At a cheap diner, listening to a cover of Lionel Richie’s “Hello” in Korean, I wondered if there isn’t a common language of feeling that precedes abstraction.
There are certainly external, commercial forces that promote a convergence of popular culture. But there may also be internal forces that make such a convergence inevitable. The centripetal [...]
space suits: clothing as a machine. (via BoingBoing)
An excellent introduction to Arabic geometry.
If the robot was our double in the 20th century, perhaps the ghost will be our double n the 21st. Kelefa Sanneh: “When people in America say that certain jobs are ‘disappearing,’ they usually mean that non-Americans are now doing them.”
More kudos, then, to the Daily Show for their series on Iran; in particular, [...]
Siege mentality apparent in company email patterns:
Menezes thinks he and Collingsworth may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely.
The case study was Enron. Previously.
Ironic science fiction movies, on a continuum:
Galaxy Quest
Starship Troopers
Dune
Star Trek (2009)
slick. when we praise something as “slick,” we delight in what is slippery, mercurial, tantalizing. we can neither contain nor explain it.
a slick object is magical, a talisman.
Ikea could make a killing if they re-issued some of their 70s designs at a higher price point, in a smaller production run and with more focused distribution. maybe.
now is not a volume economy and clever design is as popular as ever thanks to the web.
Many of Bersuit’s lyrics pack the punch of poetry and their music can be as moving as that of the best bands.
Toco y me voy is likely my favorite of theirs, a wonderful tribute to soccer – a sport I don’t even follow.
On a related note, the recent movie Rudo y Cursi is a happy [...]
Jill Lepore: “Germ theory, which secularized infectious diseases, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.”
The notion of god is like a bubble trapped under film. You can push it down and out of sight but then it just pops up elsewhere and otherwise. Even the declaration “God is dead” or “There was never a [...]
In a much discussed and very provocative essay about health care, Atul Gawande makes two very compelling arguments.
First, that doctors and hospitals don’t share enough information and are thus very inefficient. This claim should not be controversial. Whenever humans have shared information the outcome has been greater life, liberty and happiness. The second observation, [...]
I just found this slidesow from 2005 about visiting dog show. It might even be cheaper now to edit out the dogs.
someone is building a house on the hill behind us. at first, when the work was tedious, the music was loud and mexican. now the music is quieter and 80s pop, punctuated by nail guns and the occasional table saw.
It’s official: Italy is a parody of itself.
The [new] Italian National Guard uniforms feature an imperial eagle, a symbol often associated with Fascism. In addition, on the armband is a black-rayed sun, or Sonnenrad, an image found in a castle used by the Nazi’s paramilitary SS. The guard was introduced by the right-wing fringe Italian [...]
Heavy hitters:
The odds are always with whoever has control of the army and airwaves. People can be forgiven for already assuming that the hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating today in Tehran will fail in contesting the election results. Perhaps they will. But then again, perhaps they won’t. Mir-Hossein Mousavi has a lot of people [...]
Heartbreaking. Conservatives in Iran steal the election, cut off all media and give police orders to shoot to kill protesters. Analysis of the stolen election by Juan Cole and, in a sense, of the stolen revolution by Laura Secor, both via Josh Marshall.
you may have read Google’s paper on predicting the present? the web has given the invisible hand of the market an opposable thumb, if you will, by allow the market to more clearly articulate its desires.
beforehand, it was all too common for a few people to be given the responsibility of deciding what “the [...]
when it was hard to find things (before the web), an idea had to be either very popular (the more people who believe X, the more likely you’ll run into someone who believes X) or it had to be popular with a few powerful people (the kind who program radio, TV, newspapers, etc.) for it [...]
the web is full of people, bumping up against each other in the dark. there are still only a few architectures in place to create more structured encounters. for centuries, cities, buildings and rooms have created a myriad of opportunities for people to interact in many different ways. want to spend three hours with a [...]
Superbad.com, your spirit lives on.
Jim Rossignol proposes a stunningly simple and brilliant hypothesis in Videogames And The Impossibility Of Escape From Planet Earth. Hint: inner space.
More on intelligence: this time plants. Previously: animals.
Charlie Kaufman has a proposal: consciousness is a retaining wall against emotion. He wants to use paradox and absurdity to hammer out the pins that keep that retaining wall intact thus flooding the viewer with feeling. It’s a clever trick. Unfortunately, he is apparently mostly interested in feelings of despair and despondency.
The same technique [...]
The NYT:
Along with Mr. Colbert, who arrived Friday, came 30 members of the show’s production staff. That’s one-third of the usual, but still a large operation that takes over several rooms at a former palace of Saddam Hussein, where the show is being taped: skinny comedy writers and producers milling around Camp Victory in [...]
The history of psychology suggests that we know very little about our brains. Eventually, this history will include what we didn’t yet know about the intelligence of other animals:
“We think it is fair to assume that chimpanzees can remember the exact location of probably thousands of trees ,” says Normand.
Culture clash:
One indigenous leader, Luis Huansi, told Reuters news agency on Saturday that about 8,500 protesters had taken up strategic positions around the city of Yurimaguas.
He said the protesters would not be using guns: “We are counting on our traditional weapons which our forefathers left to us for defence, weapons to fight. They are spears.”
heart-breaking ecstasy:
Elliot Smith – Independence Day
Devendra Banhart – The Body Breaks
Feist – I Feel It All
Of Montreal – Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games
videos about the making of videos:
Magnum v. Solo, sequence comparison
Sorry I’m Late making of
Previously. Related.
In the underrated You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, John Turturro’s character retires from battling the Israelis to open a chain of shawarma restaurants called Muchentuchen. Yesterday, Hugo Chavez opened a shawarma restaurant in Beirut, Lebanon:
The restaurant, it seems, is quite patriotic indeed — decorated with flags and pictures of the Venezuelan president and, [...]
Street Fight, a documentary about Corey Booker’s first mayoral campaign in Newark, is gripping, raw and full of can’t-believe-they-got-that-on-tape moments. Made for television, it’s a bit short and certainly biased but it’s also as dramatic as fiction. You could splice it with scenes from The Wire and not a miss a beat.
Towards the end of [...]
I can’t wait for the inevitable graduate theses on 4chan so that I can read summaries and discussions of same on the web. Previously.