Worthy Works of Non-Fiction, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty)
(01 sep 2011)I’m afraid the novelist J.M. Coetzee was at least partially right: “Always move towards pain when making art.” (01 sep 2011)
Steve Jobs doesn’t tolerate duds. Shortly after the launch event, he summoned the MobileMe team, gathering them in the Town Hall auditorium in Building 4 of Apple’s campus, the venue the company uses for intimate product unveilings for journalists. According to a participant in the meeting, Jobs walked in, clad in his trademark black mock turtleneck and blue jeans, clasped his hands together, and asked a simple question:
“Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continued, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?”
For the next half-hour Jobs berated the group. “You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,” he told them. “You should hate each other for having let each other down.” The public humiliation particularly infuriated Jobs. Walt Mossberg, the influential Wall Street Journal gadget columnist, had panned MobileMe. “Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us,” Jobs said. On the spot, Jobs named a new executive to run the group. (01 sep 2011)
Craig Roh, who runs up and down the stairs in Haven Hall if he gets to class early. (01 sep 2011)
Each of our airplanes we fly is equipped with FOQA, pronounced ‘folk-wa’, or Flight Operations Quality Assurance, a monitoring system that records every parameter for every approach over a two-week period. So if we had been just two knots fast before we extended the flaps or we didn’t have them fully extended by 1,000 feet, or if we were high or fast, the captain would be called and asked to explain, with immunity for the most part, what caused this approach to be out of tolerances. (01 sep 2011)
Now David’s been at Dover for the past two years and he’s beginning to think cab freedom is just another myth. “I’ll tell you when I started to get scared,” David says. “I’m driving down Flatbush and I see a lady hailing, so I did what I normally do, cut across three lanes of traffic and slam on the brakes right in front of her. I wait for her to get in, and she looks at me like I’m crazy. It was only then I realized I was driving my own car, not the cab.” (Night-Shifting for the Hip Fleet) (31 aug 2011)
She got presents every time she graduated from something, so she has three different art degrees. (Night-Shifting for the Hip Fleet) (31 aug 2011)
who make considerably more money [the word reads “sophisticated”. this one’s from an article written in 1975] (31 aug 2011)
Hanging around at shape-up today are a college professor, a couple of Ph.D. candidates, a former priest, a calligrapher, a guy who drives to pay his family’s land taxes in Vermont, a Rumanian discotheque D.J., plenty of M.A.’s, a slew of social workers, trombone players, a guy who makes 300-pound sculptures out of solid rock, the inventor of the electric harp, professional photographers, and the usual gang of starving artists, actors, and writers. (Night-Shifting for the Hip Fleet) (31 aug 2011)
what does it say about us that we wanted (enough to make it happen) cats and dogs as pets? (30 aug 2011)
How to generate all these lecture notes, blog posts, etc.? Well, if you thought by writing things up… (30 aug 2011)
And as Good explains, this result is based on only very weak assumptions about the population distribution and the sampling process: we assume only that the distribution remains constant as samples are taken, and that each individual sampling event is independent of the others.
(It’s worth observing that even this rather weak assumption may be false in real situations, in particular where the “animals” being sampled run in herds or flocks or swarms.)
(Statistical estimation for Large Numbers of Rare Events) (29 aug 2011)
One of the most straightforward results of this interesting paper is that (where N is the total observed count of individuals),
the expected total chance of all species that are each represented r times … in the sample is approximately
(r+1)nr+1/N
and as a result,
We may say that the proportion of the population represented by the [species in the] sample is approximately 1−n1/N, and the chance that the next animal sampled will belong to a new species is approximately
(Statistical estimation for Large Numbers of Rare Events) (29 aug 2011)
This is closely related to the problem of getting better estimates for the future chances of event-types that we’ve seen a small number of times. There is often some structure in the event space that allows us to use other sorts of evidence to improve such predictions — for example, by relating the probability of symbol-sequences to the probabilities of sub-sequences involving the same symbols.
For solving the first problem, a key paper is IJ Good, “The Population Frequencies of Species and the Estimation of Population Parameters”, Biometrika 40(3-4) 237-264, December 1953. The abstract:
A random sample is drawn from a population of animals of various species. (The theory may also be applied to studies of literary vocabulary, for example.) If a particular species is represented r times in the sample of size N, then r/N is not a good estimate of the population frequency, p, when r is small. Methods are given for estimating p, assuming virtually nothing about the underlying population. The estimates are expressed in terms of smoothed values of the numbers nr (r = 1, 2, 3, …), where nr is the number of distinct species that are each represented r times in the sample. (nr may be described as `the frequency of the frequency r’.) Turing is acknowledged for the most interesting formula in this part of the work. An estimate of the proportion of the population represented by the species occurring in the sample is an immediate corollary. Estimates are made of measures of heterogeneity of the population, including Yule’s ‘characteristic’ and Shannon’s ‘entropy’.
(Statistical estimation for Large Numbers of Rare Events) (29 aug 2011)
LEARNED HAND
unlike on Supreme Court, he couldn't pick and choose his cases.
~3,000 opinions in his lifetime
Augustus (grandfather) had three sons. One begot August Noble Hand (Learned's cousin, would later serve with him. "Quote Learned and follow 'Gus". One of the others was Samuel, Learned's father.
Originally "Billings Learned Hand". Called "B" by his best friend, "Jay" by his wife and kids.
Studied philosophy at Harvard under William James, George Santayana, Josiah Royce, F.W. Taussig, CE Norton. Lucky bastard.
Friends got into the eating clubs but he didn't.
Editor of the Harvard Advocate (like Sanders!).
Gave class-day speech at graduation. Phi Beta Kappa. Summa cum laude.
"He said he thought with his fingers: He wrote his opinions by hand, never dictated them, on long yellow legal foolscap, scratching each page out in a tiny, crabbed hand, and rewriting three or four or more times before he was satisfied" (9).
No judge more frequently cited by SC than Hand. "Tenth SC justice"
Beloved on a personal level.
"'He was Ariel, and Prometheus, and Jove, with a goodly touch of Mephistopheles, too'—-and, one might add, a bit of Rabelais. He was serious, but not solemn; scholarly, but not pretentious; righteous, but not prudish; disciplined, yet vagrant; skeptical, yet joyous; impatient, yet tolerant. He was a devastating mimic, a hearty storyteller, a fabulous talker—-and a willing listener. He could—-and did—-swear like a stevedore, romp through Gilbert and Sullivan, and nostalgically recall old folk songs he learned as a boy in the Adirondacks."
United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ("C.A. 2"), and American Law Institute.
No absolutes. "The Absolute is mute."
"Skepticism, self-doubt, uncertainty, tolerance, intellectual humility, a willingness to grapple with details, discrimination, a certain toughness of mind—-all were implicit in his distrust of the absolute."
"He knew 'that knowledge is hard to get, that man must break through again and again the thin crust on which he walks, that the certainties of today may become the superstitions of tomorrow, that we have no warrant of assurance save by everlasting readiness to test and test again.'
'Beware then of heathen gods,' was his advice. 'Have no confidence in principles that come to us in the trappings of the eternal.'"
"complex and universals slippery and perilous…truth is a dangerous experiment and man a bungling investigator."
- Individual is sacred. Choice.
"Absolute, unbound, knowing no loyalties but a single loyalty, admitting no coercion, its very essence in its affirmation, the self asserts its unassailable right to create all values, what it chooses alone is good. Others may command, it may be forced to comply; but within, its rule is unimpaired; it knows no crompomise; it brooks no equal. That is the unbending spirit we foster, that is the freedom wewiosh to insure. … Implicit [is] the belief that man, and man alone, creates the universe of good and evil; that beyond and beneath all the commandments is the commandment "Be Thyself."
"Life is a dicer's throw; and reason, a smoky torch. We move by what light we have."
"Battleships, aeroplanes, relativity, the proton, neutron, and electron, T.N.T., poison gas, sulfathiazole, The Fifth Symphony, The Iliad, The Divine Comedy, Hamlet, Faust, The Critique of Pure Reason, Das Kapital, The Constitution of the United States, The Congress of Industrial Organizations, Huey Long, and The New Deal. All these from just 'monkeying around'!"
"The common law must be content to lag behind the best inspirations of its time until it feels behind it the weight of such general acceptance as will give sanction to its pretension to unquestioned dictation. Yet with this piety must go a taste for courageous experiment, by which alone the law has been built as we have it, an indubitable structure, organic and living."
On legislation:
"First [the judge] must be aware of the difficulty and the hazard. He must hesitate long before imputing more to the "enactment" than he finds in the words, remembering that the "policy" of any law may inhere as much in its limits as in its extent. He must hesitate long before cutting down their literal effect, remembering that the authors presumably said no more than they wanted. He must have the historical capcity to reconstruct the whole setting which evoked the law; the contentions which it reoslved; th objects which it sought; the events which led up to it. But all this is only the beginning, for he must possess the far more expectional power of divination which can peer into the purpose beyond its expression, and bring to fruition that which lay only in flower."
"When a judge tries to find out what the government would have intended which it did not say, he puts into its mouth things which he think sit ought to have said, and that is very close to substituting what he himself thinks right. Let him beware, however, or he will usurp the office of government, even though in a small way he must do so in order to execute its real commands at all."
Detached but not aloof. "Judge as though it weren't your fight."
- On constitutional law: "What is 'freedom of speech and of the press'; what is the 'establishment of religion and the free exercise thereof'; what are 'unreasonable searches,' 'due process of law,' and 'equal protection of law … These fundamental canons are not jural concepts at all, in the ordinary sense; and in application they turn out to be no more than admonitions of moderation."
"He called these provisions 'eternal verities emptied of the vital occasions which gave them birth.' The judiciary should not seek 'to fill them from its own bosom.' Under this interpretation, the Bill of Rights is 'merely a counsel of perfection and an ideal of temperance; always to be kept in mind, it is true, but whose infractions were to be treated only as a matter for regret.'"
"On the matter of judicial review of legislation, even Judge Hand's staunchest supporters have deserted him." He doesn't make a large enough role for the judiciary. Too passive, conservative.
But wait: "Judge Hand has suggested that if courts act as a third legislative chamber, reweighing the values and sacrifices already weighed by the appropriate organ of government, judges are likely to lose their independence. The people will recognize that judges are engaged in a political exercise, and in their appointment, their known or expected convictions or predilections will become an important determinant." Boom! [Blog?]
- Judge Hand was well aware of the argument most often cited in support of broad judicial review, the protection of a powerless minority against an immoderate or tyrannical majority: "You may ask what thenw ill become of the fundamental principles of equity and fair play which our constitutions enshrine; and whether I seriously belive that unsupported they will serve merely as counsels of moderation. I do not think that anyone can say what will be left of those principles; I do not know whether they will serve only as counsels; but this much I do know—-that a society so riven that the spirit of moderation is gone, no court can save; that a society where that spirit flourishes, no court need save; that in a society which evades its responsibility by thrusting upon courts the nurture of that spirit, that spirit in the end will perish."
As one who knew the judicial process intimately, he placed no faith in courts: "[Liberty] is the product, not of institutions, but of a temper, of an attitude towards life… It is idle to look to laws, or courts, or principalities, or powers, to secure it. You may write into your constitutions not ten, but fifty, amendments, and it shall not help a farthing, for casuistry will undermine it as casuistry should, if it have no stay but law."
Probably too extreme a position. The courts needn't do everything, just something.
- In his opinions, "There is a polyphony between the samllest detail of fact, thoroughly comprehended and absorbed, and the majestic abstractions of the law writ large. 'This is why he was such a great judge,' wrote Max Ascoli. 'His realm of action was at the boundary of inner and outer life, legal abstraction and tumultuous reality.'" [Might be a good quote for application essay.]
Obscenity:
Regina v. Hicklin — isolated passages, effect on most susceptible members of community. In U.S. v. Kennerley, Hand uses this rule even though he disagrees with it. Saw limited role of his position on a trial court. Later, though, on the Court of Appeals, he overturned Hicklin with Augustus on the Ulysses case.
"I question in the end men will regard that as obscene which is honestly relevant to the adequate expression of innocent ideas, and whether they will not believe that truth and beauty are too precious to society at large to be mutialted in the interests of those most likely to pervert them to base uses."
US v. Levine — "…if the book is not directed at the community at large, it should be judged by its effect on the group for whom it is intended."
Ha: "The first is a reproduction of a collection of photographs, for the most part of nude female savages of different parts of the world; the legitimacy of its pretensions as serious anthropology is, to say the most, extremely tenuous…"
Libel:
Court shouldn't consider the fact that the guy, by bringing the suit, only draws more attention to the embarrassing photo.
Even though there was no statement of truth (which would be a countervailing interest against a claim of libel, since the truth is more important than a person's reputation), the picture is still actionable, since the guy suffered so much for it and did not consent to such a depiction. (29 aug 2011)
Now we have a new paper whose title gets right down to it: “SRT1720 improves survival and healthspan of obese mice”. First time I’ve seen “healthspan” as a word, I might add, and another interesting sidelight is that this appears in Nature Scientific Reports, the publishing group’s open-access experiment. But now to the data: (28 aug 2011)
kat·a·bat·ic/ˌkatəˈbatik/
Adjective: (of a wind) Caused by local downward motion of cool air.
(define katabatic - Google Search) (28 aug 2011)
She compares the phenomenon to a person who catches a ride to a dinner party in an unfamiliar neighbourhood, but is later asked to drive home and has difficulty remembering the route. “We’ve found that, even when people are monitoring things very carefully, you just don’t have a good understanding of what’s happening. When you realize there’s a problem, you don’t necessarily know how you got into that state and what to do to correct it.”
(Cockpit crisis - World - Macleans.ca) (28 aug 2011)
Thus, the interpretation-construction distinction opens the door for a partial reconciliation of originalism with living constitutionalism: the Constitution can live in the “construction zone” where the linguistic meaning of the Constitution underdetermines results. We might call the view that original meaning and a living constitutionalism are consistent “compatabilism”—the case for this view has been made by Jack Balkin.
(27 aug 2011)In fact we may not even need to posit polysemy (several meanings for a single word) in this case: we may simply be seeing a sign that the phrase intellectual property is becoming lexicalized (at least in legalese), which means you can no longer compute its meaning from what intellectual means and what property means. (25 aug 2011)
I confess that, when I contemplate the grue riddle, I can’t help but recall the joke about the Anti-Inductivists, who, when asked why they continue to believe that the future won’t resemble the past, when that false belief has brought their civilization nothing but poverty and misery, reply, “because anti-induction has never worked before!” (24 aug 2011)
Results like these provide further evidence—if any was needed—that polynomial-time computability is an extremely natural notion: a “wide target in conceptual space” that one hits even while aiming in purely logical directions. (23 aug 2011)
Briefly, Searle proposed a thought experiment—the details don’t concern us here—purporting Briefly, Searle proposed a thought experiment—the details don’t concern us here—purporting to show that a computer program could pass the Turing Test, even though the program manifestly lacked anything that a reasonable person would call “intelligence” or “understanding.” In response, many critics said that Searle’s argument was deeply misleading, because it implicitly encouraged us to imagine a computer program that was simplistic in its internal operations—something like the giant lookup table described in Section 4.1. And while it was true, the critics went on, that a giant lookup table wouldn’t “truly understand” its responses, that point is also irrelevant. For the giant lookup table is a philosophical fiction anyway: something that can’t even fit in the observable universe! If we instead imagine a compact, efficient computer program passing the Turing Test, then the situation changes drastically. For now, in order to explain how the program can be so compact and efficient, we’ll need to posit that the program includes representations of abstract concepts, capacities for learning and reasoning, and all sorts of other internal furniture that we would expect to find in a mind. (23 aug 2011)
The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject. This is the assumption that as soon as a fact is presented to a mind all consequences of that fact spring into the mind simultaneously with it. It is a very useful assumption under many circumstances, but one too easily forgets that it is false. —Alan M. Turing [126] (23 aug 2011)
The best economists say that your automobile shouldn’t cost more than half of your annual income, but we see many Negroes earning $7000 a year paying $5000 for a car. The home, it is said, should not cost more than twice the annual income, but we see many Negroes earning, say, $8000 a year living in a $30,000 home. (Martin Luther King Jr.: An Interview with Playboy | The Gypsy World) (23 aug 2011)
PLAYBOY: What do you mean by “militantly nonviolent”?
MARTIN LUTHER KING: I mean to say that a strong man must be militant as well as moderate. He must be a realist as well as an idealist. If I am to merit the trust invested in me by some of my race, I must be both of these things. This is why nonviolence is a powerful as well as a just weapon. If you confront a man who has long been cruelly misusing you, and say, “Punish me, if you will; I do not deserve it, but I will accept it, so that the world will know I am right and you are wrong,” then you wield a powerful and a just weapon. This man, your oppressor, is automatically morally defeated, and if he has any conscience, he is ashamed. Wherever this weapon is used in a manner that stirs a community’s, or a nation’s, anguished conscience, then the pressure of public opinion becomes an ally in your just cause. (Martin Luther King Jr.: An Interview with Playboy | The Gypsy World) (23 aug 2011)
PLAYBOY: Their stated reason for refusing to help was that it was not the proper role of the church to “intervene in secular affairs.” Do you disagree with this view?
