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Jul 4, 2009
I have a hypothesis: add fog to anything, and it automatically looks ten times better. As evidence for this hypothesis, I submit this photoset by Stephan M (whoever that is, I envy him his supply of fog).
I have a hypothesis: add fog to anything, and it automatically looks ten times better. As evidence for this hypothesis, I submit this photoset by Stephan M (whoever that is, I envy him his supply of fog).
Jul 4, 2009
Re: implicitly declaring yourself King of the Internet.
I can’t help it: I always bite on this stuff. This is just fantastic (via):
There’s such a distinct lack of text content on Tumblr that breaks even 100 words in a post, it’s pretty sad… Tumblr, support your writers. Help add a text element to this picture-heavy platform that we have here.
Cue dozens of people going back and forth about how to use Tumblr, what it’s for, &c. This discussion is cyclic. Everything I said then holds now: there’s no one true way! There’s no one true way to blog, to use Tumblr, to live your fucking life. Don’t tell me how to do what I do! There’s room for many approaches, and some of them, frankly, will suck, but that’s life. I’ve built up a pretty decent audience doing the complete opposite of what half of the people in this discussion say the blogging platform I’ve chosen is for; I know there are others who have built enormous audiences doing the complete opposite of what I’m doing. That’s fine! It’s just a blogging platform, people. We choose how to use the tools we’re given, and you have to be pretty small-minded not to see that there is a huge variety of things you can do with those tools.
The best response to this whole discussion, of course, would be to produce some kick-ass content in your chosen form. That would prove to anyone who’s got half a head that this blogging platform can be used for whatever it is you’re doing, and hey, everyone likes kick-ass content. That’s what I intend to do, but I can’t resist writing this post, too.
Maybe these problems stem from the fact that people don’t see Tumblr as a blogging platform, but as a community. It’s both. I try to treat it as the former, because I don’t want this to be “a tumblr”, I want it to be a blog, and I don’t want to reach just “tumblr people”, I want to reach the internet in general. But if you take two seconds to look at the Tumblr dashboard, it’s obvious that it’s got all the tools you need to do any or all of the following:
- Post long text-only essays.
- Make an online photo gallery.
- Keep a link blog.
- Share your favorite music.
- Make a log of good quotes you found.
- Do a webcomic.
- Keep a log of what clothes you wore today, what you ate for dinner, or when you took a crap. Or none or all of those.
- Make a gimmick website: a collection of hipsters, vintage video game title screens, sad stock brokers, pets that look like they want to kill themselves, boner-worthy things, things that remind you of the ’60s/70s/80s/90s, webcomics devoted to removing one of the main characters of a well-known comic, front pages of major US newspapers, and so on.
- Review literature/music/websites.
- Tell your mom to upload shit to Tumblr instead of forwarding you fifteen chain emails a day.
- Make a feed of self-portraits. With or without beer.
- Share poems.
- Chronicle teenage angst, or anonymously confess your love for friends/coworkers/celebrities/that hot girl on the commute.
- Dissect Tumblr, on Tumblr.
- Prove your worth as a Social & Viral Marketing Scientist.
- Share your favorite Youtube/Vimeo videos. Or share your own videos.
- Put photos you like on this space so you don’t have to message people you know (or strangers) OMG LOOK AT THIS PHOTO and they will look and say “it’s a book on a school desk with light streaming on it, and most of this shit is blurry, why do you waste my time on this?” and totally not get it.
- Archive buildings you would own or houses you would live in if you had a billion on the books.
- Take a quote, slap it over a vague photograph, and get 1,000 reblogs.
- Share recipes.
- Idolize pretty women with big boobs. Or metrosexual twentysomething lead stars in teenage romance tv series.
- Bait a book deal and get one.
- Philosophize.
- Disgust your readers.
- Memes, memes, memes.
- Preach the fact that JESUS LOVES YOU.
- Spam. Also, see directly above.
- Share the latest in science. Or art. Or penis rings.
- Practice your Basque/Japanese/English/Swahili.
- Combine song lyrics rendered in artful typography with the song in question in mp3 format that you can listen to.
- Create a portfolio.
- Write a mixed-media tumblelog that mixes all of the above.
Need I go on? Almost all of the above I have seen people actually do, and if not, I know how I’d do it if I wanted to. Who are you to tell me I can’t, shouldn’t, or should be doing more of any of that?
Jul 3, 2009
Kavka's toxin puzzle
An eccentric billionaire offers you a million dollars if at midnight tonight you intend to drink a vial of poison tomorrow afternoon. You are free to change your mind after midnight and not take the poison; you will receive the money whether you take the poison or not, so long as you at midnight sincerely intend to take it. Knowing all this, can you get the money, yet also avoid the poison?
