Instead of an Email...

East of Camelot- Skilly (by lau15899) Very funny UWCSEA East...

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 21:01:00 +0800

East of Camelot- Skilly (by lau15899)

Very funny UWCSEA East video of Skilly dancing to 60s music to advertise a GC dance this Friday….

ilovecharts: First Illustrated Quote Chart from I Love...

Fri, 24 May 2013 14:23:12 +0800

First Illustrated Quote Chart from I Love Chart-ist Reader Submission!

“After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.” – Oscar Wilde

Thanks to likethatofarainbow for the quote! Oscar Wilde was definitely a character, and if anyone were to be given the opportunity to hang out with him (in the afterlife… obviously) I’m sure they would appreciate this guide to rely upon.

So thrilled to see Maggie’s charts on I Love Charts….

explore-blog: In his fantastic SVA commencement address on the...

Sun, 19 May 2013 15:54:23 +0800

explore-blog:

In his fantastic SVA commencement address on the false division between “high” and “low” culture, critic Greil Marcus adds to history’s finest definitions of art.

(via Mr. Messy (Mr. Men Classic Library): Amazon.co.uk: Roger...

Sun, 19 May 2013 14:25:19 +0800

(via Mr. Messy (Mr. Men Classic Library): Amazon.co.uk: Roger Hargreaves: Books)

The Mr. Men books have been in the UK news recently.

See the May 9th Guardian article: Michael Gove attacks use of Mr Men in iGCSE history lessons — Education secretary claims use of Mr Men characters to study Hitler is symptom of culture of low expectations

One of the commentaries led me to Hamilton Richardson’s series of reviews of the Mr. Men books on the UK Amazon site.

Priceless.

5.0 out of 5 stars Unsettling Echoes of Josef K, 28 Feb 2010

This review is from: Mr. Messy (Mr. Men Classic Library) (Paperback)

If ‘1984’ or ‘The Trial’ had been a children’s book, Mr Messy would be it. No literary character has ever been so fully and categorically obliterated by the forces of social control. Hargreaves may well pay homage to Kafka and Orwell in this work, but he also goes beyond them.

We meet Mr Messy - a man whose entire day-to-day existence is the undiluted expression of his individuality. His very untidiness is a metaphor for his blissful and unselfconscious disregard for the Social Order. Yes, there are times when he himself is a victim of this individuality - as when he trips over a brush he has left on his garden path - but he goes through life with a smile on his face.

That is, until a chance meeting with Mr Neat and Mr Tidy - the archetypal men in suits. They set about a merciless programme of social engineering and indoctrination that we are left in no doubt is in flagrant violation of his free will. ‘But I like being messy’ he protests as they anonymize both his home and his person with their relentless cleaning activity, a symbolism thinly veiled.

This process is so thorough that by the end of it he is unrecognizable - a homogenized pink blob, no longer truly himself (that vibrant Pollock-like scribble of before). He smiles the smile of a brainwashed automaton, blandly accepting what he has been given no agency to question or refuse. It is in this very smile that the sheer horror of what we have seen to occur is at its most acute.

Somewhere behind this blank expression though is a latent anger - a trace of self-knowledge as to what he once was - in the barbed observation he makes to Neat and Tidy that they have even deprived him of his name.

The book ends with a dry reminder from Hargreaves that just as with the secret police in some totalitarian regime, our own small expressions of uniqueness and volition may also result in a visit from these sinister suited agents.

Sam just came back from seeing the British Museum traveling exhibit on the Egyptians at the Art...

Sun, 19 May 2013 14:14:37 +0800

Sam just came back from seeing the British Museum traveling exhibit on the Egyptians at the Art & Science Museum here in Singapore, so we were discussing mummies.

I told him my father told me that Maine paper mills used to use old cotton mummy wrappings to make paper.

Luckily Wikipedia was able to provide some confirmation….

