March 2011
On eating one's own tail
My greatest fear is retreating into the self. I take photographs because they force me to engage with the world. This isn’t entirely true, of course: there are other ways to force yourself to engage with the world, and there are other reasons to photograph. But still, there’s a very important truth there: in order to make a true photograph, and I am an old-fashioned believer in truth,...
Sleep is a boundary. It distinguishes one day from the next. But sleep is also a border with strict border controls: it decides which sorrows, worries and joys we take with us from one day to the next. Have you ever had an idea just before sleep and debated whether it’s worth it to get out of bed to write it down? On the one hand, doing so will likely wake you up; on the other, not writing...
Week 12
I’ve been offline most of the week, and it’s been wonderful. Traveling generates plenty of blog fodder, but I need some time to process it. In the meantime, here are some photos.
(There’s a little guy below giant-cock-guy taking a picture of giant-cock-guy’s giant balls.)
I have little interest in Jewish history, but the Jüdisches Museum has some nice architecture.
That...
1 tag
Week 11
Lost colonies! What happened to the Roanoke colony, one of the first English colonies in America? Or, perhaps more intriguing, the Norse colony on Greenland, last heard from in 1408?
On disappointment: “I think differently about disappointment: I don’t think our goal should be to avoid it. I think disappointment is evidence we’re on the right track. I think it means we’re after the things...
For the landscape painter, paint in tubes was the greatest thing since sliced bread. In the second half of the 19th century, when paint tubes became widely available, plein-air painting exploded. An artistic direction followed directly from a technological invention. And I can just imagine some young painter looking at one of these new landscapes, so clearly painted on site, and asking the...
1 tag
1 tag
lol
In a fit of inspiration, and/or insanity, I conceived of this thing I want to write which is essentially an extended riff on archetypes, and so I’m busy devouring archetypal stories. And I realized something: 4chan is Loki, Pan, and the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Which is to say, the 4chan hivemind, well-known cesspool of the internet and also originator of most of its influential memes, is a...
Week 10
Nathan Myhrvold is a renaissance man. This makes me optimistic that it’s possible to do important and interesting stuff in all of your areas of interest. Of course, being a millionaire must help. His latest project is a 2,500-page cookbook based on meticulous lab research and costing upwards of $1 million to produce. He founded Microsoft Research. His other ventures include paleontology,...
1 tag
Reading in the internet age
I am a compulsive reader. It’s not quite the terrible infinitely mounting anxiety that cannot be quenched except through the performance of some irrational rite, like in OCD, but at times it feels close. My parents used to have this little cottage, inherited from my uncle’s widow (they sold it a few years back), and we’d spend some weeks there every summer. There was no...
A bad day on the job for Inform 7 build 6G60
The alarm clock rings. It’s early morning and you’re one cup of
coffee and one commute away from your wonderful job.
>
You hit snooze.
>
I’m afraid I can’t let you do that.
>
I don’t know how to just fucking hit the goddamn snooze button!!
>
I could be fired from my job for letting you do that. Rise and
shine! It’s a beautiful day...
1 tag
The Sochi Project →
The opposite of quick journalism must be slow journalism. Photographer Rob Hornstra and writer Arnold van Bruggen are documenting Sochi, Russia, which will host the Winter Olympics in 2014, and surrounding areas. And they started several years ago! If a regular news article is written in less than twenty-four hours, and a feature article in weeks or a few months, these guys’ schedule is...
1 tag
Week 9
At the very first Oscars, there was not one but two “best picture” categories. Wings, a WWI drama, won the award for “outstanding picture, production”, while Sunrise was awarded as a “unique and artistic production”. The next year, and every subsequent year, the two awards were merged into one. Sometimes I wonder if they shouldn’t have kept that...
Miscommunication, misfits, and the tragic story of...
Is there a critical age beyond which a child can’t acquire language? There is, according to the so-called “critical period hypothesis”. But the evidence suggests that there is no sharply delineated critical period beyond which there’s a huge drop-off. Rather, there’s a linear decline in language proficiency as the age of first exposure increases, both for first and...
“The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in...”
– Freeman Dyson.