Another thing we could learn from the Chinese
I’ve been working with the Forbidden City in Beijing for the last three years. It’s been rewarding in many ways (and hopefully will reward you come June), but maybe my favorite thing is how things are named there. I’m not talking about poor English signage, though that always gets a chuckle. I’m referring to the historical practice of naming buildings in a style that is both humorously literal and exaggeratedly fantastic.
Consider the following.
Pavilion of the Three Friends – OK, but which three? You’re immediately interested in knowing what this place is about, aren’t you? The best kind of place name for a museum of similar-looking buildings.
Hall of Mental Cultivation – A center of learning, right? You got mentally cultivated just reading the name of the place.
Palace of Tranquil Longevity – Definitely a better name than Del Webb’s Sun City. When I get old and crotchety, please put me in a palace of tranquil longevity.
But those are just for beginners. Ratcheting it up a notch we have …
Palace for the Establishment of Happiness – In reality, part of Qianlong’s palace-within-a-palace retirement complex. In your mind, so many naughty things.
Pavilion of Literary Profundity – You think “library”, but you think wrong. It is a book repository. And one of my very favorites.
Pavilion of Auspicious Clarity – Here we move into the abstract, the philosophical. You don’t exactly know what the hell auspicious clarity is, but you want it.
The Palace for Gathering Excellence – And this is why the Chinese are unstoppable. They stockpile excellence.
But my hands-down favorite has got to be …
Hill of Piled Elegance – There’s such a surplus of elegance at the Forbidden City that it must be heaped into a garden mound, presumably for later sorting.
So, starting small, I’ve taken to renaming areas of my own home in this style. Here’s a handy chart.
| kitchen | Hall of Flourishing Sustenance | |
| living room | Palace of The Ceremony of Leisure | |
| basement | Pavilion for Fleeing the Inauspicious Children | |
| bedroom | Watchtower of Eternal Hope | |
| bathroom | Gate of Piled Excrement |
This is bound to pay off. Name important, be important!
Chess with verve
Over the holidays my six-year-old son discovered chess. He picked up the basic piece movements remarkably fast and soon became fixated on special moves like castling, en passant, and pawn promotion. So much so that in some early games performing those moves became his sole motivation.
But the best thing about playing chess with my kid is that it is an un-self-consciously emotional affair. He jumps around, screams at the board, and covers his eyes after he makes a questionable move. This is the way chess should be played. Forget about that computer and the four hour matches. Let’s spice it up with name-calling, body-checking, and post-game emotional meltdowns!
Reminds me of that classic SNL skit with Jim Belushi as a high school chess coach in the style of Bobby Knight. “You call that castling?! Come on! Why don’t you just give him the king?! Give it to him!” (Transcript.)
Isn’t there some sport that involves playing a few moves of chess then boxing or something?
End of the Ride?
We have a second car, a 1994 Honda Accord affectionately referred to as MySweetRide, which I’ve not taken great care of. It’s never seen the inside of a garage, braving the elements in the Deep South and the Fucking Cold North. I don’t drive it very much, but it comes in just handy enough to keep around. At least until we have to make any kind of serious outlay of cash for it. Which may be soon.
You can hear the car idling on the street from my basement. There’s a gaping maw in the dashboard where the stolen stereo once lived. A short in the driver-side door keeps the dome light on. Every hinge creaks like a drawbridge and there’s enough decomposing flora in the shelf where the trunk shuts to compost a medium-sized garden.
And yet, she is loved.
2AM Sunday morning. Awakened by a phone call from friend who had the car*. A screw had punctured a tire and put the trusty steed out of commission a few miles away. (Ironically, the car was being used to transport home a bike that had just gotten a flat tire.) We jacked her up, unlugged the nuts, and then … could not get the damn tire off. Like me, it just didn’t want to let go of the Ride.
We left her for the night.
In the cold light of day we lubed her up and still could not get the tire off. We were about to give up. Just then — and I swear it was quite honestly right then — the dirtiest tow truck I’d ever seen drove up and out leaned a similarly hygienic individual asking if we needed help.
Aw, hell, he’d seen this thing before. He got out of the truck, walked up to the tire and kicked it as hard as he could. Nothin’.
No problem. He reached back into the cab of the truck and pulled out a baseball bat that clearly had a few stories to tell. He scooted under the car and swung for the fences behind the tire. Voila! Off it came. And away he drove, our guardian angel Cooter of Hazzard County.
Of course, the spare was flat. Probably should have seen that coming.
It’s all good now, but it does have me wondering if 2008 is the year I need to put MySweetRide out of its misery.
* You may remember that MySweetRide is at the center of an informal car-sharing service and, as such, has its very own Twitter site.