“Dard Hunter is a well-known paper researcher and cataloguer and a proponent of handmade paper. His book, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft, relates the experiments of I. Augustus Stanwood in both ground-wood paper and mummy paper. Hunter received his information from Stanwood’s son Daniel, a professor of international law. According to Daniel, during the American Civil War his father was hard-pressed for materials for his Maine mill. As such, he imported mummies from Egypt, stripped the bodies of their wrappings and used this material for making paper. Several shiploads of mummies were brought to the mill in Gardiner, Maine and were thus used to make a brown wrapping paper for grocers, butchers and other merchants. Professor Stanwood continues on to report that the rags supposedly caused a cholera outbreak among the workers since there were no standards for disinfection at this time. However, since cholera is actually a bacterium, it is unlikely that active disease cells could have survived for centuries in the wrappings, meaning the outbreak at the plant was likely either from poor personal hygiene of the workers or from dirty rags recently imported from deceased Europeans, primarily Frenchmen and Italians, rather than the mummy rags.[12]”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_paper

popchartlab: “Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one...

Sat, 18 May 2013 12:29:56 +0800

popchartlab:

“Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.”

Ron Swanson rocks.

For you, Sam….

The following is about my friend Julia’s father…. It’s an excerpt from The New...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 13:22:18 +0800

The following is about my friend Julia’s father….

It’s an excerpt from The New Statesman as it celebrates its centenary as a publication:

One person who is still with us is Norman Mackenzie, who joined the NS as assistant editor in 1943 after being recommended to the editor Kingsley Martin by Harold Laski of the LSE. Norman, who is 91, had been forced to leave the RAF because of ill health and, as he writes on page 104, his interview took place at Martin’s cottage in the north Essex village of Little Easton, near Dunmow. It went well. Norman remained on the paper until 1962, when the then editor, John Freeman, called him the “rock on which the best of the NS has been founded”. He went on to have a distinguished career as an academic at Sussex University, where he founded, with others, the Open University and wrote many books. His political journey took him from the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party to Labour and then the Social Democratic Party.

Last year, Norman was given only two months to live and yet, although in poor health, he remains resilient and lucid. I met him for the first time last autumn when the historian Hugh Purcell and I visited him at the home he shares with his wife, Gillian, in Lewes, Sussex. I returned to see him again in February, only to find that he’d broken his hip in a fall and was confined to bed.

Although it was late morning we opened a bottle of champagne and sat beside Norman as he talked without sentimentality and with great wit and epigrammatic flair about his days on the NS – about Martin (“He was the epitome of his readers, instinctively understood them and was never a bore”), George Orwell (“He was a difficult man; no one was close to George”), J B Priestley, the cartoonist Vicky, C H Rolph, Asa Briggs (“The only man I know who was ever a snob about himself”), Richard Crossman (“He was an awful New Statesman editor, the sort of man who would review his own books”), Arthur Koestler (“a clever shit”) and others.

“Here’s to the next 50 years,” he said, raising his glass and looking at me. “You might even make it.”

Asked by Hugh if he knew the spy George Blake, Norman said: “One does have standards, my dear.” Of Dorothy Woodman, Martin’s partner, he said: “There was something not quite right with her. I got on with her badly very well, if you see what I mean.”

Norman stopped reading the NS when it became preoccupied with what he called the “silly left”. He started reading it again last year. “It’s like coming back to the place after 30 years away to find someone has been polishing the doorknobs.” It’s wonderful to have the chance to publish him in this issue.

As I left Norman’s house at the end of that first visit, he accompanied me to the door. “It’s terrible being 90,” he said. I knew that his wife was religious and I asked if he, too, was a believer. “No, it’s a load of nonsense,” he said. “But I’m not afraid. I just hope there isn’t too much pain at the end.” We shook hands and I left him there, a tall, slightly stooped figure, standing in the doorway as he peered out at the rain, his arm raised in a formal gesture of farewell.

Norman is approaching the end of his life and is a last, cherished link to the old world of Kingsley Martin’s New Statesman and Orwell’s London. When he’s gone, there will be no one left to recall what it was like to work at the Great Turnstile offices during the Second World War, when the NS became a dominant publication in the culture, capturing the mood and articulating the hopes and aspirations of a generation.

"Reader was made for absurdly ambitious readers. It’s designed for people like me—or, rather, for..."

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 05:59:00 +0800

“Reader was made for absurdly ambitious readers. It’s designed for people like me—or, rather, for people like the person I used to be—that is, for people who really do intend to read everything…. Using Twitter feels, to me, like joining a club; Reader felt like filling up a bookcase.”

- Farewell, Dear Google Reader : The New Yorker

I’m going with Reeder now, thanks to Maggie. Because I still intend to read everything…. eventually.

