More masks. Cf also with the oldest mask in the world.
Also, these Plague Doctors were spooky. Definitely the kind of thing I would run from. Although I’d have to hope I wasn’t just running into the plague zone. Actually that would basically be an Italian “Appointment In Samarra.”
Bin Laden, according to Gartenstein-Ross, had a strategy that we never bothered to understand, and thus that we never bothered to defend against. What he really wanted to do — and, more to the point, what he thought he could do — was bankrupt the United States of America. After all, he’d done the bankrupt-a-superpower thing before. And though it didn’t quite work out this time, it worked a lot better than most of us, in this exultant moment, are willing to admit.
Ezra Klein has a super interesting article about Bin Laden’s strategy. (Though the last paragraph is bogus.) He wanted to provoke us into fighting a difficult, expensive, and hard-to-leave war.
Which we uh,
so maybe the way to to “beat” bin Laden is to end the war in Afghanistan, because….
(Source: Washington Post)
I love the term magic realism, whoever invented it – I do actually like it because it says certain things. It’s about expanding how you see the world. I think we live in an age where we’re just hammered, hammered to think this is what the world is. Television’s saying, everything’s saying ‘That’s the world.’ And it’s not the world. The world is a million possible things.
(Source: believermag.com)
Sound Matrix
my brother pointed me to these two pretty cool computational music generators. The one above is interactive, and more fun.
But Wolfram’s company has created what they’re calling “Wolfram Tones.” It’s a mashup of Wolfram’s Cellular automata research, MIDI, and a music box. Pretty impressive, though maybe not as much as Wolfram might like.
Neither is aleatoric! Though they both sort of sound like it.
Pollan displays a marked weakness at acknowledging intellectual debts. His writing
has a fresh, ingenuous quality – as if he thought of it all by himself yesterday. For example, ideas in his earlier Botany of Desire (2001) draw quite clearly from the writings of Bruno Latour, about whom no mention is made. In Omnivore’s Dilemma, to be fair, he is more careful
… But a simple listing of names does not really do justice to the origins of ideas.
… So, while Pollan must be commended for bringing arguments from agrarian theory to a wider audience, he does so at the expense of codes of scholarly conduct that sets a poor example to our students.
[and much later]
What is so painfully evident here and in many other of the new food books, is how food politics has become a progenitor of a neoliberal anti-politics that devolves regulatory responsibility to consumers via their dietary choices … But in regard to this book and contemporary food writing more generally, I am fed up with the apolitical conclusions, self-satisfied biographies of food choices, and general disregard for the more complex arguments that scholars of food bring to these topics. … there are plenty of highly readable scholarly monographs being published these days that can teach food in all the complexity it deserves and without heavy-handed notes and citations. Susanne Freidberg’s French Beans and Food Scares (2004) and Melanie DuPuis’ Nature’s Perfect Food (2001) come to mind immediately.
(Source: springerlink.com)
These are fucking incredible. I kind of “see” like this, sometimes, with my eyes shut, but I don’t think I could ever put them together like this. Or it would take a long, long time. I want to order prints and put them on my walls and study them whenever I feel sad.
Found out about this from a guy on the DFW mailing list.
This is photo of the Milky Way is by Stephane Guisard. There are a lot of really interesting photos of the night sky over at his site.
In the suburbs of the US, most of the cool stuff is blocked by the ambient light. I had no idea that the Milky Way was this visible.
Also, poking around wiktionary, I see that the the Japanese and Chinese name is made of a combination of a silver character and a stream/river character.
