Meet your Nerd Boyfriend
This is just awesome. Can’t say much more about it. Thanks to the Condron for highlighting…. Check out Nerdboyfriend here
Apparently Europe is disappearing…
Sometimes I enjoy stumbling across something truly evil on the internet, something with enough jingoism to shake me from my liberal slumber. Witness the charming Charles Murray, giving us a quick demographic study of Paris:
“I can’t vouch for the representativeness of the sample, but at about eight o’clock last night in the St. Denis area of Paris, it worked out to about 50-50, with the non-native French half consisting, in order of proportion, of African blacks, Middle-Eastern types, and East Asians. And on December 22, I don’t think a lot of them were tourists.”
See the whole sorry mess here.
Photo by Desmond Kavanagh
Things that make other things, and so on….
The more I dwell on this, the more potent it seems. My friend Daniel at Elegant Embellishments, explained this concept to me over a Dunkel Bier in Berlin last year, and I’m not sure that i fully grasped it then. But as I watched the presentation above, his words seemed oddly prescient. This may be the preserve of CAD wizards for the time being, but give the wide scale adoption of the precursors to this technologies, it seems less a function of if, and more of when.
Via Faris
Waltzing Black Holes….
I know it’s a little mawkish, but I found the idea of these enormous super-dense galaxy crushing entities, waltzing slowly together as if at a Sunday dance in an old people’s home…. strangely compelling. Find the whole story here.
Via Wired
Bikes + Lasers = Good.
I’m not sure if it’s utility or just the fact it has lasers, but i’m pretty certain the boys at LightLane are on to something. It’s probably just the lasers, and the potential for customising it to transmit pithy messages to bus drivers.
Where were all the economists?
I just finished reading this absolutely excellent essay by James K. Galbraith at the University of Texas. It synopsises nicely some of the schools of thought that had some success in foreseeing the recent economic difficulties, and sets them somewhat critically against the presiding schools of economic thought. Sounds like someone didn’t get picked to be in the football team…….
The Mathematics of War
This is relatively interesting. It seems that the analysis completely ignores the skew of the reporting entities i.e. relative newsworthiness of attacks, and source disposition to report. But nonetheless, having some sense of the relative impact of time series events in a conflict does seem to offer some insight.
Some pretty music…. The XX
There is a beguiling simplicity about the eponymous debut from southwest London foursome The XX. You can almost hear them fumbling around their instruments, but the summed output of the whole thing draws me towards late PJ Harvey or The The. Check it out on Spotify here.
Mind Tonic, an interesting read.
I enjoyed the 2nd issue of Mind Tonic over my coffee this morning in rural Wales, particularly the piece on Radiohead. If you’d like to share my resolve in being tiresomely tied to a laptop at inappropriate moments, please download by clicking the picture above.
The context of authenticity
Interesting article at CrookedTimber regarding authenticity and veracity as the base requirements for meaningful artistic or literary dialogue. Instinctively I feel quite opposed to this viewpoint, thought not in the empircal sense, I am sure the author is quite right in saying that the entirety of an artist’s body of work defines their legacy. But more in the sense that I feel that artistic dialogue can exist quite separately from biographical or contextual study. This feeling, however notional, is for me rooted in the magnetic pull one experiences once in a while, as one stares across a gallery to be caught by some blur of colour or movement, or as a few hours disappear as one dissolves into the pages of a book. Though contextual sensibility can no doubt enrich these experiences, for myself that base emotional, indescribable interaction is what animates my involvement, and sometimes the detail just gets in the way.
Thoughts?