Update: Due to an overwhelming number of requests to help out in some way (one comment so far) I’ve added a Donate button. The money is pouring in ($1 so far).
Resolved 2008
Last year was the first in a while where I set no specific goals for myself in the new year. Maybe it is because I was tired of batting slightly better than .500. Or maybe I wanted to see what a goal-less year would be like. (Answer: not great.)
In past years I laid them out (2005, 2006), reviewed them midway (2005), and then gave a final assessment (2005, 2006).
This year I’m getting back to it. Shall we place bets?
- Simplify.
Instead of doing ten things at once, do four. For all aspects of my life. - Moderate.
Related to above, but in quantity not complexity. - Start to write a book.
Been researching it for six months now (or is it all my life?). Time to get back to the word. - Make more music.
This one looks promising. There’ll be an announcement soon … - Get back into distance running.
Why? Because it is the simplest, cheapest way to exercise. - Not travel as much.
See point one. See also my family. See also my sanity. - Visit Tibet.
Wha?! I thought you said … Well, I know I’m going to China at least once this year, possibly for the last time in a while. Might as well make it worth it. (And by worth it, I mean riding the Permafrost Express to Lhasa!) - Figure out what I want to be when I grow up.
I’m open to suggestions. - Learn to be ok with doing nothing/being still.
OK, enough of that. Let’s move to the next thing, - Visit more of the neighborhoods of Chicago.
This requires more than just idly ambling around the city which would be inefficient and possibly dangerous. It requires a plan. I have a plan. - Read more books.
You know, books. Spine-bound, pulp-paged tomes. - Eat more slowly.
What occurred to me is that if you can’t recall what something tasted like five minutes after you’ve eaten it, it is time to eat slower. (Or find tastier food, I suppose.)
Begin.
Favorite links of 2007
359 links posted in 365 days. I just went back through them all and plucked out the most unusual, thought-provoking, or interesting of the lot. In my opinion, of course. Kinda interesting (depressing?) to note the trends of topics that capture my attention over time.*
(As a sidenote, if you’re not receiving these links in your subscription to Ascent Stage add this feed here. It combines the main posts with the links. For you site-visitors the links are called Marginalia and are over in the right gutter. All links historically live at del.icio.us.)
Mindstorms Autofabrik
LEGO robots that build LEGOs. How Skynet began.
How to Speak a Book
Richard Powers on writing fiction by dictation. I knew there was something different about the style of his latest novel.
100 Years of the DJ
From “music waiter” to international superstar. A great audio-annotated timeline.
Vintage Charleston video set to Daft Punk
I enjoy watching this very much. The moves at the end are approximately 60 years ahead of their time.
No ducking foie gras law
Doug Sohn, mastermind behind the greatest hot dog joint in Chicago, takes a stand against an asinine law.
Spaceport Sheboygan
Bratwurst Capital of the World and … the Midwest’s only licensed space launch facility? What the hell?
wikisky.org
Space. Annotated.
One Picture, 1,000 Tags
Museums begin to understand the value of user-created descriptive taxonomies. Says the Met: “There’s a huge semantic gap between museums and the public.” Well, yes.
Wrigley Beer Vendors
Trading cards for the most important people in the ballpark. Fantastic.
Music textile
A fabric-based MIDI controller that is interesting because it raises the possibility of a music score itself acting as the instrument.
How to Turn a Book Into a Picture Frame
Creative. Try matching book themes to photo subjects.
The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel
Hilarious recounting of America’s greatest engineering accomplishment. Viva Maciej.
Forget team-building, shoot an after-work music video
This made my day, maybe my week. Apparently these co-workers did this in one take. Watch ’til the end.
Best Venn diagram ever
So, so true. I am not truly happy right now.
a.placebetween.us
Plot a point between two people. Want to find a bar to meet your mate equidistant from you both? This is your app.
Baseball Geography and Transportation
Alex Reisner explains the impact of changing modes of transportation on player culture and ballpark symmetry. Very well done.
reCAPTCHA
OK, this is currently the most brilliant thing I’ve come across in 2007. Simple, beautiful.
Serial Port: A Brief History of Laptop Music
Serious, thoughtful primer on the laptop as more than just a digital turntable.
Incredible! Why Roger Federer may be the most amazing athlete ever
This is not new, but I never tire of watching it. Kudos to Roddick on his sense of humor too.
Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail
A High Line-type project to convert an abandoned elevated rail line into a linear park through Chicago.
Baby monitor in Illinois picks up live video from NASA mission
See also, how John would be arrested for parental negligence.
If Real Life were like Second Life
Giggle. (Love the away person.)
