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“… ‘Everyone wants to think they’re smarter than the poor souls in developing countries, and smarter than their predecessors,’ says Carmen M. Reinhart, an economist at the University of Maryland. ‘They’re wrong. And we can prove it.’ Like a pair of financial sleuths, Ms. Reinhart and her collaborator from Harvard, Kenneth S. Rogoff, have spent years investigating wreckage scattered across documents from nearly a millennium of economic crises and collapses. They have wandered the basements of rare-book libraries, riffled through monks’ yellowed journals and begged central banks worldwide for centuries-old debt records. And they have manually entered their findings, digit by digit, into one of the biggest spreadsheets you’ve ever seen. Their handiwork is contained in their recent best seller, “This Time Is Different,” a quantitative reconstruction of hundreds of historical episodes in which perfectly smart people made perfectly disastrous decisions. It is a panoramic opus, both geographically and temporally, covering crises from 66 countries over the last 800 years.” In the mid-19th century, mathematics was rapidly blossoming into what it is today: a finely honed language for describing the conceptual relations between things. Dodgson found the radical new math illogical and lacking in intellectual rigor. In “Alice,” he attacked some of the new ideas as nonsense — using a technique familiar from Euclid’s proofs, reductio ad absurdum, where the validity of an idea is tested by taking its premises to their logical extreme. “I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: ‘This is water, this is water.’”
"In a world full of chaos and irregularity, the terminal seemed a worthy and intriguing refuge of elegance and logic. It was the imaginative centre of contemporary culture. Had one been asked to take a Martian to visit a single place that neatly captures the gamut of themes running through our civilisation - then it would have to be to the departures and arrivals halls that one would head."
Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name, Unpacking My Library opens with an essay from Walter Benjamin. “… there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector - and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be - ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.” The pages that follow present a series of bookshelf images along with commentary from each Architect. The jargon sometimes makes the text less accessible, but the images alone would have interesting enough for me. Liswood writes about the challenges associated with diversity (specifically cognitive diversity) in enterprise. Citing examples from her decades at Goldman, she tells a story of dominant and non dominant groups, unwritten rules, and unconscious perceptions. I gained an appreciation for the influence of culturally-specific lessons from ‘Grandma’ on participation in the workplace. (ex: [US] The squeaky wheel gets the grease vs [China] The loudest duck gets shot). These quotes and images were thoughtfully selected (I especially enjoyed Alofsin’s and Muschamp’s) but I was left hoping for a bit more context and analysis. Going West for the NZ Book Council produced by Colenso BBDO and animated by Andersen M Studio Fry, a co-creator of processing, presents a series of visualization case studies with clean code snippets and concise explanations. It seems a little bizarre to claim that acquisition is a stage of the visualization process (might visualization start after you have a dataset and are trying to find a new way to understand and share its nuances?). Still, this is a manual I will keep nearby. Belsey offers an overview of poststructuralism that exposes the reader to prominent thinkers and their major claims. The relationships to current art/literature/etc. would benefit from a bit more depth. A quick and satisfying read. |
Alex AinslieI'm a recent Cornell CS MEng graduate interested in data, computation, design and their intersection. In 2009 I graduated early with an independent BA in Computing, Cognition & Aesthetics and minors in French and Information Science. My honors thesis examined the traces our Bluetooth-enabled devices leave behind in public space and my masters thesis explored opportunities for machine learning and visualization to inform personal sensemaking. I have spent the past three summers as an intern at Google working on mobile maps and gmail, suggest, query refinements, social search, and most recently goggles and mobile local search. I joined Google fulltime in August 2010 - the views expressed here are mine alone. This site was born as a personal photo journal during a semester spent abroad in Paris and has evolved into a curated collection of links, text, and images. |
