January 2011
13 posts
1 tag
December 2010
18 posts
1 tag
To a dog, a hammer doesn’t exist. A dog doesn’t act with or on a hammer, so it has no significance to a dog. At least, not unless it overlaps with some other, meaningful object: it is wielded by a loved person; it is urinated on by the cute dog down the street; its dense wooden handle can be chewed like a stick.
I am really, really enjoying this book, you guys.
1 tag
I often treat biological impulses and psychological urges as if they were tasks on a computer. For instance, I have a hunger daemon, a subprocess to keep tabs on my current uptime (fuel, sleep, etc). Breathing cron job.
Dreaming is defragging.
The core biological needs are root, obviously. Getting root access usually requires either extreme self discipline, or drugs. Don’t sudo if you...
2 tags
Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” has had a weird history. From the schmaltzy (but great!) original recording through John Cale’s lyrical rearrangement and Jeff Buckley’s radical reduction, it’s become an object of abstract emotional grammar, used less for its words than for its gestalt feeling and its ability to convey meaningfulness even in the absence of actual meaning. Its aesthetic beauty feels...
1 tag
Songs that go through my head while I perform...
In the car during winter as I blow into and rub my hands together while waiting for the heat to come on:
The Avalanche by Sufjan Stevens Come on, hands! Come on, feet!
Idly wondering how much further I have to drive, usually while waiting for the Maps application to load on my iPhone:
Familiar Ground by The Cinematic Orchestra How near? How far?
Standing in front of the mirror tending to a...
2 tags
VH1 was the first instance of being told that something in the near-past of pop culture was cool, or at least delightfully campy, and presented these relics in such a way that it was easy to quote and talk about with your friends, instead of actually discussing why Back to the Future was actually an important film. Everything became a giant in-joke that everyone was supposed to get.
— Josh...
2 tags
There are two types of videogame: those in which you develop an avatar’s skills, and those in which an avatar develops yours.
Simon Parkin is the only video game reviewer (aside from Ars, natch) that has made it into my RSS feed.
Story games – the Zeldas, Final Fantasies and Metroids – generally fall into the former camp. As you lead these characters on a journey, so they grow and...
The word “information” has grown urgent and... →
Everyone has been linking to this piece and I’m just now settling in to read it but I just wanted to say that I find that first line devastatingly beautiful.
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
3 tags
2 tags
Quantum measurements are governed by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It states that measurements of pairs of physical quantities, such as time and energy or position and momentum, are linked such that the more you know about one, the less you do about the other. If you know exactly where a particle is, you know nothing about its momentum, and vice versa.
When the states of two...