This is my new desktop wallpaper and will likely be my desktop wallpaper for all time. Why have I never seen this before? And if you have a high quality jpg of this, can you please send it to me?
[ via dirtynerdluv ]
Most people would take the screenshot above to be representative of a schism within me. To that, I say: nay! Music I like is good music, good music is music I like, regardless of era, genre, production method or commercial success. Praise be to Anil for happily walking the road less traveled and teaching me to accept my inner self.
Anyway. I get to see The Arcade Fire again this Thursday, at Summerstage. As cool as it would be to see Davids Byrne or Bowie on stage with them for a song or two, how much more awesome would it be if Donna Summer went up and sang on Neighborhood #3 (Power Out) or an uptempo Crown of Love? How many hipsters there would have the will—or the gall—to refuse to unironically acknowledge the fabulousness of disco incarnate?
Choire asked, way back in January, Dear Nerds: When Are We Getting Tags Or Categories For Email?
With blogs and flickr and del.icio.us, we use categories or tags to arrange, retrieve, and store chunks of data (blog posts, say, or photos, or links). But when am I going to be able to do this with email, in a way that is recognized by the recipient and the sender? Say I have a friend, and we email about various things in the course of the day: edits on a piece, or the thing we’re going to next weekend, or some bit of gossip, or a troubled friend. And, like everyone else, we’re bad with subject lines. Why can’t our email application have some tags in a checkbox that I can mark?
I don’t know about the checkbox thing, I like freeform tagging, but otherwise it’s a great idea and one that I’d really love to see, but in the meantime I’ll settle for being able to organize my email by tags (like I have with all my photos on Flickr) instead of just sorting stuff into ten million folders (what I’ve previously done) or using labels (the Gmail way).
MailTags is a plugin for Mail.app that sorta kinda but not really does that, but I use Thunderbird and don’t want to switch. I beseech thee, Lazyweb! Someone please write a proper tagging plugin for my mail client of choice!
This week’s bathroom reading is Michael Paterniti’s Driving Mr Albert: A Trip Across America With Einstein’s Brain. I’m halfway through with the book, which is surprisingly enough a true story and not fiction, as I’d assumed when I first picked it up; Paterniti wrote a piece about his trip with Dr Thomas Harvey that was published in Harper’s, won the 1998 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and turned into this book. I haven’t decided whether I really like or just like Driving Mr Albert yet, but I am in all kinds of love with this bit from the chapter titled How to Make Love to the Same Person for the Rest of Your Life:
Even now there are doctors who claim in our lifetimes we will see the first brain transplant or that cloning will become an everyday occurence. In essence, they predict that science, not religion, will guarantee us an afterlife. And yet I can’t help but wonder what Einstein would make of America if he sat in the backseat now—or, perhaps, what he will make of it when he sits in the backseat again. And I wonder if this kind of afterlife would be so great after all. Einstein’s brain in the body of Fabio? Or Einstein regenerated, living a life on top of the life he’s already led, doomed by the accomplishments of his former self. A life already confined, categorized, and collated before it’s even begun again. What would it feel like to be born with an FBI file already open on you? Or to know you had once revolutionized the world with your work, but then never found true love? Might you try to trade one for the other? Or would you just sit around smoking pot all day, rebelling againt yourself?
Reading that brought back memories of a novel I haven’t thought about since I finished reading it as a pre-teen, C.J. Cherryh’s Hugo Award-winning Cyteen, in which the protagonist is a clone of a brilliant deceased leader of state, being raised in an environment designed to give her the personality and character of her manipulative and warped predecessor.
I didn’t find Cyteen as compelling a read then as I think I might if I picked it up again now, possibly because when I was younger I was more focused on just being myself, whatever I was, whereas now I’m all about figuring out why I am the way I am (and what’s broken, how do I fix it, etc). Most of us fit and measure ourselves against our parents and siblings, our friends and contemporaries, people we admire; how much more difficult would it be to deal with other lives we’ve lived?
