August 2009
Biology Class →
Short story by David Fischer. (via Trivium)
“I just wish it was higher resolution.”
– André Brocatus on a picture of a single pentacene molecule.
For fun: a top of the line optical lens has a resolution of 400 lines/mm.
Quote from this page: “The spacing between neighboring carbon atoms is only 0.14 nanometers—roughly 1 million times smaller than the diameter of a grain of...
Anonymity
Rory Cellan-Jones of BBC’s dot.life blog writes:
Now anonymity is a valuable, indeed vital protection for junior staff inside corporations or public bodies, or people from countries with repressive governments, who would otherwise feel unable to contribute their views or provide valuable information to blogs like this.
But doesn’t “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells” have more...
The Collector Dilemma →
Ck/ck:
I stumbled upon some photos today of someone’s vintage camera collection, and I found myself in something of an emotional dilemma.
On one hand, it’s always fantastic to see these beautiful old cameras being saved and cared for, preserved for future generations to use a tired phrase. Yet on the other hand after seeing this particular collector’s extensive collection of at...
Sneaky Tactics
Here’s how to force your customers to agree to something they don’t want to agree to: make a form and let the customer fill it out. When the user submits the form, send him to another form. This one has a box the customer can check to agree to something the company gains on, but that the user often doesn’t want to. To make sure that the customer does agree to this of their own,...
Pessimism, Zapffe, Ligotti
I’m continuing a theme here. Issue IV of the philosophy journal Collapse is online. The issue focuses on “concept horror”, “the horror uncovered through conceptual investigation itself: the horror buried beneath the apparently rational discourses of philosophy and theory, the nonsense beneath sense, the abyssal unground towards which philosophical thought invites us when it...
“Living 14,000 years didn’t make me a genius.
I just had time. Time....”
– There’s something to be said for sampling The Man from Earth, an excellent film that needs rewatching.
“Twice five syllables
plus seven can’t say much but
that’s haiku...”
– Douglas Hofstadter.
Of course, haiku gets
harder if you include a season word, like “spring”
Pillow Talk →
“This is a new translation of Sei Shonagon’s ‘Pillow Book’, a 10th century blog.” I especially like Things that really piss me off.
i am having a nice time →
A choose your own adventure. (via)
Lost in the Meritocracy
→
The moral of the story might be, as Mark Twain may or may not have said, “never let your schooling interfere with your education.”
My script for a proposed Special Dispatch that...
Hello there, this is a dispatch from Godless Liberal Socialist Utopia, Norway, which is having its highly democratic election on September 14. Since many of you will be unfamiliar with life in a modern Godless Liberal Socialist Utopia, and since I have nothing better to do, I’ll fill you in on the political climate; however, since complaining is a lot easier and more fun than praising the...
There is a museum in Paris devoted to counterfeit objects (hat tip). I was going to get all clever and tell you about my dream to buy a hugely expensive, very exclusive object and put it in the museum, and the scam would be that it was actually the real deal.
Turns out they display the real objects alongside the counterfeits.
Fucking modernists probably think I’m too clever by half. But...
“Japan lives in the future; it has lived there for a century. Hot-wired by...”
– William Gibson on how Japan became “the favored default setting for so many cyberpunk writers”.
An Open Letter to John C. Wright →
I don’t follow scifi blogs closely. I do know there are occasionally very heated discussions about things like race, gender and sexuality and how it’s representend in science fiction. The latest round appears (to me, having admitted to not following it closely) to have started when someone criticized the Scifi (sorry, Syfy) Channel for the bad/lacking treatment of gays in their...
“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old...”
– J. R. R. Tolkien.
“I am at war with the obvious.”
– William Eggleston.
“On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere...”
– Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the...”
– Antoine De Saint-Exupery. (via Brocatus, Ben Casnocha)
In Praise of Shadows (1933)
In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki is a lovely little meditation on traditional Japanese aesthetics and how it differs from Western aesthetics. It was not, as I had hoped, about a mood I’ve been interested in for some time, mono no aware, my favorite translation of which is “beauty as an awareness of the transience of all things, and a gentle sadness at their...
I just helped my dad update the password to his email exchange server on his Nokia smartphone. He has to change password regularly, but he doesn’t know how, so he delegates the task to me. As a result, I do it regularly, and even I have to spend a quarter of an hour looking through the menus to find the correct option. And who can blame us? I wrote down the winding path down the menus today,...
Thought Experiment: A new cure for depression, by... →
“The thought of suicide is a great consolation; by means of it one gets through many a bad night”, said Nietzsche.
Religion and Society →
Srinivas became the leading advocate of the field-view and the sociological approach, by which he meant an approach based on a careful and methodical examination of observed or observable facts. It does not treat religion as being either completely autonomous or as invariant, eternal and unchanging. Religious beliefs and practices vary and change, and this has to be examined in relation to...
Marco:
I don’t need to get into this very much with this audience, but for the people standing in the back who just came in and missed the last few years of one of the internet’s favorite arguments, Apple simply doesn’t have a low-end lineup. Their hardware is very competitively priced to similar hardware from other vendors.
I’ve heard this many times, and I never understood it. I have...
The World's Shortest Horror Story →
Unknown date: “He sat alone in the dark, afraid. Someone put matches in his hand.” Circa 1870: “A woman is sitting alone in a house. She knows she is alone in the whole world; every other living thing is dead. The doorbell rings.” 1948: “The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…” 1957: “The last man on Earth sat alone...
This Is The Only Level →
Thirty variations on one level. The captions for each stage are helpful. (via)