Jun 25, 2010

How People Think...

IMG_4110Image by Jemimus via Flickr
Ian Buruma reviews "Hitch-22 - A Memoir" by Christopher Hitchens.

Setting off with a quote from the book,
...the ways in which the conclusion is arrived at may be interesting…just as it is always how people think that counts for much more than what they think...
Ian Buruma explores just what kind of thinking goes on inside the Hitchens head.

Not flattering, if I get the tone of the review right- for Buruma writes,
"Protesting against the Vietnam War was not a bad thing to do, of course. But still sticking to the business of how rather than what Hitchens thinks, the peculiar tone of self-righteousness, combined with a parochial point of view, even when the causes concern faraway, even exotic countries, is distinctive."

Read more at The Believer  in The New York Review of Books.


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Jun 24, 2010

Tennis or Basketball?

John IsnerImage via Wikipedia
This is the first round match, Isner has served 98 aces, Mahut 95: hope there is more to come today.

"American John Isner and Nicolas Mahut of France were tied at 59-59 in the fifth set at Wimbledon after exactly 10 hours of action when play was suspended because of darkness Wednesday night. It is by far the longest match in terms of games or time in the century-plus history of tennis."

Read more at Isner, Mahut set marathon records at Wimbledon
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Moscow's Dostoevsky station could be 'suicide mecca' - Telegraph

Moscow Metro, clockImage via Wikipedia
"'What did you want? Scenes of dancing?'
Dostoevsky does not have them,' he (Alexander Mozhaev) said."

The Moscow Metro, where about eighty people kill themselves every year, has reopened with 'gloomy' murals drawn from Dostoevsky's novels. The representation of dark, brooding Dostoveskian characters in the metro that already has a reputation of inspiring suicidal thoughts has invited criticism from Russian psychologists.

Alexander Mozhaev, the artist who made the murals finds them inspiring, though. 

Read more at 
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Lion Burgers

ZOO Bratislava - African Lion (Panthera leo kr...Image via Wikipedia
"'In Africa they do eat lions, so I assume if it's OK for Africans to eat lions then it should be OK for us.' Mr Selogie added: 'We thought that since the World Cup was in Africa that the lion burger might be interesting for some of our more adventurous customers.'"

Cameron Selogie is the owner of Il Vinaio Restaurant near Phoenix, Arizona. He is offering a lion burger for $21 in tribute to South Africa where the Fifa World Cup games are underway.

The burger is made from a free range lion grown at a farm.

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Homemade Nuclear Reactors

Aerial view of Lawrence Livermore National Lab...Image via Wikipedia



"As long as they [private citizens] obtain that material [the components of the reactor] legally, they could do whatever they want,' says Anne Stark, senior public information officer..."
Mark Suppes of New York is one among a select group of amateur physicists who have achieved nuclear fusion in a homemade nuclear reactor. A 15 year old boy from Michigan is the youngest among the 38 who have found success.

Mark Suppes is a web developer for Gucci. Building nuclear reactors is his hobby.



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Jun 23, 2010

Shocking revelation about Digital Copiers and Data Theft

My Home Office IIIImage by TranceMist via Flickr
... As he says, ”The type of information we see on these machines with the social security numbers, birth certificates, bank records, income tax forms… would be very valuable.” - Digital copiers - a privacy and security timebomb, Kim Cameron's Identity Weblog.

Apparently, every digital copier made after 2002 has a hard drive that stores an image of every document copied, scanned, or emailed by the machine: if you think of the stuff you copy...

If you run a business, it might be a good idea not to sell your copier, right, think what is inside it, and it ends up at China or somewhere!

Please read more here.

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Journalism at its best

Gen. McChrystal disembarks a Black Hawk with D...Image by The National Guard via Flickr
This is a brilliant piece of journalism that might make a difference to the war at Afghanistan- writing at its best is at Rolling Stone, a profile of Gen McChrystal, warts and all- mostly warts, and how ugly!
"McChrystal wound up ranking 298 out of a class of 855, a serious underachievement for a man widely regarded as brilliant. His most compelling work was extracurricular: As managing editor of The Pointer, the West Point literary magazine, McChrystal wrote seven short stories that eerily foreshadow many of the issues he would confront in his career. In one tale, a fictional officer complains about the difficulty of training foreign troops to fight; in another, a 19-year-old soldier kills a boy he mistakes for a terrorist. In "Brinkman's Note," a piece of suspense fiction, the unnamed narrator appears to be trying to stop a plot to assassinate the president. It turns out, however, that the narrator himself is the assassin, and he's able to infiltrate the White House: "The President strode in smiling. From the right coat pocket of the raincoat I carried, I slowly drew forth my 32-caliber pistol. In Brinkman's failure, I had succeeded." "
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Jun 22, 2010

The pain of yearning that spinach cause...

