Shared posts

08 Nov 18:14

The Balmis Expedition

by Greg Ross

Smallpox ravaged the New World for centuries after the Spanish conquest. In 1797 Edward Jenner showed that exposure to the cowpox virus could protect one against the disease, but the problem remained how to transport cowpox across the sea. In 1802 Charles IV of Spain announced a bold plan — 22 orphaned children would be sent by ship; after the first child was inoculated, his skin would exude fluid that could be passed to the next child. By passing the live virus from arm to arm, the children formed a transmission chain that could transport the vaccine in an era before refrigeration and other modern technology was available.

It worked. Over the next 10 years Spain spread the vaccine throughout the New World and to the Philippines, Macao, and China. Oklahoma State University historian Michael M. Smith writes, “These twenty-two innocents formed the most vital element of the most ambitious medical enterprise any government had ever undertaken.” Jenner himself wrote, “I don’t imagine the annals of history furnish an example of philanthropy so noble, so extensive as this.”

08 Nov 18:13

Big Talk

by Greg Ross

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Samuel_L_Clemens,_1909.jpg

“The German long word is not a legitimate construction, but an ignoble artificiality, a sham,” wrote Mark Twain. “Nothing can be gained, no valuable amount of space saved, by jumbling the following words together on a visiting card: ‘Mrs. Smith, widow of the late Commander-in-chief of the Police Department,’ yet a German widow can persuade herself to do it, without much trouble: ‘Mrs.-late-commander-in-chief-of-the-police-department’s-widow-Smith.'” He gives this anecdote in his autobiography:

A Dresden paper, the Weidmann, which thinks that there are kangaroos (Beutelratte) in South Africa, says the Hottentots (Hottentoten) put them in cages (kotter) provided with covers (lattengitter) to protect them from the rain. The cages are therefore called lattengitterwetterkotter, and the imprisoned kangaroo lattengitterwetterkotterbeutelratte. One day an assassin (attentäter) was arrested who had killed a Hottentot woman (Hottentotenmutter), the mother of two stupid and stuttering children in Strättertrotel. This woman, in the German language is entitled Hottentotenstrottertrottelmutter, and her assassin takes the name Hottentotenstrottermutterattentäter. The murderer was confined in a kangaroo’s cage — Beutelrattenlattengitterwetterkotter — whence a few days later he escaped, but fortunately he was recaptured by a Hottentot, who presented himself at the mayor’s office with beaming face. ‘I have captured the Beutelratte,’ said he. ‘Which one?’ said the mayor; ‘we have several.’ ‘The Attentäterlattengitterwetterkotterbeutelratte.’ ‘Which attentäter are you talking about?’ ‘About the Hottentotenstrottertrottelmutterattentäter.’ ‘Then why don’t you say at once the Hottentotenstrottelmutterattentäterlattengitterwetterkotterbeutelratte?’

He calls the long word “a lazy device of the vulgar and a crime against the language.”

08 Nov 18:11

This is Phil Fish

by Jason Kottke

Using Phil Fish, the person responsible for critically acclaimed indie game Fez, this video by Ian Danskin explores what it means to be internet famous, something everyone who writes/creates/posts/tweets online has experienced to some extent.

We are used to thinking of fame as something granted to a person by people with media access. The reason people hate Nickelback is because of that record contract, that Faustian bargain -- they bought into it. They had to be discovered; someone had to connect them to video directors, record producers, stylists, advertisers.

This is not what fame looks like on the internet. There, fame is not something you ask for. Fame is not something you buy into. Fame happens to you.

Phil doesn't have an agent. He doesn't have ad executives. He doesn't tour the country on press junkets. He doesn't have a PR department. (Obviously.)

He talked on social media. He did interviews when invited to do them. He was invited into a documentary. People read these things as shameless self-promotion or a desperate need for attention, or both, but that's projection -- nobody knows Phil's reasons for doing them but Phil and the people who know him personally.

Phil never asked to be famous.

We made him famous. Maybe, in part, because we found him entertaining. Maybe, in part, because we found him irritating. Largely because many of us were once sincerely excited about his game. But he became a big deal because we kept talking about him.

On the internet, celebrities are famous only to the people who talk about them, and they're only famous because we talk about them, and then we hate them for being too famous, and make them more famous by talking about how much we hate them. Could there ever be anything more self-defeating than this?

