April 2010
Drifted toward Dragons: Utopia Today →
“Utopia is the scope of the plan, not the nature of the product.”
Reality
Tom Wolfe, 1972:
The New Journalists—Parajournalists—had the whole crazed obscene uproarious Mammon-faced drug-soaked mau-mau lust-oozing Sixties in America all to themselves.
So the novelists had been kind enough to leave behind for our boys quite a nice little body of material: the whole of American society, in effect. It only remained to be seen if magazine writers could master the...
“For more than a century, scholars have searched for the essence of religion....”
– Stephen Prothero, who argues that it’s dangerously naive to assume that all religions boil down to the same. I agree. I don’t think there is an essence to religion which can be isolated — this, of course, means that there is no way to confirm or deny religion, only specific...
units.dat →
units.dat, the database file for the unix unit conversion tool, is a copiously researched goldmine of information about all sorts of scales and units. In it, we learn, for instance, that a crocodile is a megavolt, a jerk is ft/s3, thou art 0.001 inches, a linen yarn count is 300 yards/pound, a standard Japanese tatami mat is (5.8*2.9) shaku2 (the shaku is roughly a foot), and the French catheter...
Things that must surely be metaphors for...
When you learn a foreign language well, but you don’t live in a country where the language is spoken and don’t habitually associate in the flesh with native speakers, you get embarrassing and unexpected holes in your vocabulary. You’ll have complex and arcane vocabulary down yet miss the seemingly obvious things, things that aren’t obvious to you because you never have to...
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At the moment, Top 10 Ways to Access Blocked Stuff on The Web returns Http/1.1 Service Unavailable. I was hoping it was a test — like, are you worthy of this information? Let’s see you break through this first. But no, it’s just a standard linkbaiting list and Lifehacker happened to crash when I accessed it. (via)
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We’re almost halfway through Jorge Luis Borges’s only novel before it is revealed that the narrator is Moses. Borges perfected this particular technique in the short story The House of Asterion, also about a mythological figure, but Dios1 was written earlier. It’s his longest work, but still a slim volume,2 and like all of his fiction, it thrives on inverting expectations.
Moses...
Vice Guide to North Korea →
Vice did a video “travel guide” piece on North Korea back in 2008. CNN was recently “intrigued” by their “very transparent approach to journalism”. The guide follows Shane Smith and his cameraman as they go on a highly choreographed tour of North Korea. The “transparent approach to journalism” is gonzo-style, where the reporter himself is highly...
Six kinds of lists of n things
Ever since Paul Graham wrote that the list of n things is “a degenerate form of the essay”, “the cheeseburger of essay forms”, it has been my ambition to write a great list of n things. Short of inserting 1, 2, 3 arbitrarily at the beginning of paragraphs in totally unrelated essays, I’ve been unable to. This might simply be because ambition very rarely leads you...
“My only suggestion would be to develop interests and pursue them — nothing...”
– Elliott Erwitt’s advice to beginning photographers. (via)
HATETRIS →
A tetris that always gives you the worst piece for your position. The fact that there’s no gravity doesn’t make things as easy as they may seem. The world record seems to be 17 lines. I’ve been messing with the source (it’s javascript), trying to hijack the game’s calculation of worst piece to find the optimal sequence of moves — it calculates the best move for...
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Building a railway and port, ca. 1900; building a...
A neighbor lent my dad a small booklet from 1903 celebrating the opening of the Ofoten railroad — which runs from Kiruna, Sweden to Narvik, Norway — and I’ve been scanning it in. Narvik is a city I have some connection to: it’s where I was born, where my father grew up and where my parents met, and I spent most of my childhood summers there. Besides, I think that the...
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Olof Rudbeck (1630-1702) →
Olof Rudbeck, discoverer of the lymphatic system, was quite a fellow. He spent the latter half of his life trying to demonstrate his grand theory of history: that Sweden was, in fact, the cradle of civilization, identical to Atlantis; the result of his labors was the Atlantica, a 3,000-page multi-volume treatise of comparative mythology, archaeology and historical linguistics. Through faulty...
Frank Horvat’s book Between Views, a series of conversations with photographers, is online in its entirety. Wonderful stuff. My favorite bit in the interview with Josef Koudelka, which I found here, isn’t so much about photography as about life:
Joseph Koudelka: “Good” is when a situation is at its maximum, and when I myself am at my maximum. It may happen that I reach that maximum...
