Practice and a sense of Theatre

That's what it takes to do something like this:



When the barrier to getting video published plummeted, I wondered what would succeed on it. The traditional forms of displayed entertainment (90 minute movies, 30 minute TV shows) seemed to have not worked well. The two genres that I think succeed best so far are short-form comedy and what I'll call look-what-I-can-do videos, like this one.

Art by Livestock

Salt licks take on sculptural qualities as they are used.

New Tech Splurges

Bought a couple items recently that are pretty sweet additions to the home computer:

1. A Drobo storage device. It's basically a box with bays for up to four SATA hard drives that looks to the computer like an ordinary USB drive. Each bay has a status light, telling you, in effect, "everything's fine" or "replace me" or "getting full, swap in a bigger drive". All of those are actions you can do on the fly, without powering down or telling the Drobo in advance. The Drobo ensures redundancy of data on the drives. It's such a charming device that I almost want to replace drives to see it in action, but really, it's a place to store data and not worry about it. No more worrying that I should do a backup; all i really need to concern myself with is offsite backups in case the whole device is destroyed or lost at once.

Given that we dropped major $$$ to retrieve data from a dead drive a year ago, this is a great thing to have. It's like a RAID drive or a NetApp for the masses, minus the administrative headaches.

2. Ostensibly I bought a 30 inch monitor for Diane so she could work on her school stuff and have many more documents open and visible at the same time. It also sort of vaguely (cough, cough) occurred to me that it might be nice for gaming, especially with so many great games out (BioShock, Team Fortress 2, Half Life Episode 2). In fact, it's beautiful and it works great for Diane, but it's so huge that I fear I can't see everything that's happening in a FPS game, much like sitting in the front row of a movie theatre. Will I have to switch game genres? Or sit back further from the computer (shudder)?

Now of course, it's turning out that running Diane's documents and a game is proving a strain for the computer, so I'm soon to install 2 Gig of RAM in the machine, which I am hoping will make it less painful to switch from citing academic references to bludgeoning aliens.

Mind wins arguments against reality

An amazing piece by filmmaker Errol Morris about how we believe our mind's notions rather than facts presented to us.

"The photo of a man holding a photo of the man in the iconic photo created an associative link much stronger than mere words might have. We see the man who purports to be the Hooded Man in a photograph, holding the Hooded Man photograph.

Years ago I became enamored with the writings of Norwood Russell Hanson, a philosopher and ex-fighter pilot who died at the age of 43 while flying his own plane to a lecture engagement at Cornell. Hanson, among others, pioneered the idea that observations in science are not independent of theory but are, on the contrary, quite dependent on it. In his book, “Patterns of Discovery,” published in 1958, he coined the term “theory-laden” and wrote: “there is more to seeing than meets the eye.” I would like to make an even stronger claim: Believing is seeing."

Global culture, indeed.

Polish rap, bhangra, Bollywood video, and hints of Tuvan throat singing? Genius.

That Pounding Noise is the Sound of Progress

As I type this on the living room couch on a Saturday morning, workers are cutting out the door that leads from our bedroom to the back garden and replacing it with a new door. The old door was both unattractive and falling apart, the latter due to the fact that we live five blocks from the Pacific Ocean and thus have moist salty air pretty much every day (especially at night). Last week they replaced four windows, including one which I had removed and boarded up six years ago.

This kind of renovation is odd, in that you have tons of decisions to make about the windows and doors before they get made, but the actual process of getting them in place is pretty quick. Admittedly, the painting and finishing aren't done yet (too damp to paint today) and the house is a huge mess, but, you know, there is a window. It's sort of like writing software; often the main point of the software is done pretty fast.

Is there anything good about Men?

A seriously fascinating paper on the different cultural rules that men and women follow, how they work together, and how they result in men's increased likelihood of being rich (or homeless), having many children (or none). A brilliant look at how the two different evolutionary paths have led to such different behaviors.

"For women throughout history (and prehistory), the odds of reproducing have been pretty good. Later in this talk we will ponder things like, why was it so rare for a hundred women to get together and build a ship and sail off to explore unknown regions, whereas men have fairly regularly done such things? But taking chances like that would be stupid, from the perspective of a biological organism seeking to reproduce. They might drown or be killed by savages or catch a disease. For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe. The odds are good that men will come along and offer sex and you’ll be able to have babies. All that matters is choosing the best offer. We’re descended from women who played it safe.

For men, the outlook was radically different. If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won’t have children. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. Hence it was necessary to take chances, try new things, be creative, explore other possibilities. Sailing off into the unknown may be risky, and you might drown or be killed or whatever, but then again if you stay home you won’t reproduce anyway. We’re most descended from the type of men who made the risky voyage and managed to come back rich. In that case he would finally get a good chance to pass on his genes. We’re descended from men who took chances (and were lucky)."