Joanna Newsom Live

I saw her on this tour and it was,without question, one of the top five concerts I've ever seen. There was at least a 15 minutes standing ovation. I've never seen such a mix of indie rockers, children, classical music enthusiasts, wealthy aged people, and gutter punks enjoy the same thing so thoroughly.

Articles and Excerpts

No Pantheon for Camus

"During his campaign in 2006, Sarkozy notoriously dismissed the 17th century French novel La Princesse de Clèves by Madame de La Fayette, arguing that civil service entrance exams should not include questions about such painfully irrelevant subjects. A great crowd of unsuspected Madame de La Fayette fans arose, holding marathon public readings of La Princesse de Clèves ..."

"The filmmaker Yann Moix concurred in the political journal La Règle du jeu, pointing out that since the Panthéon is the 'Académie française for dead people," these days Camus is surely both "sufficiently academic and sufficiently dead to repose there.' "

France, I love you.

Green Giant

"If China’s emissions keep climbing as they have for the past thirty years, the country will emit more of those gases in the next thirty years than the United States has in its entire history."

The Genesis 2.0 Project

"The believe-it-or-not superlatives are so extreme and Tom Swiftian they make you smile. The L.H.C. is not merely the world’s largest particle accelerator butthe largest machine ever built. At the center of just one of the four main experimental stations installed around its circumference, and not even the biggest of the four, is a magnet that generates a magnetic field 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. And because the super-conducting, super-colliding guts of the collider must be cooled by 120 tons of liquid helium, inside the machine it’s one degree colder than outer space, thus making the L.H.C. the coldest place in the universe."

“ 'We have a religion,' an American physicist and cernlifer named Steven Goldfarb confessed one day over lunch, 'and that’s symmetry.' ”

Please, Oh Please build this library

Concept for the Stockholm Public Library created by someone named Olivier Charles.

Cormac's got me wondering...

WSJ: What kind of things make you worry?

Cormac McCarthy: If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable. We may indeed be part machine and we may have computers implanted. It's more than theoretically possible to implant a chip in the brain that would contain all the information in all the libraries in the world. As people who have talked about this say, it's just a matter of figuring out the wiring. Now there's a problem you can take to bed with you at night.

Cormac's on to something here, but if humanity masters technology in such a way that we can intertwine our consciousness with processing power we will likely be well on our way, or past the point, where actual Artificial Intelligence is brought into being. Who is to say that malevolent (or just uncaring) AI won't find humanity useless or incongruous with its goals and plans? I used to feel like these concerns were pretty far afield and wacky, but now I'm not so sure.

Best cover of a song ever?

I don't know, but this song has stuck with me longer than any.

Links

The Science of Success

The Truth About Lions

Herb Crusted Beef Tenderloin

The Big Questions

Economics and Politics Bloggers Review Avatar

Matt Yglesias

I’ve heard it analogized to Dances With Wolves, but it’s more like Dune meets Fern Gully. Technically very impressive, and the plodding dialogue didn’t really bother me, but the whole story is really staggeringly unoriginal. The allegory to American imperialism was clear enough that we didn’t really need to be hit over the head (”some kind of shock and awe campaign”) with it. I’d also add that the strategic thought behind the Na’vi counterattack is extremely unimpressive—they’re aiming for tactical victory with no real long-term plan—but that’s arguably realistic.

Tyler Cowan

Yes, it is showing already in Leon, Nicaragua, as Bryan Caplan had predicted. You should see it. Cameron has absorbed a lot from Princess Mononoke. The aliens don't seem to trade much or accumulate capital. Like the Olympics ceremony in Beijing, it raises the bar for a lot of subsequent efforts. The crowd seemed unmoved by the theme of "las indigenas." It has interesting themes on disability and also the diversity of intelligences. The three hours go by very quickly. It's not perfect. People who can reach other planets still fire bullets from machine guns. Dubbing makes all the dialogue sound corny and thus it limits the impact of the real clunkers, which do come every now and then. I'll see it again, in 3-D next time.

