April 2009
“Write then, now that you are young, nonsense by the ream. Be silly, be...”
– Virginia Woolf, Letter to a Young Poet. (via danielsh)
The same sentiment has been many times, among them: “remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition; don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better; composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under,...
Ego depletion →
Self-control might be a resource you can use up. Or like a muscle that gets tired. The more temptations you resist, the harder it gets to resist further temptations. Isn’t that interesting?
“The fetishization of self-destructive behavior is only romantic if you have a...”
– Philip-Lorca diCorcia.
Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps →
Powers of Ten came out in 1977. It was a modern adaption of Cosmic View, a book written by Kees Boeke, twenty years earlier. The science in the book may be a bit outdated, but it’s interesting regardless. (via metafilter)
2 tags
Nature Makes the Awesomest Fractals
Try this: take your camera with you and go into a dense forest. Climb under a tree, point your lens upwards and shoot. Nature makes some truly fascinating shapes. (I’m not sure if they’re technically fractals, but they do remind me of them.) Plus, it’s an excuse to go into a dense forest and crawl under a tree, which, I’m told, you normally don’t do.
Some of these...
dictionary of awkward Japanese →
Whether you want to a quick exit to a boring conversation, you are a political shit-disturber, or you are just tired of “naughty” Japanese dictionaries that are basically just cuss words, here is the thing for you; The DICTIONARY OF AWKWARD JAPANESE. Guaranteed to bring any conversation to a screeching halt, the DOAJ is a collection of things that most Japanese know but would not want...
Broken Koans and other Zen debris →
I know almost nothing about Buddhism, but I found this “broken koan” poignant: a student is complaining that other students, through various means, gain enlightenment, but he has been doing these things for two years, and things don’t make any more sense to him. The teacher replies:
Well you see, for most people, and especially for most educated people like you and I, what we...
“Stop all the downloadin’, turn off ICQ,
Prevent the paperclip from...”
– A Geocities lament.
the ad hominem fallacy fallacy →
Inky writes:
I’m going to make a point of studying some of these [logical fallacies] every day. Today, I start with:
Ad hominem: Source A claims X is true. There is something objectionable about Source A. Therefore, claim X is false.
Which reminded me of some of the subtleties of the ad hominem fallacy. It appears to be so simple, but it’s often misunderstood. Hence this article:
The...
Should Banksy be nominated for the Turner prize? →
The reason I don’t like street art is that it’s not aesthetic, it’s social. To celebrate it is to celebrate ignorance, aggression, all the things our society excels at.
This just in: art should not be social, it should be aesthetic only (the two are apparently contraries). Also, street art, the medium, is aggressive, ignorant, and of course, unaesthetic.
Robert Recorde invents the equals sign →
Mark Dominus goes back to the sources to look at the invention of the equals sign.
Man pretending to fall off bridge actually falls →
The 23-year-old stood eventually climbed to the ledge of the bridge, then looked at his friend and pretended to fall. “He then in fact fell,” reads a press release from the Bloomingtin Police Department.
That’s some lovely deadpan, right there. This Darwin Award-inspired tidbit brought to you not by The Onion, but AP. (via clusterflock)
“One gentleman in particular–Zeke–looked over my shoulder one day and saw the...”
– Doug Menuez, The zen of film vs. digital gratification.
A Television Simulator →
In today’s world of huge, sharp LCD monitors, it’s hard to remember what a videogame image looked like on an ordinary television of the late 1970s. Emulators like Stella make it possible to play Atari games on modern computers, serving the function of archival tool, development platform, and player for these original games. But unfortunately, they also give an inaccurate impression...
Introducing Asterism.
I’ve been planning to release the theme I use for my site, and several people have asked if they could use it, which is flattering. Now, I’ve tidied it up, and I’m introducing it as a public theme, which I’m calling Asterism. (This symbol is an asterism: ⁂. Patterns in the sky not officially recognized as constellations and an optical phenomenon seen in some gems can also...
The H&FJ Institute for Unapplied Mathematics →
The world’s largest known prime number is 243112609-1 (12,978,189 digits), but how large is that? H&FJ crunched some numbers to find out how long it would be set in type. In 12pt Courier, it’s around 33 km, or about 20.5 miles.
The philosopher and the wolf →
I can still picture Brenin’s brothers and sisters running around the pen, tumbling over each other and jumping back to their feet in glee. But of the person who sold me Brenin, I can remember virtually nothing. Something had already started; a process that would become more and more pronounced as the years rolled on. I was already starting to tune out human beings. When you have a wolf, they...
Hanging disposable camera experiment in Portland,... →
In 2008 I left a disposable camera hanging from a pedestrian bridge in North Portland with a note attached that read: “Take 1 Photo”
The results are surprisingly good.
We have a winner. The screenshot I posted earlier was indeed from Tokyo Story. I promised I’d email a cookie, but since this person doesn’t display an email address on his/her website, I’ll have to do it publicly:
Here's a cookie for you:
Set-Cookie: you=won
I'm impressed. Sincerely,
Simen
“The future will be a struggle between huge competing systems of psychopathology.”
– J. G. Ballard.
“I like how everything has fag appended to it. Are actual gay people called...”
– Comment about 4chan by someone called, uh, GlueBoy.
“The person who says “Enough innovation, let’s stick with what we...”
– Dave Eggers.
= (equals sign)
I have a grand theory that ties together several factors: human identity; the stigma around mental illness; and the refusal of many autists to even consider taking a cure, if they were offered one. I’m going to explain it to you. This isn’t merely an academic exercise, so bear with me.1
Human identity is layered, in a sense. We aren’t equally attached to every aspect of...
one surrealist a day →
This is definitely weird. Still undecided about whether it’s good weird or bad weird.
They're made out of Meat →
Short story — really, it’s a quick read — by Terry Bisson.
