Maxistentialism

nique: Mark Bird, The Space Gardener.

Sat, 25 May 2013 12:41:04 -0500

Mark Bird, The Space Gardener.

polypblog: Ladies and gentlemen: the House of...

Fri, 24 May 2013 00:11:45 -0500

Ladies and gentlemen: the House of Lords.

“Could I ask the chairman of the committee why myself and these noble lords should trust the executive to deal with mice when they can’t deal with the economy?”

Another day, another Cards Against Humanity marriage proposal.

Thu, 23 May 2013 23:17:40 -0500

Another day, another Cards Against Humanity marriage proposal.

AlterNet: Californians Doug and Catherine Snodgrass are suing their son’s high school for allowing...

Thu, 23 May 2013 13:37:00 -0500

AlterNet:

Californians Doug and Catherine Snodgrass are suing their son’s high school for allowing undercover police officers to set up the 17-year-old special-needs student for a drug arrest.

In a video segment on ABC News, they say they were “thrilled” when their son — who has Asperger’s and other disabilities and struggled to make friends — appeared to have instantly made a friend named Daniel.

“He suddenly had this friend who was texting him around the clock,” Doug Snodgrass told ABC News. His son had just recently enrolled at Chaparral High School.

“Daniel,” however, was an undercover cop with the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department who “hounded” the teenager to sell him his prescription medication. When he refused, the undercover cop gave him $20 to buy him weed, and he complied — not realizing the guy he wanted to befriend wanted him behind bars.

In December, the unnamed senior was arrested along with 21 other students from three schools, all charged with crimes related to the two officers’ undercover drug operation at two public schools in Temecula, California (Chaparral and Temecula Valley High School). This March, Judge Marian H. Tully ruled that Temecula Valley Unified School District could not expel the student, and had in fact failed to provide him with proper services.

“Within three days of the officer’s requests, [the] student burned himself due to his anxiety,” Tully said. “Ultimately, the student was persuaded to buy marijuana for someone he thought was a friend who desperately needed this drug and brought it to school for him.”

Excellent use of public resources.

"Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed in the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:52:21 -0500

“Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed in the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of universal being circulate through me; I am a part or particle of God. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tumblr’s new ad sales pitch deck: “Brands finally...

Tue, 21 May 2013 17:20:58 -0500

Tumblr’s new ad sales pitch deck: “Brands finally are front and center.”

Ship Destroyer by Frog Eyes

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:25:52 -0500

Ship Destroyer by Frog Eyes

Douglas Hofstadter: [Will the mind one day understand itself?] Depends on what you mean by...

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:50:10 -0500

Douglas Hofstadter:

[Will the mind one day understand itself?] Depends on what you mean by understand itself. If you mean in broad-principle terms if we will come to understand things, yeah, I don’t see why not. For example, I like to look back at Freud. I don’t know when it was that he first published his ideas about the ego, the id and the superego, and I don’t know how much truth there is to those ideas, but it was a big leap even if it wasn’t completely correct, because nobody had ever spoken of the abstract architecture of a human soul or a human self. It’s as if he were saying that a self can be thought of in an abstract way, the way a government is thought of, with a legislative branch, a judicial, an executive, and he was making guesses at what the architecture of a human self is. And maybe they were all wrong, but it doesn’t matter; the point is it was a first stab. Like the Bohr atom, it was a wonderful intuitive leap.

Q: So it’s fine to say, everybody should learn a little bit about how to program and this way of thinking because it’s valuable and important. But then maybe that’s just not realistic. Donald Knuth told me that he thinks two percent of the population have brains wired the right way to think about programming.

Mon, 20 May 2013 19:58:04 -0500

Q: So it’s fine to say, everybody should learn a little bit about how to program and this way of thinking because it’s valuable and important. But then maybe that’s just not realistic. Donald Knuth told me that he thinks two percent of the population have brains wired the right way to think about programming.
Hal Abelson: That same logic would lead you to say that one percent of the US's population is wired to understand Mandarin. The reasoning there is equivalent.

Q: Will you restrict content on Tumblr?

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:54:21 -0500

Q: Will you restrict content on Tumblr?
Mayer: No, we don't. It's the nature of user-generated content.

"My solitude doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:19:13 -0500

“My solitude doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche

Another Cards Against Humanity marriage proposal; I designed the...

Mon, 20 May 2013 15:17:23 -0500

Another Cards Against Humanity marriage proposal; I designed the cards for this one.

"Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was..."

Sun, 19 May 2013 18:07:02 -0500

“Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.”

- Ludwig Wittgenstein (via stickyembraces)

"[Yahoo!] killed a lot of good startups, wasted a lot of engineers’ time, etc. Perhaps I spent too..."

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:07:00 -0500

“[Yahoo!] killed a lot of good startups, wasted a lot of engineers’ time, etc. Perhaps I spent too much time inside that particular sausage factory… I wish I had not sold it to them. The cash and freedom do not even come close; I would rather work on a big, popular product.”