Here's a transcript of the video. In his post about why he decided to sell Minecraft to Microsoft, Markus Persson cites This is Phil Fish as an influence:

I was at home with a bad cold a couple of weeks ago when the internet exploded with hate against me over some kind of EULA situation that I had nothing to do with. I was confused. I didn't understand. I tweeted this in frustration. Later on, I watched the This is Phil Fish video on YouTube and started to realize I didn't have the connection to my fans I thought I had. I've become a symbol. I don't want to be a symbol, responsible for something huge that I don't understand, that I don't want to work on, that keeps coming back to me. I'm not an entrepreneur. I'm not a CEO. I'm a nerdy computer programmer who likes to have opinions on Twitter.

Robin Sloan connected Persson's post with a post by Erin Kissane on how she has curtailed her use of Twitter. Here's one of her problems with Twitter:

The first is feeling like I'm sitting at a sidewalk cafe, speaking in a conversational voice, but having that voice projected so loudly that strangers many streets away are invited to comment on my most inconsequential statements -- especially if something I say gets retweeted beyond my usual circles.

Many moons ago, I was "subculturally important" in the small pond of web designers, personal publishers, and bloggers that rose from the ashes of the dot com bust, and I was nodding along vigorously with what Danskin, Persson, and Kissane had to say. Luckily for me, I realized fairly early on that me and the Jason Kottke who published online were actually two separate people...or to use Danskin's formulation, they were a person and a concept. (When you try to explain this to people, BTW, they think you're a fucking narcissistic crazy person for talking about yourself in the third person. But you're not actually talking about yourself...you're talking about a concept the audience has created. Those who think of you as a concept particularly hate this sort of behavior.)

The person-as-concept idea is a powerful one. People ascribe all sorts of crazy stuff to you without knowing anything about the context of your actual life. I even lost real-life friends because my online actions as a person were viewed through a conceptual lens; basically: "you shouldn't have acted in that way because of what it means for the community" or some crap like that. Eventually (and mostly unconsciously), I distanced myself from my conceptual counterpart and became much less of a presence online. I mean, I still post stuff here, on Twitter, on Instagram, and so on, but very little of it is actually personal and almost none of it is opinionated in any noteworthy way. Unlike Persson or Fish, I didn't quit. I just got boring. Which I guess isn't so good for business, but neither is quitting.

Anyway, I don't know if that adds anything meaning to the conversation, just wanted to add a big "yeah, that rings true" to all of the above, particularly the video. (thx, @brillhart)

Update: From the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, a short essay called "Borges and I":

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.

Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

(via @ezraball)

Tags: celebrity   Erin Kissane   Ian Danskin   Jason Kottke   Markus Persson   Phil Fish   video
08 Nov 17:58

World's fastest onion chopper

by Jason Kottke

I think this guy is the T-1000 robot from Terminator 2, but for chopping onions instead of assassinating future resistance fighters. Evidence:

1. In the brief view we get of his face at about 20 seconds in, he is not even really looking at the onion. Total robot move.

2. Um, he's like superhumanly fast at chopping that onion.

3. The T-1000 can easily morph into other people, like this fast watermelon cutter or this pancake flipper or this lemon chopper. Different people, same shapeshifting food prep robot from the future! (via @kdern)

Tags: food   video
08 Nov 17:57

#aspirational

by Jason Kottke

In the future, people won't want to meet or talk to celebrities, they'll just want to borrow some of their social capital.

(via ★interesting)

Tags: Kirsten Dunst   video
06 Nov 19:53

reallifescomedyrelief: viforcontrol: beautifuloutlier: gwydthe...



reallifescomedyrelief:

viforcontrol:

beautifuloutlier:

gwydtheunusual:

too—weird-to-live:

zafojones:

Circus Tree: Six individual sycamore trees were shaped, bent, and braided to form this.

how the hell do you bend and braid a tree

Actually pretty easy. Trees don’t reject tissue from other trees in the same family. You bend the tree to another tree when it is a sapling, scrape off the bark on both trees where they touch, add some damp sphagnum moss around them to keep everything slightly moist and bind them together. 
Then wait a few years- The trees will have grown together. 

You can use a similar technique to graft a lemon branch or a lime branch or even both- onto an orange tree and have one tree that has all three fruits.

Frankentrees.

As a biologist I can clearly state that plants are fucking weird and you should probably be slightly afraid of them.

On that note! At the university (UBC) located in town, the Agriculture students were told by their teacher that a tree flipped upside down would die. So they took an excavator and flipped the tree upside down. And it’s still growing. But the branches are now the roots, and the roots are now these super gnarly looking branches. Be afraid.

