Bas bleu
My name is Alaina and this is
my commonplace book and occasional journal, circa 2007-present.
My name is Alaina and this is
my commonplace book and occasional journal, circa 2007-present.
beautiful and varied mosaics by Isaiah Zagar in Philadelphia
It’s not my place to judge anyone, but it’s frustrating as hell that there are people—my brother included—that are able to enjoy marriage equality more than once.
Terry Gross on Stephen Colbert (HT David Dark)
There was one classical musician Jobs revered both as a person and as a performer: Yo-Yo Ma, the versatile virtuoso who is as sweet and profound as the tones he creates on his cello. They had met in 1981, when Jobs was at the Aspen Design Conference and Ma was at the Aspen Music Festival. Jobs tended to be deeply moved by artists who displayed purity, and he became a fan. He invited Ma to play at his wedding, but he was out of the country on tour. He came by the Jobs house a few years later, sat in the living room, pulled out his 1733 Stradivarius cello, and played Bach. “This is what I would have played for your wedding,” he told them. Jobs teared up and told him, “You playing is the best argument I’ve ever heard for the existence of God, because I don’t really believe a human alone can do this.” On a subsequent visit Ma allowed Jobs’s daughter Erin to hold the cello while they sat around the kitchen. By that time Jobs had be struck by cancer, and he made Ma promise to play at his funeral.
-from Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
The job of art is to chase ugliness away.
(Source: christiannightmares, via hipsterlibertarian)
Living is a meatloaf sandwich.
Dunbar came away from his in vivo studies with an unsettling insight: Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.) “The scientists had these elaborate theories about what was supposed to happen,” Dunbar says. “But the results kept contradicting their theories. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn’t make sense.” Perhaps they hoped to see a specific protein but it wasn’t there. Or maybe their DNA sample showed the presence of an aberrant gene. The details always changed, but the story remained the same: The scientists were looking for X, but they found Y.
Dunbar was fascinated by these statistics. The scientific process, after all, is supposed to be an orderly pursuit of the truth, full of elegant hypotheses and control variables. (Twentieth-century science philosopher Thomas Kuhn, for instance, defined normal science as the kind of research in which “everything but the most esoteric detail of the result is known in advance.”) However, when experiments were observed up close — and Dunbar interviewed the scientists about even the most trifling details — this idealized version of the lab fell apart, replaced by an endless supply of disappointing surprises. There were models that didn’t work and data that couldn’t be replicated and simple studies riddled with anomalies. “These weren’t sloppy people,” Dunbar says. “They were working in some of the finest labs in the world. But experiments rarely tell us what we think they’re going to tell us. That’s the dirty secret of science.”
How did the researchers cope with all this unexpected data? How did they deal with so much failure? Dunbar realized that the vast majority of people in the lab followed the same basic strategy. First, they would blame the method. The surprising finding was classified as a mere mistake; perhaps a machine malfunctioned or an enzyme had gone stale. “The scientists were trying to explain away what they didn’t understand,” Dunbar says. “It’s as if they didn’t want to believe it.”
The experiment would then be carefully repeated. Sometimes, the weird blip would disappear, in which case the problem was solved. But the weirdness usually remained, an anomaly that wouldn’t go away.
[…]The reason we’re so resistant to anomalous information — the real reason researchers automatically assume that every unexpected result is a stupid mistake — is rooted in the way the human brain works. Over the past few decades, psychologists have dismantled the myth of objectivity. The fact is, we carefully edit our reality, searching for evidence that confirms what we already believe. Although we pretend we’re empiricists — our views dictated by nothing but the facts — we’re actually blinkered, especially when it comes to information that contradicts our theories. The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail — it’s that most failures are ignored.
I’m currently going through my Instapaper account and found this gem from 2 yrs ago.
Jason Schwartzman interviews Ben Kweller, poolside
“How Come You Never Go There” - Feist, Remix by Beck
I read an interesting blog post by Oliver Segovia on the Harvard Business Review last week: “To Find Happiness, Forget About Passion.” Segovia recounts the story of a peer who was primed to pursue her passion (in this case, earning a Ph.D. in the liberal arts, which we all have been told ad nauseum is not a, shall we say, profit-making enterprise these days), but found when she got out of school that there were no jobs, and ended up teaching part-time in a small research centre. And, he says, “She suffered the anguish of an uncertain future, became socially withdrawn, and felt a sense of betrayal.”
Whether this is because Millennials insist on instant results, or because they have been proselytized to pursue their dreams, Segovia’s point is a good one. He says in his final paragraph:
Happiness comes from the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, and what the world needs. We’ve been told time and again to keep finding the first. Our schools helped develop the second. It’s time we put more thought on the third.
[…] it’s not so much that we ought to “forget” our passion as that we ought to recognize that our vocation lies at the intersection of our passion, our skills, and the big problems that the world has. If we’re so focused on what everyone else wants us to do that we don’t look at what delights us, then we’ll often be boxed into a direction we hate—but if we’re so focused on ourselves that we barely look at the world around us, we’ll just be an anachronism.
