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May 31, 2003
I linked the online exhibits
I linked the online exhibits of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, several weeks ago; I should have also mentioned The National Gallery in London, which has an awesome online catalog of exhibits for your browsing pleasure. It is well organized, and I love the search function.
Each time I've had the pleasure of spending any time in the National Gallery, I always reserve 15-20 minutes for one painting, which is among my all-time favorites. The painting from 1768 entitled 'An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump', by Joseph Wright of Derby, depicts a lecturer demonstrating the creation of a vacuum: a powerful demonstration that air is vital for life. A white cockatoo has been removed from its cage and placed in a covered glass jar, and the air has just been pumped out by a mechanism of pistons and levers. Slowly suffocating, the beautiful bird languishes at the bottom of the cage, one wing stretched out, dead within seconds if air is not let back into its container.
In the room, illuminated by candlelight, several people stare at the glass container in hypnotized fascination. But there are also other reactions. A little girl gazes upon the bird with sadness, pity and dread; one young woman is so overwhelmed that she covers her eyes. A man in a tan coat gestures toward the bird as if explaining the principles of science involved. The largest figure of all, the lecturer, holds his left hand poised on the cap of the jar, waiting for the precise moment to break the seal and let the precious air back in and thus restoring life to the bird.
The painting is beautiful, but there is a deeper meaning here as well. Taken together, the spectators' faces reveal the full range of attitudes about science. Wright's painting is a magnificent synthesis of science and art. The painting is approximately 8 feet wide and 6 feet tall, rendered in near photographic detail. I see new things in the painting every time I visit.
Posted by John at 11:28 PM | Comments (0)
May 29, 2003
Maybe it's all just a
Maybe it's all just a psychogenic fugue. The University offers a course of study in that very state of mind. Most people don't understand UPF, but it's a very liberating path to enlightenment. Suffice it say that the school's Board of Trustees proposed to turn the the college into a theme park called Educationland after the whole teaching staff of its mother institution died from poison mushrooms put in the faculty dinner by its chef, a chorus girl who suffered from the delusion that she actually was a real French chef. Sounds promising.
Posted by John at 10:47 PM | Comments (0)
As if you didn't have
As if you didn't have enough to worry about, I just want to let you know that your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren are screwed.
"March 16, 2880, is the day the asteroid known as 1950 DA, a huge rock two-thirds of a mile in diameter, is due to swing so close to Earth it could slam into the Atlantic Ocean at 38,000 miles per hour."
Unless, of course, Bruce Willis goes into cryo and they can thaw him out in time for him to round up a crew of rough-and-tumble yet charming offshore drilling rig workers and shoot them into space to blow it up with a nuclear bomb.
Posted by John at 10:36 PM | Comments (0)
Apropos of nothing in particular,
Apropos of nothing in particular, here's a little slice-of-life commercial that I thought was hilarious. Maybe you have to have lived it to appreciate it, but it cracked me up.
Posted by John at 10:32 PM | Comments (0)
I heard a commerical on
I heard a commerical on the radio today from a life insurance company that referenced four different profiles of people when they retire: the Ageless Explorers, the Comfortably Content, those who Live for Today and the Sick and Tired. These prototypes apparently emerged from a study entitled “Re-Visioning Retirement,” conducted by the market research firm Harris Interactive and gerontologist Ken Dychtwald, sponsored by AIG SunAmerica, Inc. (conducted in the fall of 2001 with over 1,000 participants). The study set out to identify choices that made for the happiest retirees in hopes that future retirees could learn from them. Of course the whole study was biased, with sponsorship from an insurance company(!), and the answer came out with "financial planning" as the most important thing in the world. Surprise!
Still, while I'm not buying that conclusion, the prototypes identified do seem to pertain. In fact, they seem to me to be personality types that are shaped throughout people's lifetimes. Most of friends are in their 30's and 40's, a long way from retirement, but I have no problem categorizing them under those four criteria, and I have a high degree of confidence in those guesses.
Posted by John at 10:30 PM | Comments (0)
May 27, 2003
Got this one in the
Got this one in the email over the weekend. I guess the Brooklyn Bridge has finally sold out.
