Ramblings & ephemera
From Retina Adapts To Seek The Unexpected, Ignore The Commonplace:
Researchers at Harvard University have found evidence that the retina actively seeks novel features in the visual environment, dynamically adjusting its processing in order to seek the unusual while ignoring the commonplace. …
“Apparently our thirst for novelty begins in the eye itself,” says Markus Meister, the [...]
Posted on October 30th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: science | Comments Off
From A Collection of Unusual Neurological States:
Kluver-Bucy Syndrome: Damage to the front of the temporal lobe and the amygdala just below it can result in the strange condition called Kluver-Bucy Syndrome. Classically, the person will try to put anything to hand into their mouths and typically attempt to have sexual intercourse with it. A classic [...]
Posted on October 30th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, science | Comments Off
From "The Habit of Democracy" by Adam Gopnik in the 15 October 2001 issue of The New Yorker, a review of two books about Alexis de Tocqueville:
Newcomers, like newborns, have symbolic sight. They see faces first, and features later.
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French policians and French writers
Amongst family and friends
Word of the day: cunctative
Why so many Google projects [...]
Posted on October 29th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book | Comments Off
From "The Challenges Facing Nanotechnology", on Ockham’s Razor:
Let us now examine nanotechnology, and assess the hurdles it must overcome before it becomes a society-transforming revolution. In our view there are four major issues:
Feasibility: can we do what we claim we can do, or is it as fantastic as the Nanobot?
Secondly, economic value: does it change [...]
Posted on October 29th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, science | Comments Off
From Lawrence Lessig’s blog:
Here’s a reductio ad absurdum of folding in the face of copyright overclaiming: “While interviewing students for a documentary about inner-city schools, a filmmaker accidentally captures a television playing in the background, in which you can just make out three seconds of an episode of ‘The Little Rascals.’ He can’t include the [...]
Posted on October 29th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, politics | Comments Off
From Neither the Power Nor the Glory: Why Hollywood leaves originality to the indies, on Slate:
Back in the old days of the studio system, the brand of a Hollywood studio meant something to the moviegoing public. Each studio, with its roster of stars under contract, came to be identified with a particular genre of movies: [...]
Posted on October 18th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book | Comments Off
From "The Habit of Democracy" by Adam Gopnik in the 15 October 2001 issue of The New Yorker, a review of two books about Alexis de Tocqueville:
[Tocqueville] decided to devote himself to politics in France, and, like all French literary men, made a mess of it. (French writers are emporers of conceits; French politicians must [...]
Posted on October 16th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, On Writing | Comments Off
From "The Habit of Democracy" by Adam Gopnik in the 15 October 2001 issue of The New Yorker, a review of two books about Alexis de Tocqueville:
At a deeper level, too, [Tocqueville's] turn of mind was French: witty but humorless, indifferent to empirical details, constantly searching for the lucid abstraction, what he called the "general [...]
Posted on October 16th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, history, politics | Comments Off
From "The Habit of Democracy" by Adam Gopnik in the 15 October 2001 issue of The New Yorker, a review of two books about Alexis de Tocqueville:
"There is nothing absolute in the theoretical value of political institutions," Tocqueville wrote. "Their efficiency depends almost always on the original circumstances and the social conditions of the people [...]
Posted on October 16th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, history, politics | Comments Off
From "Culture Club" by Louis Menand in the 15 October 2001 issue of The New Yorker:
Things take their identities from what they are not … The concept of a highbrow culture, the culture of great books and the like, depends on the concept of a lowbrow, or popular, culture, whose characteristics highbrow culture defines iself [...]
Posted on October 16th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, On Writing | Comments Off
From "The Producer" in the 15 October 2001 issue of The New Yorker, an article about the Hollywood producer Brian Grazer:
His creation achieved its brilliant apotheosis a few years ago, when he reconceived Brian Grazer as a form of performance art. He started putting photographs of himself, grinning like a pixie, in dime-store frames and [...]
Posted on October 16th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Cool Stuff, True Stories | Comments Off
From "The Producer" in the 15 October 2001 issue of The New Yorker, an article about the Hollywood producer Brian Grazer:
Ron Howard: But you love really sophisticated movies.
Grazer: Like what? I guess I do. I do? Which ones were you thinking of?
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Why the color-coded threat alert system fails
Weldon Kees, polymath
The [...]
Posted on October 16th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Fiction | Comments Off
From "The Producer" in the 15 October 2001 issue of The New Yorker, an article about the Hollywood producer Brian Grazer:
[Edgar J. Scherick, the TV producer, hired Grazer when he was young, & had this to say about him:] "One day, he told me he was dissatisfied. We talked for half an hour and I [...]
Posted on October 16th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, True Stories | Comments Off
From "Art for Everybody" in the 15 October 2001 issue of The New Yorker, an article about the immensely popular, incredibly kitschy painter Thomas Kinkaid:
… ten million people own some product featuring his name, and most editions are signed with ink containing DNA from his hair or blood, to prevent fakes.
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The rules of conspiracy
Problems [...]
Posted on October 16th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, security | Comments Off
From "Editing audio in Linux":
On proprietary platforms, eventually you’ll run into "you can’t do that." On open platforms, you’ll run into "you have to learn more to do that."
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Unix vs Windows: NYC vs Celebration
Unix specs vs. Windows specs
Tim O’Reilly’s definition of open source
Remove EXIF data from JPEGs
Problems techies are good at solving
Posted on October 14th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology | Comments Off
I remember the first day I ever got on the Internet. I was an English teacher working at a camp for gifted high school students, and a technologist was there talking about this thing called “the Internet” and how it was going to change everything. It sounded fascinating, so when I returned home a few [...]
Posted on October 11th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Musings, Technology | Comments Off
From Clay Shirky’s “Thinking About Networks” syllabus:
Communications networks are invisible in the traditional sense; their inner workings are hidden inside devices, behind walls and underground, or pass silently through the air. We will examine a variety of electronic networks — telegraph, telephones, internet — and design philosophies — client-server, lattice, peer-to-peer — and explore the [...]
Posted on October 11th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Social Software, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society | Comments Off
From Scott Rosenberg’s "Web 2.0 jottings":
AOL’s Jonathan Miller … told them about having his car towed in Manhattan, and visiting the godforsaken place you go to get your car, and waiting in line forever, and getting angrier and angrier, and finally getting to the front of the line and seeing a sign that read: "The [...]
Posted on October 7th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book | Comments Off
From Adam Gopnik’s "The In-Law", a profile of Willie Nelson in The New Yorker (7 October 2002):
"I love Michael J. Fox," one says. "I was upset when he left the show because of that sad illness of his." (Willie’s family really talks that way: Willie, on being asked about Kris Kristofferson’s remark that he is [...]
Posted on October 7th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, overheard | Comments Off
From Claudia Roth Pierpont’s "Jazzbo", about George Gershwin, in The New Yorker (10 January 2005):
[Gershwin] had been saved by the piano. On a fateful day in 1910, a secondhand upright was hoisted through the family’s Second Avenue window and, to general shock, scapegrace street fighting George, age twelve, sat down and tore through a popular [...]
Posted on October 7th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, True Stories, history | Comments Off