Dunning-Kruger effect
“The phenomenon whereby people who have little knowledge systematically think that they know more than others who have much more knowledge.” I have an in-law who suffers from this. Or rather, the rest of the family suffers from it.
Thousands of rubber ducks to land on British shores after 15 year journey
Amazing story of bath toys washed overboard in the Pacific that have made their way to the Atlantic.
Bud Light Swear Jar
One of the commercials that didn’t air. By far the funniest. I was crying at “Doesn’t count.”
Man(y) With a Movie Camera
Very cool idea for a “remake” of Vertov’s classic with user-submitted clips.
Watch the World(s)
My god. This is wonderful, gorgeous. Vincent would be proud.
People are reading more in the UK than they were in the 1970s
Interestingly counter-intuitive theory: “Books are ideal to fill gaps in people’s schedules – and with busier lives there are more gaps.”
The Manualist
Hand-fart soloist. (Thank you, Internets. Thank you.)
An entire prison does the Thriller dance
Not sure what to say about this except to wonder how many death threats the choreographer got. Impressive organization.
Barry Bonds surpasses Ty Cobb as the Biggest Asshole in Baseball History
Some contest: “Bonds’ Assholery has been enhanced by illegal drug use. Chemically induced “roid-rage” has artificially inflated his numbers. Ty Cobb established his record fueled by nothing more than bourbon and cold, steely hate.”
Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original “Adventure” in Code and in Kentucky
And you thought all English professors did was explain iambic pentameter, eh?
Flickr timeline with Simile
Rob Smart answers my call for a simple timeline view of your Flickr photos. Well done!
Venice charges rude tourists extra
I don’t disagree with this, though it might be nice to have the rudeness quotient work both ways, i.e. a rude shopkeeper discount as well.
Sara and I just got engaged!
Did YOU laser-cut foam core as part of your marriage proposal? No, I didn’t think so.
The immaturity of consumers (or “I want a refund!”)
Glad I am not the only one who thinks that the whining about the iPhone price drop is ridiculous. If you did not think it was worth $600 why did you buy it? (‘Course I’m not going to say no to the $100 rebate.)
x is the new y 2007
Roo Reynolds plots the permutations of x is the new y (e.g., “white is the new black”) based on Google results. Impressive and humorous.
Soundtracker
Fellow baldy Darren Shaw creates a Last.fm for playlists.
Seth’s Blog: Thinking about this war
The War on Terror as a marketing problem.
The Virtual And The Far Away
Gorgeously deserted, compellingly human. From my work pal Jeff Berg.
someecards.com
ecards for when you care enough to hit send
Amazon MP3
Whoa. Millions of songs. Not an iota of rights-management. Your move, Apple.
The Open Workspace Environment: “Where a human becomes a human resource”
Including tips on limiting your odor waft radii, abolishing prairie dogging, comparisons with prison cell square footage, and more.
DOT Unveils Sidewalk Compass Markings
What a great idea. Chicagoans, don’t get your hopes up. The first compass needed by the CTA is to direct it in removing its head from its ass.
Reverse Graffiti
Brilliant. Subtracting grime from walls to create art. But be warned: cleaning a wall may get you arrested.
“The half-life of an irregular verb scales as the square root of its usage frequency.”
That is, the more frequently an irregular verb (to be, to have, etc) is used the less likely it is to evolve into a regular verb (e.g., the past tense of “chide” has become “chided” where in the past it was — wait for it — “chode”.
The Moby Quotient
A handy formula to determine “the degree to which artists besmirch their reputations when they lend their music to hawk products or companies.”
The Future of the Music Business
Hint: one genre of music already provides the model.
Make a Mixa
Forget CD’s. Put your next mix on a cassette tape USB drive. Love it!
Using McDonalds’ As Pizza Toppings
And I thought the Goblin Cock was innovative. As described: “a culinary Frankenstein cooked by Bizarro, a crude combination of deliciousness into an artery-jamming fatty Voltron.”
NeoVictorian Computing
Mark Bernstein’s insights into the software developer as artisan. A good read.
The wisdom of clouds
Cumul.us is a merger of multiple weather feeds, user predictions, and suggestions on what to wear (and buy) to combat the elements. An excellent idea.
This salad container topographic map is genius.
Yes, I would have to say it is.
The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)
Great exposition on the new e-reader from Amazon that people are ga-ga about.
Japan’s melody roads play music as you drive
This is so great. I have often thought that the sound of changing pavement is a lot like half the stuff in my music library. And that’s a good thing.
Forgotten Chicago
Bookmarked so I don’t, you know, forget.
