January 2010
Notes on "Camp" (1964), by Susan Sontag →
A few notes and questions, in the spirit of the essay:
Did Susan Sontag simply nail the hipster, ironic detachment, and most of postmodernism forty years before everyone else?
It seems to me that many of the things that America, probably unjustly, has come to be associated with in Western Europe are prime targets for campy appreciation: overly elaborate Christmas lighting, mythical lawsuits such...
Future Shock →
Marco thinks this is awesome. Have a look:
What you’re seeing in the industry’s reaction to the iPad is nothing less than future shock.
For years we’ve all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the ‘average person’. I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.
Secretly, I suspect, we...
Computing as driving, or: Don't get your hopes up...
There are all kinds of cars, beautiful and ugly, some easy to use for regular people and some not. Most adults — no, let me correct that — most adults in the developed world, who live outside the biggest metropolitan hubs where traffic is a perpetual crawl and public transporation is more convenient, own or have access to and regularly drive a car. There are plenty of beautiful cars...
nostrich:
I’m amazed at how arrogant geeks are sometimes. Here’s what happened yesterday: Apple launched a device that is a first of its kind (don’t try and tell me it isn’t, it is), and the collective response was: doesn’t do anything I need, this thing is going to be a total failure. Ok, the collective response was a deluge of terrible jokes about tampons, but after that.
You know what you...
Onward and Upward with the Arts. Diary of a Viewer... →
A 1947 article from the New Yorker about watching tv. It’s wonderfully quaint: the reporter visits a family a number of times to watch television (he informs us that, to his embarassment, none of the 7,000 households in Manhatten that own tv sets are acquaintances of his). He describes what’s on the tv and the people watching, and that’s it. It’s page upon page of...
3 tags
In which I put on my robe and tinfoil hat.
Somewhat related to this: could there be unknown knowledge? Things notes:
Everything is interesting, and what’s more, we’ve developed the tools and the aesthetics with which to create the deep levels of analysis that would overwhelm a masters thesis from the 80s or 90s.
A while ago, Wired ran a feature story about the coming age of data-driven science. Instead of the traditional...
The world is perfect for the curious. I’d like to think that curiosity is one of those fundamental human longings — we long for food, love, but also for understanding — but the fact is that most people aren’t curious. Actually, let me revise that: most people aren’t curious about how the world works. Everyone’s curious, but most people’s curiosity is...
“Knowing the mind is like seeing an infographic on how you’ll die: at once...”
– Mills.
“What would happen if the printed book had just been invented in a high-tech...”
– Juan Villoro, via.
Robert Frank’s proposal for the Guggenheim grant that enabled him to do what became The Americans, found here:
The summary
To photograph freely throughout the United States, using the miniature camera exclusively. The making of a broad, voluminous picture record of things American, past and present. This project is essentially the visual study of a civilization and will include caption...
Maps and Legends
I’m reading Michael Chabon’s book of essays Maps and Legends. The title essay reminds me of the story of California City. It begins: “In 1969, when I was six years old, my parents took out a Veterans Administration loan and bought a three-bedroom house in an imaginary city called Columbia.” The city was Columbia, Maryland, which at the time wasn’t much more than a...
Wiki says: “While the name may be recent, the FAQ format itself is quite old. For instance, Matthew Hopkins wrote The Discovery of Witches in 1647 in FAQ format.”
Who would have thought that the origin of the FAQ was mediaeval witch hunting manuals? Indeed, the most infamous of them all, the Malleus Maleficarum (1486), is a FAQ. To be fair, the authors seem to have misunderstood the...
I don’t carry a sketchbook to write down ideas. I don’t write drafts in notebooks. Instead, I write and rewrite ideas in my head. I’m not talking about general ideas here; I assume everyone, or at least everyone who cares, thinks about what they want to write before they sit down to write a serious text. Even those who say they think by writing, I assume, don’t sit down to...
Quantum Bogosort →
Bogosort is a perversely awful sorting algorithm: it’s equivalent to throwing a deck of cards in the air, assembling the deck randomly, and repeating until the deck is sorted. (Worst case running time: forever.) However! Quantum computing to the rescue:
An in-joke among some computer scientists is that quantum computing could be used to effectively implement a bogosort with a time...
Jesus. When you write an angry post about incomprehensible text, the sentence fragment “Penothing at all about the photographs thentecostalist” doesn’t look very good. I don’t know how that happened, but why the hell did I not notice it? Muphry’s law.
“As another high school English teacher, here’s my take: Unlike...”
– craigiest on reddit.
CoffeeScript →
Major nerdery alert:
This started out as a nicer syntax for javascript, but quickly morphed into an independent programming language that compiles to javascript, and it looks very nice. It borrows features from Python and Ruby, like significant whitespace, list comprehensions, ranges with range slice syntax, everything is an expression, an improved switch statement and splats. Like Ruby, it has a...
