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“May axes Labour police beat pledge - James notes that every single one of these six words can serve as either a noun (sample possible senses: fifth month; woodcutting implements; opposition party; constabulary; musical timing unit; commitment) or a verb (will possibly; performs chopping; work hard; oversee; physically chastise; give a promise). So we start with 26= 64 different assignments of noun or verb status, and start sifting about for a coherent parse that gives us a meaning that could make sense in some context…” “… It’s an old story. We can make it harder for the bad guys to hide by enabling the government to track everything we do. Where do we draw the line and say we’d rather take the risk–when the tradeoffs are so hard to quantify, and the worst case scenarios so terrifying?” “… Gourmet cupcakes are evil. Not just bad, over-hyped, or unhealthy — evil. Here’s why. A cupcake is a miniature cake. Cakes are for special occasions and celebrations: birthdays, anniversaries, and weddings. We eat cake at times that have meaning and purpose. Times when it is natural to want to feast and indulge. Mama Rose, my lovely grandmother, always made a stunningly delicious angel food cake with coconut shavings on our birthdays. It was out of the ordinary, and it signified and enhanced the greater meaning of our celebration (comfort food). Enter the cupcake. A mini-cake in a little cup. Not only is the cupcake a physically smaller version of a cake, but it also requires less psychological justification to eat it. It’s cake’s casual cousin, and it can be eaten just for fun. The very act of eating a cupcake can be the cause of the mini-celebration. Rather than having a special occasion that merits indulgence (birthdays, weddings), the act of indulgence is the cause for celebration. And here’s the kicker. There used to be a stigma to eating cake on ordinary days. And there still is, to some extent. Few people go around eating cake on a regular basis. Nice cakes are too big, too expensive, too luxurious. The challenge that the cheap, standard grocery-store cupcakes always faced is that they were too cheap, too standard, too inexpensive. They weren’t special enough — conscience and the last vestiges of social stigma could outweigh enjoyment. But when gourmet cupcake makers fancied cupcakes up a bit and started charging $3.25 a pop, it provided that little excuse: ‘Now THIS is a special cupcake.’ And eating this gourmet cupcake is a special occasion. It’s all backwards. Evil, thy name is comfort food.” “… But onto my idea. Get ready for it: The Friendly Period (EXCLAMATION POINT) Sorry. What I meant was, the friendly period! Period. Am I talking about an era of increased kindness? No. A new, more pleasant brand of menses? No. (We already swim, ride horses on the beach and run through fields of daisies—how much more pleasant can menstruation get?) No, I’m talking about a period that says, ‘That sentence, the one right before me, is as affable as they come. That sentence, in fact, wants to buy you a beer.’ “ Q: Over the years, has your vision for what McSweeney’s should be evolved? If so, how? What are your hopes and plans for the future of McSweeney’s? Ed Page Seattle, Washington A: It’s changed a lot over three years, or however long it’s been since we started. Not that we’ve ever had any real idea what we’re doing. In terms of what we look to publish, our tastes have evolved issue to issue, but it’s been driven by what comes to us through the mail — that has the single greatest effect on what we do. We let the issues get shaped by the individual pieces in it, basically, rather than the other way around. But early on, we might have been more inclined to publish something experimental though unsuccessful over something traditional but well-executed. We valued the experiment above all, really, and were a little form-obsessed. But now we’re more balanced, I would say. But it’s always changing… “The system is basically set up to maximize kvetching. Government is filled with superconfident, highly competitive people who are grouped into small bands. These bands usually have one queen bee at the center — a president, senator, cabinet secretary or general — and a squad of advisers all around. These bands are perpetually jostling, elbowing and shoving each other to get control over policy. Amid all this friction, the members of each band develop their own private language. These people often spend 16 hours a day together, and they bond by moaning and about the idiots on the outside.”
“Here’s my recipe for programming success: - Peter Norvig “Malcolm Gladwell reports that a study of students at the Berlin Academy of Music compared the top, middle, and bottom third of the class and asked them how much they had practiced: Everyone, from all three groups, started playing at roughly the same time - around the age of five. In those first few years, everyone practised roughly the same amount - about two or three hours a week. But around the age of eight real differences started to emerge. The students who would end up as the best in their class began to practise more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight by age 12, 16 a week by age 14, and up and up, until by the age of 20 they were practising well over 30 hours a week. By the age of 20, the elite performers had all totalled 10,000 hours of practice over the course of their lives. The merely good students had totalled, by contrast, 8,000 hours, and the future music teachers just over 4,000 hours. So it may be that 10,000 hours, not 10 years, is the magic number.” “… That Hayward managed in the hearing to maintain a certain narcotized composure probably had less to do with actual narcotics (though, hey, you never know) than with his understanding that what he was enduring was a ritualized necessity. Like the Obama White House, Hayward’s company wanted to turn last week into an “inflection point,” a chance to pivot to a better place regarding the crisis in the gulf. For the administration, Obama’s Oval Office address and meeting with BP’s bosses were designed to show that the president has a handle on the disaster and a plan to cope with it. For BP, the agreement to put $20 billion into a damage-payment fund, the decision to forgo issuing dividends, and Hayward’s turn on the Hill were meant to blot out its recent PR malfunctions—and cast the company in a newly responsible and contrite light.” “Steven Holl asks the same question of architecture that Merleau- Ponty asks of philosophy . Can the ambulating sentient being embedded as he or she is in the matrix of concretized values as they are inscribed in that being experience and understand seeing in a context articulated for that purpose? How can a building such as Kiasma, function simultaneously as the “frame” of the experience of and for visual art and as an embodiment of the very process of seeing. For Holl like Ponty uses the analogy of the optic chiasm with its “inflected” decussating fiber structure which appropriates the visual field like a highway cloverleaf, allowing each hemifield to be conjoined, left side to right sided brain and right side to left side of the brain, to serve a as model to appropriate the entire visual apparatus including the eye and the folded surface of the brain, for his purpose. Holl uses each element of the building as another opportunity to deal with the structure of light and its processing: the building operates as a kind of surrogate for the eye. On the first level of analysis there is the light catching section, functioning somewhat like a pupil, which captures the warm light of the a horizontal sun and diffuses it through carefully oriented apertures and there is the “sun path reversal” in which the building, like gaze movements of the eye, follows a reverse path of the sun’s path between 11 am and 6 p.m… Coextensive with these aforementioned qualities of seeing is the process by which seeing becomes other. Seeing is evaluated in terms of itself and is analyzed as process. Thus Kiasma reveals a succession of curved enframed structures as rooms in which the different qualities of light are created because the light enters each room in many different ways: in the journey from one room to the next we experience the transformation of light as data.”
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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 a minor in French. My honors thesis examined the traces our Bluetooth-enabled devices leave behind in public space. 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 will join Google fulltime in August 2010. 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. |