This is one example of what happens when you start mixing logic, time, and human intentions/beliefs.
Jul 1, 2009
Decomposing corpse, Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, Knoxville, Tennessee, by Taryn Simon.
The research facility, also known as the body farm, is the world’s primary research center for studying, basically, how human bodies rot. It’s a 2.5 acre enclosed plot of land where they put a bunch of corpses in different conditions (in the woods, in car trunks, in houses, submerged in water, etc.) and observe them decay. All this to better be able to predict time of death, sex, race, etc. from dead bodies, to help solve murder cases.
The photo is part of Taryn Simon’s series An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, which includes all manner of weird things: an Arab woman having her hymen reconstructed “to adhere to cultural and familial expectations regarding her virginity”; Kenny, a retarded white tiger, the result of inbreeding; cryopreservation units; a braille edition of Playboy; and nuclear-waste capsules submerged in water, seen through Cherenkov radition, which Wikipedia describes as “electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle (such as an electron) passes through an insulator at a constant speed greater than the speed of light in that medium.”
Fascinating stuff.
Jul 1, 2009
The Rumpus Interview With Zak Smith
Zak Smith qualifies as an Interesting Person in my book. He’s a talented painter/drawer. His magnum opus, at least so far, is called Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow and tempts seven-year-olds away from video games, according to Amazon. He also stars in porn movies. He likes to draw girls and monsters fighting. He has a new book out called We Did Porn, from which there’s a lengthy excerpt here, and he’s currently working on illustrating Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian with five other artists. Plus, he says a lot of quote-worthy things. On working in porn:
Nobody ever asks me, “Why make paintings?” Is wanting to spend your time around attractive women who like to have sex much more difficult a desire for journalists to understand than wanting to dip wisps of horsehair into a wet lake of colored goo and smear it all over a piece of paper until it looks pretty?
People say “that thing is a work of art” and they basically just mean it’s really good. Like “that sandwich you made is a work of art, man.” But you would know that the craft of sandwich-making had seriously seen better days when sandwiches were in museums rather than out where people could eat them.
In real life, “art” is a commercial label you put on something when nobody seems to be able to find any other way to sell it. If you made a really nice mug that had a big hole in the bottom but you still wanted to sell it you might be able to sell it by calling it “art.” In my opinion, it’s easier for something to be art than to be anything else. A piece of blank film sort of starts out as “art,” and then if it actually has something on it that somebody’d want to watch then it’s a “movie,” and if it has sex in it then it’s a “porno movie.”
On the art world:
I do think it’s important that people know that the social life of the art world is like living death. It is a lot like living death. Think about living death: Like, if you died and yet also walked the earth, what would that be like? You could do nothing fun, and would be constantly faced with situations which only made you want to do things which you could never actually achieve (like, say, somehow ensure that the assistants who designed and constructed all the art for the artist standing next to you actually got all the money that that artist made just for signing it, or, say, grab the hors d’oeuvres tray and shove it into that artist’s eye socket), and no-one would listen to anything anyone else said or wrote, and no-one would think seriously at all about anything and yet simultaneously no-one seemed to have a sense of humor about anything and you would constantly watch unholy outrages against both reason and your fellow human beings being perpetrated in a thousand ways and you would never see anyone worth having sex with and the only music playing would be Britpop or DJs re-mixing Britpop and the only thing to look at would be Andy Warhol or re-mixes of Andy Warhol and the walls would be white and the food would be vegetarian and in very small portions, and, in short, you would be consigned to never knew beauty, pleasure, intellectual stimulation, or visceral experience in any form forever.
That would be living death, right? That would also be the art world.
1-Drugs are very popular among people who are interested in interesting things but are not themselves very interesting.
2-Drugs make your body do weird things—so they’re interesting if you’re in the performing arts.
3-Drugs make boring things seem interesting, so products created by people while they are on drugs are often really boring.
Glenn Gould is a pretty good example of all three of these propositions—his rendition of Webern’s piano opus—(23 or 28?)—is amazing, but when he sits down and writes his own stuff, he’s terrible and derivative.
What I do—and what most fine artists do—is not a performing art, so drugs just do to you what they do to everyone else: they make you suck and then waste everyone’s time pretending you sucked for some non-drug reason.
I mean, in art school if there was some minimalist who made like a 2 by 4 except it was purposefully off by a quarter-inch and that was their art, you knew that guy was either on speed or a big pothead. When you look at all that crap conceptual art from the sixties and seventies—drugs.
On information culture:
Information is only information if people are not total morons—however, people are total morons. Therefore we do not live in an information-saturated culture, we live in a Brad-Pitt-and-whatshername-just-had-a-baby- saturated-culture where smart people who care can find what they need when they have to if they’re lucky and we always have and we always will.
