Score Your Very Own 80's Film

Urushi Musical Interface from Yuri Suzuki on Vimeo.

Links

Abstract Concrete

Minimal Products

What Science Fiction Authors Think About

Indonesian Dessert

Herzog (from the other end)

Welcome to Lagos

Best thing like this I've seen in a long, long time. Refreshing to see this take on poverty and the human spirit. No patronizing shots with sad dull music, it's not a lamentation that says "look at these poor people" it's a celebration of the people and a look at human civilization in the throws of change for better or for worse. And...it's all on youtube.

I picked up Ayn Rand and the World She Made. I can't wait to jump into it. There was a time when Rand for me was the end-all, and I absolutely adored her and her work. Later I distanced myself from her completely. My thoughts on her now are a bit more complicated. I realize how deeply flawed she was and also how brilliant she could be. The things that shape us as teens don't ever really leave us; we internalize them and even if we think much differently as adults, the essence of these things must still be there. I'm excited to read a book that is neither full of condemnation or unquestioning praise, and to get a feel for what someone who encountered Rand as an adult for the first time has to say.

From the Fountainhead:

"I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body."

Perdido Street Station

You haven't read any book like this. It's delightfully genre-bending but it isn't really delightful. You could accurately pin almost any adjective to it but doing so would be doing the novel a disservice. It's just... new. Or at least it's new to me.

Here's a taste:

"He entered. Light seemed to give up the struggle halfway through the thick, soiled windows, leaving the interior in shadows. The walls were unadorned except by dirt. The pub was empty of all but the most dedicated drinkers, shambolic figures huddled over bottles. Several were junkies, several were Remade. Some were both: The Dying Child turned no one away. A group of emaciated young men lay draped across a table twitching in perfect time, strung out on shazbah or dreamshit or very-tea. One woman held her glass in a metal claw that spat steam and dripped oil onto the floorboards. A man in the corner lapped quietly from a bowl of beer, licking the fox's muzzle that had been grafted to his face."

Link

A Fresh Quid of Tobacco

"I asked the Negro factotum about the hire of horses, and presently a man came in from the bar who, he said, could supply my needs. This man, the very type of a Western pioneer, bowed, threw himself into a rocking-chair, drew a spittoon beside him, cut a fresh quid of tobacco, began to chew energetically, and put his feet, cased in miry high boots, into which hiis trousers were tucked, on the top of the stove. He said he had horses which would both "lope" and trot..."

That's from A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Lucy Bird. Look her up.

Meat

"If pigs are fed on residues and waste, and cattle on straw, stovers and grass from fallows and rangelands – food for which humans don't compete – meat becomes a very efficient means of food production. Even though it is tilted by the profligate use of grain in rich countries, the global average conversion ratio of useful plant food to useful meat is not the 5:1 or 10:1 cited by almost everyone, but less than 2:1. If we stopped feeding edible grain to animals, we could still produce around half the current global meat supply with no loss to human nutrition: in fact it's a significant net gain."

From an article in the guardian on the book "Meat: A Benign Extravagance" by Simone Fairlie

Are you an abstract human? Am I?

"I remember that I was in Berlin at the Wissenschaftskolleg, and there was a woman, Barbara Lane, there who was an architectural historian. We went to a housing area, where two types of Seidlungen or housing were to be found together: Bauhaus housings and a competing housing project by National Socialist architects. It was interesting to me, that the Bauhaus architects had figured out exactly how many square meters people needed, how much water they needed, how much sunlight, playground space… They had planned for an abstract human being; and the architecture could have been executed anywhere in the world. Whereas the Nazi architects had build genuine homes, with little chimneys, small front steps in brick—all these references to vernacular architecture that was part of the German cultural tradition. I realized that in a sense, the international aspiration of the Bauhaus school was to be placeless and universal, as IKEA does now. I found myself a little embarrassed that I would rather have lived in a dwelling designed by the Nazis than a Bauhaus home, but it does illustrate my point of governing: how is it executed? With what level of ambition in mind?"