Alex Tabarrok

It was entertaining but I was expecting to be awed by at least one scene, as happened in Terminator, T2 and Titanic, and I was not. The plot is identical to that of Battle for Terra, right down to the "tree of life." Many scenes I felt like I had seen before. Here is the helicopter gunship scene from Apocalypse Now, here is the men in robot suits battle scene from Alien (and one of the Matrix movies), here are the sky islands from Castle in the Sky, here we have the Dances with Wolves scene(s). I am all for homage but this was pastiche.

The aliens were gorgeous, leggy, blue fashion models. Nice, but Star Trek did the green alien girl thing forty years ago. Personally, I like my aliens to be a little bit more well, alien. All the way to another planet just to find that the girls are blue and the horses have eight legs instead of four? Sad.

I insisted on seeing it in 3D but the effect was not revolutionary and there is still some eye strain. In the end I would have preferred 2D.

I was entertained but I was not enthralled.

Tim Heidecker in odd(?) music video

Turnip Risotto

Via Serious Eats

This was relatively easy and relatively tasty:

Ingredients

6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 red onion, cut into 1/8-inch dice
1 1/2 pounds turnips, cut into 1/8-inch dice
2 cups hot chicken stock
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/2 cup Parmigiano-Reggiano, freshly grated
1/2 cup parsley, finely chopped
Salt and pepper

Procedure

1. Warm the chicken stock in a sauce pan over medium-low heat.

2. Pour the olive oil into a large skillet and turn the heat to medium. Toss in the onion and cook until softened, about 10 minutes.

3. Add the turnips and cook for 2 minutes. Ladle in some of the hot chicken stock and cook until absorbed. Continue until all of the stock has been added, about 10 minutes.

4. Season with salt and pepper. Add the butter and grated cheese stir occasionally for a minute. Remove from the heat, garnish with parsley, and serve.

Ruins of Kita Daito

My brain is open

From Wikipedia:

Mathematician Paul Erdős:

"Possessions meant little to Erdős; most of his belongings would fit in a suitcase, as dictated by his itinerant lifestyle. Awards and other earnings were generally donated to people in need and various worthy causes. He spent most of his life as a vagabond, traveling between scientific conferences and the homes of colleagues all over the world. He would typically show up at a colleague's doorstep and announce "my brain is open," staying long enough to collaborate on a few papers before moving on a few days later. In many cases, he would ask the current collaborator about whom he (Erdős) should visit next. His working style has been humorously compared^{[by whom?]} to traversing a linked list."

Economies of Agglomeration

Interesting piece on NPR's All Things Considered on the clustering of like businesses in cities and the economic rational behind it.

One of the points of the piece is that this clustering encourages differentiation. You either compete on price or you differentiate. Increased competition increases the variety of services and products offered which really just drives innovation. A functional large city really should be a place for innovation, even if that innovation is just an interesting design on a light fixture.

The Santa Fe art market sadly doesn't seem to follow this pattern. Why isn't there a wide variety of art here with so much competition? There has got to be a limit on how much native/folk/landscape art a small area can take right? It just makes the city feel that much more deliberate and sterile to me.

This also makes me wonder what negative/positive effects the internet will have on city life as people continue to shop online for products. Brick and mortar stores will never be able to compete with an online retailer on price so perhaps stores will only become more specialized and more innovative? That's a good thing right?

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:

Long time the manxome foe he sought --

So rested he by the Tumtum tree,

And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,

The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,

And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through

The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and with its head

He went galumphing back.

"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?

Come to my arms, my beamish boy!

