Archive for August, 2007
I don’t get anything out of this kind of art, but I hate how unfair the media has been on Priscilla Bracks, the artist behind Bearded Orientals: Making the Empire Cross. It’s kind of amazing that anyone could still be shocked by this kind of art, and maybe Priscilla is shocked too – the [...]
This video from Slate V covers the amazing research of Tetsuro Matsuzawa, who reckons humans traded short-term memory for other cognitive skills. The clips of the chimps doing memory tasks are amazing, and – naturally – cute: Link.
I finished listening to the lectures from InfoSys C103: History of Information – one of the many courses that UC Berkeley makes available as a free podcast.
The scope of the course is as ambitious as the title suggests – it’s a history of the interaction between humankind, information, and technology, winding for 30-odd hours through [...]
The New York Times has an interesting op-ed by seven US soldiers at the end of their tours of duty in Iraq: Link. It’s a real change to hear news from on the ground there. Journalists have next to no access in Iraq today, so when it’s spoken about at all, we tend [...]
Slate has a nice article about the recently deceased Tony Wilson (founder of Factory Records and the Hacienda club, and the guy 24 Hour Party People was about): Link.
Bert Newton’s What A Year has been axed, following the fate of Bert’s Family Feud and 20 to 1, the other shows he’s done for Channel 9 in the past couple of years: News.com story.
It’s been depressing to see the kinds of pathetic light entertainment filler Channel 9 has put Bert in. Good [...]
There’s not much as perfect as Norman MacCaig’s “Summer Farm”, which my dad showed me years ago, and which still amuses, surprises, buzzes, and pulses.
SUMMER FARM
Straws like tame lightnings lie about the grassAnd hang zigzag on hedges. Green as glassThe water in the horse-trough shines.Nine ducks go wobbling by in two straight lines.
A [...]
Ying Tong: A Walk With The Goons starts in Brisbane in a couple of weeks. A loving tribute can be fantastic or the absolute worst – worse than a normal bad play, because it also drags something good down with it. Anyway, I plan to see it: Link.
Here’s a nice passage from The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse. The book is fairly dense reading — I’ve been reading it for yonks now! — but it’s a wonderful, mind-boggling, and unique experience. This is from Richard and Clara Winston’s translation.
A bit of background: The Castalians are an order of [...]
Link: Edmund Blair Bolles’s blog summarises the answers a bunch of scholars gave to the question:
If we shipwrecked a boatload of babies on the Galapagos Islands—assuming they had all the food, water, and shelter they needed to survive—would they produce language in any form when they grew up? And if it did, how many [...]
This Onion article made me laugh out loud repeatedly. Link. Excerpt:
“And if you like multiplayer gaming, you’re in luck,” Hendleman continued. “In Sousaphone Hero’s cooperative marching-band mode, as many as 135 of your friends can play simultaneously.”
Hendleman also emphasized the “fun” rewards players receive as they become more proficient. If they hit [...]