I’ve certainly experienced this in my own brief but very winding career path. Furthermore, I didn’t find out what my passions were until I had done a bit of wandering around in the vocational wilderness, and even last month I was still uncovering new things I didn’t know I loved.
[…] our vocation (or, more accurately, vocations) evolves over the course of our lives. We don’t find it and then we’re set. For Segovia’s friend, earning a Ph.D. was her vocation for those seven years. But when that vocation winds down, the next may not present itself immediately. There may be a little wandering. “Happiness” in our work is not a right—it’s a gift, and sometimes it’s withheld for a time so we might mature in other ways.
Addiction by Hanna K. Lee (via)
(via curiositycounts)
Am I the last Mac user to notice these cool word spectrums in the Dictionary app?
Iceland never had any bookshops between the sixteenth century and the mid-nineteenth. It also had no schools. Yet by the end of the eighteenth century the population was almost entirely literate. Families in farms scattered over an enormous area taught their own children to read—and the Icelanders read a great deal, especially during the long winter months. Aside from religious works, their reading matter consisted primarily of Nordic sagas, copied and recopied over many generations in manuscript books, thousands of them, which now form the principal collections in Iceland’s archives. Iceland therefore provides an example of a society that contradicts everything in my diagram. For three and a half centuries, it had a highly literate population given to reading books, yet it had virtually no printing presses, no bookshops, no libraries, and no schools. An aberration? Perhaps, but the experience of the Icelanders may tell us something about the nature of literary culture throughout Scandinavia and even in other parts of the world, especially in remote rural areas where oral and scribal cultures reinforced each other beyond the range of the printed word.
Well, maybe not evil, but “highly problematic.”
First, let’s remove what we all *think* Lego is (i.e. our own nostalgic memories, our aspirational beliefs, or $250 robot sets), and instead concentrate on what Lego today is, for the most part: It’s movie-tie-in model sets marketed pretty much exclusively towards boys.
We’ve gotten my son a Lego advent calendar for the last few years. It’s typically a pretty sweet affair: figures with ice skates, a snowman, a Christmas tree, that kind of thing. This year’s choice, on the other hand…
It features a bunch of robbers stealing stuff, some cops, a catapult for some reason, and a nice log cabin you can build. Except it’s a jail. Oh, but you get Santa on Christmas Eve. Ho ho ho.
We ended up getting the Lego Star Wars calendar instead, which is awesome except that it’s not particularly Christmassy (though you do get a Yoda dressed as Santa at the end (that’s in continuity, right?)) and it cost an unbelievable $40 because of the licensing fees (it’s like $10 more than the normal calendar).
This is par for the course in old Legoland now. Outside of the Movie tie-ins (Star Wars and Harry Potter being the marquee products, Pirates of the Caribbean and (inexplicably) Prince of Persia holding up the rear), they’ve created a series of in-house brands like Ninjago, Atlantis, and Alien Conquest that hew pretty closely to the spaceships-n-guns success they found with Lego Star Wars. Ninjago goes the extra mile, with a spin-off DVD series.
Lego City, the one readily available (read: you can go to Target to buy it) Lego series that hasn’t traditionally hewn to the ships-n-guns model has gone deep on cops and robbers this year.
Look: I will fully admit that these sets are really, really cool. My son is getting a gigantic Millenium Falcon set from Santa this year (DON’T TELL) and both my wife and I are excited to play with it too.
But it’s a model kit. We will put it together once and we will play with it a lot and that will be that. It won’t get remixed, won’t get hacked. Eventually it’ll come apart and be put away and not rebuilt because 1000 pieces is a pain in the ass.
The reality is that the unisex, open-ended, building and imaginative creation sets that my peers normally associate with Lego are gone. Look at this ad:
That ad is remarkable for two reasons: First, it presents Legos as a playset where you can just make stuff, and it revels in it. But even more remarkable is that it features a girl holding Legos. I seriously can not remember the last time I saw a Lego marketing image of a girl holding their product. The girls in my son’s first-grade class? Only the tomboys play Lego—all the rest “used to.”
Legos are still held up as a gateway to engineering and science, and despite my misgivings about the current state of their kits, I still believe they are (I bought my son a Mindstorms kit with my book advance). But if they’ve become toys marketed to a single gender, then we’re just reproducing the already awful gender imbalance in STEM education and employment.
Oh wait: Today NPR says “With New Toys, Lego Hopes To Build Girls Market.”
“The new Lego girl minifigures have names like Stephanie, Olivia, and Emma, and the building sets include a veterinary clinic, a hairdressing salon, a horse academy and a clinic.”
Oh. Dear. God.
I don’t want Lego to end up like Nerf (Don’t. Get. Me. Started.), I DO want it to be a great thing for every kind of kid. But right now it’s not. And that makes me depressed and uncomfortable.
PS. As usual Omar says it best.