But Vi, how can you mention that and NOT post a picture? D:

image

[source]

I admire that level of spite.  “Teacher told us a tree would die if flipped upside down?  Chet go steal an excavator, we are going to show that motherfucker what’s what.”

06 Nov 19:49

Prosecutors accidentally demand a statement from a dog, get the response they deserve

by Joey White

Last year, the West Midlands Police Department grew frustrated with repeated requests from the Crown Prosecution Service for a witness statement from Officer PC Peach. Why? Because Peach is a K9 officer.

Since a dog is obviously incapable of offering a statement, the exasperated police finally provided this reply…

Dog Statement

The CPS wasn’t pleased to be the butt of the joke, but the officer guilty of the forgery got away without a reprimand.

(via Reddit)

11 Sep 16:55

Cause for Alarm

by Greg Ross
Mohan K. V

This page has been among the most insightful ones I have read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergence_of_random_variables

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sherlock_Holmes_and_Professor_Moriarty_at_the_Reichenbach_Falls.jpg

Sherlock Holmes is walking through the valley of Reichenbach Fall. On a clifftop overhead, Moriarty has perched a boulder. When he pushes it, it will have a 90 percent chance of killing Holmes. Just as he is about to send it over the edge, Watson arrives at the clifftop. Watson can’t see Holmes, so he’s not able to push the boulder safely clear, but he reasons that it’s better to push the boulder in a random direction than to let Moriarty aim it carefully. So he pushes the boulder off the cliff in such a way that Holmes’ chance of dying is reduced to 10 percent.

Unfortunately the boulder crushes Holmes anyway. Watson’s push decreased the chance of Holmes’ death, but it also caused it.

What are we to make of this? Generally speaking, it seems true to say that Pre-emptive pushing prevents death by crushing. That is, Watson’s push was of the sort that made it less likely that Holmes would die — if the scenario were re-enacted many times, with the boulder pushed sometimes by Watson, sometimes by Moriarty, Watson-type pushes would result in fewer deaths. But it also seems true to say that Watson’s pushing the rock caused Holmes to die. But cause and prevent are antonyms. How can both of these statements be true?

(Christopher Read Hitchcock, “The Mishap at Reichenbach Fall: Singular vs. General Causation,” Philosophical Studies, June 1995.)

11 Sep 16:52

Appreciation

by Greg Ross

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William-Adolphe_Bouguereau_(1825-1905)_-_The_Difficult_Lesson_(1884).jpg

“Why I began to write for children,” by Isaac Bashevis Singer:

  1. Children read books, not reviews. They don’t give a hoot about the critics.
  2. Children don’t read to find their identity.
  3. They don’t read to free themselves of guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion, or to get rid of alienation.
  4. They have no use for psychology.
  5. They detest sociology.
  6. They don’t try to understand Kafka or Finnegans Wake.
  7. They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.
  8. They love interesting stories, not commentary, guides, or footnotes.
  9. When a book is boring, they yawn openly, without any shame or fear of authority.
  10. They don’t expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity. Young as they are, they know that it is not in his power. Only the adults have such childish illusions.

(From his 1978 Nobel banquet speech.)

11 Sep 16:50

Oh

by Greg Ross

During Arthur Conan Doyle’s first tour of the United States, in 1894, he encountered a cabbie in Boston who declined his fare and asked instead for a ticket to that evening’s lecture. Surprised, Doyle asked how he had recognized him. The cabbie replied:

“If you will excuse other personal remarks, your coat lapels are badly twisted downward, where they have been grasped by the pertinacious New York reporters. Your hair has the Quakerish cut of a Philadelphia barber, and your hat, battered at the brim in front, shows where you have tightly grasped it, in the struggle to stand your ground at a Chicago literary luncheon. Your right overshoe has a large block of Buffalo mud just under the instep, the odor of a Utica cigar hangs about your clothing, and the overcoat itself shows the slovenly brushing of the porters of the through sleepers from Albany. The crumbs of doughnut on the top of your bag could only have come there in Springfield … and stenciled upon the very end of your walking stick, in fairly plain lettering, is the name Conan Doyle.”

