A tremendous article from The Atlantic that digs through the files of the longest running study of a group of men, from college-age to death, to get a glimpse of what makes a life and what makes happiness, with a bit more of a skeptical eye than the typical “positive psychology” literature. This reminds me a little bit of famed The Up Series
Photo source: daverton
An interview with some thoughtful answers by Rick McGinnis who until recently wrote a column for the Toronto version of Metro, which along with laying off journalists, has lately been selling off its assets to pay the bills. I met him once or twice through a mutual friend and found him very intelligent and perceptive.
Some interesting CBC and Canada-related stuff at the end:
I actually think CBC Radio is in more viable, but I think they should pare down to one, very basic national station focused on news, weather, and the most politically neutral current affairs programing possible. It sounds unexciting, but providing the country with the most utilitarian radio service imaginable is the essence of their mission. The rest of their programming – all the music and arts and cultural chat show stuff – should go into internet radio channels and podcasts.
I used to work in a record store classical music department back in the ’80s, when classical music aficionados were replacing their LPs with CDs, after which the classical market collapsed. It’s a niche musical interest, and it’s most economically served by small, local broadcasters in cities, not a national, publicly funded radio network.
Basically, I just don’t think you can legislate culture, or fund an audience into existence. We’ve been doing it for years, and there’s never been any kind of unqualified success story; the movie industry has been an exercise in producing films for the smallest possible audiences, and CanCon regulations in music have become completely irrelevant in the internet age. We have to grow up, and the first thing we have to do is shed these old, counterproductive habits and assumptions about building culture, which barely made sense forty years ago, and have become anachronisms today.”
I disagree with the interviewer’s contention that the sitcom has gone the way of the dodo, though. Using Seinfeld as the high water mark for sitcoms seems kind of bizarre given the rise of modern sitcoms like The Office UK (not sure about the American version) and Curb Your Enthusiasm, which in my mind are just as good if not better than Seinfeld, but sure, they don’t use laugh tracks and three-camera setups, so does that mean they aren’t sitcoms?
From The Design of Everyday Things
Now consider the information world of the future. The modern laser disk is capable of holding billions of characters of information.[13] This means that instead of purchasing individual books, we can now purchase whole libraries. One compact disk can hold hundreds of thousands (even millions) of printed pages of information. Whole encyclopaedias can be available at our fingertips, through our computer terminals and television screens. And when every home is connected to a central computer system through improved capacity telephone lines, or the cable television wire, or a rooftop antenna aimed at the neighborhood earth satellite, the information of the world is available to all.
There are two costs for these pleasures. One is economic: it may only cost a few dollars to manufacture a compact disk that contains the contents of one hundred books, but the cost to the consumer will be measured in the hundreds of dollars. After all, each book took an author several years of effort and a publishing house with editors and book designers another three to nine months. Connection to the world’s libraries through the telephone, television, and satellite lines of the world cost money to the telephone, cable, and communication companies. These costs have to be recovered. Those of us who use the computer library search facilities available today know that it is most convenient to have them available but that each second of use is marked by the tension that the costs are piling up. Stop to reflect on something, and your bill increases astronomically. The true costs of these systems are high, and the user’s continual thought that each use exacts a cost is not reassuring.
The second cost is the difficulty of finding anything in such large data bases. I can’t always find my car keys or the book I was reading last night. When I read an interesting article and store it away in my files for some unknown but probable future use, I know at the time I stick it away that I may never be able to remember where I put it. If I already have these difficulties with my own limited possessions and books, imagine what it will be like when trying to find something in the libraries and data bases of the world, where the organization was done by someone else who had no idea of what my needs were. Chaos. Sheer chaos.
The society of the future: something to look forward to with pleasure, contemplation, and dread.
From our man in Honolulu, an interesting article on the man who first came up with the 160-character text message limit. Thus spake Twitter.