--James C. Scott


"There is a sameness—this is one of the things that is boring people—this sameness. This sameness has economic implications. You don’t get new products and services out of sameness. Now the Americans haven’t gotten dumbed down all of the sudden so that only a few people who can decide on new products for change are the only ones with brains. But it means that somehow there isn’t opportunity for these thousands flowers to bloom anymore."

--Jane Jacobs

Windless Wave of the Spears of the Bull

Kennings for beer from this index of kennings

lœðar jastar; — ‘of the yeast’s flood; may ’ - BEER

brim horna – — ‘the surf of horns ’ - BEER

vindlauss vágr geira svigðis — ‘windless wave of the spears of the bull ’ - BEER

I take it these make sense because they drank beer from a horn?

How can I help make this happen?

I found these on dezeen.com. They are by an american firm called Choi + Shine Architects.

Peloton

Great photos of this year's Tour de France in The Boston Globe.

E.D. Kain's "Liberal Party" is close to what my ideal party would be if you applied some practical considerations to my ideology. I'd even bother to register!

My hastily sketched out platform:

• Limited government, but not anti-government. Trust in good governance and transparency rather than demonizing all things ‘statist’.
• Support for a simplified, but still progressive tax code.
• Non-interventionist militarily; globalist economically.
• Free trade with strong safety nets (like health care and unemployment assistance) to help people aversely effected by inherently chaotic (and thus functioning) markets.
• Support for more legal immigration of both low-skilled and high-skilled workers.
• A strong focus on civil liberties and social equality: end DADT, support for gay marriage, no more government authorized torture or assassination.
• A push toward more competitive federalism where possible to make government more responsive to people and less bureaucratic.
• A focus on ending subsidies in agriculture, fossil fuels, and other industries which distort trade, hurt the environment, and benefit big business.
• Strong, but fair, environmental protections.
• Support for workers rights, but not for too-big-to-fail government unions.

Of course in the platform of any party that I'd put my name on would be a retooling of the overall national transportation strategy. If government is to be in the business of designing and paying for transportation networks it shouldn't be actively building highways and enforcing zoning laws that encourage insubstantial(sprawly) municipalities, cities, whathaveyou. Great, dense, thriving cities are natural, efficient, beautiful, and are the engines of culture, innovation, and ideas. What great people and ideas never mingled or coalesced over the nasty stretches of highways and throwaway storefronts that pass for a towns or citys nowadays. It's just sad.

"The achievements of Apollo were so bold and our subsequent efforts so timid that the energy of those years seems like a youthful dream.”

Real

Failure

Frm J. K. Rowling's 2008 Harvard Commencement Speech:

"On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination."

"So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive... And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life."

Link

From David Byrne on cities:

The generous attitude towards failure that big cities afford is invaluable—it's how things get created. In a small town everyone knows about your failures, so you are more careful about what you might attempt. Every time I visit San Francisco I ask out loud "Why don't I live here? Why do I choose to live in a place that is harder, tougher and, well, not as beautiful?" The locals often reply, "You don't want to live here. It looks like a city, but it's really a small village. Everyone knows what you're doing"

Link

More Wisdom from Cocktails

"Anticipation should not be underrated as an aspect of any aesthetic experience. It is as essential to a cocktail as it is to a good production of Cymbeline or Don Carlos or a cassoulet."

Good Quote

"...you shouldn’t present a persona of cultivated pretensionlessness. False modesty can be worse than arrogance.”

That's from David Mitchell. The New York Times profiles him here. Time to read one of his books, me thinks.

Mayan Art

From National Geographic

"December 13, 2005—Archaeologists today revealed the final section of the earliest known Maya mural ever found, saying that the find upends everything they thought they knew about the origins of Maya art, writing, and rule."

" A traveler to Oklahoma reported seeing a prairie dog 100 feet in the air... burrowing!" - Tulsa Daily world, March 17, 1935

The Six Characteristics of a Good Cocktail

It:

"must whet the appetite, not dull it."

"should stimulate the mind as well as the appetite."

"must be pleasing to the palate."

"must be pleasing to the eye."

"must have sufficient alcoholic flavor."

"must be well-iced."

From The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks

By way of this really great article on cocktails.