An Open Letter to a Guy I Work With Who Always Comes Into My Office to Tell Me He Sent Me an E-mail Right After He Sends Me an E-mail.
I’d like to append my name to this letter. I HATE when people do this.
Electronic Music Writing Guide
Need to write an electronica review? Here’s your cheat sheet. I particularly like “an arduous slab of Powerbook abstraction.”
The Worst Band Names Of ’07
Worst? I think not! Deny the creativity of this sampling, just try: The Asbestos Tampons, Harmonica Lewinsky, Slut Barf, Coach Said Not To, Bi Furious. And yes, they all have MySpace pages.
Our Dumb World | The Onion
Now an annotated Google Map and Earth layer. A new country is “featured” each week. Hilarious.
You know those computers you see in the movies…
Most of the “fictional interfaces” you see are designed by this guy. What an awesome job to have.
Update:: And here are a few I liked from my stint as Guest Editor of Coudal’s Fresh Signals.
Dopa, funkadelico, scratchare, and suckeroni. Hip Hop Italiano blends American slang and dialect from the bottom of the boot. Viva comic opera.
Zombies vs. Robots, a new comic so conceptually sound it is self-evidently perfect.
Intimate Exchanges is a “multi-play” where two actors make decisions Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style, cycling through 10 characters and 8 different plays. It can be perplexing, but each show is a new experience. Here’s the decision tree.
If you can’t describe it in 17 syllables, perhaps you shouldn’t be drinking it.
This bed sheet with printed rulers should finally give you the data you need to protect your territory.
Underpass as Photoshop. View Layers.
Tom Phillips selectively draws right onto the pages of a Victorian novel. Brian Dettmer takes it a step further and carves into the z-axis of a book. It’s all about layers, you see.
Vader’s labored breathing? Just pausing between sets.
Peter Feigenbaum’s gorgeous model railroad slums.
* Top tags for my links: music, chicago, humor, space, design, art, maps, tools, language, travel, video, visualization, china, secondlife, photography, nasa, google, lego, mashup, ibm, architecture, mac, museum, blog, books, cubs, map, audio, baseball, flickr, ipod, history, web2.0, baby, film, parenting, social, web, gadget, itunes. Yep, that’s pretty much me.
Favorite posts of 2007
Personal blogging is by definition a bit narcissistic. Compiling a list of your own favorite posts of the year, well, that’s downright solipsistic. But so it is. Here’s the best of this year, in easy-to-digest narrative format.
I started 2007 strong by challenging a MacArthur Genius and getting it handed right back to me. Beaten, I went to Russia and contemplated empire. Not content with the glories of the past, I experienced our glorious future of levitating trains in Shanghai.
Full of the future, I discoursed on how to change the world in the here and now, remembering our human knack for figuring out how to destroy the planet utterly. I started local, though, helping envision a better sewer.
But that was all so deep. So I got drunk on a rooftop and focused on the people who really matter, including those I never had a chance to meet. This all led to the meaning of life, naturally.
Now enlightened, I was able to pull back into my iPod-shell and dream of random things. Then I took my parents to Italy on a journey that was both wonderful and harrowing and learned how nothing is ever really random. Like Star Wars, just one story in a much larger universe.
So I relaxed by shooting rockets at friends and, ahem, aiming for the cornhole. Too much of a good thing, but of course nature has a way of balancing things out.
I shook my fist at the natural world and turned to man-machine interfaces and technological humanism. Take that!
But I was too bold. The long arm of the law, aided by border paranoia and Big Business, nearly got me for the love of artisanal fakery.
Nothing left to do at this point but have fun, so thelovelywife and I organized a small get-together.
And that, friends, was 2007.
Here’s last year’s best-of. For god’s sake, is anything improving around here?
Most played music of 2007
| last year | ||
| 1 | Biosphere | 1 |
| 2 | Fatboy Slim | — |
| 3 | Aphex Twin | 17 |
| 4 | Office | — |
| 5 | Sufjan Stevens | 2 |
| 6 | Tycho | — |
| 7 | Justice | — |
| 8 | Mike Relm | 11 |
| 9 | Ulrich Schnauss | 15 |
| 10 | Apparat | — |
| 11 | Amon Tobin | — |
| 12 | Der Dritte Raum | 6 |
| 13 | Ladytron | 12 |
| 14 | Air | — |
| 15 | Matthew Dear | — |
| 16 | LFO | — |
| 17 | The Black Dog | — |
| 18 | Shpongle | — |
| 19 | MSTRKRFT | — |
| 20 | Jóhann Jóhannsson | — |
Interesting how few artists made it on the list from last year. Sorta proud of that. Biosphere of course is unassailable, as ol’ Geir accompanies most night’s trips to sleep. The list is Most Played, you see, not Most Actually Heard.
