| Inspired by the LOST finale, was reading up about Jeremy... |
[02 Jun 2008|11:41pm] |
12:57 02.06.2008
Inspired by the LOST finale, was reading up about Jeremy...
Inspired by the LOST finale, was reading up about Jeremy Bentham. He was an amazing guy--a former child prodigy (just like his friend and fellow paragon of Utilitarianism, J.S. Mill) and an astonishingly liberal thinker. He was also, among other things, the inventor of the panopticon and responsible for convincing Adam Smith to advocate letting interest rates regulate themselves. Moreover, he went out in style:
As requested in his will, his body was preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet, termed his "Auto-icon". Originally kept by his disciple Dr. Southwood Smith,[11] it was acquired by University College London in 1850. The Auto-icon is kept on public display at the end of the South Cloisters in the main building of the College. For the 100th and 150th anniversaries of the college, the Auto-icon was brought to the meeting of the College Council, where he was listed as "present but not voting".[12] Tradition holds that if the council's vote on any motion is tied, the auto-icon always breaks the tie by voting in favour of the motion.
The Auto-icon has always had a wax head, as Bentham's head was badly damaged in the preservation process. The real head was displayed in the same case for many years, but became the target of repeated student pranks including being stolen on more than one occasion. It is now locked away securely.
The picture is priceless. The "cabinet" is more like a telephone booth, and Bentham looks like a ventriloquist's puppet. People were so tiny in the 19th century!
Tangentially related: The average man storming the Bastille in 1789 was 5 feet ZERO, and 100 pounds--he looked not like a valiant solider, but like a "thirteen year old girl." You'll learn that and more in Burkhard Bilger's fascinating article about height from a few years back. (link)
read more at kottke.org
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| I have lots of friends who make their living in advertising;... |
[02 Jun 2008|11:41pm] |
14:58 02.06.2008
I have lots of friends who make their living in advertising;...
I have lots of friends who make their living in advertising; I myself live off of it, indirectly. But nonetheless, I hate it by in large, and I always looked forward to time that new media would at least marginalize the extent of billboards and their visual pollution. Not even close. A new technology is adding the one thing that billboards have lacked: demographic data.
For the most part, they are still a relic of old-world media, and the best guesses about viewership numbers come from foot traffic counts or highway reports, neither of which guarantees that the people passing by were really looking at the billboard, or that they were the ones sought out.
Now, some entrepreneurs have introduced technology to solve that problem. They are equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by--their gender, approximate age and how long they looked at the billboard. These details are transmitted to a central database.
I'm thinking that this will mean crazier and crazier billboards in every nook of big cities like NYC--big companies will see that the same demographics of a glossy magazine are available on select corners, on the cheap. And they'll respond by simply plastering ads on every inch of downtown New York that's still naked.
An editor of mine once told me his job was to "make something that kept the ads from sticking together." Now, perhaps the goal of every business on every street corner could be seen as providing a pleasant interlude between "ad impressions"? (link)
read more at kottke.org
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| An amazing story about Oscar Kokoschka, one of the three... |
[02 Jun 2008|11:41pm] |
16:22 02.06.2008
An amazing story about Oscar Kokoschka, one of the three...
An amazing story about Oscar Kokoschka, one of the three great giants of Viennese expressionist art (the others being Klimt and Schiele). From The Nonist:
I wonder whether any of you have seen the film Lars and the Real Girl? It was a sweet, chaste sort of film considering its casting of a Real Doll as the female lead, and though I enjoyed it I couldn't help but spend its entire length being reminded of the altogether less sweet, less chaste, true life corollary of "Oscar and the Alma Doll."
(link)
read more at kottke.org
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| Felix Salmon ponders why people for some reason tend not... |
[02 Jun 2008|11:41pm] |
19:20 02.06.2008
Felix Salmon ponders why people for some reason tend not...