11 Apr 15:06

Franklin’s Mint

by Greg Ross

Lesser-known maxims from Poor Richard’s Almanack:

  • Bucephalus, the horse of Alexander, hath as lasting fame as his master.
  • Who has deceiv’d thee so oft as thy self?
  • We are not so sensible of the greatest Health as of the least Sickness.
  • A temper to bear much, will have much to bear.
  • Content and riches seldom meet together; riches take thou, contentment I had rather.
  • Want of care does us more damage than want of knowledge.
  • Vanity backbites more than malice.
  • In success be moderate.
  • A new truth is a truth, and an old error is an error, tho’ Clodpate won’t allow either.
  • What maintains one Vice would bring up two children.
  • The Golden Age never was the present Age.
  • Quarrels never could last long, if on one side lay the wrong.
  • If your riches are yours, why don’t you take them with you t’other World?

“Sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden, but it is forbidden because it is hurtful. Nor is a duty beneficial because it is commanded, but it is commanded because it is beneficial.”

11 Apr 15:02

“A Magic-Ridden People”

by Greg Ross

Excerpts from “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema,” a paper published by Horace Miner in the June 1956 edition of American Anthropologist:

  • “They are a North American group living in the territory between the Canadian Cree, the Yaqui and Tarahumare of Mexico, and the Carib and Arawak of the Antilles. Little is known of their origin, although tradition states that they came from the east.”
  • “The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease. Incarcerated in such a body, man’s only hope is to avert these characteristics through the use of ritual and ceremony. Every household has one or more shrines devoted to this purpose.”
  • “In addition to the private mouth-rite, the people seek out a holy-mouth-man once or twice a year. These practitioners have an impressive set of paraphernalia, consisting of a variety of augers, awls, probes, and prods. The use of these items in the exorcism of the evils of the mouth involves almost unbelievable ritual torture of the client.”
  • “There are ritual fasts to make fat people thin and ceremonial feasts to make thin people fat. Still other rites are used to make women’s breasts larger if they are small, and smaller if they are large. A few women afflicted with almost inhuman hyper-mammary development are so idolized that they make a handsome living by simply going from village to village and permitting the natives to stare at them for a fee.”

It’s a satire. What’s Nacirema spelled backward?

11 Apr 15:01

Moments of Inspiration

by Greg Ross

James Watt perfects the steam engine, 1765:

I had gone to take a walk on a fine Sunday afternoon. I had entered the Green and had passed the old washing house. I was thinking up on the engine at the time and had got as far as the herd’s house, when the idea came into my mind that as steam was an elastic body it would rush into a vacuum, and that if a communication were made between the cylinder and an exhausted vessel it would rush into it and might there be condensed without cooling the cylinder. I had not walked farther than the golf house when the whole thing was arranged clearly in my mind.

Charles Darwin realizes why species diverge, 1840s:

I can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me; and this was long after I had come to Down. The solution, as I believe, is that the modified offspring of all dominant and increasing forms tend to become adapted to many and highly diversified places in the economy of nature.

Walter Cannon recognizes the fight-or-flight response, 1911:

As a matter of routine I have long trusted unconscious processes to serve me. … [One] example I may cite was the interpretation of the significance of bodily changes which occur in great emotional excitement, such as fear and rage. These changes — the more rapid pulse, the deeper breathing, the increase in sugar in the blood, the secretion from the adrenal glands — were very diverse and seemed unrelated. Then, one wakeful night, after a considerable collection of these changes had been disclosed, the idea flashed through my mind that they could be nicely integrated if conceived as bodily preparations for supreme effort in flight or in fighting.

William Rowan Hamilton conceives the fundamental formula for quaternions, 1843:

But on the 16th day of the same month — which happened to be a Monday, and a Council day of the Royal Irish Academy — I was walking in to attend and preside, and your mother was walking with me, along the Royal Canal, to which she had perhaps driven; and although she talked with me now and then, yet an under-current of thought was going on in my mind, which gave at last a result, whereof it is not too much to say that I felt at once the importance. An electric circuit seemed to close; and a spark flashed forth, the herald (as I foresaw, immediately) of many long years to come of definitely directed thought and work, by myself if spared, and at all events on the part of others, if I should even be allowed to live long enough distinctly to communicate the discovery.

Hamilton adds: “Nor could I resist the impulse — unphilosophical as it may have been — to cut with a knife on a stone of Brougham Bridge, as we passed it, the fundamental formula with the symbols, i, j, k; namely,

i2 = j2 = k2 = ijk = -1

which contains the Solution of the Problem, but of course, as an inscription, has long since mouldered away.” The bridge now bears a permanent plaque marking Hamilton’s achievement (below), and mathematicians undertake an annual walk from Dunsink Observatory to commemorate it.