MARTIN LUTHER KING: Most emphatically. The essence of the Epistles of Paul is that Christians should rejoice at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believe. The projection of a social gospel, in my opinion, is the true witness of a Christian life. This is the meaning of the true ekklesia—the inner, spiritual church. The church once changed society. It was then a thermostat of society. But today I feel that too much of the church is merely a thermometer, which measures rather than molds popular opinion. (Martin Luther King Jr.: An Interview with Playboy | The Gypsy World) (23 aug 2011)
Yes, I do—in Albany, Georgia, in 1962. If I had that to do again, I would guide that community’s Negro leadership differently than I did. The mistake I made there was to protest against segregation generally rather than against a single and distinct facet of it. Our protest was so vague that we got nothing, and the people were left very depressed and in despair. It would have been much better to have concentrated upon integrating the buses or the lunch counters. One victory of this kind would have been symbolic, would have galvanized support and boosted morale. But I don’t mean that our work in Albany ended in failure. The Negro people there straightened up their bent backs: You can’t ride a man’s back unless it’s bent. Also, thousands of Negroes registered to vote who never had voted before, and because of the expanded Negro vote in the next election for governor of Georgia—which pitted a moderate candidate against a rabid segregationist—Georgia elected its first governor who had pledged to respect and enforce the law impartially. And what we learned from our mistakes in Albany helped our later campaigns in other cities to be more effective. We have never since scattered our efforts in a general attack on segregation, but have focused upon specific, symbolic objectives. (Martin Luther King Jr.: An Interview with Playboy | The Gypsy World) (23 aug 2011)
One of the most painful experiences I have ever faced was to see her tears when I told her that Funtown was closed to colored children, for I realized that at that moment the first dark cloud of inferiority had floated into her little mental sky, that at that moment her personality had begun to warp with that first unconscious bitterness toward white people (Martin Luther King Jr.: An Interview with Playboy | The Gypsy World) (23 aug 2011)
r, on homeownership: "No one can tell me not to eat cookies." (23 aug 2011)
It's not that I feel like I somehow don't deserve the money. That's the market and I realize there's something to it. It's that I'm just sort of grateful, like, how easy it would have been to roll out into the workplace in that particular year with those particular grades and that particular attitude and just basically flounder for a while, making nothing, going sideways with no sense, at all, of starting a career. But look what happened! How lucky I am and how grateful I have to be. (23 aug 2011)
how this new office mgr started at ga, and how I was introduced to her, and how my reaction, basically, was "why the hell am I being introduced to this person?", and how I must have telegraphed that feeling, and how easy it would have been just to ask her something real, about where she worked or went to school and what she's hoping to get out of the thing, and hey isn't this a weird and interesting scene? Think of what TC would have done. (23 aug 2011)
Well, just because he tells you that something is awful or great, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll feel that way tomorrow. You have to low-pass filter his input. (Folklore.org: Macintosh Stories: Reality Distortion Field) (23 aug 2011)
In the last chapter, Burdick talks about two species of bacteria that live nowhere on this planet except in the absolutely sterile jet propulsion labs in Pasadena, California. We have created these through natural selection. They used to be able to super-heat these things to get rid of bacteria but now, because of the delicate computers and so on, they have to use a strong bleach in order to kill bacteria. As we know from our hospitals, that never kills off everything, just the ones that are weakest. So, living in the labs now are these invasive species, known nowhere else in the world. (TC Boyle on Man and Nature | The Browser) (22 aug 2011)
Our pride is not that we were swept up by the whirlwind of tragic history, but that when we were, we were not found wanting. (22 aug 2011)
but they virtually never get around to telling you exactly what would have to happen to disconfirm their expectations (22 aug 2011)
But just then she spots something and brightens. “Look!” she says. “A German flag.” Sure enough, a flag flies over a small house in a distant village. You can spend days in Germany without seeing a flag. Germans aren’t allowed to cheer for their team in the way other peoples are. That doesn’t mean they don’t want to, just that they must disguise what they are doing. “Patriotism,” she says, “is still taboo. It’s politically incorrect to say, ‘I’m proud to be German.’ ”
(
It's the Economy, Dummkopf! | Business | Vanity Fair)
(22 aug 2011)It's not laziness that keeps me from cooking more often — it's the lack of mental affordance of recipes (22 aug 2011)
"You know who isn't hard on themselves? Amateurs" (22 aug 2011)
From the phone:
Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Sting — that sort of writing and humor.
A writing problems server.
A list of Seinfeldian questions / comments: what is your take on giving to the homeless? my soap company made the hole bigger. Toilet paper tradeoffs. Do you use a seatbelt in taxis? Favorite day of the week? How do you kill time at an airport? The arms do all the work in a stick figure. Shower technique / order. Texting / IM / phone use among kids. Would you rather be a hunter or gatherer? How do you think you'd keep yourself entertained on the savannah? Did they have things as comfortable as couches in 10,000 BC? Is there anything you can do so well, so reliably well, that you could still do it if your life was on the line? Examples: hitting the bulls-eye with a dart, breaking 170 on the LSAT, picking someone up at a bar.
The generals in that game theory paper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals'_Problem).
Ingredients resolution (on a bag of chips, say).
What sort of personality does one have to have to like oneself (either at a first impression or as a good friend)?
Nearly stabbing myself in countless kitchen situations.
The way that tingle fades as a song grows old, compared to what probably happens with some bach or chopin. Compare relationships. Context: the playlist.
Slavery commercials.
Blackteria.
I should probably use the word "bonehead" more often.
"I'm not going to stop my motherfucking game-playing because of your niggerish ass."
The name Kipling Broeder.
The idea that each generation has to relearn everything will someday look hopelessly primitive. The next big stage.
"W. G. Snuffy Walden kinda needs to get a fucking job."
How the voice in your head changes when something's underlined. What if it had an Indian accent?
Nearly done =~ "Circling for a landing." Nice phrase.
The "Cryptic Carbuncular Bottom" thought experiment.
Paxton Whitehead.
Anus mirabilis. (Brownian motion.) (When GR came to him, in an elevator.)
TWW in a tech startup. Coder talk.
How women's signatures change when they get married.
ET's running / gone up the slide. The cookies are in the quarry. I'm afraid if we keep going in this direction we'll end up with sherpas in the bathtub. I feel like I'm wiping my ass with a catamaran guys. I didn't come to Rio for a shrimp cocktail.
How does the drug approval process work and where do the costs come in?
Sorkin and the energy of excellent people asking for the ball.
"It's like seasickness: you think you're gonna die and everybody else thinks it's just funny."
Comminist Manufesto (a neat spoonerism)
DFW and metaphor talk: "It's not like I'm shaking the straw out of my hair as I walk up to these things" … "just shy of the 'golly the buildings are tall' thing."
J on what sort of girl one should want — the mutual admiration — never belittle (chess).
S's sense of adventure; compare P's.
First ej is first n yrs stored up — shorties want the geyser (22 aug 2011)
From the black notebook:
Notes should be read-heavy, like this Tumblr system, without organization, with bad handwriting. Comparing read-heavy to write-heavy database management. The former kicks complexity down the road.
Searching for words and phrases that you don't know (or have on the tip of your tongue) is inherently difficult because search is based in words and phrases.
How the meta level is a breeding ground for bikeshed talk.
The digital divide: jotting things here and typing them up, organizing them on the computer.
With a single notebook (as opposed to looseleaf pages) you can work in batch mode, as I'm doing here.
Is Aaron Sorkin a racist? Using white guilt to make sentimental black characters, like Charlie, Fitz, the comedian, AFGM, and the rest.
Think of the NY tech scene and the negative space of the "bubble" concept: like BT and the micromechanics of overfunding (and how constraints drive creativity), or GA and the fact that no one's there on a Sunday at 5pm (and what are these people are doing on a Sunday at 5pm?). Think of the ecosystem externalities and how a windfall in the tens of millions, because it's now 100x cheaper to start companies, means a pie that can be sliced so many more times. Don't forget there is an elite cadre, but look at all the hangers-on and parasites. Think of M and my decision not to leave New York (and what that says about New York). Think especially of the irony of TS and Amit and then of his giraffe, and the two weeks it takes to get a prototype cooking. Think of course of my level of skill.
Sorkin's drama isn't necessarily built on character arcs driving to some big event — it's just these dramatic moments, dramatic almost just for drama's sake, that happen to add depth. Like the characters' depth is incidental to the vignettes, which work because they're tightly engineered.
What's interesting about n. is that because he's non-neurotic he's not so afraid to think, and so he probably thinks more often in that special way — a sort of purposeful but playful tumbling — that I only rarely ease into. But he never shows it. Nor does he seem to write it down. What happens to this thought? (Imagine finding notebooks under his bed, tens of composition books packed with little print. What sort of treasure might that be, if one at all?)
In bankruptcy must you sell your assets? What's the real-life equivalent of flipping over those Monopoly cards? Well, in Chapter 7 some property is exempt, and some debts can be discharged, 'scepting things like child support, car loan interest payments, mortgages, property taxes, and student loans. Chapter 7 filers are now means tested to prevent abuse. (Can the petitioner pay back the discharged debt over, say, the next five years, out of disposable income?)
Some tenets and precepts of running an organization: (1) Know everything about everything — web monitoring, what people are saying, the competition (who runs 'em, how far along their product is, what their customers are saying, their funding and cash flow situation), accounting, the code, legal issues (think of how R read all the TOSes), employees (both professional and personal). (2) A culture of hard policies on the important stuff — none of this startup foofery ("as long as the work gets done"): no dicking around, links, news, etc., at work (R); how one should respond to customer messages (and how quickly); all the copy that comes out of the organization; ticketing and commits and documentation and testing and commenting. Pick a process and use it and stick to it assiduously (but keep it dead fucking simple). (3) Milestones and a single giant hierarchical todo list. (4) High expectations and no budging. Think of what happens when an editor gives on a deadline. (5) Arrive earlier and stay later than the team. Respond to their e-mails right away. Set an example like JWF. (6) Ask them what they're worried about, in a way that they'll answer. (7) Do everything like you give a damn. (8) Have a sense of urgency and show it. (9) Use checklists.
My mapping project in Cambridge, and bicycles, and the sort of mode that kicked it off.
The BW office and the "what it's like" of such software companies.
Drills for writers: (1) Fast sentence generation, (2) Transitions, (3) Rewrites of sentences or paragraphs.
Is TWW structured so well that you could use it to teach screenwriting?
FS@BW as a character: a house divide against itself.
Who were the prior tenants of the PF Collins and Son building? What's that weird auditorium?
A simple company directory with pictures, and its role in on-boarding.
S's question to doctors in training: is the body more or less robust than you thought before studying medicine?
Consider the data that big companies give little companies, like, the fact that I can see all this unpublished Economist content. (But surely there are better examples. Think of Gz or 37.)
A daily one-on-one lunch isn't a bad policy. Think, too, of how one-on-ones are structurally a whole lot different than 3+s. How does that relate to my instinct, sometimes, to want to watch something on my own? ("I'm just not eager to turn this solo thing into a social thing.")
Sticking to a routine requires an assertiveness, with yourself, that's just like asking someone for what you want.
FS: "Just cut the check to us and look smart." … "Micromanage yourself so that I don't have to… because you're better at it than I am."
Young people who speak rudely to their parents.
S's care-fulness.
What are those little positions or takes that you carry latently in your brain? How is a thing like that stored? And think of how it can change, like my take on whether it matters if a person can spell. It's a bit that's flipped n times.
Some choice quotes re P and his work: "A front line to the Fascist party." "Government people buy the store." "A meeting about a meeting to send an e-mail. (Question design for a questionnaire.) Just ask the goddamn questions."
Bloomberg was 200 people shy of hitting their quarterly R & D hiring target.
Beer pong six-cup practice session (shots taken to kill the rack): 14, 14, 9, 12, 19, 11, 16, 13, 10, 12, for an average of 13.0.
I have a hunch that young readers in school might be encouraged to underline the most abstract stuff, the most general stuff, the "upshot" sentences, instead of the examples those sentences are based on. Is it possible that they're taught to go after the wordsy stuff? And that they get so good at it that they affine for it and away from the concrete things, the things Feynman would care for? With respect to the wordsy realm, think especially of the YLS kids and the sorts of conversations they seemed drawn to like a marble to the bottom of a bowl.
Think of what Feynman said after Los Alamos in the context of the Freedom tower, the one I can see out my window. Why are you building it when it's going to be destroyed? What kind of honorable stupidity is that?
"I Want to be a Writer" like Halmos wanted to be a mathematician.
The thrill deploy a bugfix during a live demonstration, and what the mere possibility of such an act says about the world we code in.
Do we keep the penny around because of the possibility of massive deflation?
It would be nice if there were more movies with a ride interlude. Of course it would require special seats. But how much fun would that be? Surely a better expense than this 3D nonsense.
Does a life with less love move faster?
Life expectancy should be conditioned on how old you are now. Say that the life expectancy of a male in the US is 72 years old. That number includes (doesn't it?) lots of dead infants. Well, what's the life expectancy for a 24 year-old male, when I've gotten out of that infant mortality gravity well?
Gravity wells are a good general metaphor / image.
The girl on the JZ subway and the AE principle.
Because of this silly and meaningless shape all the things I've wanted won't be wanted back, and that realm is closed to me, and I'm not included in the conversation even though I know just what to say.
For the I Can't Believe It's Not Butter product there should be an "I Can't Believe It's Not [X]" ad campaign, where the ICB version sucks. The tag line should be "Butter: gotta have the real thing."
The meeting with S in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is low and sprawling. Doorman: "You don't have the right address"; "I answer to two people…"; "…not going to run away with the phone. I got ten of them." — "Sorry temporarily cash only." — "Within the last week there have been two rapes in the neighborhood and two more attempted." The people seem fine but the whole place feels and looks sad as hell. God would I hate to live there. Neat to be finally trying the early stops of the subways that seem to arrive in lower Manhattan out of nowhere specked with low unhappy faces. It's not a neighborhood that's nice to walk in, though it does feel like a neighborhood. It's not the dense mess of Manhattan — it's like what you'd get if you cut the buildings down and laid them sideways, and those apartments become shitty little houses, and the businesses anchored on the main drag, wide, with room for cars, like an on-ramp dotted with convenience stores.
The sound of intelligence might just be technical jargon combined with creative colloquialisms, like "putting lipstick on the pig" or "cutting the fat" or "guilding the lily" or "I'm not saber rattling."
My friend Christine is telling her friend about a Korean pop collective and at some point in the conversation shows him the cover of their latest album, which is like a grid of nine portraits. To which the friend says "Oh, she's cute." And Christine tells him, "Those are nine different girls."
My GPA, hiring, clinical vs. actuarial judgement, and giving a damn. There's an essay in there somewhere.
That Fergo thing might be like the typewriter vs. word processor, in that constant feedback might constrain and hedge you.
S's image of an ice cream scoop and the scoops and the tough substance, and how they're all different, all the same.
Here's what I'd ask a neurosurgeon (or a fledgling): How do you think of the different procedures, like a pro golfer and different shot types, or like a pro golfer and different shots? This is a selective profession: how'd you get there? What was the fight like? What's it like to cut a brain? This is their personality, what someone is and what they can be. What a responsibility that must be? How much time is spent in the cutting, and in the looking? What else are you doing: reading? What do neurosurgeons read?
A diet that's helped nine billion women lose ten pounds in one day.
If I'm writing something and I'd like to jot some daily notes about it for folding in later then I might as well try to start a conversation or two about the thing, as conversations like that tend to generate some good ideas.
The idea of writing as a ticket to adventure, in that it gives you a way to cash in — or really, just to justify — exploring. Think of how that relates to scientific field guides, and how the kings and governments and whatever who commissioned exploration would ask the captains, in exchange, (and among other things), for careful copious notes about wildlife and the land.
A Socratic crossing guard.
Semen is just delusion ejecting from your penis.
Compare parsing and following turn-by-turn directions to having a destination and a map, and think of structured vs. goal-directed AI a la Rodney Brooks and his subsumption architecture.
Might the best way to teach programming be an ORIC-1-style Python DSL that can paint an HTML5 Canvas?
In 200332% of systemwide cable customers paid in cash.
What is the most effective position to be in to write notes while walking? Has anyone figured this out?
Think more about cathedrals.
Is T-L-S not interesting to n.? Why? How is that related to a more general conservatism?
How that well-educated twenty-something had wedding invitations on her fridge.
What it was about my second lesson with A, and LPTHW, that was pedagogically disturbing / enlightening. How what I was after was something truly problem-based, inductive — introducing concepts with no context: building the context up from nothing but a question. Example: quips[randint(0, len(quips) - 1] and all that goes into that.
A TV show set in an airport.
How scores digitize an analog contest (in sports).
The flight attendant and his ice cube scoop, and the way he let the water drip before pouring, and the pleasure of people who do their jobs well, and the crushing frustrating sadness of the people who don't. Think about those little sandwich shops with the quick cashiers, and the guy at LB who toweled up after every sandwich, and that horribly slow lady at the Starbucks.
I bet there are submarines in the East River with a horrible mission, missiles at the ready.
Alienation in the New York subway and how what you're seeing is people on their way somewhere.
The french for "body wash" is "gel douche."
If there were no birds would we have invented airplanes?
"I have a hard time understanding people who don't think exactly like me." -P
You lived for n years, so why are you so keen to take and share and need? Like somehow this stuff is just activated in relationships.
Two weeks in British Columbia: Booze at Tree, bike round town; Mt. Work hike, moss foot climb; Sooke Coast Trail, moment lost, trails gnarly; Gear up at thrift stores, squash hard; Drive 1 to 4 to secret camp off a logging road, thirteen black bears, camp, fire, bald eagle, cheddar smokies; 6:30am with the crows, breakfast and coffee, Greenpoint, secret beach, hobo cave, beach walk 16km, food, burn, beach again, cut, knife, five agro crags one-handed, tide up, hospital, "ooh la la!", restaurant; Lick the wounds, Phoenix; Finlayson hike, lost on the way down, BBQ at JVC's; Cowichan River Provincial Park, ford the river, m & j in the mix, "fookin' prawns!", Prairie Inn, Spoons, Cowabboggan Lake deadly hike — "stop… fucking… running!", bike mish (X-men castle, Thetis lake), pain.
My notes as passive rather than genitive and active.
Writing and hacking on side projects is much higher leverage than reading or whatever.
This "okay" stuff with R Ferris and JVC, and what it says about their conscientiousness.
M & drunk driving joke & Elyse & assuming the worst — and wanting to think little of you & wanting to sanction (related, of course, to wanting to feel indignant).
This ceaseless thanking and apologizing seems to be about keeping at bay a natural hostility, the thanking especially. It's too phatic.
Imagine swatting a fly. You're swinging something at it. Is the event unfolding in a mental time — for the fly — that makes your incoming implement seem hopelessly slow? (Like bullet time.) Compare the time scale of trees, of emergencies, and so on. Think of Permutation City.
To be truly self-reliant — is that even possible? Yes in a certain sense, but really no — what of your provisions, products, know-how? The goal maybe should be at the margin.
The etiology of gunk character is like a Robert Eddy — cheeky in the main, smart, well-meaning, a bit of mischief. The story revolves around a math dept, as these guys are getting stupider. Robert is brought in — after a few trials with others — to sort it out. The dept and by extension the schools is becoming a laughingstock. There are embarrassments at conferences. — It comes down to a joke they tell, the implications of which lead all these topologists (say) to the same train of thought, which, Robert discovers, degrades their brains. The thing is, this ToT isn't especially mathematical… and the mathematicians are not smart enough to keep it to themselves. They start getting conspiratorial.
P, on commuting from Duncan: "A snowy day on the Malahat and you're pooched like a dingle."
A special kind of tree where the trunk opens down into a house framed by the roots, connected to others as a graph G.
Growing up and learning in more and more detail what happens when people get drunk, and using that knowledge to retrospectively evaluate relations you had as a kid.
Alternative for a watch — a bracelet, thin, loose, that fades from green to red at the fifteen minute mark, basically, with the hour marked by a hatch.
Dream: Bill Pullman, a key, secret room, brothers and 'ship, Ben Franklin (played by Giamatti), Hofstadter, subway.
A list of things I know I don't know and would be keen to find out: how catheters work, clouds forming, what a day in the life of a bird is like, how the toilets on planes are rigged up, how wheat was domesticated, how a family farm operates, logging, how to do more hardcore camping, how a NYT story is reported, what makes a non-iron shirt smooth, how to construct a crossword, why dinosaurs got so big, what you can do to all the pieces of a buffalo, how a good shoe is made, what denim is, how to make a hiking trail, what tree growth looks like from the inside, how taxes are processed, what dbs look like at 10^8, basic house construction, why the law of large numbers works, what the hiring process for dad looked like, how the dartboard was invented, what pretty young girls are thinking, whether the typical commercial flight challenges the pilots, the chance I'd crash a jet if given control midway through the flight (compare the cases with and without the radio)…
druggyostasis
"…fascinated by the feelings of women…" — that the way there is empathy, and really giving a shit, and taking their personhood whole, thinking here of G and his falling fast and for real and his unphatic "how's your night going?"