Felix Salmon ponders why people for some reason tend not to pony up for good food, but will pony up for good wine:
Why does food behave in the opposite manner to wine, in this respect? The same bottle of wine, we know, will taste better the more expensive it is. Yet while price reassures us in the case of wine, and even intimidates us into liking the bottle more, it seems to serve no such role in the case of food, where we're much more likely to consider a high price a sign of being ripped off.
I've thought about this before; basically I refuse to pay a lot for wine but I'll pay a good deal for great food. My argument: Compare a $10 bottle of wine to $100 bottle of wine. If they're both great, the more expensive bottle won't be ten times more delicious. And either way, you're unlikely to notice the deliciousness after a glass and a half.
Compare that to a $10 plate of food versus a $40 plate of food. If you're careful with your restaurant choice, I'm betting the $40 plate of food potentially can be at least four times better than the cheaper one. (Though cheap, amazing meals are always out there.) And you'll probably enjoy every single bite. As a corollary, I really do think EVERY great restaurant, if they're as serious about their food as they are about their receipts, will offer cheap bottles on their menu. One example: Babbo. Though I think the restaurant isn't as great as it once was, Batali has always offered bottles below $40.
Update: I just remembered that even Per Se offers cheap bottles--$35, if I recall right--at dinner.
Update 2: After an interesting conversation I had with Michael, I got to thinking what it might mean to say a one subjective experience--like the taste of a meal--is "four times" better than another. And I think there's a simple way to quantify it: Would you recall, with fondness, the experience of one four times as often as the experience of the other? Take my experience at Per Se, for example: I've told the story of that meal--the food, not the setting--many many times. At least 20 times as often as I've told people about the deliciousness of the duck at my favorite noodle shop. And the meal probably cost about 20 times more. (link)
read more at kottke.org
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| IEEE Spectrum, which has quickly become a magazine as good as... |
[02 Jun 2008|11:41pm] |
20:45 02.06.2008
IEEE Spectrum, which has quickly become a magazine as good as...
IEEE Spectrum, which has quickly become a magazine as good as any out there--including the New Yorker, Wired, what have you--has a new issue devoted only to Kurzweil's idea of a singularity: That once computers possess greater-than-human intelligence, it will trigger a cascade of changes in how we live. So the question is, when will the singularity come, and from what arena? What are the limits and impetuses for it's development? The issue isn't a self-parody of futurism, but there's plenty of blow-your-mind angles:
On consciousness, we have John Horgan, whose book The Undiscovered Mind describes how the mind resists explanation. We also have Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi, neuroscientists who specialize in consciousness. Rodney Brooks, of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, weighs in on the future of machine intelligence. IEEE Spectrum journalism intern Sally Adee reports on a wildly ambitious effort, just gathering steam now, to map the human brain in enough detail to learn its secrets--and eventually re-create it. Robin Hanson, an economist, describes a future in which capitalist imperatives and technological capabilities drive each other toward a society that the word weird doesn't even begin to describe. Nanotechnology researcher Richard Jones, philosopher Alfred Nordmann, and semiconductor researcher Bill Arnold all consider aspects of singularitarian visions and explain where they're myopic.
(link)
read more at kottke.org
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| ● Hasta Lasagna |
[02 Jun 2008|11:41pm] |
23:08 02.06.2008
● Hasta Lasagna
So Jason K., the man, the myth, is, as I write, crossing the Atlantic in one single bound, on his way back from merry olde England. Which means that I am going back to my long, cryogenic sleep, to dream about the finer things in life, such as Angela Lansbury's sexuality, dinosaur bones, lasers, and circuses. It's been fun while it's lasted. Many thanks to all of you kind enough to write in with nice things to say about my run. Until next time, I'll be at my own, slightly ruder blog, Delicious Ghost (which is dedicated to oddities and visual culture), and sundry other dead-tree places. Keep your feet on the ground, and keep reachin' for the stars.
read more at kottke.org
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