Mullum MalarumImage via Wikipedia
I don't whether this is a legitimate use of blog: I read this interesting article about subtitles- Indian subtitles!

"I imagine a video editing suite somewhere in the suburbs of Mumbai or Chennai, where the key moment arrives and the lead translator hands off the balance of the film to some sub-subtitler and heads outside for a well-deserved masala dosa.He says that "the greatest amount of South Asian subtitle strangeness" occurs in the songs, and presents a couple of wondrous examples: "On the tip of the noses love enjoys even the beauty of crows!" and "Thoughts of various spinaches make me yearn." The latter is from from Mullum Malarum (Tamil, 1978), and I have to say, it tempts me to see the movie."- Language Hat

It is tragic that Mullum Malarum- a classic Tamil Film- is not widely known outside Tamil Nadu except for this immortal translation- "Thoughts of various spinaches make me yearn."




Related link: Cardus

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Jun 21, 2010

An Intensely Concentrated Look





What is so great about this picture?
“This is so sexy, precisely because it’s Marilyn reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. She doesn’t have to pose, we don’t even need to see her face, what comes off the photo is absolute concentration, and nothing is sexier than absolute concentration..."-Jeanette Winterson

via Ordinary Finds via Solitary Pleasures

Does the knowledge that she is reading Ulysses make any difference to you?

But about the attractiveness of a concentrated look, I know it. It has something to do with the fact that the person who is concentrating has her whole being in one place, and you are shut out of it, and you would like her to have you with the same kind of intent absorption.

A question by -O-uknow:
Does a concentrated look in the eyes, focused but distant and a slight upward curvature of the mouth almost always signals arousal?
Phillis - Zacks little sister answers:
Sure, it could be arousal, but it may not be sexual arousal. A baseball fanatic could be thinking about last year's stats of his favorite player. No kidding - that happened to me once! 4 years later, I had my first child with the man.
Read more: Answerbag

Jun 19, 2010

The Trading of information

A rubber bit gag with blindfoldImage via Wikipedia
Pushing the boundaries of Twitter:

"Earlier today, convicted killer Ronnie Lee Gardner was executed by a Utah firing squad; the first execution of its kind in the United States in 14 years. Shortly before that, Attorney General Mark Shurtleff announced it with a couple of tweets.
One of them read: “I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner’s execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims.” Earlier, he tweeted: “A solemn day. Barring a stay by Sup Ct, & with my final nod, Utah will use most extreme power & execute a killer. Mourn his victims. Justice.”"
- Mashable

The mark of a civic society is the self-restraint it shows in public behaviour. Twitter might be a great tool for communication, but announcements made on matters of life and death in such an anonymous media that fosters intimacy not through shared memories, but the trading of information, seems inappropriate to me. I think what we have here is the result of misplaced priorities where information is divorced from its context.



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Jun 14, 2010

The Vast Riches of Afghanistan

The Afghan problem got more of a problem-

"The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials."
U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan - NYTimes.com
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Jun 13, 2010

Mao's Famine

Photo credit: China Postcard via Flickr


There is an engrossing account at The Financial Times about Yang Jisheng, the author of Tombstone, the book which revealed that about 35-40 million people starved to death in a man-made famine caused by Mao's policies between the years 1958-61.

"For most of his career, Yang, 69, had faithfully done what Xinhua reporters do: write stories, cleared through the propaganda system, for the public news wire. Backstage, he performed a second, covert function required of senior Xinhua journalists – he provided secret internal reports to the party itself. Yang had not pulled his punches in these on-the-ground dispatches, vital to Beijing’s efforts to monitor officials outside the capital. A number of his reports, about the military’s abuse of its powers, economic decline and official corruption, landed on the desks of senior leaders in Beijing, to the consternation of the party bosses in the regions where he was based. It was not until 1989 that Yang, angry and disillusioned over the violent military crackdown around Tiananmen Square, set off on a new path.
Instead of spying on the regions for Beijing, Yang launched a mission against his masters. Using the privileges afforded a senior Xinhua journalist, Yang was able to penetrate state archives around the country and uncover the most complete picture of the great famine that any researcher, foreign or local, has ever managed. The book he wrote was the consummate inside job, the product of a lengthy, clandestine co-operation with fellow party members determined to expose the lies told about the famine in China for decades."
- FT.com / Reportage - The man who exposed Mao’s secret famine.
 The article ends on an upbeat note, the author has not suffered any punishment, his work ,though ignored, did not invite any adverse notice from the Chinese authorities. Yang sees this as an evolution of the decaying state- it has learned from its mistakes.


