Scott Aaronson on academic publishing:
I have an ingenious idea for a company. My company will be in the business of selling computer games. But, unlike other computer game companies, mine will never have to hire a single programmer, game designer, or graphic artist. Instead I’ll simply find people who know how to make games, and ask them to donate their games to me. Naturally, anyone generous enough to donate a game will immediately relinquish all
further rights to it. From then on, I alone will be the copyright-holder, distributor, and collector of royalties. This is not to say, however, that I’ll provide no “value-added.” My company will be the one that packages the games in 25-cent cardboard boxes, then resells the boxes for up to $300 apiece.
But why would developers donate their games to me? Because they’ll need my seal of approval. I’ll convince developers that, if a game isn’t distributed by my company, then the game doesn’t “count”—indeed, barely even exists—and all their labor on it has been in vain.
Admittedly, for the scheme to work, my seal of approval will have to mean something. So before putting it on a game, I’ll first send the game out to a team of experts who will test it, debug it, and recommend changes. But will I pay the experts for that service? Not at all: as the final cherry atop my chutzpah sundae, I’ll tell the experts that it’s their professional duty to evaluate, test, and debug my games for free!
On reflection, perhaps no game developer would be gullible enough to fall for my scheme. I need a community that has a higher tolerance for the ridiculous—a community that, even after my operation is unmasked, will study it and hold meetings, but not “rush to judgment” by dissociating itself from me. But who on Earth could possibly be so paralyzed by indecision, so averse to change, so immune to common sense?
I’ve got it: academics!
Feb 1, 2012
Inglourious Basterds (2009).
Jan 30, 2012
Boxers (1818), an early lithograph by Théodore Gericault and held at the Met, is generally acknowledged to be inspired by the 1810 fight between Tom Molineaux and Tom Cribb. Brian Phillips tells the story of how Molineaux, a black American who may have been a freed slave, came to England to challenge Cribb, the champion of the national pastime, boxing. It’s a sad, but great story:
It was the greatest fight of its era. But its significance went beyond that. Even at the time, it seemed to be about more than boxing, more than sport itself. More than anything, the contest between a white English champion and a black American upstart seemed to be about an urgent question of identity: whether character could be determined in the boxing ring, whether sport could confirm a set of virtues by which a nation defined itself.
The fight cemented a set of stock characters — the fast-talking, ultra-talented, self-destructive black athlete; the Great White Hope; the canny coach who’s half devoted to his pupil and half exploiting him — that have echoed down the centuries. In fact, so much about the fight feels familiar today, from the role of race to the role of the media, that if you had to name a date, you could make a good case that December 10, 1810, was the moment sport as we know it began.
Jan 28, 2012
Someone left half a coconut in the snow.
Jan 27, 2012
I miss summer. Taking photos in the winter is harder: there’s no damn light to capture.
Jan 25, 2012
I bought this book almost a year ago, and I’ve been meaning to post about it, but I couldn’t figure out how. In the end, I suppose a visual approach is best. This is Der Rote Bulli: Stephen Shore and the New Düsseldorf Photography. It’s a study of photographic influence.
Stephen Shore met Hilla Becher in 1973, the same year he started using a large-format camera and began making what would become Uncommon Places. Hilla suggested that he should photograph “main streets all over America”, in line with the Bechers’ typological project, but Shore decided he wasn’t interested in cataloging main streets. He was interested in “the quintessential main street.
” Hilla and her husband Bernd, with whom she made all her photographs, helped bring Shore’s work to Germany. When Shore and the Bechers participated in the New Topographics exhibition in 1975, the Bechers were the only Europeans in the show. Bernd Becher would go on to become an influential teacher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, inspiring generations of photographers who are sometimes known as the “Düsseldorf school” of photography. Well-known names from the school include Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Elger Esser, Candida Höfer and Axel Hütte.
This book, then, focuses on Shore’s influence on a generation of German photographers. There is a lot of text in this book, which is bilingual (every other page in German and English, making for some slightly disjointed reading). But there really isn’t any need for excessive theorizing. The evidence for the book’s premise—that Stephen Shore, via the Bechers, has had a big influence on the photographers who came out of the Düsseldorf Art Academy—is right there in the pictures. The real point of a book like this has to be the photographs. In addition to Shore and the Bechers, there are 21 photographers featured in the book, several of whom I was pleasantly surprised that I hadn’t heard of before. Sadly, some of the less well-known names are hard to find much about, or by, online.
Jörg Colberg did a video review of this book, where he pages through quite a bit more than I’ve shown in this post. This is a heavy, dense and expensive book, but it’s definitely worth paging through if you get the chance. Some of the artists featured in this post: Claudia Fährenkemper, Miles Coolidge, Kris Scholz, Matthias Koch. (I trust you know about the Gurskys and Ruffs of the world.)
Remember this? This glaring monstrosity is The Million Dollar Homepage, the viral sensation that swept the web in 2005. I hate this website. Everyone hates this website. We all hate it because we didn’t think of it first. It’s the perfect egg of Columbus.
What has Alex Tew, the genius who made a million dollars on the neon pile of shit above, done since? Nothing successful. He’s made several attempts that failed to generate significant income. His latest project was One Million People, which is exactly like the Million Dollar Homepage, but with people’s faces instead of ads. It never took off, and now appears to have morphed into a charity, which is nice, but hardly testifies to Tew’s business acumen.
I haven’t thought about this site for years, until I randomly stumbled on it today. I’m sure there’s a lesson here about the internet, business, or whatever the fuck that TechCrunch or someone could SEOify and divide into ten pages and make money off. (I’m glad I didn’t think of that idea.) Whatever it is, it would be something something luck something something.
Jan 20, 2012
Links that have been sitting in my drafts folder for varying lengths of time, but don’t warrant posts of their own.