And I Have Come Upon This Place By Lost Ways

"There is an extraordianry story about a small delegation of Navajos that was invited to the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. They were wandering from one exhibit to the next when they stumbled on a particular pavilion from Canada that struck their fancy. This exhibit was staffed by Indians who happened to be Athapaskans, and the Navajos to their astonishment, understood nearly every word these oddly familiar-looking Canadians said. Although they could carry on a perfectly intelligible conversation, the Athapaskans were not happy to see the Navajos. "We split up a long time ago," they warned, "and it is said that if we ever saw each other again, the world would be destroyed." The Navajo delegation was similarly unnerved by the encounter, and for their remaining three weeks in Chicago, they never again visited the Athapaskan pavilion."

As soon as he could, he made his way up to Taos

"The mountain village of whitewashed adobe houses some seventy miles north of the capital, and found the rough-and-ready life there much more to his liking. Taos would be his home, sentimentally if not in fact, for the rest of his life."

I'm finally reading Blood and Thunder and it's incredible. I love history written this way. I need to read more history on the places I travel and live. The experience is so much richer this way.

I am thousands of years old, I have been immortal, and I did make a bargain with the devil.

Thoughts on Terry Gilliam:

With purpose he paints the fantastic with a crude brush and it's perfect. It's plastic magic, its strength is the imagination, not a world suffocating in marvelous effects.

Almost all of his films feel like they are amateur endeavours. But almost all of them succeed. Each movie he makes is something like an accidental success. Each one is like a homebrew experiment and each time he tries he succeeds. He's not an amateur though, he's really good at it.

If you've seen the criterion collection release of Fellini's 8.5 you can tell from his commentary that he is clearly well versed in film and to call him a novice is unfair.

There is a lack of polish to the man. But there is an abundance of accent.

This is what happens when I scribble notes while drinking...

Invictus

This is a great movie. Watching it really gives you a feel for how improbable Mandela was. The most improbable man in the most improbable nation. South Africa is like fiction. The man spent something like 30 years in a cell and came out a forgiving and thoughtful leader. It makes me wonder about good leaders and what their real effect can be on a society. Sometimes I wonder if South Africa is just running on Mandela's momentum. The leadership of SA following Mandela seems less than stellar from my outsider perspective. How cynical it feels to say that a society sometimes won't do what it needs to do for itself and a brilliant leader needs to come along, but I really think that without the moderating/inspirational leadership of Mandela South Africa might have seen far more blood and gone the way of Zimbabwe long ago.

It goes without saying that this is one of the greatest songs ever recorded

Genial

Bikes!

Slate has a great photo gallery of people on bicycles up.

Good Enough for a Post

Joan Didion on New York City

I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always has an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at Best's and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live, But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions ("Money," and "High Fashion," and "The Hucksters"), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of "living" there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not "live" at Xanadu.

Found at the Atlantic's City Blog

Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?

This exchange makes me like Steve Jobs quite a bit.

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

Just ordered this book from Amazon. This purchase is solely based on story titles.

The Green Hills of Earth
"The Last Flight of Dr. Ain"
"The Screwfly Solution"
The Boundaries of Humanity
"And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side"
"The Girl Who Was Plugged In"
"The Man Who Walked Home"
"And I Have Come Upon This Place By Lost Ways"
Male and Female
"The Women Men Don't See"
"Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!"
"Houston, Houston, Do You Read?"
Star Songs
"With Delicate Mad Hands"
"A Momentary Taste of Being"
"We Who Stole the Dream"
Life and Death
"Her Smoke Rose Up Forever"
"Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death"
"On the Last Afternoon"
"She Waits for All Men Born"
"Slow Music"
Epilogue: And Man Abides...
"And So On, and So On"

he must yield to the fate of mortality

Cyrus Buck

Georgia, VT
June 28th 1813

Dear Sir,

Feeling under obligation of transmitting to a friend importand and interesting events I with sorrow and depression communicate the following but perhaps you may have heard of the same but I consider it no less than an incumbent duty to inform you of some particulars realtaive to this event; your Brother Moses recieved a couple of wounds one in his breast the other in his side in the actoin at Fort George he was brought to Fort Lewis and terminated in Death the 17th Day following this news I had personally from a soldier belonging to his own Company who was taken a prisoner soon after and deserted them on his passage to quebeck who was formerly a resident of this town and was acquainted with your Brother he saw Moses twice in his wounds and conversed with him on his situation for a few days he thought he should recover but soon found that he must yield to the fate of mortality he at lenght became resigned knowing he fell in a glorious cause in as much as the loss his friends sustained was an unperishable gain of his beloved Country thus he bid a long Farewell to things with a hope of a blest immmortality above.