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Jun 12, 2010

The Colour Blue

Thats Lord Krishna portrayed in a Madhubani pa...Image by Disha Gadhiya via Flickr
Alex Bellos in the review of "Through the Language Glass: How Words Colour Your World" by Guy Deutscher at the Guardian writes,
"Deutscher has a lot of fun relating the discovery that colour words emerge in all languages in a predictable order. Black and white come first, then red, then yellow, then green and finally blue. (Although sometimes green is before yellow.) Red is probably first because it is the colour of blood and of the easiest dyes to make in the wild. Green and yellow are the colours of vegetation. And blue is last because – with the exception of the sky – few naturally occurring things are blue and blue dyes are very difficult to make."
 The relationship between language and coginition is a fascinating one- I remember an article at the Edge by Lera Boroditsky - it defined the influence of language on coginition in my mind. There were several articles at the New York Times too, regarding how the words and images we use to describe the world impinge upon our consciousness, manipulating the way we feel objects outside us and the environment around us.

The interesting part of this article is the claim that we found the word for blue only recently, after we had named all other colours- Homer never described the sky as blue, writes Bellos, and I remember that in our Myths too, Lord Krishna is described not as black, but blue: could it be that he was originally described as black, and later in a strange reversal, his colour was changed to blue- or could it be that blue is black, and the two were coterminous words that meant the same thing in Sanskrit?

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The Passion of a Connected World

Emergency "Twitter was down so I wrote my...Image via Wikipedia
"People used to talk about boredom as though it were a thing, not a mood—a sort of physical object. It “descended” on you. You “escaped” from it, you “fled” it. Or you “dispelled” it, as though it were a fog. This wasn’t always easy to do; sometimes the boredom was just too thick, too “heavy.”
Boredom Is Extinct - Magazine - The Atlantic

There have been some posts in this blog lately, linking to the distracting influences of social media, and this is just another one in that line. Walter Kirn has a short incisive piece at The Atlantic which takes a look at this question, and decides may be we have lost some of our creativity, but Twitter, Facebook, iPad, Blackberry and more such technologies have liberated us from boredom.





Roger Ebert has written a great article, "Tweet! Tweet! Tweet!", which makes you feel no matter what they say, Twitter definitely is a force for the good. I found it moving, obviously he is writing from the heart, and he owes up that he is addicted to Twitter, and actively looks for stuff to tweet about. He also outlines his basic rules of tweeting-

"My rules for Twittering are few: I tweet in basic English. I avoid abbreviations and ChatSpell. I go for complete sentences. I try to make my links worth a click. I am not above snark, no matter what I may have written in the past. I tweet my interests, including science and politics, as well as the movies. I try to keep links to stuff on my own site down to around 5 or 10%. I try to think twice before posting."

It is obvious that Ebert is not doing this to escape boredom or loneliness, this is a passion that has found expression in tiny bits of information.

Whether the internet is a distracting, destructive phenomenon does not seem to be as big a question as it was- but I am sure of this- people who are creative and love to communicate make best use of it. Internet seems to focus their interests into a body of work that not only stands alone by itself, but also actively helps them seek and engage the people they are addressing. It is like a conversation that has matured into a lecture. 


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Jun 11, 2010

Pinker on the Plastic Brain

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.Image by Ben Lawson via Flickr
"Experience does not revamp the basic information-processing capacities of the brain. Speed-reading programs have long claimed to do just that, but the verdict was rendered by Woody Allen after he read “War and Peace” in one sitting: “It was about Russia.” -Op-Ed Contributor - Mind Over Mass Media - NYTimes.com
In an incisive article, Steven Pinker argues that the plasticity of the brain proves nothing for or against the supposed distracting influences of social media. In fact, if anything, they make it easier for us to find information. It takes huge amount of training to think to a purpose, and the increasingly available modes of networked information is no deterrence to analytic thinking.

A good point, it seems to me, against the line of thinking that that says internet corrodes the brain.
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Jun 10, 2010

A Surplus Easy to Squander- Jonah Lehrer on Cognitive Surplus

Lolcat from :Image:Cat crying.jpg Text ideated...Image via Wikipedia
Jonah Lehrer review of Clay Shirky's book, "Cognitive Surplus- Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age". Shriky seems to develop the theme that passive watching of television has come to end, and we are poised to enter more deeply the interconnected world of web-based colloboration-

". "The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something, and someone making lolcats has bridged that gap."

Whether reading a poem, or passively watching a classic movie is an inferior act to making a lolcat, or as in my case, making a blogpost is the question Lehrer poses.