Here’s his sketchbook/blog. Some of the pictures are a little too abstract for my taste; others are awesome. All have style.
Jul 1, 2009
Future olympic park, 2007, by Bas Princen.
Future olympic park, 2007, by Bas Princen.
Jul 1, 2009
Why not impose a moral statute of limitations on historical wrongs? If world opinion, or some substantial portion of it, took the view that victimhood isn’t transferable to subsequent generations, humanity almost certainly would benefit. Nationalists and other demagogues would find it harder to fan centuries-old resentments; more to the point, individuals who have been encouraged to adopt an irredentist, cargo-cult mentality toward the past would have to get on with their lives.
H. W. Brands. (via)
Yes, yes, yes. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s original sin. And passing blame down generations is exactly that.
Jun 29, 2009
Nobody stops. Aw.
Nobody stops. Aw.
Jun 28, 2009
Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.John Stuart Mill.
Jun 27, 2009
Balanced Ternary
Quoth Donald Knuth: “Perhaps the prettiest number system of all is balanced ternary.”
Balanced ternary is a fascinating, non-standard positional number system. I’m assuming you’re familiar with positional number systems, like decimal and binary, and can recognize that 10base-2 = 2base-10. Ternary is base-3, so 10base-3 = 3base-10. Ternary uses 0, 1 and 2. Balanced ternary, on the other hand, uses -1, 0 and +1 (i.e., it’s “balanced” around zero). Other than that, it’s a positional system just like decimal, binary and ordinary ternary, with three as the base number.
This means balanced ternary can represent negative and positive numbers without using a separate minus sign. If we adopt + as shorthand for +1 and - as shorthand for -1, we get this system:
-++- 0 - 3^3 + 3^2 + 3 - 1 -16 -++0 0 - 3^3 + 3^2 + 3 -15 -+++ 0 - 3^3 + 3^2 + 3 + 1 -14 0--- 0 - 3^2 - 3 - 1 -13 0--0 0 - 3^2 - 3 -12 0--+ 0 - 3^2 - 3 + 1 -11 0-0- 0 - 3^2 - 1 -10 0-00 0 - 3^2 -9 0-0+ 0 - 3^2 + 1 -8 0-+- 0 - 3^2 + 3 - 1 -7 0-+0 0 - 3^2 + 3 -6 0-++ 0 - 3^2 + 3 + 1 -5 00-- 0 - 3 - 1 -4 00-0 0 - 3 -3 00-+ 0 - 3 + 1 -2 000- 0 - 1 -1 0000 0 0 000+ 1 1 00+- 3^1 - 1 2 00+0 3^1 3 00++ 3^1 + 1 4 0+-- 3^2 - 3^1 - 1 5 0+-0 3^2 - 3^1 6 0+-+ 3^2 - 3^1 + 1 7 0+0- 3^2 - 1 8 0+00 3^2 9 0+0+ 3^2 + 1 10 0++- 3^2 + 3 - 1 11 0++0 3^2 + 3 12 0+++ 3^2 + 3 + 1 13 +--- 3^3 - 3^2 - 3 - 1 14 +--0 3^3 - 3^2 - 3 15 +--+ 3^3 - 3^2 - 3 + 1 16
Counting in balanced ternary is actually kind of relaxing; I wrote the above table by hand, but I think it’s error-free. There are some neat things about this system, like the fact that there is no separate minus sign, yet we’re both below and above zero. From the above table, it looks like we can negate a number by inverting pluses and minuses, leaving zeroes alone. And I’m pretty sure that if I removed all the labels and didn’t tell you about balanced ternary, finding out what the sequence stands for and how it progresses would be a decent brain teaser.
Wikipedia has more: the leading non-zero digit is the sign of the entire number; comparing two numbers is as simple as starting with the most significant digit and comparing each digit until you find two digits that are different, which indicates whether one number is larger than, smaller than, or equal to the other; and rounding is the same as truncating, so you can just cut off the trits that you don’t want from the end of the number.
There was actually an experimental Soviet computer, Setun, that used balanced ternary.
Well, I thought it was neat.
Jun 26, 2009
Pagan, by Noel Rodo-Vankeulen.
Pagan, by Noel Rodo-Vankeulen.
Jun 26, 2009
Moustache Dreams by Gustav Gustafsson.
Moustache Dreams by Gustav Gustafsson.
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About
Daily Meh is written and edited by Simen (contact me). It is, basically, about whatever interests me. Some things that have held my interest over time: philosophy, photography, logic, the internet, pop culture, not-at-all-popular culture, computer science, linguistics and speculative fiction. Among other things. You might also like to know that I live and go to school in a small town in Norway.
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