July 3, 2009
A California Constitutional Convention
Robin says,
The setup:
With the state's fiscal woes mounting and Sacramento seemingly frozen in place, a group of California leaders has proposed a constitutional convention as a way to fix the Golden State's deeply entrenched structural problems.
But how do you organize the convention? I really like the sound of this scheme:
RANDOM SELECTION: This method might sound the strangest but actually may hold the most promise. It has been used in Canada and elsewhere. A scientific sampling of Californians would be randomly selected from the statewide voter list, like a jury pool.The Bay Area Council, a group of business leaders, has proposed randomly selecting 400 Californians to create a body of average citizens who could bring their common sense and pragmatism to the problems at hand. Those delegates would be paid to participate for eight months, starting with an intensive two-month education process in which they would hear from many experts about the problems and potential solutions for California.
It's like deliberative polling with teeth!
It's not without problems, of course -- but to me they seem like better problems than the ones you get with appointed or elected bodies. And keep in mind, a randomly-selected group would be generating policy options which would then be voted on by everyone else in California, so it's not like we would, er, skip democracy entirely.
This Is What the Alien Invasion Looks Like
Robin says,
Another winner from Today and Tomorrow. Pretty sure this scene would be completely gross seen through eyes not belonging to an amazing photographer. This is the danger of great photography, yeah? The world doesn't look like this. Or even like this.
Riding in Style
Robin says,
Yo I totally want one of these vehicles. How can something so Seuss-ian actually be real?
July 2, 2009
Kickstarter
Robin says,
Kickstarter is quickly becoming one of my favorite things. Here's a list of recently-funded projects.
Geeking Out, c. 1990
Tim says,
I love this; Hewlett-Packard is selling an exact copy of its HP-12C financial calculator for the iPhone.
The iPhone version of the HP-12C is a near carbon copy of the actual machine. It not only looks the same, but it actually runs the same code as do the physical calculators. The iPhone version is actually a bit better than just a clone of the original, though, because HP includes a simplified portrait-mode calculator (the 12C is a landscape-mode device). When used in portrait mode, you can use the number keys, along with all the usual math operators and a couple of other functions such as square roots and memory—perfect for those times when you just need a basic calculator.The real power of the HP-12C is found when you rotate your iPhone to landscape mode; what appears on the screen then is a photographic reproduction of the actual HP-12C calculator, complete with the gold-brown-orange-blue color scheme that made the original so…endearing? Because the app uses the actual calculator’s code, absolutely everything works just like it does on the real calculator.
I used a calculator just like this to win a middle school mathematics competition - in those days, it was called a "Calculator Competition," because you could (gasp!) use a calculator. There was a school-wide thing, then a regional, and then a state final; it was a whole thing. The state final was the first time I'd ever seen a graphing calculator; that shiz blew my mind.
July 1, 2009
Volcano, Meet Cloud; Cloud, Volcano
A plume of smoke, ash and steam soars five miles into the sky from an erupting volcano.The extraordinary image was captured by the crew of the International Space Station 220 miles above a remote Russian island in the North Pacific.
The round hole in the clouds is thought to have been caused by the shockwave of the initial explosion. At the centre lies the billowing mushroom tower of grey and brown ash.
For volcano experts, the most exciting part of the image is the layer of smooth white cloud that caps the plume - a little like a layer of snow on a mushroom.
This cap of condensed air is created from the rapid rising and then cooling of the air directly above the ash column. When moist, warm air rises quickly it creates a cloud.
File under: Beauty, Media Galaxy, No Comment, Science
This Post Is About the Windows Operating System
Robin says,
(Pardon the geeky, utilitarian interruption, but this Windows volume control app just changed my life. Which will sound silly to you... unless you've ever tried to change the volume on Windows, in which case you too will be scrambling to click that link and download this app.)
Sixty Symbols
Robin says,
Oh wow. Sixty Symbols defines a bunch of classic, crucial constants in physics and astronomy -- for instance, h, Planck's constant -- via short, snappy videos. It's clever and consumable. A+.
What Canadian Expats Miss About Canada
Tim says,
The NYT asked:
In history class, in seventh grade (or as we like to say in Canada, grade seven) we learned the story of the American Revolution — from the British perspective. Turns out you were all a bunch of ungrateful tax cheats. And you weren’t very nice to the Loyalists. What I miss most about Canada is getting the truth about the United States.
— MALCOLM GLADWELL, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of “Outliers: The Story of Success”
I also liked this quip from Simpsons writer Tim Long:
I miss the snow. Yes, I know the United States gets snow, but to my Canadian eye, American snow is like American health care: sporadic, unreliable and distributed unevenly among the population.
My Eight-Year-Old Self Can't Believe Any Of This
Tim says,
There are only 60,000 nuns left in the US Catholic Church.And the Vatican wants to start an inquisition into what's left of the orders, 'cause some o' them ladies just maybe ain't been doin' what they're told.
Well, that's just great. Thank you, Pope Benedict - you're so evil, you've got me rooting for nuns. (It's like in Return of the Jedi, when you realize Darth Vader isn't really the real bad guy.)
Behold, the Macro-User
Robin says,
Wow. Google explains some new Gmail features with graphs of aggregate user behavior. That is amazing. I want to see the whole Gmail user behavior dashboard! I want to see the top 100 labels that people use! I want to see everything!
Language Is A Technology That Restructures Language
Lera Boroditsky has a super-interesting essay at Edge on her work empirically testing the proposition that language structures thought. (Blërg - resisting urge to... blockquote.... sigh.)