"We have arranged our modern lives to maximize free time. Now, thanks to the virtual infrastructure of the internet, we are able to collaborate and interact as never before. The question is what these collaborations will create. A surplus, after all, is easy to squander."

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Q&A: Slavoj Žižek, professor and writer | Life and style | The Guardian

Effervescent-

When were you happiest?

A few times when I looked forward to a happy moment or remembered it - never when it was happening.

What is your greatest fear?

To awaken after death - that's why I want to be burned immediately.


Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek in Liverpool.Image via Wikipedia
Q&A: Slavoj Žižek, professor and writer | Life and style | The Guardian:


Great to read, as usual, and scary: the happiness of stupid people makes him unhappy, love feels "...Like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures," and Zizek's secret is the knowledge that Communism will win!

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Jun 9, 2010

Edward Hugh, Blogger.

“I am meeting all sorts of interesting people and they are paying me to have lunch with them.”
Edward Hugh, 61, "Blog Prophet of Euro Zone Doom" - NYTimes.com
Edward Hugh is an inspiration to all bloggers, if he is not yet, should be. Self educated economist who wrote reasoned posts that predicted why Euro zone is unsustainable, is now no recluse- he is respected, and the IMF has called for his assistance to analyse the Spanish Economy.

So if you get a feeling that you are flogging a dead horse in a dead world, your time might yet come: just keep doing what you are best at, and give it all you can.

Jun 6, 2010

Keanu Reeves- Good Stories

I saw early morning today in The Daily What that Keanu Reeves is a meme, and passed it by. But the same thing came up again in Kottke.org and this time, I was hooked to the comments they had about him at Reddit.

I had a few friends working special effects jobs on the Matrix movies, he bought all of them fucking HARLEYS for Christmas during the shoot for the second one.

One of those guys, Paul, said that Keanu was the most sincere, humble and lovely dude he'd ever met. Said he eschewed contact with the cast in favour of hanging out with the crew, was the only guy the martial arts coaches respected out of the whole cast, and was the bravest man he's ever met. That scene in the first Matrix film, the assault on the office tower lobby - Keanu turned down earplugs for all the charges blowing everywhere taking "bullet holes" out of pillars, walls etc, just for authenticity. When he turns and hides behind a pillar which explodes with bullets hitting it on both sides, Paul said "the entire crew was about 15 metres away, with ear protection, and all flinching anyway when the charges blew - Keanu just took it like a complete badass".

EDIT: I remembered, Paul also told me that Keanu once explained to him why he was getting so many action roles. He had injured himself at some point and had fused vertebrae in his upper back or neck, so when he turned his head, his shoulders and chest tended to follow, because of his limited flexibility. "It makes me look dynamic, rather than disabled" was his explanation."
- svunt

Makes you feel good, reading about it.

Jun 4, 2010

Wage Disparities

8,000 M.T.A. Employees Made $100,000 Last Year - NYTimes.com:

"...there are thousands of Metropolitan Transportation Authority employees — 8,074, to be precise — who made $100,000 or more last year."

You know who got it rich?

"The usual top-level managers are included in that list, but so are dozens of lower-level employees, including conductors, police officers and engineers, many of whom pulled in six figures in overtime and retirement benefits alone.
"One of those workers, a Long Island Rail Road conductor who retired in April, made $239,148, about $4,000 more than the authority’s chief financial officer, according to payroll data released on Wednesday.
"In fact, more than a quarter of the Long Island Rail Road’s 7,000 employees earned more than $100,000 last year, including the conductor, Thomas J. Redmond, and two locomotive engineers — who were among the top 25 earners in the entire transportation authority."

Contrast this with what is happening in China, where Foxconn, a BPO that makes iPhones for Apple, was forced to raise the wages by a mammoth 30%- thanks to a spate of suicide among its employees and the  consequent bad publicity.

I liked this comment by prestonramsay-

"“When something’s too cheap somebody is paying something”
This really has nothing to do with Apple or Dell, this is a perfect snapshot of the reality of consumption. I have an iphone, ipod, imac, and love them. Do I ever take into consideration who made them?..."

Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/06/workers-at-china-plant-where-10-have-committed-suicide-to-get-30-raise/#ixzz0ptQ3L3Pk

A Nation of Bloggers

The most important news and commentary to read right now. - The Slatest - Slate Magazine:

A bit late sharing this, but Jobs' statement never sounded so right as now:

"... Jobs came out in favor of paid newspaper content, warning, 'I don't want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers.' 'We need editorial more than ever right now,' Jobs added. 'Anything that we can do to help the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal find new ways of expression so they can afford to get paid, so they can afford to keep their editorial operations intact, I'm all for it.'"