A Wired interview with Teller of Penn & Teller that discusses the current collaboration that has been occurring between magicians and neuroscientists, a welding that some have called “magicology”. Along with behavioural economics, I’m loving all these areas of study that are focused on perceptual weaknesses of the brain.
Pretty good overview of the most overused vocal effect by the Village Voice. I’m still loyal to the timeless appeal of vocoders over this FAD!
I never used to be a coffee drinker, and I still mostly drink it for the flavour and less for the effects that I get from it, like a more pronounced acuity or focus when reading or doing tasks. Too much, and I’m twitchy and my hands get cold from the blood vessels constricting. I don’t think I could ever use drugs of any sort to enhance my functioning intentionally, but here’s an article from the New Yorker about those who use drugs like Adderall and modafinil to increase their productivity and fight off fatigue.
It all sounds a little sketchy to me, but given how many people use caffeine for the same reason, and how many societies in the past have used coca-based drugs or potions to achieve various mental states, I don’t know if this is surprising news. Like most things, I doubt there is a free lunch — even those drugs that claim no side-effects don’t have the ability to really foresee what those really are. They might not have near-term effects, but it’s fair to say they can’t predict the long term consequences or effects.
I remember hearing about Jill Price, perhaps while she was still using a pseudonym, a few years ago. She’s a woman who has an incredible memory for events, dates and experiences she’s had, enough so that scientists have chosen to diagnose her with a newly-dubbed syndrome (“hyperthymestic” for her exceptional memory). Here’s a detailed Wired article on her by a cognitive psychologist that goes behind the media hype and figures out the real shape of things.
If Price’s memory of her own history is so precise, why is it so average for everything else? Or, more to the point, if her memory for everything else is so ordinary, why is her memory of her own history so extraordinary? The answer has nothing to do with memory and everything to do with personality.
I saw Joshua Bell play with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra tonight at the Orpheum. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but my girlfriend was blown away by his performance, which seemed impressive but not quite worth the extended standing ovation that the crowd gave him in my opinion. But I’m a hard one to really impress, and don’t give out praise as easily as some. My girlfriend and I spent some time mulling over why she was so taken by his virtuosity — perhaps she had seen enough mediocre violinists growing up with a family that liked to go to the symphony, or maybe I just didn’t really like the violin that much? — but in the end, we had our own opinions.
I did look Bell up though; strangely enough, I had never heard of him before until my girlfriend pointed out his concert tonight. Somehow, the world’s greatest living violinist (to some) was completely off my cultural radar. That seems strange. But it somehow connects to this Pulitzer Prize-winning article that Gene Weingarten wrote in the Washington Post, that explores the subjectivity of beauty and the contextual requirements for its recognition. Joshua Bell dresses as a schlub and plays six of the greatest works of classical music in some non-descript subway station in Washington, and is almost completely ignored by passersby. Is it because they don’t recognize great art when they hear it? Is it because they’re intent on their destinations at jobs that they can’t be late for?
At tonight’s concert, I dropped my cellphone in the darkness under the seats and for a time, thought it was lost. I spent the last several minutes oblivious to the encore Bell was playing, hoping that I wouldn’t have to replace my cellphone and mentally retracing the steps I had taken during the intermission. Had I dropped it while in the lobby? Meanwhile, he was delighting the audience who was paying attention, who had it in their mind that the great Joshua Bell was in front of them and that all focus must be placed on him. But I didn’t care — that thing was going to be a bitch to replace!
I was skimming channels on the television a while ago, which is a rare enough occurrence given the amount of excellent video available outside of a cable subscription and the shoddiness of the basic package I have (if I could figure out how to stream daily local and national news to my television I would probably have unsubscribed long ago), and found myself watching a bit about the Roaring 20s on the Knowledge Network. I got so engrossed by the story that I watched the whole thing, which ended up being about two hours, and ended with “To be continued…” — obviously it was a part of a much larger series.