I have one of these cold sweats coming and will have to lie down

Sarah I sometimes wish our government could be crushed to attoms. When I see good men treat in the way they are. But we must do the best we can another year will soon rowl around, And then I'me done soldering for such a government as This.

I have lots more I should be glad to write but dont feel very well. I have one of these cold swets coming on and will have to lie down.

I remain as ever your true Brother

Write soon without fail

A good strong stomach for hard tack and sowbelly

My mom just sent me copies of letters written by some of my ancestors going all the way back to the revolutionary war. I'm sitting here reading them and thinking how great it is to have this kind of thing.

"Dear Sister and Brother,

At a late hour I seat myself to have a little chat with you by way of letter. Though I had intended the next letter I wrote I should be the maile caryer myself but as things are progressing differently than we expected I fear we shall get lots of time to answer letters though I hope not very long. Myron said he wrote you yesterday, I was not aware of that and should not attempt to write this morning as he wrote all the news.

So here goes for what it may fetch you, As you will know before this reaches you that nearly all of the Co. (?) have taken another sollem oath to defend their country for three years longer. Therefore it would be useless for me to expend time and good talents writing in regard to this matter. but there is one thing which seems quite a mistory. And that is whether the 3rd Iowa Inlisted through pure and undefiled Patriotism. Or whether its for those four hundred and odd dollars. I think the latter.

....

I suppose Myron told you why he made his foolish move in regard to goin into the actions. So I suppose you will expect me to give my reasons. Well don't know as I have any in partikular, more than I inlisted partly because he did, and partly, the biggest part for big pay and a privleg of coming home. I think this is enough to justify anyone that has got a speck of patriotism and Lincolns Green Backs. And also a good strong stomach for hard tack and sowbelly. I may beet this home. When we will have some of those old fashioned country visits that are long to be remembered, And besides this we shall expect some pretty good grub which I know you have pleanty. With these remarks I close hopeing you will not wait to long before answering this."

Autism-Spectrum Quotient

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html

I scored 26 today. Took this a few years ago and had a much higher score... I guess that just means my answers depend on my mood.

OLD (jazzy) Bjork

Oh Asia, why did I leave you so quickly???

Caribou - Jamelia

From Study Hacks:

"...deep procrastination, though scary, represents something important and perhaps even exciting. It marks that key transition where the momentum of “this is what you need to do” — the momentum that carried you through high school and into college — begins to wane, leaving you to discover a new source of propulsion — not just new, but also more durable and more personal."

Star Wars Considered

This is... great.

Sometimes I envy my parents

From Felix Salmon

"It’s been a very impressive day to learn how the stock-market sausage is made: I think we just saw the largest intraday fall, in point terms, that has ever happened. But the bigger lesson is that in the short term, any market can fail temporarily. The question is whether the jitters from this afternoon are going to mean increased volatility and risk aversion going forwards. My feeling is that, yes, they both will and should."

Do you ever look at the post war 20th century with envy? Barring the threat of nuclear annihilation it was a fertile environment for positive thinking. Things were on the up in general and progress seemed to be something that was inevitable. Maybe they were just starting so low it made any gains seem extraordinary. News like today's stock market freak out is so utterly unsurprising that we should all be shocked at how not shocking it all is. A guy tried to kill a bunch of people in times square the other day, no biggie. The stock market went absolutely nuts for seemingly no reason, just another day right?

Great Gladwell Article in This Week's Newyorker

LINK

"In the case of Operation Mincemeat, Germany’s spies told their superiors that something false was actually true (even though, secretly, some of those spies might have known better), and Germany acted on it. In the case of Cicero, Germany’s spies told their superiors that something was true that may indeed have been true, though maybe wasn’t, or maybe was true for a while and not true for a while, depending on whether you believe the word of someone two decades after the war was over—and in this case Germany didn’t really act on it at all. Looking at that track record, you have to wonder if Germany would have been better off not having any spies at all."