Anyway, 2005 marks a full century since Einstein’s annus mirabilis, the year he published the four papers that catapulted him from clerk at the Bern Patent Office to international superstar. Three ways to celebrate:
- Read Alan Lightman’s excellent novel Einstein’s Dreams, in which we get a glimpse at 30 dreams about time Einstein might have had in 1905 while working on the theory of relativity.
- Watch I.Q., one of my favorite romantic comedies, in which Walter Matthau’s Einstein matchmakes his brainy niece Meg Ryan with Tim Robbins’s sweet mechanic. My favorite exchange:
Einstein: “The problem is she would never go out with a guy like you.”
Ed: “Well that’s easy. Lend me your brain for a while.”
Einstein: “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
Ed: “Now what are the odds of that happening?” - Buy this Albert Einstein Action Figure:
More Einstein: fantastic Wikipedia Entry (did you know the photo of him with his tongue out was taken on his birthday in 1951?), Albert Einstein Online (a great collection of links), the American Institute of Physics’ site on Einstein’s Image & Impact, and Nova’s Einstein’s Big Idea special which premieres on October 11.
More Michael Paterniti/Driving Mr Albert: Excerpt from Driving Mr Albert, Paterniti reading from Driving Mr Albert as RealMedia & mp3 from Salon and RealAudio from BoldType, Interview from Interview in 2000.
Happy In the Trunk of Your Car Day! I always forget how much I love Girls Are Pretty because Bob Powers’ writing is just too good to be true, and yet it has been this good for years now.
I love me some good science fiction so I’ve been actively working on reading the classics of the genre over the past decade, and it’s always stuck in my craw that I haven’t read anything by the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem. I finally got around to reading his short story collection The Cyberiad last week and thought it was magnificent, especially Trurl’s Electronic Bard, in which the constructor Trurl creates a machine that writes poetry. His friend and rival, the constructor Klaupacius, envious of what Trurl has done, tries to confound it by requesting it write “a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit.”
I loved the resulting poem, but my undergraduate degree is in creative writing—my knowledge of mathematics is almost entirely forgotten from high school and just enough for me to broadly get the jokes within. I decided that wasn’t good enough, set myself a-googling (I learned more about math this past hour googling than I did in college) and came up with the annotated version of the poem you see below. I didn’t bother to define some terms (I figured if I knew what they meant most everybody else interested would) and others I likely didn’t pick the best definition because I didn’t know any better, so please feel free to point out my mistakes and suggest better links in the comments. Otherwise, enjoy the annotated Electronic Bard’s poem of love and tensor algebra:
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!Come, every frustum longs to be a cone
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.I’ll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou’lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love’s lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?Cancel me not – for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a2 cos 2 ψ!
More about Stanislaw Lem: official site, Wikipedia entry, great article from The Modern Word. If you don’t read science fiction and Lem’s name sounds familiar it’s probably because his novel Solaris has been adaptated for the silver screen twice, most recently in 2002, directed by Steven Soderburgh and starring George Clooney.
Thanks to Ranjit for lending me the book out of his excellent personal library!
Alison’s perfect description of something I’ve been thinking about lately:
i think my problem is that i’m smart enough for something as mundane as the average work week to make me contemplate the relative pointlessness of my own existence, but i’m not smart enough for someone rich to pay me to spend all day in a studio making things in the hopes that i’ll come up with something really cool. i’m not smart enough to be so distracted by my own ideas that i can ignore how stupid everything is, but i’m too smart not to notice it.
Post-grad school malaise, in my case, I think. It’s been weird these past few months to see half my school friends just going straight out in the world and doing all these crazy amazing things, and the other half basically using the hot summer months as an excuse to take our time figuring out what we want to do for the next few months/years/the rest of our lives, when the truth is that fall’s coming fast and we’re mostly none the wiser.