11 Apr 14:44

In a Word

by Greg Ross

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_York_Public_Library_060622.JPG

jubate
adj. having a mane

Oliver Herford said that at the New York Public Library one “learned the meaning of the expression ‘reading between the lions.’”

11 Apr 14:42

Penny Wisdom

by Greg Ross

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Franklin-vi.jpg

More proverbs from Poor Richard’s Alamanack:

  • Those who have nothing to trouble them, will be troubled at nothing.
  • Great modesty often hides great merit.
  • The Muses love the Morning.
  • Do me the favour to deny me at once.
  • There’s none deceived but he that trusts.
  • If evils come not, then our fears are vain; and if they do, fear but augments the pain.
  • Full of courtesie, full of craft.
  • The tongue is ever turning the aching tooth.
  • Nothing dries sooner than a Tear.
  • In the Affairs of this World Men are saved, not by Faith, but by the Want of it.
  • An old young man will be a young old man.
  • The prodigal generally does more injustice than the covetous.
  • Singularity in the right, hath ruined many: happy those who are convinced of the general Opinion.
  • Why does the blind man’s wife paint herself?

“The wit of conversation consists more in finding it in others, than shewing a great deal yourself. He who goes out of your company pleased with his own facetiousness and ingenuity, will the sooner come into it again. Most men had rather please than admire you and seek less to be instructed and diverted, than approved and applauded; and it is certainly the most delicate sort of pleasure, to please another. But that sort of wit, which employs itself insolently in criticizing and censuring the words and sentiments of others in conversation, is absolute folly; for it answers none of the needs of conversation. He who uses it neither improves others, is improved himself, or pleases any one.”

11 Apr 14:38

Un-Doing

by Greg Ross

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pedro_Am%C3%A9rico_-_detalhe_de_A_vis%C3%A3o_de_Hamlet.jpg

If human behavior is essentially rational, what are we to make of procrastination? I have to write a paper; it’s a requirement of the course, and I know I’ll be better off for writing it, but instead I alphabetize my spice rack. “The procrastinator is someone who knows what (s)he wants to do, in some sense can do it, is trying to do it — yet doesn’t do it,” write psychologists Maury Silver and John Sabini. Bewildered by his own delay, Hamlet says

I do not know
Why yet I live to say “This thing’s to do;”
Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
To do’t. Examples gross as earth exhort me.

“Hamlet knew what he had to do, wanted to do it, had the means to do it, and was prepared to do it — constantly — but was ‘unable’,” they write. Procrastination is “a psychopathology of everyday life, as curious to those who suffer it as to those who would explain it.”

(Maury Silver and John Sabini, “Procrastinating,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 11:2, July 1981.)

11 Apr 14:19

Unquote

by Greg Ross

“[John] von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of von Neumann’s advice. It’s made me a very happy man ever since. But it was von Neumann who put the seed in that grew into my active irresponsibility!” — Richard Feynman

He expands on this in Christopher Sykes’ No Ordinary Genius (1994):

“I got the idea of ‘active irresponsibility’ in Los Alamos. We often went on walks, and one day I was with the great mathematician von Neumann and a few other people. I think Bethe and von Neumann were discussing some social problem that Bethe was very worried about. Von Neumann said, ‘I don’t feel any responsibility for all these social problems. Why should I? I’m born into the world, I didn’t make it.’ Something like that. Well, I’ve read von Neumann’s autobiography and it seems to me that he felt perpetually responsible, but at that moment this was a new idea to me, and I caught onto it. Around you all the time there are people telling you what your responsibilities are, and I thought it was kind of brave to be actively irresponsible. ‘Active’ because, like democracy, it takes eternal vigilance to maintain it — in a university you have to perpetually watch out, and be careful that you don’t do anything to help anybody!”

Hans Bethe:

“Feynman somehow was proud of being irresponsible. He concentrated on his science, and on enjoying life. There are some of us — including myself — who felt after the end of the Second World War that we had a great responsibility to explain atomic weapons, and to try and make the government do sensible things about atomic weapons. … Feynman didn’t want to have anything to do with it, and I think quite rightly. I think it would be quite wrong if all scientists worked on discharging their responsibility. You need some number of them, but it should only be a small fraction of the total number of scientists. Among the leading scientists, there should be some who do not feel responsible, and who only do what science is supposed to accomplish.”