"He then returned to Washington and rose to head the C.I.A.’s counter-intelligence division throughout the Cold War.

Angleton did not write detective stories. His nickname was the Poet. He corresponded with the likes of Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, Archibald MacLeish, and William Carlos Williams, and he championed William Empson’s “Seven Types of Ambiguity.” He co-founded a literary journal at Yale called Furioso. What he brought to spycraft was the intellectual model of the New Criticism, which, as one contributor to Furioso put it, was propelled by “the discovery that it is possible and proper for a poet to mean two differing or even opposing things at the same time.” Angleton saw twists and turns where others saw only straight lines. To him, the spy game was not a story that marched to a predetermined conclusion. It was, in a phrase of Eliot’s that he loved to use, “a wilderness of mirrors.”

Orion Beer Song

This makes me so happy...

Kaki King - Gay Sons of Lesbian Mothers

Candy Claws - Catamaran

Creepy

The XKCD web comic is good sometimes:

Solving for Happiness

Here are some points from a read-worthy longer article on the Lesswrong blog:

Happiness is a pairing between your situation and your disposition. Truly optimizing your life requires adjusting both variables: what happens, and how it affects you.

You are constantly changing your disposition. The question is whether you'll do it with a purpose. Your experiences change you, and you affect those, as well as how you think about them, which also changes you. It's going to happen. It's happening now. Do you even know how it works? Put your intelligence to work and figure it out!

The road to harm is paved with ignorance. Using your capability to understand yourself and what you're doing is a matter of responsibility to others, too. It makes you better able to be a better friend.

You're almost certainly suffering from Ugh Fields: unconscious don't-think-about-it reflexes that form via Pavlovian conditioning. The issues most in need of your attention are often ones you just happen not to think about for reasons undetectable to you.

How not to waste the effort:

Don't wait till you're sad. Only thinking when you're sad gives you a skew perspective. Don't infer that you can think better when you're sad just because that's the only time you try to be thoughtful. Sadness often makes it harder to think: you're farther from happiness, which can make it more difficult to empathize with and understand. Nonethess we often have to think when sad, because something bad may have happened that needs addressing.

Introspect carefully, not constantly. Don't interrupt your work every 20 minutes to wonder whether it's your true purpose in life. Respect that question as something that requires concentration, note-taking, and solid blocks of scheduled time. In those times, check over your analysis by trying to confound it, so lingering doubts can be justifiably quieted by remembering how thorough you were.

Re-evaluate on an appropriate time-scale. Try devoting a few days before each semester or work period to look at your life as a whole. At these times you'll have accumulated experience data from the last period, ripe and ready for analysis. You'll have more ideas per hour that way, and feel better about it. Before starting something new is also the most natural and opportune time to affirm or change long term goals. Then, barring large unexpecte d opportunities, stick to what you decide until the next period when you've gathered enough experience to warrant new reflection.

Elephant Funeral

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/holiday_type/wildlife/article1271944.ece

As they grew closer, we could see a column of elephants, headed by their matriarch, the grandmother (or even great-grandmother) of the herd, her tattered ears indicating great age.

On they came, until they began to assemble around the bloody remains of the baby elephant, some stamping their feet and snorting in the direction of the lion family they knew still to be near. But most would lightly touch and sniff the body with their trunks and then move to a respectable distance, standing in silent groups.

Still more elephants arrived until there were at least 100 in all, the latecomers filtering their way to the body, seemingly paying their respects, then moving to the rear of the congregation.

All the time, the lions watched from the shade of the bushes, great oval eyes unblinking – perhaps like terrorists relishing the extent of the grief they had caused without ever being able to comprehend the depth of that grief.

Then the matriarch abruptly turned away and began to head back along the valley. Others followed until only one female was left. Our Botswanan guide was certain it would be the mother.

Carl Sagan Never Ceases to Amaze

"We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock. The significance of our lives and our fragile realm derives from our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning."