If someone had told me when I started college that a decade later I was going to have a master’s from the “Intergalactic Teleportation Program” instead of a JD and a small office in a big firm, I wouldn’t have believed them—no one who knew me then would’ve and yet here I am. Now I think: never mind ten years from now, where will I be in six months?
Joe of bostonsteamer points out that “today is a really special day for bloggers. It’s the five year anniversary of the “girl on a bike” story.” You know what this means, right? Only three more days till the fifth anniversary of my girl on a bike MetaFilter double post!
Anyway, this bit Joe wrote really got to me because I remember exactly what he’s talking about, the way things used to be:
It’s fun to look back on the old days of blogging, when everyone was so wide-eyed and naive. People really opened their hearts so their readers could take a look inside. Every blogger had the same “coming of age”, where they’d post something that hurt another person, and after the fallout they’d realize, “hey, what I blog about really does affect my meatspace life.”
Maybe in the same way that you can’t call yourself a writer till you’ve actually gotten paid for your writing, you’re not really a blogger until your blog has screwed you in real life somehow?
A while back I had someone I really cared about tell me he didn’t trust me, because I was indiscreet and would post all sorts of secrets, never mind that I’ve never actually done that to anyone. I called him out on it and he apologized and took it back, but I couldn’t tell if the apology was sincere or at least as honest as the accusation, and anyway he’d already struck a chord; things changed after that. So then when Justin Hall went and had his infamous breakdown not a month later I took it very hard, as did most everyone I know who’s been putting personal stuff up for at least four or five years, before blogging really took off.
My natural impulse both online and off is always to share of myself. I’ve never done it expecting anything back, but generosity has always led to receiving so much from others in turn: laughter, affection and best of all friendship. So many of the relationships I cherish most today are with people I’ve met because of the web that I haven’t really done much thinking about whether living like I do has pre-emptively scared anyone away.
I did tell Clay once that I feel like I have more privacy now, because everyone assumes that I share everything and so it never occurs to anyone that there might be things I keep just for myself, and you can’t ask after what you don’t even know exists, after all. But now I find myself wondering how many times I’ve dooced my personal life without even knowing it. I know at the end of the day it’s really someone else’s loss if they choose not to value me as a friend, but I hate giving up on people and I hate the thought of people giving up on me. I don’t know what I’m really trying to say here—let me know if you do—but I do know what I want to say: please don’t give up on me. Buy me a beer if you must, sing a stupid song with me at karaoke if you can, keep reading if you want to, but don’t give up.
As most of you probably know, I recently finished up with grad school; my portfolio and resume are more than three years old and therefore badly in need of updating, so of course the first thing I did was… redesign this here weblog. Here are a few of my thoughts behind the overhaul:
- I’ve been writing about food over at A Full Belly since April and I’ve really come to like being able to write short posts over there, which I’ve never been comfortable doing on here mainly because of how I’d laid the site out. So the biggest part of this redesign was switching the menu to the top and bottom of the pages to make room on the side for my new links log quick bites, mainly inspired by Andy, Simon Carless and, natch, Anil‘s late lamented sidebar. For those of you who prefer things syndicated, it comes with its own feeds: RSS 2.0 and Atom.
- If you read the site via RSS 2.0, you’ll now get to see the comments and trackbacks for every post. If you’d like to do the same with your feeds: Simple RSS Customization.
- No more static header graphic anywhere in the near future, no matter what I put up there I get sick of it eventually! I love being able to share my life via moblog with all my friends on Flickr and so I decided I would make the photos more accessible to my regular readers as well, hence the thumbnails of my nine most recent photos at the top of the page.
- Comments are awesome, but like Heather I too hate zeros. Current solution: make a little pixelly comment balloon in Photoshop and stick that in. I think it’s super cute but is it inviting enough? Do you prefer knowing how many people have commented already, or are you willing to break the ice? Please let me know, I’m more than happy to tweak with this for usability’s sake.
Next two things will be reintroducing a blogroll, as I’ve sorely missed having one, and finally (finally!) adding tags.