As I compile these stats year after year it is becoming clear the bias built in. For one, iTunes/Last.fm doesn’t do a great job of logging very long tracks — such as unbroken DJ/live sets — which this year accounted for much of my listening. Not sure a track is logged unless its end is reached, so though I could listen to an hour of a set if I don’t hit the end it is statistically invisible. Also, since I don’t automatically synch music to my iPhone or iPod iTunes never knows about play counts that happens outside of itself. This also skews things mightily since so much of what I listen to is not in front of my computer.
Vinicolor
The idea: use red wine to make a watercolor painting.
Why is this concept art?
A) Because what I tried to paint was the town seal of Barile, my great-grandparents’ home town in Italy
B) Because the wine is Aglianico del Vulture, grown in and around Barile, from the winery of the Paternosters, our distant relatives
C) Because the paper is from Amalfi, Italy, waypoint on our trip this summer
D) Because I am an awful painter, but the concept is quite good
E) All of the above
It can be done well — as this site, where I got the idea, shows.
The thing is, wine is a tough medium. Each time you put the brush to the paper, which in this case was 100% cotton, the wine dab pooled momentarily and then chose the rivulet of least resistance and poured into it. More topographical analysis and fluid dynamics than art, really.
Kinda makes a nice Rorschach though. Do you see an iPod?
All of you on the good Earth
Did I choose to write this post? Or was it chosen for me?
We almost have the house back in order after the cataclysm two weeks ago. One upside to reconstructing the basement is that lots of books have to be put back in place and this has given me the pleasure of rediscovering a bunch of titles I’d forgotten about.
This past week I grabbed two volumes, completely at random, on two separate trips to the toilet: Stephen Hawking’s The Universe in Nutshell and The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Admittedly, not exactly bathroom fare, but such was what laid about en route.
And this is where it gets odd. Not too far into my first, um, session I randomly opened the philosophy encyclopedia to the entry on Molina, Luis de (1535 – 1600). Molina was a Spanish theologian best known for his doctrine of “middle knowledge,” a way of reconciling human free will with the predetermination implicit in the idea of divine grace:
Middle knowledge, God’s knowledge of what persons would do under any set of circumstances, enables God to arrange for certain human acts to occur by pre-arranging the circumstances surrounding a choice without determining the human will.
Basically Molina has it both ways. God has foreknowledge of what humans will do but only because he knows all the possible choices that humans can freely make in the omnipotently-arranged circumstances. He doesn’t direct people’s actions, just sets the stage. And because He set it, He gets to know the possible acts that can be played out on it. The elegance of this proposition, it seems to me, is that it comports with a purely rational view of the world. Remove the deity from Molina’s equation and it is still entirely valid as a description of how people act.
During my next visit to the W.C, I had the Hawking book, a really beautiful follow-up to his Brief History of Time. Just flipping it open I landed in chapter three where he discusses histories of the universe:
Even if the boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary, it won’t have just a single history. It will have multiple histories …. There will be a history in imaginary time corresponding to every closed surface, and each history in imaginary time will determine a history in real time. Thus we have a superabundance of possibilities for the universe. What picks out the particular universe that we live in from the set of all possible universes?
Hawking’s answer invokes the “anthropic principle” which basically states that “the universe has to be more or less as we see it, because if it were different, there wouldn’t be anyone here to observe it.” Might seem like circular reasoning, but it makes complete sense, especially if you flip it around: humans would not exist to think about alternate universes in the first place if we did not inhabit one that could sustain intelligent life. So that’s why we’re in this one.
We can conceptualize alternate histories (e.g., one in which I posted about how much I love taco pizza instead of this rambling) and posit parallel universes that behave differently than ours, but we can only ever know the one we’re carving a path through. Not because the choices have been made for us, but because we are choosing from the finite number of paths that are permissible given the universe we live in.
Now, I’m no philosopher and, though I really did want to be an astrophysicist when I was little, I am regrettably not a member of that profession either. But it seems to me that Molina and Hawking are describing the same thing, essentially. Or something very similar, anyway. Haven’t fully parsed it all out yet.
In a way, both acknowledge that the sum of one’s choices — one’s personal “history” — is constrained in some external way (Molina by God; Hawking by the physical properties of the universe). What I find interesting is that they both also suggest a kind of human obliviousness to this constraint that allows us to live as though we were fully in control. Whatever I’m reading into these two passages, it is strangely comforting to me.
And the fact that I just randomly opened to two passages both related to free will? Well that’s just spooky.
See also: “Gone out of experience”
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
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