Daniel Ellsberg on the effects of getting access to top secret information:
Over a longer period of time — not too long, but a matter of two or three years — you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. (…) In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening.
The Saint Petersburg Paradox is a bet with an infinite expected value. Therefore, you should take it at any price. But I wouldn’t take it for twenty dollars.
Kim Jong-il dropping the bass.
An anonymous mathematician answers: what’s it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics? Also: what’s it like to be a drug dealer? There is, of course, no way to verify that anonymous responders really possess the experience they claim, but then again, that’s the internet for you.
Alfred North Whitehead: “The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.
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A “stone’s throw from” means in reach of a powerful catapult: the Economist on euphemisms from around the world. Also from the Economist, a story about the failure of Kodak, which filed for bankruptcy today. (Kodak has obtained a loan allowing them to operate normally during bankruptcy, but the writing’s on the wall.)
Edge.org’s annual question for 2012: What’s your favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation?
The adjacent possible, on innovation as tinkering and recombination of existing parts:
The premise that innovation prospers when ideas can serendipitously connect and recombine with other ideas may seem logical enough, but the strange fact is that a great deal of the past two centuries of legal and folk wisdom about innovation has pursued the exact opposite argument, building walls between ideas. Ironically, those walls have been erected with the explicit aim of encouraging innovation. They go by many names: intellectual property, trade secrets, proprietary technology, top-secret R&D labs. But they share a founding assumption: that in the long run, innovation will increase if you put restrictions on the spread of new ideas, because those restrictions will allow the creators to collect large financial rewards from their inventions. And those rewards will then attract other innovators to follow in their path.
The problem with these closed environments is that they make it more difficult to explore the adjacent possible, because they reduce the overall network of minds that can potentially engage with a problem, and they reduce the unplanned collisions between ideas originating in different fields.
A more rigourous attack on patents and copyright from an economic standpoint can be found in Against Intellectual Monopoly, by David K. Levine and Michele Boldrin. They’re not piracy-luvin’ hippies, but PhD-holding academic economists. The book is available for free (as expected), but also in dead-tree form. I may write more about this book later, but I’ve only gotten as far as the first chapter. It has an interesting case study, showing that while James Watt’s steam engine patent lasted, there weren’t many steam engines actually produced. Once the patent expired, production and innovation of steam engines exploded. While he had the patent, Watt and his business partner spent more time squeezing money out of his patent than actually producing or improving on steam engines. Thus Watt’s patent set back the industrial revolution by several decades.
Finally: Bryan Formhals, of La Pura Vida, now LPV Magazine, one of my favorite places to find new photography, has started a weekly digest of photo-related stuff. It looks excellent so far, and I wish him the best of luck. I know how hard that can be to keep up. Also, Richard’s new blog, The Syllabi, which attempts to contextualize and summarize links to interesting stuff. Much like LPV’s digest, or my weeklies. I enjoyed the one on culture-bound syndromes, which I’ve written about before.
Jan 20, 2012
Plan for an unbuilt house by the French architect Jacques-François Blondel, 1737. The house squeezes another interior into the interstices of the interior. All the rooms with a view outside can be reached from a hidden world in-between the walls of the main rooms. The source of this schematic is Three Doors to Other Worlds, an essay by Andrew Crompton, who notes that the house functions as a reverse panopticon: one can’t keep tabs on the people in the house without a watcher in every room. (The other other worlds include the edge over which it is impossible to look.)
Hidden rooms and secret passages are a very powerful literary theme. They’re a source of mystique, and to uncover a room between walls or a passage between passages is perhaps one of the closest things to magic one can experience in the modern world. I was reminded of Blondel’s reverse panopticon by this excellent metafilter thread about hidden rooms and dead spaces.
Hidden spaces are a favorite trope of murder mysteries and horror stories. In Lovecraft’s Rats in the Walls, the narrator finds a crypt deep beneath his family castle:
There now lay revealed such a horror as would have overwhelmed us had we not been prepared. Through a nearly square opening in the tiled floor, sprawling on a flight of stone steps so prodigiously worn that it was little more than an inclined plane at the centre, was a ghastly array of human or semi-human bones. Those which retained their collocation as skeletons shewed attitudes of panic fear, and over all were the marks of rodent gnawing. The skulls denoted nothing short of utter idiocy, cretinism, or primitive semi-apedom. Above the hellishly littered steps arched a descending passage seemingly chiselled from the solid rock, and conducting a current of air. This current was not a sudden and noxious rush as from a closed vault, but a cool breeze with something of freshness in it. We did not pause long, but shiveringly began to clear a passage down the steps. It was then that Sir William, examining the hewn walls, made the odd observation that the passage, according to the direction of the strokes, must have been chiselled from beneath.
The Dreams in the Witch House, too, is based around a hidden space. The central conceit of House of Leaves, Mark Danielewski’s infamously convoluted debut novel, is a house that is larger on the inside than on the outside. I bought it several years ago in one of those rare bookshops where the staff will spontaneously start conversations with you about the books you’re buying. “Excellent choice,” said the man behind the counter. “This one can be tough to finish, but putting in the effort is so worth it.” I thought he was exaggerating. I still haven’t finished reading it. House of Leaves, sadly, is as twisting and winding as the house it describes.
Harry Potter’s Hogwarts is seemingly nothing but secret passages and hidden spaces, constantly reconfiguring itself. Beyond the revolving bookcases of fiction, there are real-life hidden spaces like this 1950s subway passage, complete with period ads, or H. H. Holmes’s castle, custom-built with murderous intent.
I don’t know what it is that appeals so to the imagination about these spaces. Perhaps it’s the spirit of adolescent adventure. If you found a hidden space in your house, is there anyone out there who wouldn’t explore it?
Jan 16, 2012
