January 2010
52 posts
This is why it's worth learning about advertising
Other companies are selling computers. Apple’s selling magic. Which one would you rather have?
The one that’s isn’t evil.
JNC: Burton's Sentiment of the Sword 1 →
ejmas.com
Parts of this make it one of the best books ever written about fencing.
“Robert Louis Stevenson and I, sitting in Union Square and Washington Square a great many years ago, tried to find a name for, the submerged fame, that fame that permeates the great crowd of people you never see and never mingle with; people with whom you have no speech, but who read your books and become admirers of your work and have an affection for you. You may never find it out in the world, but there it is, and it is the faithfulness of the friendship, of the homage of those men, never criticizing, that began when they were children. They have nothing but compliments they never see the criticisms, they never hear any disparagement of you, and you will remain in the home of their hearts’ affection forever and ever. And Louis Stevenson and I decided that of all fame, that was the best, the very best.”
—Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson | Beyond The Beyond
Play
CoffeeScript →
jashkenas.github.com
Pythonic Javascript pre-processor.
“For every hardware or software product, there are enthusiasts: wild, untamed, uncontrollable people who overflow with excitement that “normal” people have no way to understand. It is that excitement that sets us apart from the crowd. It is that excitement that causes people to join free software and open source projects to give away their work to others of the same kind.”
—What I want from my Common Lisp vendor and the Common Lisp community - Naggum cll archive (via ln5)
“More than 100 published studies and two clinical trials involving esophageal cancer are based partly or wholly on research that mistakenly used cells from other types of cancer, a report claims.”
—
Report: cancer studies used wrong cells
Shit.
“Broccoli is a tragic case in the vegetable kingdom, a flower of rare beauty that has never been seen by the eyes of modern man. Ancient legend has it that the broccolo (such is the term for a single flower of broccoli) was once the most beautiful and poetic of all flowers, with a heavenly scent and four exquisite petals of such delicate and ethereal color that all other flowers seemed prosaic by comparison.
But we who live in this mechanical age will never know the exquisite beauty of the broccolo, for such is the sad fate of the Brassica oleracea plant that every flower bud is eaten before it blooms;—or we should say, rather, that the buds are harvested before they bloom, since there is good evidence to suggest that much more broccoli is harvested than is ever eaten. We may regard this as one of the surest tokens of the perversity of human nature, that we prefer to cut the buds from this beautiful plant and scrape them off our plates into the dog’s dish, rather than allow them to mature and brighten our gardens with their blooms.” —DR. BOLI’S COMPREHENSIVE HERBAL. « Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine.
But we who live in this mechanical age will never know the exquisite beauty of the broccolo, for such is the sad fate of the Brassica oleracea plant that every flower bud is eaten before it blooms;—or we should say, rather, that the buds are harvested before they bloom, since there is good evidence to suggest that much more broccoli is harvested than is ever eaten. We may regard this as one of the surest tokens of the perversity of human nature, that we prefer to cut the buds from this beautiful plant and scrape them off our plates into the dog’s dish, rather than allow them to mature and brighten our gardens with their blooms.” —DR. BOLI’S COMPREHENSIVE HERBAL. « Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine.
“I saw Segovia’s last concert at Orchestra Hall in Chicago. They’d oversold it, and I was seated ON THE STAGE with my wife. The tiny 90 year old Catalonian channeled the Bach Cello Suite, and transcended the limitations of his or any instrument. I was studying classical guitar at Chicago Musical College, but I was unprepared. This was not a guitar concert. It was pure , perfect music. I am not worthy. No one was, is or will be.”
—
YouTube - Andres Segovia Plays Bach Chaconne (Part 2)
Sometimes I don’t regret looking at the comments.
“One story often told about Rowse is that he came down one day to breakfast at All Souls, fulminating about a bad review in The Times of his latest book, and said, “You see the way the upper class resent that I have been able to rise into their midst entirely by my own merit.” John Sparrow, then the Warden of All Souls (he had been elected in 1952 over Rowse), looked up from his breakfast and said, “Rowse, whatever gives you the impression that only the rich detest you?” I would think that malice behind someone’s back is preferable to such a frontal attack, but the story reminds me of Randall Jarrell’s remark that British manners are sometimes so frightening to Americans that they would prefer no manners at all.”
—NYRblog - Isaiah Berlin’s Civilized Malice - The New York Review of Books
“In 2020 we will look back on the last days of publishing and realize that it was not a surfeit of capitalism that killed it, but rather an addiction to a mishmash of Industrial Revolution practices that killed it, including a Fordist any color so long as it is black attitude to packaging the product, a Sloanist hierarchical management approach to decision making, and a GM-esque continual rearranging of divisions like deck chairs on the Titanic based on internal management preferences rather than consumer preferences.”
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Richard Nash: Book Publishing 10 Years in the Future - mediabistro.com: GalleyCat (via ayjay)
Because the absorption of publishing concerns in media conglomerates has nothing to do with capitalism?
“Suppose the Chinese government acts as expected and tells Google that it may no longer operate in China. Google.cn might vanish as a domain name, since it’s hosted under the Chinese country-code TLD of .cn, ultimately controllable by the Chinese government. But the search engine found there could of course keep operating from a different location, like cn.google.com. Suppose then that China attempts to filter out traffic to and from that new location — and to and from google.com for good measure, as it has done from time to time, especially before the advent of google.cn and its agreement to censor. (We’ll be watching for such moves at herdict.org, a site where users can report Web blockages.) What next? My hope, and expectation, is that Google engineers who might have been a bit halfhearted about implementing censorship mandates in google.cn could be full-throttle in coming up with ways for Google to be viewed despite any network interruptions between site and user. There are lots of unexplored options here. They’re unexplored not because they’re infeasible, but because most sites would rather not provoke a government that filters. So they don’t undertake to get information out in ways that might evade blockages. Here, Google would have nothing more to lose, so could pioneer some new approaches. Circumvention of filtering (or other blockages, for that matter) tends to happen on the user side of things, seeking out proxies like the Tor network, or anonymizer.com.”
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Jonathan Zittrain (via ayjay)
Google is the only force I can think of that could lead popular adoption of Tor.
Here's the game: Grab the book nearest you right now. • Turn to page 56. • Find the fifth sentence. • Reblog with that sentence. • Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST book. DO IT!!
(via graveyarddirt | honeysticks | emosloppy)
“Also present was a nurse with the head of a great brown rat.”
-The Dark Tower, Stephen King.
“Another fact which strongly suggests that it was an artificial phallus is that the women did not become pregnant by the Devil except by special agreement.”
A Handbook on Witches, Gillian Tindall“Body is essentially extended into space, non-thinking, and governed by the laws of motion.”
Descartes’ Mind-Body Problem, 30 Second Philosophies by Barry Loewer
“Now carefully turn the face inside out and scrape off the fatty tissue.”
- The Phantom Museum (and Henry Wellcome’s Collection of Medical Curiosities), ed. Hildi Hawkins and Danielle Olsen, Profile Books LTD in Association with The Wellcome Trust, London, 2003
“Gradually the people abandoned the cities.” —First Book of the Ancient Maya.
“In any case, post-battle surveys later revealed that “more than half of the buildings in the old city center of Nablus had routes forced through them, resulting in anywhere from one to eight openings in their walls, floors, or ceilings, which created several haphazard crossroutes”—a heavily armed improvisational navigation of the city.”
—BLDGBLOG: Nakatomi Space
Ballardian » Twitter: Defending the Indefensible →
ballardian.com
Interesting defense of Twitter for bloggers.