It might be smart to get a pocket knife, headlamp, sleeping bag, and water bottle. (22 aug 2011)
to jot notes during the day and, at night, to type them up — if only as a way to kick off a bout of writing (22 aug 2011)
When asked to name a scientist, Americans are stumped. In one recent survey, the top choice, at 47 percent, was Einstein, who has been dead since 1955, and the next, at 23 percent, was “I don’t know.” In another survey, only 4 percent of respondents could name a living scientist. (Groups Call for Scientists to Engage the Body Politic - NYTimes.com) (21 aug 2011)
Avicenna created an extensive corpus of works during what is commonly known as Islam’s Golden Age, in which the translations of Greco-Roman, Persian and Indian texts were studied extensively. (Avicenna - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) (21 aug 2011)
The Peripatetics were members of a school of philosophy in ancient Greece. Their teachings derived from their founder, the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, and Peripatetic is a name given to his followers. The school originally derived its name Peripatos from the peripatoi (περίπατοι “colonnades”) of the Lyceum gymnasium in Athens where the members met. A similar Greek word peripatetikos (Greek: περιπατητικός) refers to the act of walking, and as an adjective, “peripatetic” is often used to mean itinerant, wandering, meandering, or walking about. After Aristotle’s death, a legend arose that he was a “peripatetic” lecturer — that he walked about as he taught — and the designation Peripatetikos came to replace the original Peripatos.
(Peripatetic school - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) (21 aug 2011)
Likewise for FedEx, which is best thought of as a software network that happens to have trucks, planes and distribution hubs attached. (Marc Andreessen on Why Software Is Eating the World - WSJ.com) (19 aug 2011)
If you brought the Sun down to the size of a white blood cell (7 micrometres), and then brought everything else down to scale, our galaxy, the Milky Way, would be the size of the continental U.S.A.
(Tredid comments on What is the craziest fact you know that most people won’t know?) (19 aug 2011)
The rendering engine will start parsing the HTML document and turn the tags to DOM nodes in a tree called the “content tree”.
It will parse the style data, both in external CSS files and in style elements.
The styling information together with visual instructions in the HTML will be used to create another tree - the render tree.
The render tree contains rectangles with visual attributes like color and dimensions.
The rectangles are in the right order to be displayed on the screen.
After the construction of the render tree it goes through a “layout” process.
This means giving each node the exact coordinates where it should appear on the screen.
The next stage is painting - the render tree will be traversed and each node will be painted using the UI backend layer.
It’s important to understand that this is a gradual process. For better user experience, the rendering engine will try to display contents on the screen as soon as possible.
It will not wait until all HTML is parsed before starting to build and layout the render tree.
Parts of the content will be parsed and displayed, while the process continues with the rest of the contents that keeps coming from the network.
(HTML5 Rocks - How Browsers Work: Behind the Scenes of Modern Web Browsers) (17 aug 2011)
To no one but a German is Hamburg an obvious place to spend a vacation, but it happened to be a German holiday, and Hamburg was overrun by German tourists. When I asked the hotel concierge what there was to see in his city, he had to think for a few seconds before he said, “Most people just go to the Reeperbahn.” The Reeperbahn is Hamburg’s red-light district, the largest red-light district in Europe, according to one guidebook, though you have to wonder how anyone figured that out. And the Reeperbahn, as it happens, was why I was there.
Perhaps because they have such a gift for creating difficulties with non-Germans, the Germans have been on the receiving end of many scholarly attempts to understand their collective behavior. In this vast and growing enterprise, a small book with a funny title towers over many larger, more ponderous ones. Published in 1984 by a distinguished anthropologist named Alan Dundes, Life Is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder set out to describe the German character through the stories that ordinary Germans liked to tell one another. Dundes specialized in folklore, and in German folklore, as he put it, “one finds an inordinate number of texts concerned with anality. Scheisse (shit), Dreck (dirt), Mist (manure), Arsch (ass).… Folksongs, folktales, proverbs, riddles, folk speech—all attest to the Germans’ longstanding special interest in this area of human activity.”
He then proceeded to pile up a shockingly high stack of evidence to support his theory. There’s a popular German folk character called der Dukatenscheisser (“The Money Shitter”), who is commonly depicted crapping coins from his rear end. Europe’s only museum devoted exclusively to toilets was built in Munich. The German word for “shit” performs a vast number of bizarre linguistic duties—for instance, a common German term of endearment was once “my little shit bag.” The first thing Gutenberg sought to publish, after the Bible, was a laxative timetable he called a “Purgation-Calendar.” Then there are the astonishing number of anal German folk sayings: “As the fish lives in water, so does the shit stick to the asshole!,” to select but one of the seemingly endless examples.
(
It's the Economy, Dummkopf! | Business | Vanity Fair)
(16 aug 2011)
The deepest insight about this is captured in one startling point made in the book. Before container shipping, most cargo transport involved either raw materials or completely finished products. After container shipping, the center of gravity shifted to intermediate (supply chain) goods: parts and subassemblies. Multinationals learned the art of sourcing production in real time to take advantage of supply chain and currency conditions, and moving components for assembly and delivery at the right levels of disaggregation. Thanks to container shipping, manufacturers of things as messy and complicated as refrigerators, computers and airplanes are able to manage their material flows with almost the same level of ease that the power sector manages power flows on the electric grid through near real-time commodity trading and load-balancing.
(
The Epic Story of Container Shipping)
(16 aug 2011)
Let’s wrap up by looking at how the narrow world of container shipping ended up disrupting the rest of the world. The big insight here is not just that shipping costs dropped precipitously, but that shipping became vastly more reliable and simple as a consequence. The 25% transportation fraction of global goods in 1960 is almost certainly an understatement because most producers simply could not ship long distances at all: stuff got broken, stolen and lost, and it took nightmarish levels of effort to even make that happen. Instead of end-to-end shipping with central consolidation, you had shipping departments orchestrating ad hoc journeys, dealing with dozens of carriers, forwarding agents, transport lines and border controls.
Today, shipping has gotten to a level of point-to-point packet-switched efficiency, where the shipper needs to do a hundredth of the work and can expect vastly higher reliability, on-time performance, far lower insurance costs, and lower inventories. That means a qualitatively new level of thinking, one driven by the axiom that realistically, the entire world is your market, no matter what you make. The dependability of the container-plumbing makes you rethink every business.
In short, container shipping, through its efficiency, was a big cause of the disaggregation of vertically integrated industry structures and the globalization of supply chains along Toyota-like just-in-time models. Just as the Web (1.0 and 2.0) sparked a whole new world of business models, container shipping did as well.
(
The Epic Story of Container Shipping)
(16 aug 2011)
This is the subplot that interested me the most. Containerization represented a technological force that old-style manual-labor-intensive ports and their cities simply were not capable of handling. The case of New York vs. Newark/Elizabeth is instructive. New York, the greatest port of the previous era of shipping, was an economy that practically lived off shipping, with hundreds of thousands employed directly or indirectly by the sector. Other industries ranging from garments to meatpacking inhabited New York primarily because the inefficiencies of shipping made it crucial to gain any possible efficiency through close location.
Containerization changed all that. While New York local politics around ports was struggling with irrelevant issues, it was about to be blindsided by containers. The bistate Port Authority, finding itself cut out of New York power games, saw an opportunity when McLean shipping was looking to build the first northeastern container handling wharf. This required clean sheet design (parallel parking wharfs instead of piers perpendicular to shore), and plenty of room for stacking and cranes. While nominally supposed to work towards the interests of both states, the Port Authority essentially bet on Newark, and later, the first modern container port at Elizabeth. The result was drastic: New York cargo traffic collapsed over just a decade, while Newark went from nothing to gigantic. Today, you can see signs of this: if you ever fly into Newark, look out the window at the enormous maze of rail, truck and sea traffic. The story repeated itself around the US and the world. Famous old ports like London, Liverpool and San Francisco declined. In their place arose fewer and far larger ports in oddball places: Felixstowe in the UK, Rotterdam, Seattle, Charleston, Singapore, and so forth.
This geographic churn had a pattern. Not only did old displace new, but there were far fewer new ports, and they were far larger and with a different texture. Since container ports are efficient, industry didn’t need to locate near them, and they became vast box parking lots in otherwise empty areas. The “left-behind” cities not only faced a loss of their port-based economies, but also saw their industrial base flee to the hinterland. Cities like New York and San Francisco had to rethink their entire raison d’etre, figure out what to do with abandoned shorelines, and reinvent themselves as centers of culture and information work.
(
The Epic Story of Container Shipping)
(16 aug 2011)"15 going on… on the doorstep of my sexual prime." … "sure, I was just breaking down the game film." (15 aug 2011)
At heart, containerization is a financial story, and nothing illustrates this better than some stark numbers. At the beginning of the story, total port costs ate up a whopping 48% (or $1163 of $2386) of an illustrative shipment of one truckload of medicine from Chicago to Nancy, France, in 1960. In more comprehensible terms, an expert quoted in the book explains: “a four thousand mile shipment might consume 50 percent of its costs in covering just the two ten-mile movements through two ports.” For many goods then, shipping accounted for nearly 25% of total cost for a product sold beyond its local market. Fast forward to today: the book quotes economists Edward Glaeser and Janet Kohlhase: “It is better to assume that moving goods is essentially costless than to assume that moving goods is an important component of the production process.” At this moment in time, this is almost literally true: due to the recession. These sort of odd dynamics are due to the fact that world shipping infrastructure changes very slowly but inexorably (and cyclically) towards higher, more aggregated capacity, and lower costs. This is due to the highly capital-intensive nature of the business, and the extreme economies of scale (leading to successively larger ships in every generation). Ships, though they are moving vehicles, are better thought of as somewhere between pieces of civic infrastructure (due to the large legacy impact of government regulation and subsidies) and fabs in the semiconductor industry (which, like shipping, undergoes a serious extinction event and consolidation with every trough in the business cycle
(
The Epic Story of Container Shipping)
(11 aug 2011)
Even though the Internet revolution, spaceflight, GPS and biotechnology don’t feature in this book, the story teases out the DNA of globalization in a way grand sweeping syntheses never could. Think of the container story as the radioactive tracer in the body politic of globalization.
(
The Epic Story of Container Shipping)
(11 aug 2011)“of a piece” (10 aug 2011)
He was terribly good with children – that’s always a good sign, where human beings are concerned.
(
Jonathan Keates | The Browser)
(10 aug 2011)"what you do in my job if you only had a year to live and no one knew it" (10 aug 2011)
In this respect we can compare him with another great late 18th century figure – whom I happen to deeply admire personally – and that’s Casanova. Both of them were fascinated by the feelings of women. They were fascinated by women as individuals. And they needed the presence of the feminine in their lives.
(
Jonathan Keates | The Browser)
(10 aug 2011)
I am not sure who first came up with the term Peak Attention, but the analogy to Peak Oil is surprisingly precise. It has its critics, but I think the model is basically correct.
Peak Oil refers to a graph of oil production with a maximum called Humboldt’s peak, that represents peak oil production. The theory behind it is that new oil reserves become harder to find over time, are smaller in size, and harder to mine. You have to look harder and work harder for every new gallon, new wells run dry faster than old ones, and the frequency of discovery goes down. You have to drill more.
There is certainly plenty of energy all around (the Sun and the wind, to name two sources), but oil represents a particularly high-value kind.
Attention behaves the same way. Take an average housewife, the target of much time mining early in the 20th century. It was clear where her attention was directed. Laundry, cooking, walking to the well for water, cleaning, were all obvious attention sinks. Washing machines, kitchen appliances, plumbing and vacuum cleaners helped free up a lot of that attention, which was then immediately directed (as corporate-captive attention) to magazines and television.
But as you find and capture most of the wild attention, new pockets of attention become harder to find. Worse, you now have to cannibalize your own previous uses of captive attention. Time for TV must be stolen from magazines and newspapers. Time for specialized entertainment must be stolen from time devoted to generalized entertainment.
Sure, there is an equivalent to the Sun in the picture. Just ask anyone who has tried mindfulness meditation, and you’ll understand why the limits to attention (and therefore the value of time) are far further out than we think.
The point isn’t that we are running out of attention. We are running out of the equivalent of oil: high-energy-concentration pockets of easily mined fuel.
(
A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100)
(09 aug 2011)
It is also not measured in terms of 8% returns on the global stock market. That is a Schumpeterian growth measure. For that model of growth to continue would be a case of civilizational cancer (“growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell” as Edward Abbey put it).
(
A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100)
(09 aug 2011)
Many people misunderstood the fundamental nature of Schumpeterian growth as being fueled by ideas rather than time. Ideas fueled by energy can free up time which can then partly be used to create more ideas to free up more time. It is a positive feedback cycle, but with a limit. The fundamental scarce resource is time. There is only one Earth worth of space to colonize. Only one fossil-fuel store of energy to dig out. Only 24 hours per person per day to turn into capitive attention.
Among the people who got it wrong was my favorite visionary, Vannevar Bush, who talked of science: the endless frontier. To believe that there is an arguably limitless supply of valuable ideas waiting to be discovered is one thing. To argue that they constitute a limitless reserve of value for Schumpeterian growth to deliver is to misunderstand how ideas work: they are only valuable if attention is efficiently directed to the right places to discover them and energy is used to turn them into businesses, and Arthur-Clarke magic.
(
A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100)
(09 aug 2011)
The steam engine was a fundamentally different beast than the sailing ship. For all its sophistication, the technology of sail was mostly a very-refined craft, not an engineering discipline based on science. You can trace a relatively continuous line of development, with relatively few new scientific or mathematical ideas, from early Roman galleys, Arab dhows and Chinese junks, all the way to the amazing Tea Clippers of the mid 19th century (Mokyr sketches out the story well, as does Mahan, in more detail).
Steam power though was a scientific and engineering invention. Sailing ships were the crowning achievements of the age of craft guilds. Steam engines created, and were created by engineers, marketers and business owners working together with (significantly disempowered) craftsmen in genuinely industrial modes of production. Scientific principles about gases, heat, thermodynamics and energy applied to practical ends, resulting in new artifacts. The disempowerment of craftsmen would continue through the Schumpeterian age, until Fredrick Taylor found ways to completely strip mine all craft out of the minds of craftsmen, and put it into machines and the minds of managers. It sounds awful when I put it that way, and it was, in human terms, but there is no denying that the process was mostly inevitable and that the result was vastly better products.
(
A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100)
(09 aug 2011)
Two images hint at its actual globe-straddling, 10x-Walmart influence: the image of the Boston Tea Partiers dumping crates of tea into the sea during the American struggle for independence, and the image of smoky opium dens in China. One image symbolizes the rise of a new empire. The other marks the decline of an old one.
The East India Company supplied both the tea and the opium.
At a broader level, the EIC managed to balance an unbalanced trade equation between Europe and Asia whose solution had eluded even the Roman empire. Massive flows of gold and silver from Europe to Asia via the Silk and Spice routes had been a given in world trade for several thousand years. Asia simply had far more to sell than it wanted to buy. Until the EIC came along
A very rough sketch of how the EIC solved the equation reveals the structure of value-addition in the mercantilist world economy.
The EIC started out by buying textiles from Bengal and tea from China in exchange for gold and silver.
Then it realized it was playing the same sucker game that had trapped and helped bankrupt Rome.
Next, it figured out that it could take control of the opium industry in Bengal, trade opium for tea in China with a significant surplus, and use the money to buy the textiles it needed in Bengal. Guns would be needed.
As a bonus, along with its partners, it participated in yet another clever trade: textiles for slaves along the coast of Africa, who could be sold in America for gold and silver.
For this scheme to work, three foreground things and one background thing had to happen: the corporation had to effectively take over Bengal (and eventually all of India), Hong Kong (and eventually, all of China, indirectly) and England. Robert Clive achieved the first goal by 1757. An employee of the EIC, William Jardine, founded what is today Jardine Matheson, the spinoff corporation most associated with Hong Kong and the historic opium trade. It was, during in its early history, what we would call today a narco-terrorist corporation; the Taliban today are kindergarteners in that game by comparison. And while the corporation never actually took control of the British Crown, it came close several times, by financing the government during its many troubles.
The background development was simpler. England had to take over the oceans and ensure the safe operations of the EIC.
(
A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100)
(09 aug 2011)
Today the invisible web of container shipping serves as the bloodstream of the world.
(
A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100)
(09 aug 2011)in fact the extinction of behavior by aversive consequences can be demonstrated in imperfectly rational organisms ranging from flatworms to sophomores. (08 aug 2011)
This reminds me of something that happened when I was just a bit younger… My girlfriend and I were graduating from pharmacy school and she was applying for residency positions (yes, they have those for pharmacists). Well, she found out she got the one she really wanted and so that night we went out to a nice dinner to celebrate. We did it up like you would expect a happy couple to - nice bottle of wine, share an appetizer and dessert, etc. We were still living on loans at the time and so in my head I was keeping track of about how much the meal was going to run me at the end of the night (for better or worse - keep in mind we were in college at the time). We had easily cleared a hundred bucks (quite the meal for college students who usually eat $7 sandwiches or more likely cook for themselves!), and when it was time for the bill, our waitress told us “The couple that was sitting over there paid for it.”
!
You wanna talk about made our day? Try made our week. We had seen the older couple earlier, but we didn’t know them, and they were gone by the time we got our bill. We couldn’t even thank them, and we were just so… shocked. Since then, whenever we go out for a nice meal, I look for a young couple who looks happy and in love, just waiting to return that favor. (08 aug 2011)
Throughout his turbulent and peripatetic life, Grant Hadwin demonstrated a level of woodsmanship and an imperviousness to the elements worthy of a character from the pages of Robert Service or Jack London. His wife, Margaret, from whom he has been separated for a decade, described him as “indestructible,” an opinion shared by many who have known him. “Basically, you’re dealing with a person who, with very few resources, could be dropped anywhere on earth and come up smelling like a rose,” Cory Delves, one of Hadwin’s former bosses, told me.
(
Letter from British Columbia: The Golden Bough : The New Yorker)
(07 aug 2011)
We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.
(
Characterizing a Fogbank: What Is Postmodernism, and Why Do I Take Such a Dim View of it? | Certain Doubts)
(07 aug 2011)hide·bound/ˈhīdˌbound/Adjective
1. Unwilling or unable to change because of tradition or convention: “you are hidebound by your petty laws”.
2. (of cattle) With their skin clinging close to their back and ribs as a result of bad feeding.
(define hidebound - Google Search) (06 aug 2011)
They’re necessary, because when we talk about large, full-text archives empowered by text analytical tools and visualizations, we’re really talking about trying to make procedures traditionally thought of as batch-processing jobs and importing them into a world in which, as Jacob Nielson famously noted, you have eight seconds to do something interesting.
(High Performance Computing for English Majors) (06 aug 2011)
In academia, publishing stands as the final warrant of your expertise – a certification that is even more powerful than holding an advanced degree in the subject. In fact, any expert on any subject appearing on any television program you might see “is the author of” something. That’s why they’re experts. They’re published. (Anthologize It) (06 aug 2011)
who so perfectly combine ferocious talent with bonhomie. (Anthologize It) (06 aug 2011)
ir·ref·ra·ga·ble/iˈrefrəgəbəl/
Adjective: Not able to be refuted or disproved; indisputable.
