There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.
Hollywood's Favorite Cowboy
Topic: Literature
9:31 pm EST, Nov 22, 2009
John Jurgensen:
Cormac McCarthy prefers hanging out with "smart people" outside his field, like professional poker players and the thinkers at the Santa Fe Institute.
Cormac McCarthy:
They're just really bright guys who do really difficult work solving difficult problems, who say, "It's really more important to be good than it is to be smart."
Only with hindsight can one look back and see that the smartest course may not have been the right one.
McCarthy:
I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about?
k:
The absolute luxury of really reading ... the sheer inefficiency of it ... is, to me at least, the very definition of leisure.
Malcolm Gladwell:
It's really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn't work hard. It's a form of self-protection.
Carolyn Johnson:
We are most human when we feel dull. Lolling around in a state of restlessness is one of life's greatest luxuries.
McCarthy:
Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
Stanley McChrystal:
One of the big take-aways from Iraq was that you have to not lose confidence in what you are doing. We were able to go to the edge of the abyss without losing hope.
Kevin Kelly:
Five years is what any project worth doing will take. From moment of inception to the last good-riddance, a book, a campaign, a new job, a start-up will take 5 years to play through. So, how many 5 years do you have left? This clarifies your choices. What will they be?
Matt Stone:
If anybody's telling me what I should do, then you've got to really convince me that it's worth doing.
Decius:
Life is too short to spend 2300 hours a year working on someone else's idea of what the right problems are.
Sterling Hayden:
What does a man need -- really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet ... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]
Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 film The Battle of Algiers portrays the urban warfare between Algerians and the French troops occupying their country.
Decius wrote:
It's been years since jlm first posted about this film on MemeStreams. I finally got around to watching it. The film provides a provocative and balanced look at an early conflict of a sort which has become commonplace today. The powerful use of local music and impressive bombing and riot scenes provide a level of realism I didn't expect from 1960's cinema.
For a stylish 1930's-era look at the Casbah, you might consider Pepe le Moko:
The notorious Pepe le moko (Jean Gabin, in a truly iconic performance) is a wanted man: women long for him, rivals hope to destroy him, and the law is breathing down his neck at every turn. On the lam in the labyrinthine Casbah of Algiers, Pepe is safe from the clutches of the police -- until a Parisian playgirl compels him to risk his life and leave its confines once and for all. One of the most influential films of the 20th century and a landmark of French poetic realism, Julien Duvivier's Pepe le moko is presented here in its full-length version.
Michael Atkinson:
Julien Duvivier's Casbah is a fabulously cruddy, secretive, fairy-tale warren of passages, hidden doorways, towers, and underground bustle (shot on location), and his tour of the maze is tasteful and dazzling, moving backward down the Casbah alley-steps, circling around the synchronized bodies of tangoing lovers.
Kenneth Turan:
"Pepe le Moko" is the stuff that dreams are made of.
Graham Greene called it "one of the most exciting and moving films I remember seeing," a feature that succeeded by "raising the thriller to a poetic level."
Beautifully crafted, movingly acted, still involving and entertaining, this is just the kind of film people are talking about when they say they don't make them like this anymore.
MTV's Buzz: fantastically forward-thinking TV from 1990
Topic: Futurism
6:43 pm EST, Nov 19, 2009
David Pescovitz:
In 1990, MTV aired a groundbreaking TV documentary series called Buzz, a fantastic experiment in non-linearity and cut-up that drew heavily from -- and presented -- avant-garde art, underground cinema, early cyberpunk, industrial culture, appropriation/sampling, and postmodern literature.
Jonathan Lethem:
Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste our selves, might we not forgive it of our artworks?
Louis Menand:
Authenticity is a snark -- although someone will always go hunting for it.
David Thomson:
It is not that life imitates art, but that it is all art, all fictional as much as documentary, and it is cinema once any lens -- in camera or eye -- notices it.
Matt Knox:
If you can cut it up into small enough pieces, you can get people to do almost anything.
Jim Jarmusch:
Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent.
Jean-Luc Godard:
It's not where you take things from -- it's where you take them to.
By embracing "read-write culture," which allows its users to create art as readily as they consume it, we can ensure that creators get the support -- artistic, commercial, and ethical -- that they deserve and need.
How can an X chromosome be nearly as big as the head of the sperm cell?
No, this isn't a mistake. First, there's less DNA in a sperm cell than there is in a non-reproductive cell such as a skin cell. Second, the DNA in a sperm cell is super-condensed and compacted into a highly dense form. Third, the head of a sperm cell is almost all nucleus. Most of the cytoplasm has been squeezed out in order to make the sperm an efficient torpedo-like swimming machine.
From the archive:
All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across.
Zooming represents an upgrade from the second- and third-best methods for accessing information (scrolling and linking) to the best option: displaying information like a landscape, and giving people the chance to zoom down to the details.