Turns out it was an eight-part documentary called New York: A Documentary Film
I have an indifferent relationship to New York. I’ve only been once — visiting a grand-uncle in Chinatown and his family in Long Island — and barely remember anything except the interior of the brownstone in which he lived. Being from Toronto, multiculturalism and skyscrapers isn’t a huge attraction to me, and the fact that it was in relatively easy driving distance from my home made it seem somehow less interesting. With the constant demolition and rebuilding in New York, it doesn’t sound like it has the appeal of a real old-world city, or even a place like Montreal, with its religious roots. So I’ve never really felt the siren call from New York City like others have, and have passed aside numerous offers from friends there to visit. Even when I visited London in 2007, with all its history, it held much less charm than Paris, because of the amount of new building and change. I was left a little disappointed because of this — there was nothing really London about London. In the future, all cities will look the same. But this documentary did a great job of bringing the character of New York to life, making New York seem unique, and doing what the best documentaries do, which is planting a seed of interest that didn’t exist before. I might even visit someday.
David MacKay, a physicist in the United Kingdom, produced this self-published book on sustainable energy as a way to cut through the misconceptions surrounding it. I’ve only skimmed it, but it looks very interesting and very detailed, so I’ll have to come back to it later.
In February 2008 I wrote a little ode to steel-cut oats, which I reproduce below:
I’ve been eating steel-cut oatmeal a lot lately. This is not a breakfast that one takes up lightly, not with a preparation time nearing a half hour. You have to really want to eat this oatmeal, because once you’ve started the process, there’s no turning back. (Well, unless you want to dump a pile of half-cooked oats into the trash and tear open the box of Shreddies you have on standby.) I have time, though; I work a day job that I don’t particularly like and I feel no compunction for punctuality, so laziness is the order of the morning. And laziness works quite well with the cooking of steel-cut oatmeal. To be accurate, I’m eating a porridge of steel-cut oats, because these oats aren’t turned into any kind of meal. They’re not steamed and flattened like rolled oats, their essential flavour and texture processed out. Nope, these are the hardy Scots of breakfast cereals, which take a lot of time to wear down and to reveal their pleasantly gritty texture. Add in some salt, raisins, maybe a touch of brown sugar or a splash of milk, and you’re really eating the breakfast of champions, and no mistake. I recommend Bob’s Red Mill steel-cut oats, straight from Milwaukie, Oregon!
That said, there’s no substitute for a giant plate of bacon and eggs.
I still eat them every few days, although the frequency has died down, but a while ago Mark Bittman talked about savoury breakfasts and using tapenade and olive oil with oatmeal. I tried it, and it was tasty the first time. The second time, not so much; there was something about those flavours that overwhelmed the oatmeal. I had noticed prior to reading that article that I did prefer the oatmeal plain, with a little bit of salt and maybe a pat of butter at most, and that it reminded me a lot of the classic Chinese breakfast of congee (rice porridge) that I grew up having on weekends, made by my dad. And with that, I had an epiphany today! I put some Chinese pickled chili turnips in with the oatmeal and it turned it into a perfect savoury breakfast. I wonder if I could get away with cooking it with a chicken leg or turkey, or even thousand year old egg, like they do with congee? Some amazing new breakfast possibilities…
Matt Taibbi on Thomas Friedman — another hilariously profane article, much like his one that dissected AIG recently.
A fellow Vancouverite talks about her time in the presence of Robert (or Willy) Pickton, the notorious pig farmer who killed numerous prostitutes from the Downtown East Side over an extended period of time.
Nifty infographics and a succinct summary of the evolution of office spaces in Wired. Although these days people tend to reference movies like Office Space and television shows like The Office as the ne plus ultra of office comedy, in my mind, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil was one of the first to parody that kind of office culture, among other things. The link makes me recall a scene in the film that made good use of the Tayloristic design, where an exasperated boss played by Ian Holm oversees rows upon rows of his diligent, robotic workers and works himself into a lather over the absence of Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce).
Photo source: studiolindfors