(define irrefragable - Google Search) (06 aug 2011)
the idea that language is for power users and pictures and index fingers are for those poor besotted fools who just want toast in the morning is an extremely retrograde idea from which we should strive to emancipate ourselves. (The Mythical Man-Finger) (06 aug 2011)
There are other aspects of tacit knowledge that are about intuition, like our ability to make perceptual discriminations, so as we get experience, we can see things that we couldn’t see before.
For example, if you ever watch the Olympics and you watch a diving competition, the diver goes off the high board, and the TV commentators are there and the person didn’t do a belly flop, dove in, looks clean, and they’re saying, “Look at the splash. The splash was bigger than it should have been, the judges are sure to catch that”, and what happened was the diver’s ankles came apart just as she was entering the water. Then they show it in instant replay, and sure enough, that’s what happened. But the commentator saw it as it happened. To a viewer like me, that’s invisible. I just saw the dive. But they know where to look, and they know the probable trouble spots, or they know the difficult aspects. That’s part of the patterns that they’ve built up — to know how to direct their attention so they can see the anomalies. They see it as it’s happening, not in replay. You can’t tell somebody over the phone what to look for. You can say it after the fact, but they see it while it’s going on. That ability to make fine discriminations is a part of tacit knowledge, and a part of intuitive knowing.
Another part is pattern recognition. If you go to a friend’s house, and the friend for some reason has an album out, and there’s a picture from when they were in the fourth grade, you can look at the picture, and you look at all the faces, and you say, “That’s you, isn’t it?” And most of the time you get it right. Now, the face doesn’t look like the face of your friend right now, but we see the facial resemblance, we see the relationship of the eyes, and the eyebrows, and the nose, and all of that. We just have a pattern recognition that we’re able to apply. That’s another aspect of tacit knowledge
A third aspect, if we have a lot of experience and we see things, we can sense typicality, that means we can see anomalies, and that means that we have a sense something is not right here, something doesn’t feel right. And then we start to look for the specifics about what it is that’s gone wrong, and that’s another aspect of tacit knowledge that we depend on to alert us to possible danger.
Another aspect of tacit knowledge is our mental models of how things work. Mental models are just the stories, the frames that we have to explain causal relationships: if this happens, that will happen, and that will happen, and we build these kinds of internal representations, these mental models about how things work.
(Insight | Conversation | Edge) (06 aug 2011)
this is a charge of willful exogamy (On Building) (06 aug 2011)
the classic pomo bait-and-switch of oscillating between a radical-sounding claim and an utterly uncontroversial platitude (06 aug 2011)
Clearly, this work is only of historical interest now, but that interest is
considerable, since the big, synoptic picture of the nervous system which it
draws is still pretty much the one neuroscientists use. It goes (in somewhat
modernized language) as follows. The nervous system exists in animals to
control muscles, i.e., comparatively rapid motion. Some motions (like those of
the heart, lungs, and bowels) are to be kept up continually in more or less
steady rhythms; others are sporadic, adaptive responses to circumstances. The
later are triggered by sensory organs, and the nervous system provides both
what we now call “pattern generators” for rhythms, and the links connecting
sensory organs to effector organs, especially muscle fibers. The key to making
all this work is that nerve cells transmit impulses to each other, which can,
depending on the relations between the cells, either excite or inhibit further
transmission on the part of the downstream cells; neurons are themselves
excited by sensory cells, and can cause muscle cells to contract. The
character of the interaction between neurons depends, somehow, on what goes on
at the synapses between them, and it is asymmetry at the synapses which makes
the propagation of nerve impulses go in only one direction. To produce useful,
adaptive responses, each sensor generally must be able to control multiple
effectors; conversely, each effector is generally under the partial control of
multiple sensors. This many-to-many linkage means that the nervous system must
be a network (a word Sherrington uses, e.g., towards the ends of Lectures IV
and VI), where what we would now call functional and effective connectivity
changes dynamically. The “integrative action” of his title consists of
coordinating the effector responses to sensory stimuli, sometimes
cooperatively, sometimes antagonistically (as when different reflexes would
move the same body parts in different ways). Some of this can be handled in
comparatively local and stereotyped ways, which is more or less what goes on in
spinal-cord reflexes, but in an intact, healthy animal, the pre-eminent organ
of integration is the brain. (05 aug 2011)
As the siege wore on, two factions developed within the FBI,[18] one believing negotiation to be the answer, the other, force. Increasingly aggressive techniques were used to try to force the Davidians out (for instance, sleep deprivation of the inhabitants by means of all-night broadcasts of recordings of jet planes, pop music, chanting and the screams of rabbits being slaughtered). (Waco siege - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) (05 aug 2011)
Precision is the reason. It was Lewis’ meaning. While other amazing jumpers could not make consistently legal jumps — they would often foul by the smallest margins — Lewis was almost freakish in his exactness. “The way I looked at it,” he says, “fouling was unacceptable. That’s all. Unacceptable. And so I didn’t foul. Think about it: If you foul, it doesn’t count. I would hear people say, ‘Oh, I had a long foul.’ No you didn’t. You didn’t have a jump. That was my attitude. You cannot foul.”
(
Joe Posnanski » Posts The 30-Foot Jump «)
(05 aug 2011)The Bass Player:
As they stare at the singer who has abandoned the melody in favor of melismatically emoting, or the guitar player who has put his foot on the monitor and thrown his hair back to squintily wee a mishmash of pentatonic drivel, people don’t understand that I’m making their backsides wiggle and bringing us all together in funky communion.
(
What People Don't Get About Your Job: The Best Early Responses - Derek Thompson - Business - The Atlantic)
(05 aug 2011)I had a similar idea about a year ago and got as far as you did with similar results. My goal was to create a phone app that you could prop up next to a chess board that would record the moves for a speed chess game by taking a few snapshots a second.
The ultimate goal was that eventually you could tie in this input to a chess engine to get a realtime scoreboard of which side is “winning” based off the engine’s analysis.
Unfortunately the piece detection at that speed didn’t work out too well with the code I wrote. It’d probably have to be rewritten in OpenCV which is optimized for this type of thing (and even has a find chessboard function) (05 aug 2011)
After the war, a friend showed Hathcock a passage written by Ernest Hemingway: “Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and like it, never really care for anything else thereafter.” He copied Hemingway’s words on a piece of paper. “He got that right,” Hathcock said. “It was the hunt, not the killing.”[8] Hathcock said in a book written about his career as a sniper: “I like shooting, and I love hunting. But I never did enjoy killing anybody. It’s my job. If I don’t get those bastards, then they’re gonna kill a lot of these kids dressed up like Marines. That’s the way I look at it.” (03 aug 2011)
Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored - contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man - such as a policy of "don't care" on a question about which all true men do care - such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance - such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did.
Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND (03 aug 2011)
Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored (03 aug 2011)
geoff dyer: "It could be argued that this is essentially an academic habit, and that Fried is faithfully observing the expected conventions — so faithfully that he has become an unconscious apostate. If academia elevates scholarly and impersonal inquiry above the kind of nutty, fictional, navel-gazing monologues of Nicholson Baker, then Fried is at once its high camp apotheosis and its disintegration into mere manner." (02 aug 2011)
This reasoning applies more generally: the prior can be divided into one part which refers to the identifiable parameters, and another which refers to the purely-identifiable parameters, and learning only updates the former. (01 aug 2011)
"it just punts the question" (01 aug 2011)
Parfit at great length discusses optimific principles, namely which specifications of rule consequentialism and Kantian obligations can succeed, given strategic behavior, collective action problems, non-linearities, and other tricks of the trade. (29 jul 2011)
Though we have been building and programming computing machines for about 60 years and have learned a great deal about composition and abstraction, we have just begun to scratch the surface.
A mammalian neuron takes about ten milliseconds to respond to a stimulus. A driver can respond to a visual stimulus in a few hundred milliseconds, and decide an action, such as making a turn. So the computational depth of this behavior is only a few tens of steps. We don’t know how to make such a machine, and we wouldn’t know how to program it.
The human genome — the information required to build a human from a single, undifferentiated eukariotic cell — is about 1GB. The instructions to build a mammal are written in very dense code, and the program is extremely flexible. Only small patches to the human genome are required to build a cow or a dog rather than a human. Bigger patches result in a frog or a snake. We don’t have any idea how to make a description of such a complex machine that is both dense and flexible. (29 jul 2011)
The modulations in voice (and therefore sensation and thought) of a sudden turn, a speeding up, for example—where pitch rises without my having intended it, so it makes it too hard for any subsequent piece to rise above that—oh, it’s endless, really. But those sorts of things. Sometimes I use different colored pens to track it—the pitch, especially, the modulation of tone. Not to mention the nightmare of parsing out all the stress points—upon which the whole structure depends.
INTERVIEWER
So you revise a great deal?
GRAHAM
I’d say I spend ninety percent of my time in revision. It’s a craziness. There are sometimes maybe thirty variants of the lineation of a stanza. Getting “far enough away” to grow the new set of ears required to hear the poem outside of the “way you intended it to sound”—to hear what it will really sound like (and in other words mean and feel) to a stranger is quite a trick. Sometimes it means just putting the thing away and not reading it for a long time. Long enough for its intended music to fade from memory. Then you can read it “clean” to hear if you have anything resembling the music you thought you had. But you have to be right on top of it in that first “clean” read, because it takes no time at all for you to be working with a muddy text, one full of what you think is there, which you can’t sort out from what is there. That’s why keeping all the drafts and keeping them present at once is important to me. (28 jul 2011)
…of literally being “double” while pregnant—being a person housing another, truly other, person—another soul than one’s own, another body, another destiny, a different heart. (28 jul 2011)
Each article’s headline is brief and opaque (i.e. “Race to the bottom” or “An empire built on sand“) or non sequiturs (i.e. “No, these are special puppies” or “Cue the fish“). Sometimes the headlines read like the Old Spice guy wrote them (“I’m on a horse”), but that’s part of dressing up what could otherwise be dull subject matter. The non sequiturs force you to read on just so you can understand what they’re talking about.
The sub-header is all business. There’s no fat and they read like well-crafted tweets. For an article on genetic testing, one reads, “The personal genetic-testing industry is under fire, but happier days lie ahead”. The subheader is usually one or two sentences and plainly states the paper’s view on the issue (“Google has joined Verizon in lobbying to erode net neutrality“). I really like this method because at bottom all journalists have an opinion, so why not be transparent and lay it bare? By laying out the conclusion in a couple sentences upfront, it also allows the reader to get something even if she’s just paging through. (28 jul 2011)
For us Americans, the words of the Declaration have become central to our sense of nationhood. Because the United States is composed of so many immigrants and so many different races and ethnicities, we can never assume our identity as a matter of course. The nation has had to be invented. At the end of the Declaration, the members of the Continental Congress could only “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” There was nothing else but themselves that they could dedicate themselves to—no patria, no fatherland, no nation as yet. In comparison with the 235 year-old United States, many states in the world today are new, some of them created within fairly recent past. Yet many of these states, new as they may be, are under-girded by peoples who had a pre-existing sense of their ethnicity, their nationality. In the case of the United States, the process was reversed: We Americans were a state before we were a nation, and much of our history has been an effort to define that nationality. (July Fourth’s Significance As Our Independence Day Should Not Be Forgotten. | The New Republic) (21 jul 2011)
But justice is not all of morality; there remains a circle of intensity which through its emphasis on the particular and the concrete continues to reflect what I have identified as the source of all sense of value-our sense of self. (21 jul 2011)
He never showed the slightest resentment when I published some of his ideas before he did. He told me that he avoided disputes about priority in science by following a simple rule: “Always give the bastards more credit than they deserve.”
(
The ‘Dramatic Picture’ of Richard Feynman by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books)
(21 jul 2011)
In the final scene of the comic book, Feynman is walking on a mountain trail with his friend Danny Hillis. Hillis says, “I’m sad because you’re going to die.” Feynman replies, “Yeah, that bugs me sometimes too. But not as much as you think. See, when you get as old as I am, you start to realize that you’ve told most of the good stuff you know to other people anyway. Hey! I bet I can show you a better way home.” And Hillis is left alone on the mountain.
(
The ‘Dramatic Picture’ of Richard Feynman by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books)
(21 jul 2011)
He asks his father at the playground, “Why does [the ball] keep moving?” His father says, “The reason the ball keeps rolling is because it has ‘inertia.’ That’s what scientists call the reason…, but it’s just a name. Nobody really knows what it means.” His father was a traveling salesman without scientific training, but he understood the difference between giving a thing a name and knowing how it works. He ignited in his son a lifelong passion to know how things work.
(
The ‘Dramatic Picture’ of Richard Feynman by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books)
(21 jul 2011)MCPHEE
The routine produces. But each day, nevertheless, when you try to get started you have to transmogrify, transpose yourself; you have to go through some kind of change from being a normal human being, into becoming some kind of slave.
I simply don’t want to break through that membrane. I’d do anything to avoid it. You have to get there and you don’t want to go there because there’s so much pressure and so much strain and you just want to stay on the outside and be yourself. And so the day is a constant struggle to get going.
And if somebody says to me, You’re a prolific writer—it seems so odd. It’s like the difference between geological time and human time. On a certain scale, it does look like I do a lot. But that’s my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I’m going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that’s the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.
(Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
The fundamental thing is that writing teaches writing. And you always get this question from people, and they say some version of the idea that writing can’t be taught. And the thing is, yeah, you can’t throw a firecracker on the ground and up comes a writer. But you can teach writing in the same way that you can coach swimming. When I was a swimming instructor at Keewaydin, all the kids I taught could already swim. Every single one of them was a swimmer. But as they moved through the water they had different levels of efficiency. You can talk to them about breathing and their rhythm and their arms and legs.
A teacher of writing can do that—as long as the teacher always bears in mind that writers are all unique. It seems a pointless exercise if you’re trying to teach somebody to write the way you do. You just comment on what they’re doing, and I think there’s a net utility in it.
(Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
Two or three years later. I just kept getting in deeper and deeper. I had a terrible time. When I wrote The Curve of Binding Energy, Ted Taylor and others could lead me through a little corner of physics and could make certain things clear to me. Whereas in this thing, every time you turn up one thing you get to another. Stratigraphy, structure, tectonics, brrrrr! And if you’re going to do that trip across the country, you can’t ignore any of it! So I was really scrambling. When I went with Anita to the Delaware Water Gap, I was scribbling notes, and she was talking. We spent hours there—all day I scribbled. I did not understand anything that I was writing down. And the interesting thing was that about two and a half years later, when I wrote In Suspect Terrain, by that time I could read that stuff. I understood what it said. And I hadn’t understood it when I made the notes.
That first year it sank in how far over my head I was. The next two years were ’79 and ’80, and I really was unhappy. I thought I was in a cave and I couldn’t get out. It was just too big a thing.
(Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
INTERVIEWER
Why have you avoided specializing in one field?
MCPHEE
I’ve always thought that the thing I bring to my subjects—one thing—is a fresh eye. And the fresh eye is important, because you’re learning. Certain pieces you can only do once. You can only introduce lacrosse once. The fresh eye is a distinct asset.
(Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
I suppose it is a little hard to hide your biases, though. It shows through the cracks, you can’t help it. If somebody thinks that my bias is toward what’s known as the environmental movement, they’re right. But as a writer I’m struggling to present both sides. There’s the section in Coming into the Country where Ed Gelvin and his son Stanley have run this Caterpillar bulldozer up into the mountains. They’ve dragged it over incredibly rugged terrain, a place without any roads, all fifty-five tons. They’ve taken it apart and put it back together, and they’ve gotten it to work. This is a family that has invested everything trying to get gold, and they’re tearing up a beautiful stream. The passage says, “Am I disgusted? Manifestly not. Not from here, from now, from this perspective. I am too warmly, too subjectively caught up in what the Gelvins are doing. In the ecomilitia, bust me to private.”
I’m for these guys. In this time and this place—don’t hold me to this forever—I’m for these guys. But some people think I should be writing with my cudgel. They think that I don’t have the temerity to express these opinions. That’s just the exact reverse of what’s going on. I’m trying to lay this thing out for the reader. Not to take the reader and rub his nose in it, and say, This is how you should think. I want the reader to do his own thinking. And why do I do that? Because I think it’s a higher form of writing.
(Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
I remember there was one piece we were working on that had this weird pun in it. And Bingham said, You know that pun there? That’s terrible, that’s really bad. And I said, I want it to stay there. I like that. And he says, Well, you’re the writer; I just work here. And then we go on talking about other things and everything else. Twenty-four hours go by, we’re back at his desk, he says, You know that line there? Um, it’s really bad, you should think about it again. I said, Bobby, we talked about that. I like that line. And then he mentioned it a third time and I said something similar. Another day went by, and I walked into his office, first thing I say, Bob, you know that pun there? Take it out, OK? It’s no good.
Not a smile, nothing. He showed nothing on his face. He was totally aware during this entire sequence, of course. He was tremendous. And he was just a very, very, very good friend.
(Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
It may sound like I’ve got some sort of formula by which I write. Hell, no! You’re out there completely on your own—all you’ve got to do is write. OK, it’s nine in the morning. All I’ve got to do is write. But I go hours before I’m able to write a word. I make tea. I mean, I used to make tea all day long. And exercise, I do that every other day. I sharpened pencils in the old days when pencils were sharpened. I just ran pencils down. Ten, eleven, twelve, one, two, three, four—this is every day. This is damn near every day. It’s four-thirty and I’m beginning to panic. It’s like a coiling spring. I’m really unhappy. I mean, you’re going to lose the day if you keep this up long enough. Five: I start to write. Seven: I go home. That happens over and over and over again. So why don’t I work at a bank and then come in at five and start writing? Because I need those seven hours of gonging around. I’m just not that disciplined. I don’t write in the morning—I just try to write. (Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
It sounds very mechanical, but the effect is the exact opposite. What it does is free you to write. It liberates you to write. You’ve got all the notes there; you come in in the morning and you read through what you’re going to try to write, and there’s not that much to read. You’re not worried about the other ninety-five percent, it’s off in a folder somewhere. It’s you and the keyboard. You get away from the mechanics through this mechanical means. The spontaneity comes in the writing, the phraseology, the telling of the story—after you’ve put all this stuff aside. You can read through those relevant notes in a relatively short period of time, and you know that’s what you want to be covering. But then you spend the rest of your day hoping spontaneous things will occur. (Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
INTERVIEWER
How do you approach transitions between these various sections?
MCPHEE
You look for good juxtapositions. If you’ve got good juxtapositions, you don’t have to worry about what I regard as idiotic things, like a composed transition. If your structure really makes sense, you can make some jumps and your reader is going to go right with you. You don’t need to build all these bridges and ropes between the two parts.
(Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
I knew where I was going to start, but I didn’t know the body of the thing. I went into a seminar room here at the university, and I laid the thirty-six cards out on the table. I just looked and looked at them. After a while I was looking at two cards: Upset Rapid, which is a big-time rapid in the Colorado River, and Alpinist. In Upset Rapid, Brower doesn’t ride the rapid. Why doesn’t he ride the rapid? His answer to Floyd Dominy is, “Because I’m chicken.” That’s a pretty strong scene. What next? Well, there are more than seventy peaks in the Sierra Nevada that were first ascended by David Brower, hanging by his fingernails on some cliff. “Because I’m chicken”? This juxtaposition is just loaded with irony, and by putting the Alpinist right after Upset Rapid, in the white space between those two sections there’s a hell of a lot of stuff that I don’t have to say. It’s told by the structure. It’s all crackling along between those two things. So I put those two cards side by side. Now there are thirty-four other parts there on the table. (Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
Once I’ve written the lead, I read the notes and then I read them again. I read them until they’re coming out my ears. Ideas occur, but what I’m doing, basically, is looking for logical ways in which to subdivide the material. I’m looking for things that fit together, things that relate. For each of these components, I create a code—it’s like an airport code. If a topic is upstate New York, I’ll write UNY or something in the margin. When I get done, the mass of notes has some tiny code beside each note. And I write each code on an index card.