The long slog | Way of the Duck by Buster Benson

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 09:56:42 +0800

The long slog | Way of the Duck by Buster Benson:

Introspection. Finding yourself.

Exploration. Finding everything else.

Goal-making. Based on values found during introspection.

Strategy-making. Hypotheses about how to achieve your goals.

Experimentation. Trying things. Playing. Iterating.

Finding fit. Person/universe fit.

Slogging. Executing. Doing the work.

As Buster* says, the ideal is to do all these modes of “work” in parallel.

Sitting here on a Sunday morning and deciding what today will focus on - I suspect the slog, part of which is organizing things so my assistants can take over some of the lesser sloggish tasks.

*Buster is behind that writing website, 750words.com, that you put me onto, Maggie. It’s shifting to a payment-site as of April 1st unfortunately (though understandably). Not sure if I will shift down to Evernote or stay with it. The analysis feature of 750words.com is fascinating…

On Advertising: Maria Popova - have you made $1M on affiliate ads while soliciting $500k in donations for your "ad-free" site? Then...

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 13:23:38 +0800

On Advertising: Maria Popova - have you made $1M on affiliate ads while soliciting $500k in donations for your "ad-free" site? Then...:

on-advertising:

Maria Popova is a Forbes 30 under 30 honoree, regular author for The Atlantic, and was named to the Fast Company 100 Most Creative in Business list. I let her know I was a regular reader of her site when I sent her an email a few months ago after she wrote an article about the dangers of…

Ah, it makes me think my library could be making money via Amazon ads — if I made all the book covers link to Amazon rather than our catalog (haha). But it is shameful when people make money on the sly…. Instead, she could have said - either donate OR buy books from Amazon to help support us. It’s the silence that is damning.

Brainpickings is a great site - but Maria Popova needs to tread carefully.

Gabe Newell: Reflections of a Video Game Maker (by...

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 01:29:00 +0800

Gabe Newell: Reflections of a Video Game Maker (by TheLBJSchool)

One of the founders of that radical company, Valve, talks on a range of issues.

Points that stuck in my head:

Vale is about connecting users to value.
He hates the word “talent” when it comes to employees - what you want to talk about is the ability to be productive. (Which makes think about the educational sphere… where we should be judged on producing “learning”) - He comments on the problem of how to hire and retain “productive” employees… Be aggressive re firing.
Re flat structure: how titles and hierarchy hinder productivity. Management is a skill, not a career path. At Valve, everyone does a mix of individual and group contribution. Management roles are about working hard to keep other people productive — so people do it in turns, never on back-to-back projects. He joked how you need to find a younger sucker to do it.
No QA dept at Valve, just as no marketing department.
Hiring is really just social networking
Quantitative predictions are very important.
Steam as a curated store. User-generated content is way more productive.
Reddit is so good at detecting bullshit.
Corporations are pre-internet ways of organizing production and allocating capital. The internet now does it better.

(thx Sam for giving me the link to this)

Plane Companions Worth Reading

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 04:45:00 +0800

Long flights aren’t usually very enjoyable, but I had two in my holiday travels that were fascinating.

I had stumbled across a blog - The Ribbon Farm - before leaving, and the author, Venkatesh Rao, very kindly provides an easy way (via readlists.com which I”m now using) to download sets of his blog posts to epub format - see his For New Readers.

So I just loaded up my iBooks with his work. Perfect. It was like sitting down for a long-haul journey and finding your companion full of theories — totally fun, especially when the theories involve economics, technology, the future, and the sociology of entrepreneurship. His theories ring true for me, based on the experience of DHA in Vietnam and my Boston/London days in unsuccessful start-ups.

You might start with The Gervais Principle (which uses The Office to illustrate a pet theory of his).

NB: He’s also a blogger for Forbes and just published an end-of-year “best of” list of his blog posts. Do catch these articles:

Then on another leg I chose Tim Kreider’s book of essays as my companion. Again, wonderfully opinionated — and often funny, even if sometimes in a cringing way (not quite The Peep Show level, but close).

See “In Praise of Not Knowing” - which ends with this thought:

I hope kids are still finding some way, despite Google and Wikipedia, of not knowing things. Learning how to transform mere ignorance into mystery, simple not knowing into wonder, is a useful skill. Because it turns out that the most important things in this life — why the universe is here instead of not, what happens to us when we die, how the people we love really feel about us — are things we’re never going to know.