Marvin Minsky:

“I must say I have a little of this sense of social irresponsibility, and Feynman was a great inspiration to me — I have done a good deal of it since. There are several reasons for a scientist to be irresponsible, and one of them I take very seriously: people say, ‘Are you sure you should be working on this? Can’t it be used for bad?’ Well, I have a strong feeling that good and bad are things to be thought about by people who understand better than I do the interactions among people, and the causes of suffering. The worst thing I can imagine is for somebody to ask me to decide whether a certain innovation is good or bad.”

11 Apr 14:02

What makes most restaurant reviews worthless

by Tyler Cowen
Mohan K. V

More and more of the wisdom of the crowd, including most forms of democracy, eventually turn out to be plain idiocy parading as something else

Not just the general reason why they are bad, but rather a very specific reason.  Caitlin Dewey reports about:

…a new paper appropriately titled “Demographics, Weather and Online Reviews.” The study analyzed 1.1 million online reviews of 840,000 restaurants, looking for exogenous — or external — factors in the data. In other words, they wanted to figure out what makes us like or dislike a restaurant, beside the restaurant itself.

The results can be surprising. The diners’ education levels? No effect on actual ratings. Population of the area? Again, not so much.

But reviewers consistently gave worse ratings when it was raining or snowing outside than when it was clear. And reviewers usually liked restaurants better on warm and cool days, rather than very hot or very cold ones.

In researcher Saeideh Bakhshi’s words: “The best reviews are written on sunny days between 70 and 100 degrees … a nice day can lead to a nice review. A rainy day can mean a miserable one.”

Not surprisingly, restaurants in California and Hawaii are popular.

11 Apr 14:00

Are computers coming up with answers we cannot understand?

by Tyler Cowen
Mohan K. V

I think it was with the four color problem in 1976 that we entered this regime

In mathematics at least the answer appears to be yes:

A computer has solved the longstanding Erdős discrepancy problem! Trouble is, we have no idea what it’s talking about — because the solution, which is as long as all of Wikipedia’s pages combined, is far too voluminous for us puny humans to confirm.

A few years ago, the mathematician Steven Strogatz predicted that it wouldn’t be too much longer before computer-assisted solutions to math problems will be beyond human comprehension. Well, we’re pretty much there. In this case, it’s an answer produced by a computer that was hammering away at the Erdős discrepancy problem.

Fortunately,

…it may not be necessary for humans to check it. As Gil Kalai of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, has noted, if another computer program using a different method comes up with the same result, then the proof is probably right.

There is more here, via Gabriel Puliatti on Twitter.

11 Apr 13:55

sweaterkittensahoy: djlegz: I don’t like sports, but the...











sweaterkittensahoy:

djlegz:

I don’t like sports, but the Bearcats are my new favorite team.

I love how it gets more elaborate each time. These boys are thinking this through.

11 Apr 13:41

Celebrities who look like mattresses

by Jason Kottke

Oh, this is the dumbest thing but it made me laugh today: Celebrities that Look Like Mattresses.

Mattress celeb

Mattress celeb

How on Earth did they find these pairings? Has Google perfected their Mattress Recognition technology? (via @Rebeccamead_NYC)

Tags: celebrity
11 Apr 13:41

The Prayer of Saint Francis

by Jason Kottke

I am not a religious person, but Reverend Smith spoke a few lines of the Prayer of Saint Francis on an episode of Deadwood I watched recently and I can't stop thinking about it. The prayer in full:

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is error, truth;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

The Reverend put it slightly differently:

Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted, to understand, than to be understood, to love, than to be loved...

Believer in eternal life or not, that's a way of living life I can get behind.

Tags: religion
11 Apr 13:30

Radio show story structures

by Jason Kottke

Bradley Campbell drew the story structures of various public radio shows down on cocktail napkins. Here's the structure of This American Life:

This American Life ___! ___! ___!

"Napkin #1'' is Bradley's drawing for This American Life, a structure Ira Glass has talked about ad infinitum: This happened. Then this happened. Then this happened. (Those are the dashes.) And then a moment of reflection, thoughts on what the events mean (the exclamation point).

The description of Radiolab is the most fun to read. That show doesn't quite have the non-linearity of Pulp Fiction, but it's a good example of hyperlink radio (a la hyperlink cinema). (via explore)

Tags: audio   Bradley Campbell   Radiolab   This American Life
24 Jan 00:48

Life isn’t measured in years.

by Jessica Hagy

An early Happy New Year, hopefully.

