April 2010
1 post
March 2010
12 posts
A chatroulette encounter →
Skeptical Clergy
Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola interviewed five Protestant non-believers, as the title of their paper suggests: “Preachers who are not believers”.
“Here are some questions that have haunted me for years. How many preachers actually believe what they say from the pulpit? We know that every year some clergy abandon their calling, no longer able to execute their duties with...
“I really like the idea of a meritocracy, where, sure, you want to have things...”
– Great and far-reaching interview with Merlin Mann about choosing who you are, what you do, for who… and about making old people cry. A couple of other quotes…
“I’m talking about the fact that I personally feel most alive when I’m making something”
“If I...
“After the release of the 1997 film, Titanic, Kate Winslet was dubbed by one...”
– Thinking man’s crumpet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (via EMax)
Volkswagen: See Films Differently →
Volkswagen, supporters of independent cinema, produced a series of short (25second - 1minute) videos with film fans giving interpretations of popular movies.
The three most brilliant are:
Die Hard (it’s about one man’s fight against the fashion industry)
E.T. (an alien out on a stag do with his mates)
Toy Story (a meditation on the trials of puberty and sexuality)
(note: old, but...
February 2010
27 posts
List of great dystopian novels →
Though weirdly missing ‘We’ by Yevgeny Zamyatin.
Also, related: Orwell Vs Huxley
“Somehow ranked as the number one grossing actor in history, Eddie Murphy has...”
– biographies from Huffington Post’s Dickipedia
The Ice Program →
Fascinatingly, it seems that ice can be differentiated by gender, at least for glacier-building purposes:
A “male” glacier is one that is covered in stones and soil and moves slowly or not at all. A “female” one is whiter, and grows more quickly, yielding more water. “It is important to have both sexes,” a glacier grower from the village of Ghwari in Baltistan, Pakistan-administered Kashmir,...
Social Networking and Human Interaction
Jonah Lehrer remains suspicious that online social networks will revolutionize human interactions (either for better or worse), discussing articles in Wired and the New York Review of Books. William Deresiewicz argues that we have:
“turned [our friends] into an indiscriminate mass, a kind of audience or faceless public. We address ourselves not to a circle, but to a cloud…. Friendship...
Let me tell you about Demon Souls →
This game review reads like something Simon might have written.
FTA: “Demon’s Souls is a game that will make you into a man. A scrawny fourteen-year-old, after two hours with this game, will be grooming his muttonchops and ready to ship off on the next boat to fight the Kaiser….”
Sushi Cat | Armor Games →
Sushi Cat is a flash game that is very similar to Peggle, except you’re a fat cat trying to eat as much sushi as possible…to win love?? This pretty much sums up my whole life philosophy.
Can psychiatry be a science? →
Latest from The New Yorker:
The recommendation from people who have written about their own depression is, overwhelmingly, Take the meds! …
What if your sadness was grief, though? And what if there were a pill that relieved you of the physical pain of bereavement—sleeplessness, weeping, loss of appetite—without diluting your love for or memory of the dead? Assuming that bereavement...
4 tags
“Bird Turd makes Twitter a game. In Bird Turd, YOU are the bird. And when you see...”
– Bird Turd for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad on the iTunes App Store
The Whore of Mensa →
Brilliant short story from Woody Allen:
“I mean my wife is great, don’t get me wrong. But she won’t discuss Pound with me. Or Eliot. I didn’t know that when I married her. See, I need a woman who’s mentally stimulating, Kaiser. And I’m willing to pay for it. I don’t want an involvement - I want a quick intellectual experience,...
Liberals Aren’t Un-American. Conservatives Aren’t... →
Interesting work by psychologist Jonathan Haidt, suggesting that there are five foundational moral impulses, and different people simply optimize for different ones.
Michael Bayesian Filters
[mahy-kuhl bey-zee-uhn fil-terz] noun -
a series of computer based filters, trained over time through an artificial intelligence process, which allow computer controlled motion picture cameras to automatically record high budget action sequences in the style of producer/director Michael Bay.
a method of filtering email spam that relies on producer/director Michael Bay to manually read and...
The Chameleon: The Many Lives of Frédéric Bourdain →
Fascinating New Yorker article: “At police headquarters, he admitted that he was Frédéric Bourdin, and that in the past decade and a half he had invented scores of identities, in more than fifteen countries and five languages.”
“You must constantly ask yourself these questions: Who am I around? What are they...”
– Jim Rohn