(via The Scholar’s Library in Olive Bridge, New York | Limité...

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 02:37:00 +0800

(via The Scholar’s Library in Olive Bridge, New York | Limité Magazine - Your Online Guide To Lifestyle)

If I could build anything in the woods of Maine, it would be something like this. I like both the fortress feel to it (mad men with axes locked out) and the 10,000 book storage capacity. And of course it must be warm….

Click below to see more photos of the same structure from a book I have — Manuela Roth’s Library Architecture + Design.

Library in the Woods

20 apps to help you keep your New Year resolutions - The Next Web

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 20:21:07 +0800

20 apps to help you keep your New Year resolutions - The Next Web:

Here are the ones that are free and work with iOS/Apple:

http://21habit.com/ (earn your own money back)
http://www.livifi.com/learn_more (choose from 40 lifestyle goals)
http://aherk.com/ (self-blackmail)
http://lifetick.com/ (set goals & measure progress)
http://www.43things.com/ (the old classic 43 things)
http://www.joesgoals.com/ (simple one-page goal tracking)
http://www.42goals.com/ (ditto plus widgets)
https://tree.mindbloom.com/ grow a tree to visualize your goals)
http://habitforge.com/ (help in forming habits - free/premium)
https://chains.cc/ (create a chain of good habits)
http://dontbreakthechain.com/ (a simpler calendar of chains)
http://socialworkout.com/ (social goal setting for groups or individuals)
http://www.stickk.com/ (commit to a goal)
http://weekplan.net/ (focus on weekly goals)
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/checkmark-goals/id578147414?mt=8 (tick off your goals)

Now I just need to pick one…..

jtotheizzoe: Demonstrating the Pythagorean theorem with...

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 06:47:10 +0800

jtotheizzoe:

Demonstrating the Pythagorean theorem with liquid.

(via Chart Porn)

(via The Pagan Roots of Christianity » Sociological...

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 02:28:15 +0800

(via The Pagan Roots of Christianity » Sociological Images)

Thanks, Maggie, for putting me on to this video of Stephen Fry explaining (with his typical humor) the suspicious similarities between Mithras and Christ. The blog - Sociological Images - is also worth regular viewing.

Chris Van Allsburg | The Polar Express

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 00:18:00 +0800

Chris Van Allsburg | The Polar Express:

Perhaps Christmas morning isn’t the time to share this, but I have been meaning to post about my excitement when I discovered that professor Mary Galbraith eventually did publish her theories about the Nazi echoes evident in Chris Van Allsburg’s famous picture book (forget the movie), The Polar Express. I remember being fascinated by her posts on CHILD_LIT back in 2001.

How’s this for a teaser?

In terms of its dominant visual allusions, Chris Van Allsburg’s Caldecott-winning picture book “The Polar Express” can be summarized as “René Magritte journeys to Nuremberg to meet Adolf Hitler.

Read her “Meditation on The Polar Express” here.

This is when I love the academic study of children’s literature.

jtotheizzoe: In a more modern twist of astronauts taking...

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 21:16:10 +0800

jtotheizzoe:

In a more modern twist of astronauts taking super-hip photos while in space, here’s Japanese ISS astronaut Aki Hoshide taking a self-portrait during a spacewalk earlier this year.

(via APOD)

Look - a UWCSEA grad!

(via 28 Monument Sq APT 4), Portland, ME 04101 - Zillow) Martha...

Sat, 22 Dec 2012 19:31:50 +0800

(via 28 Monument Sq APT 4), Portland, ME 04101 - Zillow)

Martha showed me this photo - of a pulpit as reading nook inside a condo in downtown Portland.

"Peter the Great turned out to be too epic a subject even for Tolstoy. (“I am in a very bad mood,” he..."

Sat, 08 Dec 2012 09:28:18 +0800

“Peter the Great turned out to be too epic a subject even for Tolstoy. (“I am in a very bad mood,” he wrote to a friend. “Making no headway. The project I have chosen is incredibly difficult. There is no end to the preliminary research, the outline is swelling out of all proportion and I feel my strength ebbing away.”) Tolstoy needed a more manageable subject.”

- Is “Anna Karenina” a Love Story? : The New Yorker

Ah, I love hearing the echos of truth from the past. Some things never change.