January 2009
85 posts
egg fried in butter, tomato, toast (large rustic...
"Whenever I think about doing something, I think,...
I think like this every single day of my life. Sometimes I subsitute in Pretentious or Corneilious instead of ‘idiot’, but it all works just as well.
Courtesy of C.A.K.
Do Sensors “Outresolve” Lenses? →
The conclusions of an article I’ve been re-reading lately, by Rubén Osuna and Efraín García, posted up at The Luminous Landscape:
So, do sensors outresolve lenses? It depends on the lens you use, the properties of the light, the aperture and the format. Small format sensors may have surpassed the limit, this is, in most cases they are lens-limited in terms of resolution. It is...
Hello, Delacroix (*impressed)
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Shamwow vs. Slanket →
crazyonyou:
johncarney:
Can’t someone just put these two products together, so we have a blanket with sleeves that we can use to mop up our spills?
i’m on it.
JG, one for you one for me. I am dying to get my hands on a shamwow. “I dunno, this stuff sells itself!”.
Quote of the day (v2): Prof/Boss Edition
“As the wise of times long past used to say, shit happens”
Said as a response to my apology for sleeping straight through the class I TA for today. Slept through two alarms no less. What the hell
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Prototypical pro-choice argument
I thought of Pretentious when I read this. He loves the idea of ‘personhood’.
“We need to first establish what makes any human special in the first place. This is usually done through appeals to rationality, or personhood. These are the ideas on which this debate turns. To be a person and not simply a human is what makes us deserving of rights and duties. All the complexity of...
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Quote of the day: Masta Killah edition
“The dumb are mostly intrigued by the drum”
Give up the Goods (Just Step) - Mobb Deep
...
Last house on the left ... is being remade. →
Okay, so a few years ago when there was nothing to do one night, we decided to rent a film. On the recommendation of Pretentious, we rented “Last House on the Left”, written and directed by Wes Craven (I think it was his first); supposedly a highly rated ‘horror’ film.
Instead, what we got was 84 minutes of the most awkward, perplexing terror-violence we had ever seen. No...
Philosopher discusses the evolution of free will →
Daniel C. Dennett on evolution, free will, and creationism:
“You might say that they think of the mind as a skyhook, as a near miraculous device that is an original fount of intelligence and creativity,” Dennett said. Instead, he argued that the human mind should be viewed as “the product of a process which fundamentally consists of a bunch of biologically engineered...
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Sometimes, although only rarely, I FUCKING HATE...
Obama orders Guantanamo closure →
US President Barack Obama has ordered the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp within one year.
The order fulfils a long-standing pledge by Mr Obama.
At Mr Obama’s request, military judges have already suspended several of the trials of terror suspects at the Guantanamo detention centre.
He has also ordered a review of the military trials and a ban of harsh interrogation techniques...
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Dirt of your android - Jaydiohead
Radiohead,...
Some Points About Pointing →
Raymond Tallis shows that the gesture is not so obvious. (Philosophy Now)
A few years ago I published a book, The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being, which identified the opposable thumb as one of the main drivers of humanity to its uniquely self-conscious state. Full opposability not only made the hand more versatile, but for a variety of reasons changed the hand into a proto-tool...
I rode the subway for 2 extra bonus stops before I...
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Diary of a Pakistani schoolgirl →
From the BBC: 11:03 GMT, Monday, 19 January 2009
Private schools in Pakistan’s troubled north-western Swat district have been ordered to close in a Taleban edict banning girls’ education. Militants seeking to impose their austere interpretation of Sharia law have destroyed about 150 schools in the past year. Five more were blown up despite a government pledge to safeguard education,...
Milking - Deerhoof
Evolution of the Mind: 4 Fallacies of Psychology →
An article By David J. Buller (Scientific American):
Times have changed. Although some self-identified sociobiologists are still around, the current fashion is evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology maintains that adaptation is to be found among the psychological mechanisms that control behavior rather than among behaviors themselves. But, as the old saw goes, the more things change,...
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The Vignelli Canon →
Massimo Vignelli has published The Vignelli Canon, a 96 page book on the intangible and tangible issues that govern his work. Delivered as a PDF in order to bypass the problems of traditional distribution, the book details Vignelli’s methodology while conveying his opinions on typography, grid systems, paper sizes and other aspects of the craft.
Throughout our creative lives we have sifted...
The Duane Reade at Essex and Delancey Is Out of... →
There’s a reason Plan B is commonly called the “morning-after pill”: You take it the morning after. In fact, the packaging very clearly states that one should not wait more than 72 hours between fornicating with that stranger and taking the pill, lest you end up with an unwanted, possibly alcohol-poisoned, child. So it’s probably not a good idea to do what the Duane...