- Joshua Schachter, on Delicious (via azspot)

"So, Yahoo’s finally decided to close Upcoming.org, the events community I started nearly ten..."

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:06:38 -0500

“So, Yahoo’s finally decided to close Upcoming.org, the events community I started nearly ten years ago. And, in Yahoo’s typical fuck-off-and-die style, they’re doing it with 11 days notice, no on-site announcement, and no way to back up past events. I knew its closure was inevitable after the infamous sunset slide, but never knew when it would happen. Like a newspaper prepping for a sick celebrity, this obituary’s been sitting in my drafts folder for months, waiting for its sad publication day.”

- Andy Baio, on Upcoming.org

Discovery: Ancient lore has suggested that the Vikings used...

Sat, 18 May 2013 10:31:33 -0500

Discovery:

Ancient lore has suggested that the Vikings used special crystals to find their way under less-than-sunny skies. Though none of these so-called “sunstones” have ever been found at Viking archaeological sites, a crystal uncovered in a British shipwreck could help prove they did indeed exist.

The crystal was found amongst the wreckage of the Alderney, an Elizabethan warship that sank near the Channel Islands in 1592. The stone was discovered less than 3 feet (1 meter) from a pair of navigation dividers, suggesting it may have been kept with the ship’s other navigational tools, according to the research team headed by scientists at the University of Rennes in France.

A chemical analysis confirmed that the stone was Icelandic Spar, or calcite crystal, believed to be the Vikings’ mineral of choice for their fabled sunstones, mentioned in the 13th-century Viking saga of Saint Olaf.

Today, the Alderney crystal would be useless for navigation, because it has been abraded by sand and clouded by magnesium salts. But in better days, such a stone would have bent light in a helpful way for seafarers.

Because of the rhombohedral shape of calcite crystals, “they refract or polarize light in such a way to create a double image,” Mike Harrison, coordinator of the Alderney Maritime Trust, told LiveScience. This means that if you were to look at someone’s face through a clear chunk of Icelandic spar, you would see two faces. But if the crystal is held in just the right position, the double image becomes a single image and you know the crystal is pointing east-west, Harrison said.

These refractive powers remain even in low light when it’s foggy or cloudy or when twilight has come. In a previous study, the researchers proved they could use Icelandic spar to orient themselves within a few degrees of the sun, even after the sun had dipped below the horizon.

David Fry: Herbert Dow founded Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan when he invented a way to produce...

Sat, 18 May 2013 09:33:02 -0500

David Fry:

Herbert Dow founded Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan when he invented a way to produce bromine cheaply. He sold the chemical for industrial purposes all over the US for 36 cents per pound at the turn of the 20th Century. He couldn’t go overseas, however, because the international market was controlled by a giant German chemical cartel that sold it at a fixed price of 49 cents per pound. It was understood that the Germans would stay out of the US market so long as Dow and the other American suppliers stayed within its borders.

Eventually Dow’s business was in trouble and he had to expand. He took his bromine to England and easily beat the cartel’s fixed price of 49 cents per pound. Things were okay for a while until a German visitor came to Michigan and threatened Dow that he had to cease and desist. Dow didn’t like being told what to do and told the cartel to get lost.

Shortly thereafter German bromine started appearing for sale in the US for 15 cents per pound, way below Dow’s price. The cartel flooded the US market, offering the chemical way below their own costs, intending to drive Dow out of business. But Dow outsmarted them. He stopped selling in the US market entirely and instead arranged for someone to secretly start buying up all the German bromine he could get his hands on. Dow repackaged it as his own product, shipped it to Europe, and made it widely available (even in Germany) at 27 cents per pound. The Germans were wondering 1) why wasn’t Dow out of business and 2) why was there suddenly such demand for bromine in the US??

The cartel lowered its price to 12 cents and then 10 cents. Dow just kept buying more and more, gaining huge market share in Europe. Finally the Germans caught on and had to lower their prices at home. Dow had broken the German chemical monopoly and expanded his business greatly. And customers got a wider range of places to buy bromine at lower prices.

Dow went on to do the same trick to the German dye and magnesium monopolies. This is now the textbook way to deal with predatory price cutting.

All Things D: According to sources close to the situation, the Yahoo board plans to meet Sunday...

Sat, 18 May 2013 00:20:57 -0500

All Things D:

According to sources close to the situation, the Yahoo board plans to meet Sunday night to decide whether to approve a $1.1 billion all-cash offer for New York-based blogging site Tumblr.

[…]

According to numerous sources, [Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer] started an intense focus on Tumblr about six weeks ago and determined quickly that the fast-growing content site, turbocharged by mountains of user-generated content, was just the kind of property that Yahoo needed to make it both “cool” and relevant to new audiences.

I love turbocharging things with mountains of content.

"A zygote is a gamete’s way of producing more gametes. This may be the purpose of the universe."

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:44:39 -0500

“A zygote is a gamete’s way of producing more gametes. This may be the purpose of the universe.”

- Heinlein

"A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg."

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:44:15 -0500

“A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.”

- Samuel Butler