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'

He chortled in his joy.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

From Wikipedia:

In the Preface to The Hunting of the Snark, Carroll wrote:

“

[Let] me take this opportunity of answering a question that has often been asked me, how to pronounce "slithy toves." The "i" in "slithy" is long, as in "writhe"; and "toves" is pronounced so as to rhyme with "groves." Again, the first "o" in "borogoves" is pronounced like the "o" in "borrow." I have heard people try to give it the sound of the "o" in "worry." Such is Human Perversity.

”

Also, in an author's note (dated Christmas 1896) about Through the Looking-Glass, Carroll wrote:

“

The new words, in the poem "Jabberwocky", have given rise to some differences of opinion as to their pronunciation: so it may be well to give instructions on that point also. Pronounce "slithy" as if it were the two words, "sly, thee": make the "g" hard in "gyre" and "gimble": and pronounce "rath" to rhyme with "bath."

Map of Oz

Soda v. Pop

I can't stop looking at this map.

Why is St. Louis an island of soda buffered by seas of coke and pop?

Do people in Miami say 'soda' because of migrants from the NE?

With the exception of Missouri and West Virginia, why does saying 'coke' seem to stay within the pre civil war slave states?

Did saying 'coke' spread west from Atlanta?

Things I Miss: Christmas in Strasbourg

The Importance of Curiosity

Via Richard Wiseman:

The old adage suggests that curiosity killed the cat. However, research suggests exactly the opposite.

According to work carried out by Todd Kashdan of George Mason University, curiosity is central to well-being. Kashdan found that people who rated themselves as curious reported higher levels of satisfaction with life than others, and less likely to derive pleasure from hedonistic behaviors such as sex, drugs and drinking.

Other work suggests that the benefits from curiosity stem from the intrinsic pleasure of finding out more, stretching yourself rather than sticking in a rut, and increased likelihood of spending time with others.

To help create a more curious life….

- Always order a dish you have never tried before in restaurants, take a different route to work or watch a TV programme you have never seen before.

- Ask yourself an interesting question each week. How do elephants communicate over hundreds of miles? Why do people laugh? Why are bananas yellow?

- Visit this site and go to a random webpage.

- Think of someone that you have worked with for years and write down a couple of words to describe that person. Now generate an alternative way of seeing them by thinking about their physical characteristics, hobbies and interests, or their dreams and ambitions.

What's the point without the capacity to wonder and be amazed?

This is REAL

What I wouldn't give to have seen this.

8:00 AM, Today, Norway.

Big Love's treatment of the mormon endowment cermony

From Wikipedia:

In Mormonism, the Endowment is an ordinance (ritual ceremony) designed to prepare participants to become kings, queens, priests, and priestesses in the afterlife. As part of the ceremony, participants take part in a scripted reenactment of the Biblical creation and fall of Adam and Eve. They also are taught highly symbolic gestures and passwords, thought to be needed to pass by angels guarding the way to heaven, and are instructed not to reveal these gestures and passwords. The ceremony also includes a washing and anointing, and receipt of a "new name" which they are not to reveal to others except at a certain part in the ceremony, and the receipt of the temple garments, which Mormons then are expected to wear under their clothing day and night throughout their life.

This episode was highly controversial because of this depiction. I really thought it was well done and it made me wonder and feel a slight sadness that there is no room in my life for mysticism and ritual. How profound and sublime it must feel to believe so utterly and to take part in something so otherworldly.

The future is now

The future was then

In which I post a fact from "Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts"

Ladies in Europe took to wearing lightning rods on their hats and trailing a ground wire--a fad that began after Benjamin Franklin published instructions on how to make them, in his almanac, Poor Richard Improved, in 1753.

Kita Daito: Personal Blog

As lonely and trying as my stay was I really miss my time on Daito.

View from the plane.

Stairs leading to Daito Gu--The island's main shrine.

School grounds

A view from the Junior High School building

"my" cat.

The Port

Basket rides mandatory

This thing is heavy if you're taller than the others.

Sumo

Okinawa Sumo (Kakuriki)

3rd and 4th graders

The view from my desk