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24 Jan 00:46

How they were raised.

by Jessica Hagy

card4038

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07 Jan 05:15

2014

Some future reader, who may see the term, without knowing the history of it, may imagine that it had reference to some antiquated bridge of the immortal Poet, thrown across the silver Avon, to facilitate his escape after some marauding excursion in a neighbouring park; and in some Gentleman's Magazine of the next century, it is not impossible, but that future antiquaries may occupy page after page in discussing so interesting a matter. We think it right, therefore, to put it on record in the Oriental Herald that the 'Shakesperian Rope Bridges' are of much less classic origin; that Mr Colin Shakespear, who, besides his dignity as Postmaster, now signs himself 'Superintendent General of Shakesperian Rope Bridges', is a person of much less genius than the Bard of Avon. --The Oriental Herald, 1825
07 Jan 05:05

More on the flailing Indian state

by Vikram

The capacity of the Indian state to carry out its functions has been discussed earlier on this blog. Lant Pritchett in his paper “Is India a flailing state ?” points out ,

My impression from three years of living in India was that it was striking of how much of the intellectual discussion around policy and priorities looked entirely conventional, with the usual left-right splits about what the government “should” do, argued out, particularly among in the English language media I was exposed to, as if the government of India could do roughly whatever it was proposed they should do.

Clearly India suffers from severely deficient parameters on health, law enforcement and education. The state’s failures to provide basic healthcare are reflected in the low life expectancy, the daily reports of rapes and crimes point to the ineffective rule of law, and survey after survey reminds us of the appalling learning levels among Indian school children. What is striking is the fact that at the very top of India’s administrative and political pyramid, there has been a great consensus on improving health and education. Project after project has been brainstormed, thought out and funded handsomely to improve these basic indicators, with very little to show for. Why is this so ?

Beyond Corruption

The classic middle class response to this question, goes something like this. Money is allocated by the government, but ‘corrupt’ officials siphon off almost everything and it makes no impact. This conveniently made claim (buttressed by daily reports of egregious corruption in an unimaginably vast country) lays the blame at the moral failure of the political and administrative class. However, it cannot stand up to deeper scrutiny. Many other developing countries have as much or even much more corruption than India, but they do far better than India on these basic indicators. For example, Iraq, a country that has been the unfortunate victim of a dictator, then a long period of turmoil, and now a weak government and a continuing civil war, has a higher life expectancy than India. We clearly have to look for answers beyond corruption.

A Question of Capacity

The key point Lant Pritchett makes, and one we should pay careful attention to is that in India’s current situation, understanding what the government can do, is atleast as important as thinking about what the government should do. In his paper, Pritchett studies the behavior of government agents at the base level of the state, and concludes that their indiscipline and indifference to their duties is to blame. But the issue might be even more fundamental. It appears that the Indian state simply does not have enough personnel to perform the tasks of a basic modern nation state. The shortfall in personnel is not a matter of operating at half or even quarter of the required workforce in India, in certain areas the Indian state doesnt even have a tenth of the workers it needs to have to perform fundamental functions. Consider these facts:

  1.  “India has 1,622.8 government servants for every 100,000 residents. In stark contrast, the U.S. has 7,681. The Central government, with 3.1 million employees, thus has 257 serving every 100,000 population, against the U.S. federal government’s 840.” – Praveen Swami in The Hindu.
  2. India had 9546 judges for a population of around a billion in the 90’s, at the same time, the US (which has a similar legal system) but a quarter of India’s population, had 28049 judges, more than three times as many. In other words, India has less than one-tenth the number of judges required to efficiently run the justice system. – John Armour & Priya Lele, – Law, Finance and Politics: The Case of India
  3. “On the basis of police per capita, India is the second lowest among 50 countries ranked using data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime from 2010. Police forces around the world are commonly measured as the number of police per 100,000 people, and India has 129. Only Uganda fares worse.” – The New York Times The world average is close to 350, and it is possible that India’s figure include the CRPF, which does not do any direct policing. Anecdotally, any Indian in the US will tell you that they see cop cars patrolling the street far more frequently than in India.

Set aside even the efficiency and morality of each public servant, the Indian state simply has nowhere near the number of personnel needed to perform its functions.