“The car wheel’s smacks on rain-wet asphalt
are not
the signals of the...”
– Rolf Jacobsen, Signals, 1933.
“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
– Pablo Picasso.
Very broadly, there seem to be two schools of thought regarding the relationship between ordinary life and art: either art is there to help us escape from the mundane, or it’s there to help us realize its value. Personally, I waver between the two on a daily basis, depending on...
Pet peeve of the day: “a particularly American phenomenon”, and equivalent phrases. Owing to the sites I read, I encounter this with some regularity. I won’t deny that there are some phenomena that are particular to the United States or North America, but most of the time, the phrase is lazy journalism that does little but expose the author’s lack of experience with the...
1 tag
The lost script →
One day while he was living near Seattle, the Senegal-born linguistics professor Fallou Ngom forgot to close a window before a rainstorm passed through, and the next morning discovered the wind had blown some of his papers to the floor. On one of them, a sheet several years old, his late father had recorded a debt.
Ngom’s father was considered illiterate because he couldn’t read and write in the...
The Americanization of Mental Illness →
My grand theory of human identity — and to be clear, I mean to imply that it probably spans over too much in an attempt to encompass everything — states, among other things, that the stigma attached to mental illness derives from the fact that we are unable to separate personhood and the mind, and so freely transfer attributes from one to the other. If your illness is localized to a...
3 tags
man bc →
Behold! It’s the incredible, the paradoxical, the awesome code that runs even when it doesn’t run!
When the quit statement is read, the bc processor is terminated, regardless of where the quit statement is found. For example, “if (0 == 1) quit” will cause bc to terminate.
This is from bc, a programming language and shell that’s basically a glorified calculator....
Prediction: the niche blog is old. What I’ll call the lens blog is what’s hot in 2010.
Of course, that assumes that for one thing to blossom, another must die, which is stupid, but hey, that’s how the prediction game works, right? You have to predict that one thing dies if you’re going to predict that another rises, right? Maybe I’ve been reading bad predictions.
...
Ignaz Semmelweis →
I found a real-world example of how knowledge is valuable, even when we cannot explain the underlying mechanism. Ignaz Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician who worked in the first half of the 19th century. Unfortunately for him, this was just before the germ theory of disease gained widespread acceptance. Semmelweis despaired that at his clinic, mothers who came to give birth had a much higher...
“The reason I enjoy photography so much is because of the ways it is similar to...”
– Josh Poehlein. This was quoted in a post at Horses Think that seems to be going in the opposite direction: getting excited over photography that reaches out to other mediums. At the moment, I feel more like Poehlein above: I get excited about personal takes on old tricks, done with equipment that...
I have a theory. When two people are equally talented and put in equal effort, the one who cares most will produce/do the best (not necessarily the most profitable) things of the two. Therefore, one way to improve whatever you’re doing is to simply care a little more: for the process, for the end result, for the reasons you do it. Or is that simply wishful thinking?
Sumerians Look On In Confusion As God Creates... →
Members of the earth’s earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth.
According to recently excavated clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script, thousands of Sumerians—the first humans to establish systems of writing, agriculture, and government—were working on their sophisticated...
Some Nights
Greg Girard, Vancouver, 1975 & 1982 (check out the whole set)
Fred Herzog, Vancouver, 1960 (featured too many times on here already)
Keith Davis Young, Austin, Texas, 2008Kim Høltermand, Denmark (?)
Levi Wedel
Todd Hido
Will Govus
I like to think there’s something a little subversive about taking the ugly neon smear of a night in the city (or the suburbs) and creating something...
Phantom time hypothesis →
Speaking of missing time, a guy named Heribert Illig has made an astonishing discovery: there weren’t merely eleven days that never happened; in fact, the 297 years between 614 and 911 didn’t happen at all! They’re historical fabrications.
Or so he thinks. His — to put it generously — hypothesis is a little less than totally insane: if he had picked, say, 1500-1800...
Rex Sorgatz's 30 Best Blogs of 2009 →
I link to this list every year because it’s what blogrolls and tumblelogs should aspire to: a list of links that explains why the links on it are worth your time, and which puts the links into context. Blogrolls are (almost) useless because they simply ask you to take the fact that the links are worthwhile on authority, and too many link blogs/tumblelogs are simply disconnected lists of...
Ending The Decade Debate →
Ck/ck:
I remember being really annoyed a decade ago when there were some lamenting about the decade/century/millennium not actually beginning until 2001, and that those who thought 1999 becoming 2000 was the turn of the millennia were wrong. Admittedly, I’ve never been fully able to understand what their logic is based on, other than it being something about when you count to ten you go...
