February 2012
Precision, Ambiguity in Words
I keep meaning to write about Steven Millhauser, who is one of my favorite short story writers, and particularly about We Others, his greatest hits collection from last year. But I could never find the words to express everything about his writing that appeals to me, so instead, I’ll highlight one of them: his precision. Millhauser builds up precise mental images by furnishing our...
My favorite deep, elegant and beautiful...
Few things truly blow my mind. It’s not that I’m so intelligent and perceptive that any surprising fact seems unsurprising to me: it’s more that I like to reserve hyperbole for special occasions, and not every mildly surprising fact is a special occasion. One thing that truly blows my mind, though, is math. Not math in general, but the orgasmic parade of mindblowing facts and...
Sentences about Photography
Photography is easy. Good photography is hard.
Photographs can be true.
Photographs are made, not taken as if by force.
Photography is about consistency. Consistency is talent, and talent is hard work.
Photographs say things that cannot be said in words.
Photographs and words are not enemies.
Photography is light. Photons, not electrons, are the elementary parts of photographs.
...
Look At All These Links. Week 6.
This is the latest edition of an irregularly scheduled roundup.
The weirdness that is North Korea: Orion Choco-Pie is a popular South Korean snack food. Kaesong is an industrial park just on the North Korean side of the border where North Koreans work for South Korean companies. What happens when you put these two together? A black market. When it’s one of the few foreign commodities...
Where There's No I
We live in the age of narcissism. I don’t believe for one second that this generation is substantially worse than the one before, or the five hundred before that. The young were immoral and lazy and unwise when Socrates walked the streets of Athens, and they are no different now. As were the old. But this generation has developed the technology to perfectly express the same narcissism our...
Cyberdérive
No one surfs the web anymore. Increasingly, we get everything we want from an endless stream provided by a small selection of websites: Reddit, Google, Tumblr, Facebook, Wikipedia and Amazon would be my list. Those six sites probably constitute a frightening percentage of my web browsing, and most of the content that originates on other sites can be consumed through them—or will be...
Literature as Freedom
Norwegian author Stig Sæterbakken recently took his own life. Apart from a couple essays, I’ve never read anything he’s written. Judging by the literati’s response to his death, that was probably an oversight on my part. It feels vaguely shameful to discover an author because of their death: the fact that it takes losing someone to appreciate them says that given different...
A Thousand Small Blows
The New York Times recently published an essay about overzealous use of the Asperger’s diagnosis, and the detrimental effects getting the wrong label stuck on you can have.
I was professionally diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome as a child. I do not believe I am anywhere on the autistic spectrum. Many people profess their relief at being given a diagnosis. For me, receiving a...
GIF: A Technical History
From a technical standpoint, the success of the lowly GIF is a mystery. Both as an image format and as a video/animation format, it’s vastly inferior to the alternatives. It only supports 256 colors; its compression is inefficient; it doesn’t support sound; the last specification was published more than twenty years ago. Yet it’s still thriving. The reason, of course, is...
January 2012
Scientists seem prone to a peculiar anger... →
Scott Aaronson on academic publishing:
I have an ingenious idea for a company. My company will be in the business of selling computer games. But, unlike other computer game companies, mine will never have to hire a single programmer, game designer, or graphic artist. Instead I’ll simply find people who know how to make games, and ask them to donate their games to me. Naturally, anyone generous...