Show Me The Money

How did we end up in this scenario, and what needs to be done to rectify this ? Lets perform a simple calculation. Suppose we want to increase the number of judges in India, so that we have the same number of judges per capita as the US. How much more would the expenditure be ? Assume that each judge gets paid Rs. 50,000 as salary every month, thats Rs. 600000 a year, and that there are 10,000 judges, all getting the same salary. This is a total current expenditure of Rs. 600 cr a year. If we were to increase the number of judges by a factor of 10, the expenditure would be Rs. 6000 cr a year, i.e. we would have to arrange for Rs. 5400 cr more per year.

It is difficult for me to see how this money can be arranged without economic growth. In fact, I would speculate that one of the main reasons the Indian state is so understaffed is that the historically low rates of economic growth have constrained recruitment. Unfortunately, fast economic growth comes with its own challenges in a country with a weak rule of law and historical inequalities like India. The very policies that encourage faster economic expansion, translate into exploitation and abuse at the ground level due to the weak rule of law. A catch-22 seems to arise here, we need economic growth to be able to enforce the rule of law, but in the short term at least, that very same economic growth can make a mockery of the rule of law.


01 Jan 23:52

*Her*

by Tyler Cowen

As I tend to find Jonze’s work contrived I didn’t expect much, but I was bowled over by what is a must-see movie for anyone interested in tech or the social sciences or for that matter cinema.  Two of its starting premises are a) we as humans now face shadow prices which lead us to deemphasize the physical world of things and live in a world of information, and b) if we are going to have AI, which consumes real resources, which Darwinian principles will govern what kinds of personal assistants survive or do not?  Will they enslave us, will they be our dogs, our friends, our trading partners, or something else altogether?  This movie is the single best place to start on that question.

The rest is, as they say, solve for the equilibrium.  I found the dialogue, performances, and cinematography very strong.  The skyline blends Los Angeles and Shanghai.  The movie toys with the viewer in a clever manner as to whether it is about the future, the present, or both.  Several of the scenes (reluctance to spoil prevents further specificity) were some of the best and most creative and most conceptual movie-making I have seen, ever.

The “sources” for this movie, whether Spike Jonze is aware of them all or not, include Cyrano de Bergerac, various Mermaid legends, Blade Runner, Spielberg’s AI, 2001, Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner, Philip Pullman, Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, Pinocchio, Girard and indeed Shakespeare on the triangulation and intermediation of desire, Electric Dreams, Battlestar Galactica, Annie Hall, and even the Mormon doctrine of the Holy Ghost, as well as Jonze’s previous movies.  This is perhaps the most accurate review (some spoilers) I have seen.  This too is an insightful review, but the spoilers there are massive.  Best is not to read either but just to go see it.

Definitely recommended, for me this was one of the cultural events of the year.

28 Dec 06:04

Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe with his mentally disabled son...

Mohan K. V

via Bhatta. Also Arun Shourie's "Does he know a mother's heart?"





Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe with his mentally disabled son Hikari, who is now an award winning composer.

Oe’s classic A Personal Matter describes the pain of accepting a brain-damaged child into one’s life in conservative post-war Japan.

But the critic Takashi Tachibana has said that “without Hikari there would be no Oe literature.” Hikari was diagnosed at birth with a brain hernia. Oe knew that his child would be ostracized—it was considered shameful to even take a handicapped child out in public—but he and his wife embraced their new life.

The name Hikari means “light.” As a child, Hikari rarely spoke and seemed not to understand when his family tried to communicate with him. The Oes often played recordings of birdcalls and Mozart and Chopin beside his crib to calm him and help him sleep. Then, when he was six, Hikari spoke a complete sentence. While on a walk with Oe during a family vacation, the boy heard a bird’s cry and said, correctly, “It’s a water rail.” Soon he was responding to classical music, and when he was old enough, the Oes enrolled him in piano lessons. Today, Hikari is Japan’s most famous savant composer. He can recognize and recall any piece of music he has ever heard and transcribe it from memory. He can also identify any work of Mozart’s after hearing only a few measures and match it to the correct Köchel number. His first CD, Music of Hikari Oe, broke sales records in the classical category. He spends much of his time with Oe in the living room. The father writes and reads; the son listens and composes.

More on Oe here

21 Dec 00:07

Meet the most determined mouse in the world

by Jason Kottke
Mohan K. V

via Bhatta

A mouse finds a cracker about his own size and thinks, "this is great, I'll be able to eat for a week!" But he can't quite get the cracker up and over the short ledge that leads back to his hole. But he doesn't give up that easily:

(via ★interesting)

Tags: video