-Carl Sagan

Science and culture could really use another Carl Sagan. There are several wonderful popularizers of science out there (Neil Degrasse Tyson anyone?) but none of them come close to connecting the spiritual and sublime aspects of human living to scientific understanding like Sagan could. There is really a vacuum here and it seems so critical for someone to pick up where he left off. Scientific understanding underlies almost all human progress and it represents the only means we have to defend civilization from catastrophe. Modern popular science and the media that cover it seldom express any kind of complete vision. Science(human understanding, really) is treated like a domain all to itself and is cordoned off from the rest of life, when it's linked inherently with everything we are and do. More and more I get the feeling that if human civilization is to thrive and survive, leaps in technology need to happen, but to happen safely they need to happen in a world where science is culture and religion and sloppy thinking are artifacts of the past. Daily living and the seemingly human need for spiritual understanding need to be brought more in line with discovery and scientific knowledge, and Carl Sagan was supreme in this endeavor.

Ok, that's enough hippie shit for one day.

Going Pear-Shaped

From Wikipedia:

"It describes a situation that went awry, perhaps horribly wrong. A failed bank robbery, for example, could be said to have "gone pear-shaped". Less well known in the US it generated some media interest when British politician Margaret Thatcher used the phrase in front of the world's press at one of her first meetings with President Ronald Reagan, with many reporters being unsure of the meaning of the term."

Hey, now, It's the sun, and it makes me smile

Palimpsests

Links

Shanghai Looks Incredible

The Granite Mountain Records Vault - Where Mormons store data on your ancestors so they can baptize them...

Science models from a time when science could do anything.

Great Speculative Fiction Book Titles

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Left Hand of Darkness
The Stars My Destination
The Light of Other Days
A Thousand Words for Stranger
The Man in the High Castle
All Tomorrow's Parties
The Word for World is Forrest
Enemy Mine
The Mote in God's Eye
The Years of Rice and Salt
Forty Signs of Rain
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
Startide Rising
Speaker for the Dead
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
To Say Nothing of the Dog
The Lathe of Heaven
Stranger in a Strange Land
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

And my legs are so tired from all this standing

Akron/Family - Before and Again

I forgot how much I love this song. Do yourself a favor and type 'Akron Family' into Pandora.

Thanks Derek

Charles Stross on writing fiction

"No, it's not a fucking lifestyle — it's a job. And if you'll excuse me, I've got a book to go write ... "

"Maybe thoughts were minims and emotions were waves, for he was stuffed to exploding with both at once..."

Les Affranchis

Jamais Vu

Driving through Santa Fe last night was eerie. It felt familiar like a place I knew long ago, not somewhere I live. Usually coming home after a trip is accompanied by a relaxing feeling. This time there was no such feeling. It really is time to move on I think.

Aviatophobia Expelliarmus

My fear of flying ended yesterday and I'm still now sure how or why. No drugs; no dread; no certainty of death. Once upon a time every change in vibration or flicker of the lights drove me to grasp the hand rests. Every acceleration or deceleration spelled doom. Flying is to me what it used to be: fun, amazing, and annoying all at once. It's good to be back.

I'm floating in a most peculiar way

Planet earth is blue and there's nothing I can do.

Fantastic Time-lapse Video of the Southwest

Timescapes: "Death is the Road to Awe" from Tom Lowe @ Timescapes on Vimeo.

Angel Fire Weekend

All Photos by Deanna Nelson

The Philosophy of Furniture

"In the internal decoration, if not in the external architecture of their residences, the English are supreme. The Italians have but little sentiment beyond marbles and colours. In France, meliora probant, deteriora sequuntur — the people are too much a race of gadabouts to study and maintain those household proprieties of which, indeed, they have a delicate appreciation, or at least the elements of a proper sense. The Chinese and most of the eastern races have a warm but inappropriate fancy. The Scotch are poor decorists. The Dutch have merely a vague idea that a curtain is not a cabbage. In Spain they are all curtains — a nation of hangmen. The Russians do not furnish. The Hottentots and Kickapoos are very well in their way. The Yankees alone are preposterous."

From The Philosophy of Furniture by Edgar Allan Poe

This essay is loaded with quotables:

"...a rivulet of deep meaning in a meadow of words."