So Boroditsky's got some clever tests, including asking speakers/writers of a different language to arrange pictures chronologically (Roman languages tend to arrange chronology from left to right, Hebrew from right to left, and fascinatingly, the Kuuk Thaayorre in Australia do it from east to west), and testing incidences of adjectives speakers of languages with gendered nouns assign to those nouns - Germans think keys (male) are hard and jagged and bridges are slender and beautiful, where Spanish-speakers (whose gender assignations switch the nouns) correspondingly flip associations.
But... okay, look. I believe in this thesis. But the tests to my mind are not conclusive evidence. Here's why.
You can't get into a person's head.
Is is that simple? It is.
Because (stay with me) all of these tests don't show that speakers of different language think differently, but that they represent thought differently. The way we write changes the way we talk, and the way we represent thought in space. The way we talk also changes the way we write. And the way we talk changes the way we talk. You don't have any evidence - at least, any evidence that doesn't assume the premise - that Germans actually THINK bridges are more graceful or beautiful than Spaniards do - just that they're more likely to use adjectives with feminine associations with feminine nouns. What this suggests immediately is that language is a complex and interconnected system where terms and kinds group together, and small linguistic changes actually trigger a series of different linguistic associations and values. It DOESN'T immediately prove that language structures thought - understood as something independent from its representation.
Because if language is the vocal and visual representation of concepts, then ALL of Boroditsky's tests are instances of language. Language structures language. And once you assume unproblematically that language directly represents thought, then you naturally discover that thought and language are inseparable. Which is what was to be shown. But this is logically a tautology - even if its empirical specifics of how that tautology manifests itself are fascinating.
Let me reframe this, then. What I think these experiments show is that in moments where we may think we are simply registering our pure and unmediated experience of the world, we're really on auto-pilot - language is in fact doing our "thinking" for us. But this kind of not-quite-thinking doesn't automatically deserve to be called "thought" at all.
June 30, 2009
Jeff Scher's Parade
Robin says,
Love, love, love Jeff Scher's video about people walking down the street. It's simple and stunning.
June 29, 2009
Trollope Rides Again
Robin says,
It's tough to be a writer today, but then again, it's always been tough: More than in any other medium, you've got to compete with the past as well as the present. Hmm, should I dig into the new Richard Ford novel... or Moby Dick?
Of course, this is the great opportunity, as well. (At least if you believe Mr. Penumbra.)
This is all to say that I absolutely love the fact that an Anthony Trollope novel from 1875 is the top pick on Newsweek's list of books for our times. In fact, I love the whole list. It's one of the best I've ever seen -- broad without being shallow, diverse without being precious.
I'll offer a strong second to #28 ("Midnight's Children") and #36 ("The Dark Is Rising"); in fact, the Newsweek mention has inspired me to go back and read them both again.
And here's a Kindle bonus: Get your Trollope for free.
The Death of the End, the Birth of the Beginning
Tim says,
I don't have any answers just yet, but I like Rex's well-titled "The Death of Writing, The Rebirth of Words."
(See Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author is the Birth of the Reader" and Jacques Derrida's "The End of the Book, The Beginning of Writing")
Melting Like Hot Candle Wax (Now With Links)
It's silly to make a CD-length mix playlist in 2009. I stopped listening to CDs altogether when I donated my long-suffering 1996 Monte Carlo a couple of years ago. And curation with limits is out. Why limit yourself to a static 80-minute document when you can have your own blog - hell, your own radio station - curating music all year long? Why not just make a big "favorites" list for your iPod and stick it on shuffle?
So it took the following extraordinary circumstances to get me to put this together:
1. I'm secretly an analog dinosaur. I wrote papers on a manual typewriter until I went to college, and made cassette after cassette of 60, 90, and 120-minute songs I recorded from the radio from the time I was six or seven.
2. I keep all of my music on an external hard drive, which went kaput. I've had to scavenge data to my overloaded laptop - which means I mostly have only a few songs/albums that I really want to listen to available to me.
3. It's hot, and it's summer, so songs about heat and summer keep coming to my mind. And they're (mostly) not the obvious ones.
4. There are a few really terrific albums that have come out in the last few months.
5. The death of Michael Jackson has me reaching around in my music archive a bit.
So here's a playlist of songs preoccupying me for summer 2009. It's titled "Melting Like Hot Candle Wax." If you're really slick, you know where that title's from already.
1. "Build Voice," Dan Deacon, Bromst 2. "Two Weeks," Grizzly Bear, Veckatimest3. "Boyz," M.I.A., Kala
4. "Summertime Clothes," Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavilion
5. "Not A Robot, But A Ghost," Andrew Bird, Noble Beast
6. "Another Sunny Day," Belle & Sebastian, The Life Pursuit
7. "Summertime," Galaxie 500, This Is Our Music
8. "We Could Walk Together," The Clientele, Suburban Light
9. "Black Cab," Jens Lekman, Oh You're So Silent Jens
10. "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough," Michael Jackson, Off The Wall
11. "Postcards From Italy," Beirut, Gulag Orkestar
12. "Two Doves," Dirty Projectors, Bitte Orca
13. "Too Many Birds," Bill Callahan, Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle
14. "The City," Dismemberment Plan, Emergency & I
15. "Here Comes the Summer," The Fiery Furnaces, EP
16. "35 in the Shade," A.C. Newman, Slow Wonder
17. "Summer In The City," Regina Spektor, Begin To Hope
What music, old or new, are you listening to this summer?
June 28, 2009
Modern Problems
Robin says,
This is seriously one of the most 21st-century stories I've ever read:
For seven months, The New York Times managed to keep out of the news the fact that one of its reporters, David Rohde, had been kidnapped by the Taliban.But that was pretty straightforward compared with keeping it off Wikipedia.
(Via @mallarytenore.)
Flights 001
Robin says,
Fun project: Plot all the routes numbered 001 on various airlines. Please note the continents not visited.
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