With iTunes' Variable Pricing, Fewer Hit Song Sales Still Mean More Money For Apple
Topic: Business
8:05 am EST, Nov 17, 2009
In January, Brad Stone grandly announced:
Apple said it ... will move away from its insistence on pricing songs at 99 cents.
Many were elated, but I was skeptical:
Steve Jobs may be underweight, but he knows how to run a business. This new agreement is a margin-positive change for Apple. In other words, under the new plan, customers will be paying more for less total product.
And now Paul Bonanos reports:
For Apple and other retailers testing variable pricing in the digital music marketplace, the early returns suggest that their six-month-long experiment is succeeding -- and generating more revenue for labels and rights holders as well.
If the average price of a top-200 hit is therefore about $1.25, and track sales among the top 200 have fallen by 6 percent, sales revenue from hit songs would still be up by at least 18 percent compared with an all 99-cent store.
Neil Howe:
If you think that things couldn't get any worse, wait till the 2020s.
Ten Simple Rules for Choosing between Industry and Academia
Topic: Biotechnology
11:08 pm EST, Nov 15, 2009
Marge Simpson:
Bart, don't make fun of grad students! They just made a terrible life choice.
Dr. Nanochick:
As of May 1st, 2009, I am now "Dr. Nanochick". Too bad that title doesn't come with a pay raise.
David B. Searls, in PLoS Computational Biology:
While you may not relish extending your indentured servitude in academia, any disadvantage, financial and otherwise, can quickly be made up in the early years of your career in industry. In other words, trying to get off the mark quickly is not necessarily a good reason to choose industry over academia.
Do you want riches? Fame? A life at the frontiers of knowledge? The hurly-burly of the business world?
A somewhat more cynical view would be that in business you will spend seemingly endless hours in meetings and writing plans and reports, while in academia you will spend all that time and more in grantsmanship -- in this regard, you must pick your poison.
Trying to optimize a career decision based on current conditions is a bit like trying to time the stock market -- you are sure to be overtaken by events.
Now, if ever, is the time to be honest with yourself.
Andrew Lahde:
Today I write not to gloat. Instead, I am writing to say goodbye.
Decius:
Life is too short to spend 2300 hours a year working on someone else's idea of what the right problems are.
Ridley Scott:
How close is cynicism to the truth?
They're almost on the same side of the line. Cynicism will lead you to the truth. Or vice versa.
David Foster Wallace:
The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."
Don't tell me that I won't I can Don't tell me that I'm not I am Don't tell me that my master plan Ain't coming through
Don't tell me that I won't I will Don't tell me how to think I feel Don't tell me cause I know what's real What I can do
David Foster Wallace:
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
Steve Albini:
It was a lot to think about. Well, they like this guy and they trust him. Besides, they already signed the deal memo. He must have been serious about wanting them to sign. They break the news to their current label, and the label manager says he wants them to succeed, so they have his blessing. He will need to be compensated, of course, for the remaining albums left on their contract, but he'll work it out with the label himself.
Paul Graham:
Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.
It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.
Millions of dollars are spent each year at conferences that people attend to be inspired, to learn the latest memes and speak the latest jargon. They stand around in hotel lobbies, drinking bottled water and swapping business cards. They look at what everyone else is doing, and try to figure out how to apply what they see to their own particular endeavor. These conferences lead to what I call "city ideas".
City ideas have to do with a particular moment in time, a scene, a movement, other people's work, what critics say, or what's happening in the zeitgeist. City ideas tend to be slick, sexy, smart, and savvy, like the people who live in cities. City ideas are often incremental improvements -- small steps forward, usually in response to what your neighbor is doing or what you just read in the paper. City ideas, like cities, are fashionable. But fashions change quickly, so city ideas live and die on short cycles.
The opposite of city ideas are "natural ideas", which account for the big leaps forward and often appear to come from nowhere. These ideas come from nature, solitude, and meditation. They're less concerned with how the world is, and more with how the world could and should be.
David Lynch:
Ideas are like fish. Originality is just the ideas you caught.
If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants leaving?
Elizabeth Fenn:
You have to wonder: what were all those people up to in all that time?
Dean R. Snow:
It's really easy to kid yourself.
On Drew Gilpin Faust:
She wanted to understand how whole classes of people can get caught up in a shared worldview, to the point that they simply can't see.
Jose Saramago:
If only all life's deceptions were like this one, and all they had to do was to come to some agreement ... Were it not for the fact that we're blind this mix-up would never have happened, You're right, our problem is that we're blind.
Joe Nocera:
They just want theirs. That is the culture they have created.
Charles C. Mann:
Minute changes in baseline assumptions produce wildly different results.
Paul Graham:
Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get.