"We have no aristocracy of blood, and having therefore as a natural, and indeed as an inevitable thing, fashioned for ourselves an aristocracy of dollars..."

" Its leading feature is glitter — and in that one word how much of all that is detestable do we express ! Flickering, unquiet lights, are sometimes pleasing — to children and idiots always so — but in the embellishment of a room they should be scrupulously avoided."

When Does Simulation Beat Reality?

For the past few years some people have been putting forward the idea that a possible answer to the Fermi paradox is that intelligent races retreat into simulated worlds and either die off or lose any interest in exploring the galaxy/making contact.

I think it's a pretty compelling idea. SEED just published an article on this and here are a few excerpts:

This is the Great Temptation for any technological species—to shape their subjective reality to provide the cues of survival and reproductive success without the substance. Most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children. They eventually die out when the game behind all games—the Game of Life—says “Game Over; you are out of lives and you forgot to reproduce.”

I don't doubt this could happen to humans or any hypothetical ETs that might be out there, but what it doesn't explain to me is why we haven't seen evidence of sentient, self-improving machines scouring the galaxy for resources. Then again, maybe there isn't any reason why machine intelligence wouldn't want to make it's own retreat into the subjective.

Trust me on this...

"A recent study in the Journal of Marketing Communications found that men with beards were deemed more credible than those who were clean-shaven. The study showed participants pictures of men endorsing certain products. In some photos, the men were clean-shaven. In others, the same men had beards. Participants thought the men with beards had greater expertise and were significantly more trustworthy when they were endorsing products like cell phones and toothpaste."

"Important note: The study looked only at neat, medium-length beards. You can't just go all ZZ Top and expect people to trust you."

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/The-Trustworthiness-of-Beards/22581/

2300 A.D.

I think I'd like to have a solar sail craft with a lover, a library, a hammock, and a well stocked bar.

Dock at Mars for a few months and hike Olympus Mons? Sure.



Orbit Jupiter and watch the tempests below rage in slow motion? I guess so.


Check into one of Titan's famous resorts and observe the rings of Saturn through the transparent roof. Why not?



Ah, to live in the future.

Cast Iron Chicago Style Pan Pizza

Economist's Obituary for Eugene Terre'blanche

This thing is rightly harsh...

http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15865250

"The “leader”, as he styled himself, was no nicer in private. Though he won amnesty for his political crimes, he was jailed for beating one black worker into a coma and attempting to murder another. Yet unintentionally, he did some good. By making his cause look ridiculous, he weakened it. He fell off his horse at a parade. He wore green underpants with holes in them. He could fill a stadium and put on a show, but as a military commander, he was hopeless. Newspapers mocked him with punning headlines, such as “O volk! Terre’Blanche is back again”. Had he been less of a buffoon, South Africa’s road to democracy might have been bloodier."

...

"He was beaten to death last week, allegedly by two black farmworkers. The murder has sparked fears of renewed racial violence in South Africa. But the motive was apparently personal: unpaid wages and, one imagines, a less than agreeable management style."

Louis Theroux Interviews Terre'blanche

Aurora From space

Svalbard

Facts about Svalbard:

In 2009, Svalbard has a population of 2,753, of which 423 are Russian, 10 are Polish and 322 are non-Norwegians living in Norwegian settlements. The largest non-Norwegian groups in Longyearbyen in 2005 were from Thailand, Sweden, Denmark, Russia and Germany. Svalbard is among the safest places on Earth, with virtually no crime.

Svalbard is the northernmost tip of Europe and, a few military bases aside, its settlements are the northernmost permanently inhabited spots on the planet.

Svalbard literally means "cold edge."

The Internet connection in Svalbard is top class, courtesy of NASA renting bulk capacity on undersea fiber optic cables running at seabed to mainland Norway for its experiments.

The biggest threat on Svalbard is polar bears (isbjørn), some 500 of which inhabit the main islands at any one time. Five people have been killed by polar bears since 1973.

Anyone outside of settlements is required to carry a rifle to kill polar bears in self defense, as a last resort, should they attack.

Surface water may contain tapeworm eggs from fox feces and should be boiled before consumption.

Images of Svalbard:









Video:

Arctic Fox