Posted by John at 02:23 AM | Comments (0)
May 26, 2003
When the Iraq card decks
When the Iraq card decks were announced, it took about 10 minutes for them to show up on eBay, ripoff versions made from the PDF files that the Defense Dept. had online. Julie and the boys got me the official Iraq Most Wanted Playing Cards for my birthday. Very nifty. If you're shopping for a gift for someone, I'd also recommend the Deck of Weasels, depicting the 54 worst leaders and celebrities who opposed America and were key members of "The United Nations of Weasels." The Ace of Spades? Jacques Chirac, of course. The deck is nicely organized - each suit contains an international politico, an actor, a US congressman and a news anchor. If your lucky gift recipient already has one or both decks, you could always opt for the Supreme Court Justice Rehnquist bobblehead doll.
Posted by John at 10:59 AM | Comments (0)
May 25, 2003
So, say you're on Mars,
So, say you're on Mars, and you want to capture the Earth and Jupiter on the same photograph. What would that look like? How about a 360-degree view from the top of Mount Everest? It's good to have perspective.
Posted by John at 01:05 AM | Comments (0)
Some 60 years ago, the
Some 60 years ago, the BBC established The Reith Lectures, and this year the focus is The Emerging Mind. These are not only great lectures, but you can read them or hear them via streaming audio, your choice. Some of the thoughts expressed in the various lectures are highly speculative, but they are speculation from the world's most cutting-edge brain scientists, and hence are thought-provoking and ultimately fascinating. [via MeFi]
Posted by John at 12:49 AM | Comments (0)
I'm in full agreement with
I'm in full agreement with the admiration expressed by Signal vs. Noise for the article layout at the International Herald Tribune. Three columns, all visible on the page without scrolling, and you just "turn the page" instead of scrolling down. The column widths are perfect for rapid visual parsing; I find I can speed-read these articles many times faster than most web-based text layouts. Nice.
Posted by John at 12:24 AM | Comments (0)
Since my Motorola flip-phone now
Since my Motorola flip-phone now has the battery scotch-taped on, and the antenna nib has broken off leaving an exposed wire (which I conveniently bent at the end to prevent it from slipping irretrievably down into the phone), my mobile communications savior faire is gone. It's time to start looking for a new cell phone. Just looking around at all the stuff that has been mainstreamed in the last twelve months, from embedded digital cameras to Bluetooth technology, I can't imagine trying to evaluate all the options unless you've got at least passing familiarity with most of the technology to start with. (Plus for semi-geeky gizmo guys with short attention spans like me, it's easy to get distracted by things like the new Matrix phone, or the ability to run remote controlled vehicles with your phone.)
I did find one pretty helpful resource in my phone search, though, and that's a screening tool called Phone Finder provided by PhoneScoop.com. If you run that tool, and then (1) double-check your results against a "cutting-edge technologies" site like Gizmodo.com to make sure you aren't missing any of the latest models, and (2) also run The Cell Phone Buying Test at About.com to see if you have similar results, I think you can arrive at the best solution for your calling needs. I did that, and wound up with the Panasonic GU-87. I don't even want the embedded digital camera, but I love the large full color display.
For reference, there's also a pretty good intro to the intricacies of international cell phone coverage at The Travel Insider. It features some nifty tricks, like international callback numbers, for getting those international calling rates down to some reasonable levels.
Posted by John at 12:02 AM | Comments (0)
May 24, 2003
I got a real kick
I got a real kick of this Register article on the Matrix: Reloaded, Matrix Sequel Has Hacker Cred. Here's my favorite quote:
...hackers who've seen the blockbuster are crediting it with a more subtle cinematic
milestone: it's the first major motion picture to accurately portray a hack.
I'd like to interview the "hackers" they talked to. Near the end of the movie, to disarm the electronically triggered explosives on the doors Neo has to enter, Trinity brings down the power of a whole city block by hacking into the Matrix by using Nmap on a laptop running Unix. It's the year 2199 AD, and she's hacking into the self-aware über-computer with command-line entries in Unix? This is "accurately portraying a hack"? Puh-lease. (On the other hand, the holographic displays that the woman in Zion's flight control center was working with? Those were very cool.)