INTERVIEWER
How many components go into a piece like Encounters with the Archdruid?
MCPHEE
The whole book had thirty-six components. What I ended up with was thirty-six three-by-five cards, each with a code word. Some of these things are absolutely dictated by the story of the journey down the Colorado River. But the choices are interesting where it’s not dictated, like the facts of David Brower’s life.
(Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
You write a lead. You sit down and think, Where do I want this piece to begin? What makes sense? It can’t be meretricious. It’s got to deliver on what you promise. It should shine like a flashlight down through the piece. So you write a beginning. Then you go back to your notes and start looking for an overall structure. It’s three times as easy if you’ve got that lead. (Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
I always say to my classes that it’s analogous to cooking a dinner. You go to the store and you buy a lot of things. You bring them home and you put them on the kitchen counter, and that’s what you’re going to make your dinner out of. If you’ve got a red pepper over here—it’s not a tomato. You’ve got to deal with what you’ve got. You don’t have an ideal collection of material every time out. (Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
First thing I do is transcribe my notes. This is not an altogether mindless process. You’re copying your notes, and you get ideas. You get ideas for structure. You get ideas for wording, phraseologies. As I’m typing, if something crosses my mind I flip it in there. When I’m done, certain ideas have accrued and have been added to it, like iron filings drawn to a magnet.
And so now you’ve got piles of stuff on the table, unlike a fiction writer. A fiction writer doesn’t have this at all. A fiction writer is feeling her way, feeling her way—it’s much more of a trial-and-error, exploratory thing. With nonfiction, you’ve got your material, and what you’re trying to do is tell it as a story in a way that doesn’t violate fact, but at the same time is structured and presented in a way that makes it interesting to read.
I always say to my classes that it’s analogous to cooking a dinner. You go to the store and you buy a lot of things. You bring them home and you put them on the kitchen counter, and that’s what you’re going to make your dinner out of. If you’ve got a red pepper over here—it’s not a tomato. You’ve got to deal with what you’ve got. You don’t have an ideal collection of material every time out.
(Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
I’d started with single profiles, and when I’d done enough of them, I began to want to do a double profile. Two people at once, with the idea that one plus one might equal more than two. Who would it be? A great example for a project like that would be Frank Gehry and Peter Lewis. This Peter Lewis is some character—a one-legged insurance billionaire who lives much of the year on one of the largest yachts in the world and was once caught carrying pot into New Zealand. And he donated the sixty million bucks to build the new library here on campus. And Frank Gehry is Frank Gehry. These two guys have to know each other—that library’s built here because Peter Lewis gave the money and said that Frank Gehry would be the architect. If you did a profile of Frank Gehry and a profile of Peter Lewis, and you put them in the same piece of writing, one plus one would add up to three point six.
(Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
INTERVIEWER
Was it hard to come up with things to write about?
MCPHEE
I was really quite at sea about that. Let’s say I wanted to write about clams. I’d go to Shawn with that idea, and he would say, Oh no, no. That’s reserved in a general way for another writer. That’s reserved in a general way. Isn’t that amazing? Shawn never mentioned one writer to another. Shawn operated at the hub of an old-fashioned wheel, with the spokes going out all over the place, and the spokes were the writers and no one ever touched another. He kept this amazing thing going. He had thought beforehand about an amazing number of subjects, so the odds were if you brought something up, Shawn had pondered it in some context before. He always knew what he thought immediately. Sometimes he said that it was reserved for another writer, and sometimes he just wasn’t interested. If that was the case, he’d say, Oh no, that’s not for us.
At any rate, that first month, January of 1965, I go in there and we’re having this conversation—Oh no, that’s not for us. Again and again. And then finally I said, Well I have another idea. It’s a piece about oranges. That’s all I said—oranges. I didn’t mention juice, I didn’t mention trees, I didn’t mention the tropics. Just—oranges.
Oh yes! Oh yes! he says. That’s very good. The next thing I knew I was in Florida talking to orange growers.
(Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
He spoke so softly. I was awestruck: the guy’s the editor of The New Yorker and he’s this mysterious person. It was the most transforming event of my writing existence, meeting him, and you could take a hundred years to try to get to know him, and this was just the first day. But he was a really encouraging editor. Shawn always functioned as the editor of new writers, so he edited the Bradley thing. So I spent a lot of time in his office, talking commas. He explained everything with absolute patience, going through seventeen thousand words, a comma at a time, bringing in stuff from the grammarians and the readers’ proofs. He talked about each and every one of these items with the author. These were long sessions. At one point I said, Mr. Shawn, you have this whole enterprise going, a magazine is printing this weekend, and you’re the editor of it, and you sit here talking about these commas and semicolons with me—how can you possibly do it?
And he said, It takes as long as it takes. A great line, and it’s so true of writing. It takes as long as it takes.
(Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
The sheer business of turning out five structured stories, however short they were, every week, was excellent training for me. (Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
MCPHEE
I wrote articles during the day for the company magazine, but I couldn’t make myself write at night, so after a couple of months it became clear to me it wasn’t working out. All the time I was trying to sell stuff to The New Yorker.
INTERVIEWER
Were you always hoping to write for The New Yorker?
MCPHEE
The thing about writers is that, with very few exceptions, they grow slowly—very slowly. A John Updike comes along, he’s an anomaly. That’s no model, that’s a phenomenon. I sent stuff to The New Yorker when I was in college and then for ten years thereafter before they accepted something. I used to paper my wall with their rejection slips. And they were not making a mistake. Writers develop slowly. That’s what I want to say to you: don’t look at my career through the wrong end of a telescope. This is terribly important to me as a teacher of writers, of kids who want to write.
(Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
I decided that I would work in the big world by day and learn about how it worked, and then write about it at night. (Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
But writing teaches writing. And I’ll tell you this, that summer in Firestone Library, I felt myself palpably growing as a writer. You just don’t sit there and write thirty thousand words without learning something. (Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
They asked me to show up on the first day of senior year with thirty thousand words. So I spent the summer in Firestone Library, working in the English grad-study room, writing longhand on yellow pads. I had a real good time in there, working alongside these English grad students, all in various stages of suffering. I got my thirty thousand words done, and then I finished the thing over Christmas. It had a really good structure and was technically fine. But it had no life in it at all. One person wrote a note on it that said, You demonstrated you know how to saddle a horse. Now go find the horse. (Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
INTERVIEWER
Why don’t you read aloud to yourself?
MCPHEE
I think because it strikes me as insane.
(Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
Certainly the aural part of writing is a big, big thing to me. I can’t stand a sentence until it sounds right, and I’ll go over it again and again. Once the sentence rolls along in a certain way, that’s sentence A. Sentence B may work out well, but then its effect on sentence A may spoil the rhythm of the two together. One of the long-term things about knitting a piece of writing together is making all this stuff fit.
I always read the second draft aloud, as a way of moving forward. I read primarily to my wife, Yolanda, and I also have a friend whom I read to. I read aloud so I can hear if it’s fitting together or not. It’s just as much a part of the composition as going out and buying a ream of paper.
(Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
At Princeton High School I had the same English teacher for the first three years. Her name was Olive McKee. She put a great deal of emphasis on writing. In the average week, she would have us do three compositions. We could write anything we wanted to—poetry, fiction, or a story about a real person. But what it had to have, even if it was a poem, was a diagram of some kind that showed the structure of what we had done. You had to turn that in with your piece. (Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
If some word appealed to me, I’d say it over and over again. It would go around in my head the way the snatches of a song would. (Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
but I guess I am interested in people who are expert at something, because they’re going to lead me into some field, teach it to me, and then in turn I’m going to tell others about it. (Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
In A Sense of Where You Are, McPhee describes Bradley playing basketball “according to the foundation pattern of the game.” Despite possessing an amazingly accurate shot, the athlete distinguished himself primarily through attention to footwork, passing, and strategy. In a sense, McPhee writes the same way. He rarely draws attention to himself, but his sense of structure, detail, and language is so refined that his presence is felt on every page. (Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 3, John McPhee) (21 jul 2011)
“I’m obsessed with the structure of pieces of writing,” explained McPhee (The Millions: The McPhee Syllabus) (21 jul 2011)
“I’m obsessed with the structure of pieces of writing,” explained McPhee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Princeton’s Ferris Professor of Journalism, who has taught his legendary class on writing at the University for more than 30 years.
For his students, McPhee sketches primitive diagrams – a horizontal line with loops above and below it to represent the tangents along the storyline, a circle with lines shooting out of it that denote narrative pathways – to illustrate how a piece of writing is assembled. The “doodles,” as he calls them, are projected on a screen in front of the class.
(The Millions: The McPhee Syllabus) (21 jul 2011)
The problem with slot machines, as Telnaes saw it, was that their jackpots were limited by the number of reels they could use. Since players expected each reel to have no more than 10 to 15 symbols, a machine needed many reels to make the odds long enough to justify a huge payout when all the cherries or bells settled into a row. But the more reels a machine had, the more players were reminded of the fact that their quest for riches would likely end in futility; no one wanted to try their luck on a machine with dozens of reels (or, alternatively, hundreds and hundreds of symbols on enormous reels).
Telnaes’ solution to this conundrum was US Patent Number 4,448,419, awarded in 1984. His invention called for slot machine results to be determined not by the spinning of reels but by a random-number generator. The reels on such a machine would display only a visual representation of the generator’s results, lining up when a winning number spit forth or (far more frequently) settling into a losing mishmash of symbols. The patent made possible the development of slot machines that could offer extremely long odds—and thus enticingly massive jackpots—while still appearing to have just a few tumblers. IGT wisely purchased Telnaes’ patent in 1989, thereby guaranteeing itself a steady stream of royalties as its competitors adopted random-number generators, too.
(
1)
(20 jul 2011)A psychologist at a girl’s college asked the members of his class to compliment any girl wearing red. Within a week the cafeteria was a blaze of red. (19 jul 2011)
The work I got involved in was to try to understand these scaling laws. And to make it a very short story, what was proposed apart from the thinking was, look, this is universal. It cuts across the design of organisms. Whether you are insects, fish, mammals or birds, you get the same scaling laws. It is independent of design. Therefore, it must be something that is about the structure of the way things are distributed.
You recognize what the problem is. You have ten14cells. You have this problem. You’ve got to sustain them, roughly speaking, democratically and efficiently. And however natural selection solved it, it solved it by evolving hierarchical networks.
There is a very simple way of doing it. You take something macroscopic, you go through a hierarchy and you deliver them to very microscopic sites, like for example, your capillaries to your cells and so on. And so the idea was, this is true at all scales. It is true of an ecosystem; it is true within the cell. And what these scaling laws are manifesting are the generic, universal, mathematical, topological properties of networks.
The question is, what are the principles that are governing these networks that are independent of design? After a lot of work we postulated the following, just to give an idea.
First, they have to be space filling. They have to go everywhere. They have to feed every cell, every piece of the organism.
Secondly, they have things like invariant units. That is when you evolve from a human being to a whale (to make it a simple story) you do not change the basic units. The cells of the whale or the capillaries of whale, which are the kind of fundamental units, are pretty much indistinguishable from yours and mine. There is this invariance. When you evolve to a new species, you use the same units but you change the network. That’s the idea in this picture.
And the last one is of the infinitude of networks that have these properties - space filling and invariant total units. The ones that have actually evolved by the process of continuous feedback implicit in natural selection are those that have in some way optimized the system.
For example, the amount of work that your heart has to do to pump blood around your circulatory system to keep you alive is minimized with respect to the design of the system. You can put it into mathematics. You have a network theory, you mathematize the network, and then you make variations of the network and ask what is the one that minimizes the amount of energy your heart has to use to pump blood through it.
The principle is simple. Mathematically, it is quite complicated and challenging, but you can solve all of that. And you do that so that you can maximize the amount of energy you can put into fitness to make children. You want to minimize the amount of energy just to keep you alive, so that you can make more babies. That’s the simplest big picture.
All of those results about scaling are derived. A quarter, four, emerges. And what is the four? It turns out the four isn’t a four. The four is actually a “three plus one”, meaning it’s the dimensionality of the space we live in plus one, which is actually to do, loosely speaking, with the fractal nature of these networks, the fact that there’s a sub-similar property.
In D dimensions, you read D plus one (that’s my physicist self speaking). Instead of being three quarters for metabolic rate, it would be D over D plus one.
() (12 jul 2011)
"If I'm ever doing something I know how to do, I'm helping my bank, my business, my boss, but I'm not helping myself. I'm not learning." (12 jul 2011)
People are so bad at driving cars that computers don’t have to be that good to be much better. (Marc Andreessen on the Dot-Com ‘Bubble’ - NYTimes.com) (12 jul 2011)
The crickets and the rust-beetles scuttled among the nettles of the sage thicket. “Vámonos, amigos,” he whispered, and threw the busted leather flintcraw over the loose weave of the saddlecock. And they rode on in the friscalating dusklight. (10 jul 2011)
mirror moment junior year (09 jul 2011)
In graph theory, an arborescence is a directed graph in which, for a vertex u called the root and any other vertex v, there is exactly one directed path from u to v. Equivalently, an arborescence is a directed, rooted tree in which all edges point away from the root. Every arborescence is a directed acyclic graph (DAG), but not every DAG is an arborescence. (Arborescence (graph theory) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) (08 jul 2011)
will people continue to use the word "google" to refer to searching when google goes under? (07 jul 2011)
"Say you're testing a Ruby module directly."
Compare "Suppose…"
g's style (07 jul 2011)
You should start with the Cucumber and only write the code that you need to make the tests pass it they come. Very often, this means that first you will edit routes.rb to allow a route from the page URL you want to the proper controller action. Then you’ll write an RSpec (or other unit test) for the controller action, then you’ll define the controller action, then you’ll write a unit test for the piece of business logic the controller is response for (ie: assigning an array of ActiveRecord objects to an instance variable), and so on. Eventually you’ll access a property of an ActiveRecord model that doesn’t exist, and a test will fail because that property is not defined on that object. At this point you’ll write a migration to modify your schema. ((1) Lee Edwards’s Answers on Test-Driven Development - Quora) (07 jul 2011)
“Write drunk, edit sober.” (07 jul 2011)
We use a simple, point-based system for story estimation, where the points are measures of relative
complexity. Developers are much better at estimating the complexity of a problem than they are at
estimating the duration of work to solve that problem.
Velocity is a measure of how many points a given team completes in a given week. Experience
has shown that a given development team will work through a fairly consistent number of points
on a weekly basis, and this strong central tendency means that velocity for a team becomes very
predictable after the first two to three weeks of development. This will give you a very early
indication of how long a given set of features will take, and give you the visibility to make informed
choices about what features you choose to implement.
(Pivotal Labs: Pivotal Tracker)
(07 jul 2011)leadership as “the gift of getting everybody to perform at their best” (04 jul 2011)
There isn’t much frank, accurate information on abortion out there. Its only really there for people who know to read scientific literature or know where to find that information. It’s presented as a disastrous, horrible thing that’s shrouded in secrecy. It’s the most common outpatient procedure in the United States. Four in every ten women gets an abortion. (30 jun 2011)
After an animal has digested eaten material, the remains of that material are expelled from its body as waste. Though it is lower in energy than the food it came from, feces may still contain a large amount of energy, often 50% of that of the original food.[2] This means that of all food eaten, a significant amount of energy remains for the decomposers of ecosystems. (Feces - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) (30 jun 2011)
does it start with good taste? (and mimesis?) (30 jun 2011)
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." (28 jun 2011)
Someday every overprivileged, misunderstood high school boy who has ever come of age in New York will have his own movie, and one good thing about “The Art of Getting By” is that it brings that day, the day we can move on to other matters, a little closer (‘The Art of Getting By’ by Gavin Wiesen - Review - NYTimes.com) (26 jun 2011)
"a high and lonely destiny" (25 jun 2011)
Two images hint at its actual globe-straddling, 10x-Walmart influence: the image of the Boston Tea Partiers dumping crates of tea into the sea during the American struggle for independence, and the image of smoky opium dens in China. One image symbolizes the rise of a new empire. The other marks the decline of an old one.
The East India Company supplied both the tea and the opium.
At a broader level, the EIC managed to balance an unbalanced trade equation between Europe and Asia whose solution had eluded even the Roman empire. Massive flows of gold and silver from Europe to Asia via the Silk and Spice routes had been a given in world trade for several thousand years. Asia simply had far more to sell than it wanted to buy. Until the EIC came along
A very rough sketch of how the EIC solved the equation reveals the structure of value-addition in the mercantilist world economy.
The EIC started out by buying textiles from Bengal and tea from China in exchange for gold and silver.
Then it realized it was playing the same sucker game that had trapped and helped bankrupt Rome.
Next, it figured out that it could take control of the opium industry in Bengal, trade opium for tea in China with a significant surplus, and use the money to buy the textiles it needed in Bengal. Guns would be needed.
As a bonus, along with its partners, it participated in yet another clever trade: textiles for slaves along the coast of Africa, who could be sold in America for gold and silver.
For this scheme to work, three foreground things and one background thing had to happen: the corporation had to effectively take over Bengal (and eventually all of India), Hong Kong (and eventually, all of China, indirectly) and England. Robert Clive achieved the first goal by 1757. An employee of the EIC, William Jardine, founded what is today Jardine Matheson, the spinoff corporation most associated with Hong Kong and the historic opium trade. It was, during in its early history, what we would call today a narco-terrorist corporation; the Taliban today are kindergarteners in that game by comparison. And while the corporation never actually took control of the British Crown, it came close several times, by financing the government during its many troubles.
The background development was simpler. England had to take over the oceans and ensure the safe operations of the EIC.
(
A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100)
(24 jun 2011)
But these events were set in motion over 30 years earlier, in the 1750s. There was no need for backroom subterfuge. It was all out in the open because the corporation was such a new beast, nobody really understood the dangers it represented. The EIC maintained an army. Its merchant ships often carried vastly more firepower than the naval ships of lesser nations. Its officers were not only not prevented from making money on the side, private trade was actually a perk of employment (it was exactly this perk that allowed William Jardine to start a rival business that took over the China trade in the EIC’s old age). And finally — the cherry on the sundae — there was nothing preventing its officers like Clive from simultaneously holding political appointments that legitimized conflicts of interest. If you thought it was bad enough that Dick Cheney used to work for Halliburton before he took office, imagine if he’d worked there while in office, with legitimate authority to use his government power to favor his corporate employer and make as much money on the side as he wanted, and call in the Army and Navy to enforce his will. That picture gives you an idea of the position Robert Clive found himself in, in 1757.
