Mar
13th
Sat
13th
2010
Attempted Condescending Conclusive Statement
clarification question?
panicked bullshit explanation…?
meaningless comic non sequitur!
fake laughter!
relief.
And while we’re on the topic, some similar but funny bullshit happened on The Onion the other day and then there’s the gold standard, “Truth in Advertising” (2001), which is always worth a revisit. (lonelysandwich:natashavc)
Mar
12th
Fri
12th
2010
This is about visual thinking and visual evidence,” Tufte says. “It’s not about commercial art. The last thing in the world that’s needed here is a designer. What’s needed is an analytical, statistical, quantitative approach. Reporting is different than pitching. Artists who design for marketing purposes inherently have problems with credibility. This is something very different in spirit. It’s about accountability and transparency—with heavy, heavy amounts of data.
Cameron’s conception of technology a hundred years from now was incredibly unimaginative, even by Hollywood standards. For example, the munitions that were supposed to blow up the tree of life looked like they were used in World War II (maybe even World War I). Most of the technology looked primitive, even by today’s standards. The wearable exoskeleton robotic devices were supposed to be futuristic, but these already exist, and are beginning to be deployed. The one advanced technology was the avatar technology itself. But in that sense, Avatar is like the world of the movie A.I., where they had human-level cyborgs, but nothing else had changed: A.I. featured 1980’s cars and coffee makers. As for Avatar, are people still going to use computer screens in a hundred years? Are they going to drive vehicles?
Focus groups are still the best way to discover what people who don’t value their time value.
Borderlands (navigolucky)
An optical micrograph of a hybrid organic/inorganic polymer film that exhibits both nanoscale and microscale structures due to a competition between self-assembly and crystallization. argonne
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Mar
10th
Wed
10th
2010
Einstein’s theory of relativity on display for first time
In a darkened room in Jerusalem, the world was given a rare glimpse Sunday into the mind of Albert Einstein as he worked to unlock the secrets of the universe.
The display of 46 pages, each handwritten by the famed scientist, marks the first time the complete, original manuscript of his landmark “General Theory of Relativity” has been presented in public.
If any student comes to me and says he wants to be useful to mankind and go into research to alleviate human suffering, I advise him to go into charity instead. Research wants real egotists who seek their own pleasure and satisfaction, but find it in solving the puzzles of nature.