Posted by John at 01:02 AM | Comments (0)
One can only wonder at
One can only wonder at the quality of the market research that went into the decision to take the inflatable church to market. The mind reels.
Posted by John at 12:49 AM | Comments (0)
To make up for the
To make up for the lack of bon mots recently - which I attribute to my embarassment at having gotten sucked into some common, albeit fallacious, explanations for certain phrases, compounded by the untimely demise of the Eat More Words project which I was really looking forward to - I offer a British site, The Phrase Finder, which has over 1,000 commonly used phrases along with exploration of their origins. Phrase Finder also offers some interesting topical groupings - phrases that have their origins in the Bible, phrases derived from Shakespeare, misheard song lyrics (Mondegreens) and so on. For your etymological enjoyment.
Posted by John at 12:45 AM | Comments (0)
Too much travel and too
Too much travel and too busy at work to spend any time at all here recently, so apologies for that. Things like taking the family to see Matrix: Reloaded have taken priority. I do have a few things to add that I've stumbled across this week, though. I just got back from two days in Toronto. The first day I was there, they announced that bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease) had been discovered at an Alberta ranch in Canada. The second day, five confirmed new cases of SARS appeared in Toronto. I figured it was time to get out of there before the Niagara River turned to blood and the frogs showed up.
While we're on a Biblical theme here, I saw one of the many, many interviews with the cast of Matrix: Reloaded, and they were commenting on the fact that there are thousands of web sites dedicated to varying aspects of the philosophy of the Matrix. The Gnostic theme runs strongly throughout the movie, and it is surprising how faithful to the tenets the producers remained. The best book report on the movie I've seen so far comes from Corporate MoFo.
Posted by John at 12:32 AM | Comments (0)
May 19, 2003
Meanwhile, Richard offers up B3TA:
Meanwhile, Richard offers up B3TA: WE LOVE THE WEB as further proof that it is not great minds that think alike, merely weird ones. I'm not sure there's any other theme that emerges from the madness, which is probably because it's a bunch of Brits that put it together. It treads that delicate Python-esque line between rude and silly with a pair of size 12 boots.
Posted by John at 09:44 PM | Comments (0)
May 17, 2003
The World Barbeque Championships are
The World Barbeque Championships are either being held in June in Switzerland (via Mefi), or this weekend in Memphis, depending on who you believe. As a barbeque aficionado, I'm inclined to go with Memphis. Just check out the names of the competing teams, for example.
For Keelhauling nostalgia buffs, a link back to my Big Nate's restaurant review and a Southerner's discourse on the fine art of Barbeque.
Posted by John at 01:25 AM | Comments (0)
May 14, 2003
Interested in game theory as
Interested in game theory as applied to crowd behavior? I bet you are, even though you don't know it yet. Read it, play it, figure it out. The Game.
Posted by John at 09:33 AM | Comments (0)
May 10, 2003
Sorry for the extended absence...
Sorry for the extended absence... and thanks for the emails! Been in Florida for the past 8 days, some R&R and some business conferencing. With the hotels being hit so hard with 9/11 security concerns and SARS, they're trimming costs everywhere, closing down whole floors and making deals. One bad side effect is that it's getting harder and harder to find hotels that offer broadband Internet access, even at the Boca Raton Resort & Club, a.k.a. the pink palace.
Posted by John at 06:40 PM | Comments (0)
Hello, former @Home user who
Hello, former @Home user who is now a former AT& Broadband Internet user, welcome to Comcast! Just for the record, this sucks. They will forward my email to my new address, and webforward my URLs to the new ones until December 2004, which is just exactly about the time it take for me to totally forget about it and get everything screwed when the forwarding services expire. One saving grace is my acquisition of www.parkerfamily.net and www.keelhauling.com. At least I control where any emails to those addresses go. Forever, baby.
Well, forever one year at a time. But I just renewed them for another year!
Posted by John at 06:38 PM | Comments (0)