(
A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100)
(24 jun 2011)Mass Mass Transit – If a big city could coordinate to create subways, etc. on the scale and quality of New York, it could support densities like New York. The level of investment and coordination required to pull this off, however, seems well beyond what any known city can muster. New York only achieved it accidentally (a dotcom-like boom in private subway building). (Overcoming Bias: The Auto-Auto Race) (24 jun 2011)
smoking one’s way to health in the 17th century plague outbreak in naples bc the purported cause was a poisonous miasma. shuttering windows while indoors, etc.
these insane costumes with rods and beaks. (23 jun 2011)
is it possible that the bulk of this reading is a waste when I don't engage it — that the idea of seeding dormant associable hooks is bogus? (23 jun 2011)
"…and you did good today, I'm just saying there's a way to be a person" (Leo) (22 jun 2011)
Do not take cover behind vehicles. Pistol bullets easily pass through both doors of a car; rifle bullets can pass through a vehicle lengthwise. Stopped or disabled vehicles are "bullet magnets" that draw fire. The best protection provided by a car or truck is its ability to move away at high speed. If forced to take cover behind a vehicle or inside one, put the engine block between yourself and the shooter - it rarely gets penetrated by small arms fire.
Walls, trees, and structures provide concealment, but may not provide cover. The 7.62mm round used by the AK-47, a common assault rifle in war zones, can pass through a concrete block. The less powerful 9mm pistol round can go through a dozen layers of sheetrock. [10]
A rule of thumb to keep in mind is the 'three-second rule' which basically states if you need to move to another place of cover, it should not be more than a three second sprint away. A good phrase to remember (if possible) is: 'I'm up, He's seen me, I'm down.' Basically, you are up out of cover and moving (fast), you assume the shooter has seen you and is taking aim, and then you are back down behind suitable defensive cover before he can fire. (22 jun 2011)
The Bakaara Market (Suuqa Bakaaraha) is an open market and the largest in Somalia. Created in late 1972 during the reign of Siad Barre, its original purpose was to allow proprietors to sell daily essentials. The civil war subsequently created demand for arms and ammunition. Everything from pistols to anti-aircraft weapons are being sold. Falsified documents are also readily available. Forged Somali, Ethiopian and Kenyan passports can be processed within minutes.
(
Mogadishu travel guide - Wikitravel)
(22 jun 2011)
I’m reading a short book by Simon Baron-Cohen, Zero Degrees of Empathy, on the nature of evil, arguing that many of the terrible things that people do to each other are a consequence of a failure of empathy. The word ‘evil’ is unhelpful. It stops us thinking too closely
(
Ian McEwan on Books That Have Helped Shape His Novels | FiveBooks | The Browser)
(22 jun 2011)
The jihadi preference for instant rage, slaughter and martyrdom repels everyone, including nearly all Muslims. And the list of radical Islamist dislikes is too long, too much against the grain of human aspiration for their cause to have much appeal in the long run – sexuality, free thought, music, gays, evolutionary biology, unveiled independent women, pluralism, democracy, curiosity, fun, tolerance, fashion, humour…
I saw a demonstration along the Euston Road in London the other day – about a hundred chanting fellows in beards, with the women well to the rear, as you’d expect, head to toe in burqas, and many carrying banners demanding ‘Sharia law now’. The rush-hour traffic was edging round them; no one was paying much attention. They were a minor nuisance, like a failed traffic light. They didn’t look threatening so much as comically hopeless. How marvellous: no one was shouting or throwing stones at them, no one was much bothered. They were exercising their well-protected (I hope) right to demonstrate. A right they would surely never grant to others, if they had their way. They seemed not only puny but politically illiterate – some of their banners said ‘Hands off Gaddafi’. Well, he’s been a scourge to Islamists in his own country, so how on earth they thought he was someone they would want to support, I don’t know.
(
Ian McEwan on Books That Have Helped Shape His Novels | FiveBooks | The Browser)
(22 jun 2011)
Always distrust utopian thinkers. People who believe they can deliver us to happiness for ever are bound to think, rationally enough, that the means will justify the ends. If it will bring the peaceable kingdom to pass, then break the eggs to make that everlasting omelette!
that phrase (22 jun 2011)
This celebrated book has been in print for over half a century. It’s a historical account of the fanatical millenarian sects that swept across Europe from the 11th to 15th centuries: sects that were driven by certainty of the world coming to an end. Clearly, it has relevance for our times. And when the world ended there would be deliverance for the elect. Your enemies would be damned just as you would be saved. These sects were extremely violent, and they came from the poorest, most deprived, marginal sections of society. They surged across Northern Germany, killing Jews, priests, the bourgeois.
Frank Kermode, in his famous book The Sense of an Ending, elaborated on Cohn’s masterwork by suggesting that actually it’s very common for all of us – especially artists – to feel that we live at the end of times, and that our own demise means all the more to us because we’re not simply dying in the middle of the plot, in medias res. Our lives take on significance because as we decline we notice our society is declining all around us. It’s part of a yearning for narrative significance. As Kermode said, no one can hear a clock saying, as it does, tick tick. What we hear is tick tock. A beginning and an end. We impose this order.
(
Ian McEwan on Books That Have Helped Shape His Novels | FiveBooks | The Browser)
(22 jun 2011)
He was impenetrably courteous. At first, quite difficult to get beyond his very gentlemanly, polite and considerate shell. He protected himself. Behind this shell was all of his work. It was easier to get a more intimate Updike by writing letters. If I wrote, I’d get a response by return of post, apologising for being so quick, just as I would be apologising for my delayed replies. He said it was the only way he could keep his desk clear. But of course it was not that at all. This was a highly organised mind with boundless creative energy. He could turn in 1200 words of fiction in a day, write a review or an essay, and still address
(
Ian McEwan on Books That Have Helped Shape His Novels | FiveBooks | The Browser)
(22 jun 2011)This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die, (22 jun 2011)
I have a careless theory that the poetry of Larkin has had a profound effect on the prose writing of my generation. There are many writers of my age who are steeped in Larkin and, like me, incorporate the cadences of his lines, often without being aware of it. His poems are part of my mental furniture. Yesterday I slipped outside to get a sandwich at lunchtime, the sun was out, I looked at some rowan trees across the street, and I thought – ah yes! – ‘The trees are coming into leaf / Like something almost being said’. That’s Larkin’s poem ‘The Trees’. It has some almost Shakespearian lines: ‘Yet still the unresting castles thresh / In fullgrown thickness every May’.
On that note, I want to ask about style. I would describe Larkin’s style as conversational, but also with extreme precision and clarity of reflection, and he engages very directly with everyday experience. Prose and poetry aside, do you model your style on his at all?
Well Larkin’s style is deceptively conversational; narratively, it’s extremely and artfully compressed. Perhaps that’s why prose writers admire him so much. T S Eliot said that aesthetic revolutions in poetry are about the return to the rhythms of everyday speech, and Larkin fulfils those terms with clarity and restrained dark humour.
How does this affect my prose? There’s something in those cadences. There are times when I look back over some piece of work and I think, ‘I know where that rhythm comes from – it’s something out of “The Whitsun Weddings”, or out of “Self’s the Man”.’ It can be something so small, like a sentence that seems to miss its final beat in order to deliver something a little flat. There’s one other element too – a kind of morose scepticism, Larkin’s reluctance to be moved. And when he is moved, as he famously is in ‘High Windows’, the effect is all the more powerful.
Martin Amis and I used to meet up before going out in the evenings in the 70s, and spend an hour downing a bottle of wine and reading aloud and celebrating Larkin. I’m sure Martin would also acknowledge the curious power of Larkin in his work.
(
Ian McEwan on Books That Have Helped Shape His Novels | FiveBooks | The Browser)
(22 jun 2011)
I’m sometimes asked by a literary intellectual in an on-stage discussion – often through the medium of a puzzled frown – why I’m interested in science. As if I was being asked why I had a particular fascination for designs of differential gears in old Volkswagens, or car-parking regulations in Chicago in the 1940s. Science is simply organised human curiosity and we should all take part. It’s a matter of beauty. Just as we treasure beauty in our music and literature, so there’s beauty to be found in the exuberant invention of science.
(
Ian McEwan on Books That Have Helped Shape His Novels | FiveBooks | The Browser)
(22 jun 2011)
Sometimes I experimentally write out a first paragraph – or middle paragraph, even – of a novel which I feel no obligation to write. Those kind of dabblings I always set down in a green, ring-bound A4 notebook. It’s full of paragraphs from novels I will never complete, or hardly start. But sooner or later, one of those paragraphs will snag my attention, and I’ll come back to it asking: why does that interest me so much, why does that seem to offer a peculiar kind of mental freedom? And so I might find myself adding a page or two. It was with a complete free hand, for example, that I once wrote what turned out to be the opening of Atonement – with no clear sense that I was committed to anything at all, I was just playing with narrative positions, with tone of voice, with a certain descriptive moment. Or I might decide that what I’ve written belongs to the middle of a novel, and then I’ll spend some idle time tracing out a beginning. Then abandoning it. It’s a way of tricking myself into writing novels.
(
Ian McEwan on Books That Have Helped Shape His Novels | FiveBooks | The Browser)
(22 jun 2011)
I tend to leave long gaps between novels; I’m quite happy not to write for months on end. I don’t have anxieties about writer’s block either – I don’t even believe in the concept – but I’m a great believer in hesitation. I think there’s nothing wrong with pausing when you’re not sure how to proceed. And in that rather dreamy, floating kind of mental state (one which I long for once I’ve started a book and can no longer have it) I go where my reading and thoughts and travels take me.
(
Ian McEwan on Books That Have Helped Shape His Novels | FiveBooks | The Browser)
(22 jun 2011)
As Modi became a power centre unto himself—a “super chief minister”, to use the phrase most commonly applied to him then
(
After the Fall)
(22 jun 2011)a baby-faced man of preposterous proportions (22 jun 2011)
The Book of Disquiet. This is a book of ideas. It’s not a book about the internet. It was written much earlier, in the 20th century, and written in Portuguese. It’s really a book of meditations. It’s very philosophical. It applies to the internet in that the main point is how much joy you can take in small things and small changes and the true drama of life can be extraordinarily minute in scale, and this, I think, gets at the idea that the internet and the stories we follow are, to a lot of us, extremely important and exciting and meaningful, though really they are just a few changes of characters on a little screen somewhere.
(
Tyler Cowen on Information | FiveBooks | The Browser)
(22 jun 2011)
“One of the New York Times’ roles in this new world is authority—and that’s probably the rarest commodity on the web,” explains Pilhofer as the waiter gives us our check. “That’s why in some respects we’re gung-ho and in other respects very conservative. Everything we do has to be to New York Times standards. Everything. And people are crazy about that. And that’s a good thing.”
(
The New Journalism: Goosing the Gray Lady)
(22 jun 2011)In journalism, a nut graph is a paragraph, particularly in a feature story, that explains the news value of the story. (22 jun 2011)
In 1928 the Paris Herald Tribune became the first newspaper distributed by airplane, flying copies to London from Paris in time for breakfast (22 jun 2011)
An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is such little eye motion
(
How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later)
(21 jun 2011)
The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.
(
How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later)
(21 jun 2011)
In my writing I got so interested in fakes that I finally came up with the concept of fake fakes. For example, in Disneyland there are fake birds worked by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked into the park with real birds and substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials would feel when they discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds! And perhaps someday even real hippos and lions. Consternation. The park being cunningly transmuted from the unreal to the real, by sinister forces. For instance, suppose the Matterhorn turned into a genuine snow-covered mountain? What if the entire place, by a miracle of God’s power and wisdom, was changed, in a moment, in the blink of an eye, into something incorruptible? They would have to close down.
(
How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later)
(21 jun 2011)Kali Yuga : (Devanāgarī: कलियुग [kəli juɡə], lit. “age of (the male demon) Kali”, or “age of vice”) is the last of the four stages that the world goes through as part of the cycle of yugas described in the Indian scriptures. The other ages are Satya Yuga, Treta Yuga and Dvapara Yuga. According to the Surya Siddhanta, an astronomical treatise that forms the basis of all Hindu and Buddhist calendars, Kali Yuga began at midnight (00:00) on 18 February 3102 BCE [1] in the proleptic Julian calendar, or 23 January 3102 BC in the proleptic Gregorian calendar. This date is also considered by many Hindus to be the day that Krishna left earth to return to his abode. Most interpreters of Hindu scriptures believe that earth is currently in Kali Yuga. Some, such as Swami Sri Yukteswar,[2] and Paramhansa Yogananda[3] believe that it is now near the beginning of Dvapara Yuga. The Kali Yuga is traditionally thought to last 432,000 years.
Hindus and Sikhs believe that human civilization degenerates spiritually during the Kali Yuga,[4][5] which is referred to as the Dark Age because in it people are as far removed as possible from God. Hinduism often symbolically represents morality (dharma) as a bull. In Satya Yuga, the first stage of development, the bull has four legs, but in each age morality is reduced by one quarter. By the age of Kali, morality is reduced to only a quarter of that of the golden age, so that the bull of Dharma has only one leg.[6][7]
Kali Yuga is associated with the apocalyptic demon Kali, not to be confused with the goddess Kālī (read as Kaalee) (these are unrelated words in the Sanskrit language). The “Kali” of Kali Yuga means “strife, discord, quarrel, or contention.”
(Kali Yuga - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) (20 jun 2011)
“it’s just shelf space on the second floor” (17 jun 2011)
sits astride (17 jun 2011)
We don’t have to look far for evidence. Two million patients pick up infections in American hospitals, most because someone didn’t follow basic antiseptic precautions. Forty per cent of coronary-disease patients and sixty per cent of asthma patients receive incomplete or inappropriate care. And half of major surgical complications are avoidable with existing knowledge. It’s like no one’s in charge—because no one is. The public’s experience is that we have amazing clinicians and technologies but little consistent sense that they come together to provide an actual system of care, from start to finish, for people. We train, hire, and pay doctors to be cowboys. But it’s pit crews people need.
(
News Desk: Cowboys and Pit Crews : The New Yorker)
(17 jun 2011)
The core structure of medicine—how health care is organized and practiced—emerged in an era when doctors could hold all the key information patients needed in their heads and manage everything required themselves. One needed only an ethic of hard work, a prescription pad, a secretary, and a hospital willing to serve as one’s workshop, loaning a bed and nurses for a patient’s convalescence, maybe an operating room with a few basic tools. We were craftsmen. We could set the fracture, spin the blood, plate the cultures, administer the antiserum. The nature of the knowledge lent itself to prizing autonomy, independence, and self-sufficiency among our highest values, and to designing medicine accordingly. But you can’t hold all the information in your head any longer, and you can’t master all the skills. No one person can work up a patient’s back pain, run the immunoassay, do the physical therapy, protocol the MRI, and direct the treatment of the unexpected cancer found growing in the spine. I don’t even know what it means to “protocol” the MRI.
Before Elias Zerhouni became director of the National Institutes of Health, he was a senior hospital leader at Johns Hopkins, and he calculated how many clinical staff were involved in the care of their typical hospital patient—how many doctors, nurses, and so on. In 1970, he found, it was 2.5 full-time equivalents. By the end of the nineteen-nineties, it was more than fifteen. The number must be even larger today. Everyone has just a piece of patient care. We’re all specialists now—even primary-care doctors. A structure that prioritizes the independence of all those specialists will have enormous difficulty achieving great care.
(
News Desk: Cowboys and Pit Crews : The New Yorker)
(17 jun 2011)imprecations and porpoise (16 jun 2011)
Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good
job, but if you want to make about the same money and be happier, you could
actually just go run a fast food joint. You are much better off using code as
your secret weapon in another profession.
People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and
get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government,
sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing
things to advance those disciplines.
(Advice From An Old Programmer — Learn Python The Hard Way, 2nd Edition) (16 jun 2011)
FOOTNOTE The convention that headlines are written by copy-editors and not by reporters or columnists goes back to the days of print, when headlines had to be custom-crafted to occupy the right amount of space: a quantity that couldn’t be known until the page was laid out. For a piece in electronic form, there’s no reason not to let the author create the heading. It’s called “cultural lag.” (16 jun 2011)
From his Notebooks, (the best Emerson to read, in my view) circa 1841:
We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over & actually read a volume of 4 or 500 pages. Even the great books. “Come,” say they, “we will give you the key to the world” — Each poet each philosopher says this, & we expect to go like a thunderbolt to the centre, but the thunder is a superficial phenomenon, makes a skin-deep cut, and so does the Sage — whether Confucius, Menu, Zoroaster, Socrates; striking at right angles to the globe his force is instantly diffused laterally & enters not. The wedge turns out to be a rocket. I have found this to be the case with every book I have read & yet I take up a new writer with a sort of pulse beat of expectation.
(16 jun 2011)The strict Keynesian answer is: it should not matter. Demand is demand. As Keynes himself said in one of his more cynical moments, it would suffice if the government put bank notes in bottles and buried them in coal mines, anything to encourage private investors to put people to work. (16 jun 2011)
“deserters must be executed. any general will tell you that.” (15 jun 2011)
Man, am I a genius. Check out this sorting algorithm I just invented.
#!/bin/bash
function f() {
sleep "$1"
echo "$1"
}
while [ -n "$1" ]
do
f "$1" &
shift
done
wait
example usage:
./sleepsort.bash 5 3 6 3 6 3 1 4 7 (4chan BBS - Genius sorting algorithm: Sleep sort) (15 jun 2011)
thomas babington macauley, the pre-eminent whig historian (15 jun 2011)
the economics of broken things (15 jun 2011)
inexact is a good word (14 jun 2011)
guides for youngsters are tendentious and therefore controversial because they must be simple and are therefore astringent. it’s an especially clear kind of lossy compression. (13 jun 2011)
the sort of stuff that goes into high school yearbooks (13 jun 2011)
And here’s where I save your life. Because the truth about hyperpartisanship is that it is an absolutely miserable and unpleasant way to be a sports fan. No one talks about this, because (a) people who complain about rage in sports tend to want to mourn some lost standard of politeness, which has nothing to do with anything, and (b) because hyperpartisan fans are the most outwardly invested in their clubs, so there’s a presumption that they’re the most authentic or admirable supporters, even if they’re also, everyone knows, unbearably obnoxious. It’s the last bit, the presumption of authenticity, that’s the most concerning, because if you’re just getting into soccer, and you love your club, well, then you don’t want anyone to be more totally into your club than you are. So especially if you’re already surrounded by a lot of hyperpartisan fans in your daily life, your instinct may be to go in with blinders on and drink from the chalice of the faith.
The problem is that by doing so, you condemn yourself to a life of always being at least a little angry about a thing you supposedly love, a life of storing up slights and spinning them into bitter little stories, a life of basically hostile, suspicious, and un-fun commitment to a thing that only exists to give you joy. The sole and entire point of sports is to enjoy sports; even if you think athletic competition has a deeper purpose, that it helps with moral instruction or enforcing community ties or whatever else, it’s only able to serve that purpose because it’s fun in the first place. If your love of soccer has brought you to a point where you’re no longer really able to see the game as something wonderful and amazing except in narrow moments of unequivocal triumph, then you are doing it wrong, no matter how many kills you rack up on the internet. On that note, it’s also not unimportant that the mind-warp of hyperpartisanship is eventually going to make you think and say things that are, let’s be frank, really fucking stupid, and that there’s no need for you to be really fucking stupid just to support your club. Last week I heard from two separate Madrid fans who tortured themselves through an argument that Barcelona are actually the most negative team in soccer, and especially when they play Madrid. Anything is beautiful if you say it is, but like Mourinho’s postgame spy novel, that was a pretty big stretch.
(
Your Stupid Rage - The Run of Play)
(12 jun 2011)
That, in fact, is exactly the theory behind the Sex Purchase Law in Sweden. As of 1999, johns are punished by up to six months’ imprisonment, traffickers are locked up for 2-to-10-year hits, and prostitutes are offered medical care, education, and housing. As a result, prostitution has been reduced by 50 percent in Sweden, and the purchase of sex, which is understood to be a human-rights abuse, has decreased by 75 percent.
(
Sex Trafficking of Americans: The Girls Next Door | Politics | Vanity Fair)
(12 jun 2011)
Detective Scates has a fantastic knack for being a good street investigator and for listening to people, but not too much like a social worker.
(
Sex Trafficking of Americans: The Girls Next Door | Politics | Vanity Fair)
(12 jun 2011)
Most of the johns were startled to learn that the girls were not acting of their own free will—75 to 80 percent of prostitutes don’t.
(
Sex Trafficking of Americans: The Girls Next Door | Politics | Vanity Fair)
(12 jun 2011)mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (MECE) (11 jun 2011)
the feedback loop of praise that makes careers (11 jun 2011)
parv turns on the microscope and marvels at the giant little things (11 jun 2011)
Of course, you can use that as a baseline for talking about actual individual cities, how they over and underperform relative to this idealized scaling number. But the question is, where in the hell does that come from? What is it that’s universal that transcends countries and cultures?
Well obviously, it’s what cities are really about, not these buildings and the roads and things, but the people. It’s people. What we believe is that the scaling laws are a manifestation of social networks, of the universality of the way human beings interact, what we’re doing now, talking to one another, exchanging ideas, and doing tasks together, and so on.
It is the nature of those networks and the clustering — very importantly, the hierarchical clustering of those networks, the family structure, the way families interact, and then all the way out through businesses and so on, that there’s a kind of universality to that that is representative of the kind of scale at which humans interact.
(
edge.org/print/conversation.php?cid=geoffrey-west)
(10 jun 2011)
However, some bad and ugly come with it. And the bad and ugly are things like a systematic increase in crime and various diseases, like AIDS, flu and so on. Interestingly enough, it scales all to the same 15 percent, if you double the size. Or put slightly differently, another way of saying it is, if you have a city of a million people and you broke it down into ten cities of a hundred thousand, you would require for that ten cities of a hundred thousand, 30 to 40 percent more roads, and 30 to 40 percent general infrastructure. And you would get a systematic decrease in wages and productivity and invention. Amazing. But you’d also get a decrease in crime, pollution and disease, systematically. So there are these trade-offs.
(
edge.org/print/conversation.php?cid=geoffrey-west)
(10 jun 2011)
The first result that we actually got was with my German colleagues, Dirk Helbing, and his then student, Christian Kuhnert, who then worked with me. One of the first results was a very simple one —the number of gas stations as a function of city size in European cities.
What was discovered was that they behaved sort of like biology. You found that they are scaled beautifully, and it scaled as a power law, and the power law was less than one, indicating an economy of scale. Not surprisingly, the bigger the city, the less gas stations you need per capital. There is an economy of scale.
But it’s scaled! That is, it was systematic! You tell me the size of a city and I’ll tell you how many gas stations it has — that kind of idea. And not only that, it’s scaled at exactly the same way across all European cities. Kind of interesting!
But then, we discovered two things later that were quite remarkable. First, every infrastructural quantity you looked at from total length of roadways to the length of electrical lines to the length of gas lines, all the kinds of infrastructural things that are networked throughout a city, scaled in the same way as the number of gas stations. Namely, systematically, as you increase city size, I can tell you, roughly speaking, how many gas stations there are, what is the total length of roads, electrical lines, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s the same scaling in Europe, the United States, Japan and so on.
It is quite similar to biology. The exponent, instead of being three quarters was more like .85. So it’s a different exponent, but similar. But it’s an economy of scale.
The truly remarkable result was when we looked at quantities that I will call “socioeconomic”. That is, quantities that have no analog in biology. These are quantities, phenomena that did not exist until about 10,000 years ago when men and women started talking to one another and working together and forming serious communities leading to what we now call cities, i.e. things like wages, the number of educational institutions, the number of patents produced, et cetera. Things that have no analog in biology, things we invented.
And if you ask, first of all, do they scale? The answer is yes, in a regular way. Then, how do they scale? And this was the surprise to me; I’m embarrassed to say. It should have been obvious prior, but they scaled in what we called a super linear fashion. Instead of being an exponent less than one, indicating economies of scale, the exponent was bigger than one, indicating what economists call increasing returns to scale.
What does that say? That says that systematically, the bigger the city, the more wages you can expect, the more educational institutions in principle, more cultural events, more patents are produced, it’s more innovative and so on. Remarkably, all to the same degree. There was a universal exponent which turned out to be approximately 1.15 which translated to English says something like the following: If you double the size of a city from 50,000 to a hundred thousand, a million to two million, five million to ten million, it doesn’t matter what, systematically, you get a roughly 15 percent increase in productivity, patents, the number of research institutions, wages and so on, and you get systematically a 15 percent saving in length of roads and general infrastructure.
(
edge.org/print/conversation.php?cid=geoffrey-west)
(10 jun 2011)
Another remarkable fact is that the planet has urbanizing at an exponential rate. Namely, 200 years ago, here sitting in Manhattan, almost everything around me would be a field. There would be a teeny settlement down at Wall Street somewhere of a small number of people. But most of the people would be living in these fields all the way up Manhattan into upstate New York. Indeed, at that time, less than four percent of the United States was urban. Primarily, it was agricultural. And now, only 200 years later, it’s almost the reverse. More like 82 percent is urban and less than 20 percent is agricultural. This has happened at an extraordinarily fast rate — and in fact, faster than exponential.
(
edge.org/print/conversation.php?cid=geoffrey-west)
(10 jun 2011)
What did we learn from scaling in biology? We not only learned the network theory, but we learned that despite the fact that the whale lives in the ocean, the giraffe has a long neck, and the elephant a truck, and we walk on two feet and the mouse scurries around, at some 85, 90 percent level, we’re all scaled versions of one another.
There’s kind of one mammal, and every other mammal, no matter what size it is and where it existed, is actually some well-defined mathematically scaled version of that one master mammal, so to speak. And that is kind of amazing.
In other words, the size of a mammal, or any organism for that matter, can tell you how long it should live, how many children it should have, how oxygen diffuses across its lungs, what is the length of the ninth branch of its circulatory system, how its blood is flowing, how quickly it will grow, et cetera.
(
edge.org/print/conversation.php?cid=geoffrey-west)
(10 jun 2011)
All of those results about scaling are derived. A quarter, four, emerges. And what is the four? It turns out the four isn’t a four. The four is actually a “three plus one”, meaning it’s the dimensionality of the space we live in plus one, which is actually to do, loosely speaking, with the fractal nature of these networks, the fact that there’s a sub-similar property.
(
edge.org/print/conversation.php?cid=geoffrey-west)
(10 jun 2011)
The question is, what are the principles that are governing these networks that are independent of design? After a lot of work we postulated the following, just to give an idea.
First, they have to be space filling. They have to go everywhere. They have to feed every cell, every piece of the organism.
Secondly, they have things like invariant units. That is when you evolve from a human being to a whale (to make it a simple story) you do not change the basic units. The cells of the whale or the capillaries of whale, which are the kind of fundamental units, are pretty much indistinguishable from yours and mine. There is this invariance. When you evolve to a new species, you use the same units but you change the network. That’s the idea in this picture.
And the last one is of the infinitude of networks that have these properties - space filling and invariant total units. The ones that have actually evolved by the process of continuous feedback implicit in natural selection are those that have in some way optimized the system.
For example, the amount of work that your heart has to do to pump blood around your circulatory system to keep you alive is minimized with respect to the design of the system. You can put it into mathematics. You have a network theory, you mathematize the network, and then you make variations of the network and ask what is the one that minimizes the amount of energy your heart has to use to pump blood through it.
(
edge.org/print/conversation.php?cid=geoffrey-west)
(10 jun 2011)
Just to give you an example, if you increase the size of an organism by a factor of ten to the fourth, four is the magnitude, you would have expected naively to have ten to the fourth times as much energy. You would have the ten to the fourth times more cells. Ten thousand times more cells. Not true. You only need a thousand times. There’s an extraordinary savings in the energy use, and that cuts across all resources as well.
When we come to social organizations, there’s an interesting question. Do we have economies of scale or what? How do cities work, for example? How do companies work in this framework? That’s one thing.
The second thing is, (again, comes from the data and the conceptual framework explains it) the bigger you are, the slower everything is. The bigger you are, you live longer. Oxygen diffuses slower across your various membranes. You take longer to mature, you grow slower, but all in a systematic, mathematizable, predictable way. The pace of life systematically slows down following these quarter power scales. And again, we’ll ask those questions about life … social life and economies.
The work I got involved in was to try to understand these scaling laws. And to make it a very short story, what was proposed apart from the thinking was, look, this is universal. It cuts across the design of organisms. Whether you are insects, fish, mammals or birds, you get the same scaling laws. It is independent of design. Therefore, it must be something that is about the structure of the way things are distributed.
You recognize what the problem is. You have ten14cells. You have this problem. You’ve got to sustain them, roughly speaking, democratically and efficiently. And however natural selection solved it, it solved it by evolving hierarchical networks.
There is a very simple way of doing it. You take something macroscopic, you go through a hierarchy and you deliver them to very microscopic sites, like for example, your capillaries to your cells and so on. And so the idea was, this is true at all scales. It is true of an ecosystem; it is true within the cell. And what these scaling laws are manifesting are the generic, universal, mathematical, topological properties of networks.
(
edge.org/print/conversation.php?cid=geoffrey-west)
(10 jun 2011)
The remarkable thing in biology that got me excited and has led to all of my present work (which has now gone beyond biology and into social organizations, cities, and companies) is that there was data, quite old and fundamental to all biological processes, about metabolism: Here is maybe the most complex physical chemical process possibly in the universe, and when you ask how it is scaled with size across mammals (as an example to keep it simple) you find that there is an extraordinary regularity.
This is surprising because we believe in natural selection, and natural selection has built into it this idea that history plays an important role. There’s the environmental niche for every organism, every component of an organism, every cell type is unique and has its own unique history. So if you plotted, for example the metabolic rate on the Y axis and size on the X axis, because of the extraordinary diversity and complexity of the system and the historical contingency, you would expect points all over the map representing, of course, history and geography and so on.
Well, you find quite the contrary. You find a very simple curve, and that curve has a very simple mathematical formula. It comes out to be a very simple power law. In fact, the power law not only is simple in itself mathematically, but here it has an exponent that is extraordinarily simple. The exponent was very close to the number three quarters.
First of all, that was amazing in itself, that you see scaling. But more importantly was that the scaling is manifested across all of life into eco-systems and down within cells. So this scaling law is truly remarkable. It goes from intracellular up to ecosystems almost 30 orders of magnitude. They’re the same phenomenon.
Furthermore, if you look at any physiological variable, such as the rate at which oxygen diffuses across lungs, the length of the aorta, anything to do with the physiology of any organism, or if you look at any life history event like how long you live, how long does the organism live, how long does it take to mature, what is its growth rate, etc., and you ask how does it scale? It scales in very similar way.
That is, it scales as a simple power law. The extraordinary thing about it is that the power law has an exponent, which is always a simple multiple of one quarter. What you determine just from the data is that there’s this extraordinary simple number, four, which seems to dominate all biology and across all taxonomic groups from the microscopic to the macroscopic.
(
edge.org/print/conversation.php?cid=geoffrey-west)
(10 jun 2011)
compossible
great word (10 jun 2011)
Hathcock recollects learning the trade in the 1950s and 1960s, first on a dummy keyboard before he could “contend with the added complications of the matrices and molten metal.” He began work in Oklahoma, earning $65 a week (“I haven’t had so much buying power since”). Linotype had its own magic due to the ease and flexibility of the trade. Take note, for instance, of the people Hathcock called “the travelers”:
I became aware of “travelers” — men who moved across the country from print shop to print shop. They spoke nonchalantly about every good-sized town in the country, and they always delivered their judgments in terms of the bars, women, and hotels, as well as the print shops and newspapers. Men who have traveled that much (and most travelers were men) have a sophistication that transcends formal education, an ease in any surroundings, and a brash confidence in their skills…. They had more nicknames than the Mafia — Two Star, Dirty Shirt, the Silver Fox, Speedy, Ten High, the Wandering Jew, Pete the Tramp…. One of my friends, a Scotsman, has set type everywhere in the world that English is spoken.
(
Celebrating Linotype, 125 Years Since Its Debut - John Hendel - Technology - The Atlantic)
(10 jun 2011)
Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” ~ Mark Twain on Jane Austen
(
Meta: 5 Must-Read Books About Language | Brain Pickings)
(10 jun 2011)these jerks, these “cool guys,” who can sketch (09 jun 2011)
The machinery of genre, in other words, so ingeniously kept to a low background hum for so long, comes roaring to life, and the movie enacts its own loss of innocence. (J. J. Abrams’s ‘Super 8’ Zooms In on a Dark Secret - Review - NYTimes.com) (09 jun 2011)
how I've bungled "captive audience" for years (09 jun 2011)
For example, it is sometimes remarked how marvelous it is that a biological system like language should be so discrete and clean, but in fact there is abundant gradedness and variability in the original data; the evidence for the discreteness and cleanness of language seems to be mostly evidence we ourselves have planted. (09 jun 2011)
Soon, Tufte’s notes on information design had grown into a book-length manuscript. He showed it around to publishers, who insisted on redesigning many pages in the book, and imagined it as a niche title, only worth printing a couple thousand copies. Frustrated, Tufte took out a second mortgage on his home at 18 percent interest to print the book himself. He spent most of the next summer with a book designer named Howard Gralla. The two of them sat side by side in Gralla’s apartment, eating bagels and rearranging text so words and images would be woven together on the page. “Self-publishing,” Tufte told me, “allowed for an incredible, bizarre fussiness.”
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information came out in April 1983. To save costs, Tufte told the printer to bind only half of the initial print run of 5,000 copies. The book is now in its twentieth printing, and is one of the most successful self-published books of all time.
(
The Washington Monthly - The Magazine - The Information Sage)
(09 jun 2011)
As Hammes explains it, the reliance on PowerPoint often means that battle orders are rendered in incomplete, often unclear sentences and maps are squashed and stripped of meaningful detail, leaving essential battlefield questions of geography dangerously unclear. The details are classified, but Hammes told me that he has seen war plans for the Korean peninsula prepared in PowerPoint in which massive terrain issues were completely glossed over. On the whole, Hammes told me, the rise of PowerPoint in the military has made the decision-making process less intellectually active.
(
The Washington Monthly - The Magazine - The Information Sage)
(08 jun 2011)
Tufte dissected NASA’s PowerPoint slides on his Web site, showing that the program didn’t allow engineers to write in scientific notation and replaced complex quantitative measurement with imprecise words like “significant.” He then published a twenty-eight-page essay called “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint,” in which he analyzed hundreds of existing PowerPoint slides and showed that the statistical graphics used in PowerPoint presentations show an average of twelve numbers each, which, in Tufte’s analysis, ranks it below every major world publication except for Pravda. The low information density of PowerPoint is “approaching dementia,” he wrote.
(
The Washington Monthly - The Magazine - The Information Sage)
(08 jun 2011)
The truth is that many of the most capable low- and middle-income students attend community colleges or less selective four-year colleges close to their home. Doing so makes them less likely to graduate from college at all, research has shown. Incredibly, only 44 percent of low-income high school seniors with high standardized test scores enroll in a four-year college, according to a Century Foundation report — compared with about 50 percent of high-income seniors who have average test scores.
“The extent of wasted human capital,” wrote the report’s authors, Anthony P. Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, “is phenomenal.”
(
Top Colleges Overlook Low-Income Students - NYTimes.com)
(08 jun 2011)
Essayist? Yes…he is the one that coined the word, from French “essai,” meaning test, try, attempt, etc. Philosopher? He was an excellent observer of himself and his surroundings, from the very simple to the absurdly complex, and wrote what we know as the “Essays,” his life’s work.
the quick style here (08 jun 2011)
In the context of our Total Noise, a piece like Mark Danner’s “Iraq: … Imagination” exemplifies a special subgenre I’ve come to think of as the service essay, with “service” here referring to both professionalism and virtue. In what is loosely framed as a group book review, Danner has processed and arranged an immense quantity of fact, opinion, confirmation, testimony, and on-site experience in order to offer an explanation of the Iraq debacle that is clear without being simplistic, comprehensive without being overwhelming, and critical without being shrill… .
(Who Was David Foster Wallace? — Better Left Unfed: Consider the Lobster and the Late Nonfiction | Quarterly Conversation) (08 jun 2011)
Excessively or affectedly quaint, pretty, or sentimental
(twee in English - Google Dictionary) (08 jun 2011)
The problem with nonfiction has always been that there is no way to organize all of it, so one flips through the dictionary to find suitably elastic categorical name-plates, and one eventually ends up with the “lyric essay,” which to me sounds insufferably twee and cloying and desperate and hairless—the Michael Cera of literary genres. (Who Was David Foster Wallace? — Better Left Unfed: Consider the Lobster and the Late Nonfiction | Quarterly Conversation) (08 jun 2011)
I subsequently became hyper-vigilant about tracking down Wallace’s nonfiction. I remember when his essay on usage came out in Harper’s, and I read it at my desk at work, enraptured, for 90 minutes, refusing phone calls or filing requests. (I worked in a media relations office, and I was located in the middle of its large central room. My only job was to answer the phone and file.) I remember how Harper’s printed it as a lengthy excerpt in the middle of the issue, differently papered. It was one of those visceral, Proustianly perfect reading experiences. I did the same procedure a few years later when his essay “Host” came out in the Atlantic Monthly. I read it at my job in a television newsroom. Reading the magazine and ignoring the journalistic mayhem surrounding me neatly captured the strange value I found in Wallace’s nonfiction. The way it took a roiling contemporary phenomenon—in the case of “Host,” the heady mixture of intimacy and rage present in talk radio—and made it humanely funny, complexly clarified, rigorously observed. The mode he employed was dense but elastic, overburdened with the world’s details but still somehow exuberant. I stalked his byline like a jilted lover.
(Who Was David Foster Wallace? — Better Left Unfed: Consider the Lobster and the Late Nonfiction | Quarterly Conversation) (08 jun 2011)
But in my senior year I pilfered a professor’s hardback copy of A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again and was shaken. It triggered the clichéd-yet-genuine feeling one always gets from great writing: I had no idea one could write like this (Who Was David Foster Wallace? — Better Left Unfed: Consider the Lobster and the Late Nonfiction | Quarterly Conversation) (08 jun 2011)
The fact is, there is no dispositive empirical proof about which method is best (Where Wisdom Lives - NYTimes.com) (08 jun 2011)
Kant has an almost opposite metaphor. He imagines a dove resentful about air resistance; it could fly better, surely, if the air would just get out of the way. (08 jun 2011)
A philosopher is like a fly buzzing around in a fly bottle, according to Wittgenstein. A theory of the bottle, it doesn't need. What it needs is to be shown the way out. (08 jun 2011)
Philosophy's distinguishing value? For me, it resides not so much in the big questions' multifarious answers themselves, nor, alas, in wisdom attained through the exacting process of answering them, but rather in how it invariably reminds us how little we really do know. Philosophy is, or should be, humbling — and is, for this, ennobling. (08 jun 2011)
Desistance mandates under probation grossly outperform any existing drug treatment regimen: in Hawaii, 80% of a group of long-term methamphetamine users was on the street and not using after a year on HOPE; compared to randomly selected controls, their rates of arrest for new crimes and of incarceration were reduced by more than 50%. That falsifies the claim that “trying to manage this complex condition through punishment is ineffective.” (08 jun 2011)
But just a few years ago, the situation was completely different. Although texting was popular in Europe and Japan, the rate of use in the U.S. was roughly two orders of magnitude lower — and was mainly confined to online trading addicts getting stock price alerts, sports fanatics getting score updates, etc. See “No text please, we’re American”, The Economist, 4/3/2003; “Why text messaging is not popular in the US”, textually.org, 4/4/2003. I also noted this difference in a few posts three years ago (“Texting”, 3/8/2004; “More on meiru”, 3/9/2004; “Texting, typing, speaking”, 7/1/2004).
The explanations offered for the geographic difference, back then, included Japanese commuting habits and social conventions discouraging phone conversations in public; greater availability of networked computers to Americans; different voice, SMS and internet pricing structures between Europe and the U.S.; the fact that SMS “was originally defined as part of the GSM series of standards”, while U.S. cell phone service is more diverse in terms of its underlying technology.
(08 jun 2011)Some judges are believed to be unhappy with the changes too but so far none has put their head above the parapet (08 jun 2011)
although given a $75tn present-value unfunded liability and extremely strong resistance to significant tax increases, it’s a bit hard to see how Medicare’s not going to be walked back some. (07 jun 2011)
High-profile vehicles such as buses and tractor trailers are even more vulnerable to high winds. (07 jun 2011)
pregnant with connotations, of beautiful complex etymology (07 jun 2011)
If I ever married the very fact that the woman was my wife would be sufficient to convince me that she was superior to all other women. (07 jun 2011)
- I believe in marriage, and have whooped it up for years. It is the best solution, not only of the sex question, but also of the living question. I mean for the normal man. My own life has been too irregular for it: I have been to much engrossed in other things. But any plausible gal who really made up her mind to it could probably fetch me, even today. If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse, as a man shoots himself. I’ll regret it bitterly for about a month, and then settle down contentedly.
(07 jun 2011)a sort of sad, wistful fury at all the things of life not recognized in its cosmogony (07 jun 2011)
June Tangney of George Mason University emphasized that humility is not equivalent to low self-esteem. Rather, the humble person has an accurate view of herself. She can acknowledge her mistakes. She has low self-focus. She is aware of her place in the grand scheme of things and is sensitive to larger and possibly higher forces.
The humble person has the ability to be “unselved.”
Humility is not modesty either, Tangney argues. The modest person has a moderate view of himself, but may still think about himself all the time. Humility is better seen as the opposite of narcissism. The narcissist has a damaged sense of self and is consequently self-centered a great deal of the time, reacting in defensive ways to ego threat. The humble person has an accurate and durable sense of self and can see the relationship between the self and the larger world.
(In My Humble Opinion - NYTimes.com) (07 jun 2011)
an assemblage of vignettes, allusions and tracts, by turns provocative, grating, gorgeous and tiresome. (07 jun 2011)
The Hinkfuss Pail problem, briefly stated, says that given any functional profile and any sufficiently complex physical system, some gerrymandered set of structures within the complex system will satisfy the functional profile. The argument gets its name by imagining all the molecules in a pail of water to be the complex system. This poses a problem because it doesn’t seem that we want to say that, for example, a pail of water can “believe that X.” (07 jun 2011)
A more fitting definition of type would incorporate this ambiguity in some way, say by defining types (07 jun 2011)
Project Wheezing Hippo (06 jun 2011)
"pulsatile flow" (06 jun 2011)
gilding the lily (06 jun 2011)
Making good decisions about new data that surfaces in a rhetorical hurricane — like the data about cellphones and other technology — requires sharp critical skills. Like reading a hard poem or novel, “reading” data and commentary requires a free mind, a measure of originality and decent aesthetic judgment. Last month, John Horgan published an elegant post on Scientific American’s Web site raising questions about the efficacy of a high-fat diet in promoting weight loss. Instead of pulling magic new facts out of his data hat, in the set-piece legerdemain made famous in TED Talks and bestsellers about the brain, Mr. Horgan simply stared hard at the high-fat diet, as if at a cultural object — a poem or sofa. And then he let himself, in a brazen departure from scientific method, retch. (Cellphone Fears, Twitter Tears - NYTimes.com) (06 jun 2011)
Incapacitating one of your two precious hands just to press a radiant machine to your mastoid bone for more than a few minutes is dumb. (Cellphone Fears, Twitter Tears - NYTimes.com) (06 jun 2011)
Flakes on the surface of the skin that form as fresh skin develops below, occurring esp. as dandruff (scurf in English - Google Dictionary) (06 jun 2011)
But it struck me all at once that (Bonus Track 2) (06 jun 2011)
my definition of lifestyle design: lifestyle design is gambling with time. (06 jun 2011)
a dose-response effect (06 jun 2011)
Betteridge’s Law of Headlines states that “any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no’ “. (06 jun 2011)
That said, the success of the D-Day invasion was the death knell for the Nazi empire as they’d now begun losing ground on two fronts. The naval technology that made it all possible (the distinctive Higgins Boat that unloaded tens of troops at a time on the shores of Normandy) was designed by Andrew Jackson of New Orleans, who used them to navigate the shallow waters and swamps of the area. (06 jun 2011)
Now I come to the fourth point, which is ambiguity. This, I take it, is where statistics really come into their own. Symbolic language processing is highly nondeterministic and often delivers large numbers of alternative results because it has no means of resolving the ambiguities that characterize ordinary language. This is for the clear and obvious reason that the resolution of ambiguities is not a linguistic matter. After a responsible job has been done of linguistic analysis, what remain are questions about the world. They are questions of what would be a reasonable thing to say under the given circumstances, what it would be reasonable to believe, suspect, fear or desire in the given situation. If these questions are in the purview of any academic discipline, it is presumably artificial intelligence. But artificial intelligence has a lot on its plate and to attempt to fill the void that it leaves open, in whatever way comes to hand, is entirely reasonable and proper. But it is important to understand what we are doing when we do this and to calibrate our expectations accordingly. What we are doing is to allow statistics over words that occur very close to one another in a string to stand in for the world construed widely, so as to include myths, and beliefs, and cultures, and truths and lies and so forth. As a stop-gap for the time being, this may be as good as we can do, but we should clearly have only the most limited expectations of it because, for the purpose it is intended to serve, it is clearly pathetically inadequate. The statistics are standing in for a vast number of things for which we have no computer model. They are therefore what I call an “ignorance model”.
(06 jun 2011)Re stories: how about if we call them “case-based, experientially-rooted sequentially-organized semantic structures”? Would that make the idea that the mind is rooted in narrative seem less pretty and more true? As someone who has pushed this idea forward a bit, I view it as another attempt to navigate past the sandtrap of logicism. Logic views the mind as made of facts, narrative theory views it as made up of stories we continually tell ourselves. The latter does sound pretty, but it also sounds more convincing and realistic, at least to some of us. For more on this viewpoint, Google “narrative intelligence” or look at the work of case-based reasoning from Roger Schank and students.
(06 jun 2011)Back at the MIT150 symposium, Patrick Winston
… speculated that the magic ingredient that makes humans unique is our ability to create and understand stories using the faculties that support language: “Once you have stories, you have the kind of creativity that makes the species different to any other.”
Again, I’d like to learn more about his take on this idea. My own immediate reaction, uninformed by any knowledge of what Winston really meant, is to quote Jake at the end of The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” (06 jun 2011)
Today’s grads enter a cultural climate that preaches the self as the center of a life. But, of course, as they age, they’ll discover that the tasks of a life are at the center. Fulfillment is a byproduct of how people engage their tasks, and can’t be pursued directly. Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself. (It’s Not About You - NYTimes.com) (05 jun 2011)
Over the past few weeks, America’s colleges have sent another class of graduates off into the world. These graduates possess something of inestimable value. Nearly every sensible middle-aged person would give away all their money to be able to go back to age 22 and begin adulthood anew.
Josh Haner/The New York Times
David Brooks
The intellectual, cultural and scientific findings that land on the columnist’s desk nearly every day.
David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns.
But, especially this year, one is conscious of the many ways in which this year’s graduating class has been ill served by their elders. They enter a bad job market, the hangover from decades of excessive borrowing. They inherit a ruinous federal debt.
More important, their lives have been perversely structured. This year’s graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.
Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured. Most of them will not quickly get married, buy a home and have kids, as previous generations did. Instead, they will confront amazingly diverse job markets, social landscapes and lifestyle niches. Most will spend a decade wandering from job to job and clique to clique, searching for a role.
No one would design a system of extreme supervision to prepare people for a decade of extreme openness. But this is exactly what has emerged in modern America. College students are raised in an environment that demands one set of navigational skills, and they are then cast out into a different environment requiring a different set of skills, which they have to figure out on their own.
Worst of all, they are sent off into this world with the whole baby-boomer theology ringing in their ears. If you sample some of the commencement addresses being broadcast on C-Span these days, you see that many graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture.
But, of course, this mantra misleads on nearly every front.
College grads are often sent out into the world amid rapturous talk of limitless possibilities. But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to. The successful young adult is beginning to make sacred commitments — to a spouse, a community and calling — yet mostly hears about freedom and autonomy.
Today’s graduates are also told to find their passion and then pursue their dreams. The implication is that they should find themselves first and then go off and live their quest. But, of course, very few people at age 22 or 24 can take an inward journey and come out having discovered a developed self.
Most successful young people don’t look inside and then plan a life. They look outside and find a problem, which summons their life.
(It’s Not About You - NYTimes.com) (05 jun 2011)
What Spinoza tries to do is to define words and concepts in a very limited and rigorous way, so that there can be no misunderstanding. He uses ordinary words but in new combinations, a bit like in mathematics. Consider how “complex number” has a very specific meaning which goes beyond the common concepts of complexity and numbers. Obviously the words chosen are apposite and point in the right direction, but one could not discern the existence of the Argand plane from the words “complex number”.
In mathematics this is not so repulsive, because of the unreasonable effectiveness described famously by Wigner in 1960. This means that maths tends to lead to further insights or even technology, more than we would expect from something purely theoretical. In philosophy, there is no unreasonble effectiveness, simply new constructs which are generally further abstracted away from usefulness. (05 jun 2011)
The phrase appears in the works of Persian Sufi poets, such as Sanai and Attar of Nishapur.[1] Attar records the fable of a powerful king who asks assembled wise men to create a ring that will make him happy when he is sad, and vice versa. After deliberation the sages hand him a simple ring with the words “This too will pass” etched on it, which has the desired effect.[1] (05 jun 2011)
all this relearning will one day seem hopelessly primitive (04 jun 2011)
Operation Urgent Fury (04 jun 2011)
ao on zoolander? (03 jun 2011)
“drew, what’d you get for Total?” (cheating on the restaurant check) (02 jun 2011)
I remember giving a talk at ACL on the corpus-based
language models used at Google, and having Fernando, then a
professor at U. Penn., comment “I feel like I’m a particle physicist
and you’ve got the only super-collider.” A few years later he moved
to Google. (On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning) (01 jun 2011)
If there is a decline in motivation, it may mean that an exceptional phase in the history of American higher education is coming to an end. That phase began after the Second World War and lasted for fifty years. Large new populations kept entering the system. First, there were the veterans who attended on the G.I. Bill—2.2 million of them between 1944 and 1956. Then came the great expansion of the nineteen-sixties, when the baby boomers entered and enrollments doubled. Then came co-education, when virtually every all-male college, apart from the military academies, began accepting women. Finally, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, there was a period of remarkable racial and ethnic diversification.
(
Debating the Value of College in America : The New Yorker)
(01 jun 2011)
Until the twentieth century, that was the way it worked here, too. In the nineteenth century, a college degree was generally not required for admission to law school or medical school, and most law students and medical students did not bother to get one. Making college a prerequisite for professional school was possibly the most important reform ever made in American higher education. It raised the status of the professions, by making them harder to enter, and it saved the liberal-arts college from withering away. This is why liberal education is the élite type of college education: it’s the gateway to the high-status professions. And this is what people in other parts of the world mean when they say they want American-style higher education. They want the liberal arts and sciences.
(
Debating the Value of College in America : The New Yorker)
(01 jun 2011)
Professors say that the only aspect of their teaching that matters professionally is student course evaluations, since these can figure in tenure and promotion decisions
(
Debating the Value of College in America : The New Yorker)
(01 jun 2011)
But, as private colleges became more selective, public colleges became more accommodating. Proportionally, the growth in higher education since 1945 has been overwhelmingly in the public sector. In 1950, there were about 1.14 million students in public colleges and universities and about the same number in private ones. Today, public colleges enroll almost fifteen million students, private colleges fewer than six million.
There is now a seat for virtually anyone with a high-school diploma who wants to attend college. The City University of New York (my old employer) has two hundred and twenty-eight thousand undergraduates—more than four times as many as the entire Ivy League. The big enchilada of public higher education, the State of California, has ten university campuses, twenty-three state-college campuses, a hundred and twelve community-college campuses, and more than 3.3 million students. Six per cent of the American population is currently enrolled in college or graduate school. In Great Britain and France, the figure is about three per cent.
(
Debating the Value of College in America : The New Yorker)
(01 jun 2011)
Almost all the élite colleges saw a jump in applications this year, partly because they now recruit much more aggressively internationally, and acceptance rates were correspondingly lower. Columbia, Yale, and Stanford admitted less than eight per cent of their applicants. This degree of selectivity is radical. To put it in some perspective: the acceptance rate at Cambridge is twenty-one per cent, and at Oxford eighteen per cent.
(
Debating the Value of College in America : The New Yorker)
(01 jun 2011)Johnson’s visits were a risky affair for the casinos. He ruined
Tropicana’s table games revenue in April, driving the casino into
the red for blackjack. Monthly revenue figures compiled by New
Jersey gaming regulators show that casinos had lost money on
blackjack only six other times in Atlantic City’s 33-year history
of legalized gambling.
(Meet the blackjack player who beat the Trop for $6 million, Borgata for $5 million and Caesars for $4 million - pressofAtlanticCity.com: Breaking News) (31 may 2011)
Graced with the sober mien of the Minnesotan male, Mr Pawlenty calls to mind the old joke about the Norwegian farmer who loved his wife so much he told her. (31 may 2011)
Birefringence, or double refraction, is the decomposition of a ray of light into two rays when it passes through certain anisotropic materials, such as crystals of calcite or boron nitride. (Birefringence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) (31 may 2011)
The answering of one’s critics has always struck me as doing about as much good as fighting crabgrass with manure. (31 may 2011)
The implication is that MacArthur was expecting, or at least looking for, non-reciprocal T/V usage, in which he would address Harriman by his first name and would get title and last name — “General MacArthur” — in return. (31 may 2011)
The problem with compiled applications is that even a small source code change causes a disproportional number of byte level changes. When you add a few lines of code, for example, a range check to prevent a buffer overrun, all the subsequent code gets moved to make room for the new instructions. The compiled code is full of internal references where some instruction or datum contains the address (or offset) of another instruction or datum. It only takes a few source changes before almost all of these internal pointers have a different value, and there are a lot of them - roughly half a million in a program the size of chrome.dll.
The source code does not have this problem because all the entities in the source are symbolic. Functions don’t get committed to a specific address until very late in the compilation process, during assembly or linking. If we could step backwards a little and make the internal pointers symbolic again, could we get smaller updates? (31 may 2011)
Competitive bidding for top students has been abandoned or minimized as the colleges have shifted to the policy of grants only in case of need and limited to extent of need….The spiraling cost of competitive bidding was enough of a nightmare to persuade the stubborn, and the waste of funds by scholarships to many who did not need them while deserving students lost a chance of an education was intolerable. The rapidity of the retreat from that form of recruitment is perhaps the strongest evidence of its evils, and the testimony comes from full experience. (31 may 2011)
Intelligent Virtue presents a distinctive new account of virtue and happiness as central ethical ideas. Annas argues that exercising a virtue involves practical reasoning of a kind which can illuminatingly be compared to the kind of reasoning we find in someone exercising a practical skill. Rather than asking at the start how virtues relate to rules, principles, maximizing, or a final end, we should look at the way in which the acquisition and exercise of virtue can be seen to be in many ways like the acquisition and exercise of more mundane activities, such as farming, building or playing the piano. This helps us to see virtue as part of an agent’s happiness or flourishing, and as constituting (wholly, or in part) that happiness. We are offered a better understanding of the relation between virtue as an ideal and virtue in everyday life, and the relation between being virtuous and doing the right thing. (31 may 2011)
The emphasis on the new is a cri de coeur of modernism, one that valorizes the new (and the Romantic quest for originality) over the familiar (repetition) for many reasons, including the demands of the market. (Questions for the Film Critics, Scott and Dargis - NYTimes.com) (30 may 2011)
It is intended to give practical demonstrations of these principles with the plant illustrated. As soon as completed, it will be possible for a business man in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing, or print can be transferred from one to another place. Millions of such instruments can be operated from but one plant of this kind. More important than all of this, however, will be the transmission of power, without wires, which will be shown on a scale large enough to carry conviction. (Wardenclyffe Tower - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) (30 may 2011)
Gibson’s prose style is in the tradition of Chekhov, Carver, Chandler, Burroughs and Hemingway. Lots of verbs, lots of nouns – things – as opposed to feelings, over-explanation and exposition (The stars of modern SF pick the best science fiction | Books | The Guardian) (30 may 2011)
Paul’s habit of prefacing every show-offy bit of data with “if I’m not mistaken” is a sign that, in the ways that count, he is. He is another classic Woody Allen type, the know-it-all pseudo-intellectual, and as such the obvious foil for Mr. Wilson’s passionate, self-deprecating schlemiel. If Paul ever met T. S. Eliot, he would spout revised footnotes for “The Waste Land.” For his part, Gil cries out, “Prufrock is my mantra!”
Let’s not go there, you and I.
(‘Midnight in Paris,’ by Woody Allen, With Owen Wilson - Review - NYTimes.com)
(30 may 2011)Paul’s habit of prefacing every show-offy bit of data with “if I’m not mistaken” is a sign that, in the ways that count, he is. (‘Midnight in Paris,’ by Woody Allen, With Owen Wilson - Review - NYTimes.com) (30 may 2011)
My argument has always been that what you learn from using the skills you have—analyzing your strengths and weaknesses—is far more important. If you can program yourself to learn from your experiences by assiduously reviewing what worked and what did not, and why, success in chess can be very valuable indeed. (30 may 2011)
Toby to Will: "tell them what you want and then expect it… show some leadership skills"
