Fish Head Art
By Anne-Catherine Becker-Echivard. Discovered with the help of Viktor; images culled from around the internet via Google.
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What I would like to do is to take very bright kids, and give them fundamental ideas. I would teach them Einstein’s theory of gravity, curved space-time, I would teach them quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle, I would teach them Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. I would skip everything and go to the frontiers.
That’s what I wanted to do as a child. I was always going through piles of books trying to get to the interesting stuff and teach myself that. Because in the normal school system you take years and years and years to get to the interesting things, and that way everyone dies of boredom.
”Gregory Chaitin on how he would revise math education. (via dailymeh)
“ He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say. He is impelled by inertia, rather than curiosity, and nothing is more unlike the submissive apathy with which he hears his fate revealed than the alert dexterity with which the man of courage lays hands on the future. ”
Walter Benjamin
“ I don’t like fun. ”
Karl Pilkington
“ I get a lot of letters that are like “You’re my role model, you’re my idol, you’re a goddess,” and when I get them it feels really good. I try to be present in the moment and think, wow, I was a bridge into something for this person, and that’s one of the most amazing things I can be. But at the same time I have to keep in mind that I’m fucking three-dimensional and I’m gonna make mistakes, and that’s part of being a role model. Isn’t the best role model somebody who can change their mind and make mistakes in public and be totally fluid? When I started figuring that out, I realized that one of my main goals for being in a band and on stage was being present, and not going into Florence Henderson good-mom mode. Like “Gee, can I help you? Would you like a coke with that?” I realized that was a pretty radical thing to do, because if you’re present, you’re going to be different every time. You’re not going to give everybody what they want, which is the cardboard character. But you will give those five people there who get it what they want, because they’ll be like, “I could totally do that.” Whatever crazy shit they have in their heads. Maybe they’ll realize, if she’s getting away with it, maybe I can totally get away with this thing that I think is better. ”
Kathleen Hanna
“Live a Simple Life” by Build. Via Swiss Legacy.
“ Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. ”
Marcel Proust (via affremblequotes)
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If you, the writer, succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid, then there are two pitfalls. Number one is the avant-garde pitfall, where you have the idea that you’re writing for other writers, so you don’t worry about making yourself accessible or relevant. You worry about making it structurally and technically cutting edge: involuted in the right ways, making the appropriate intertextual references, making it look smart. Not really caring about whether you’re communicating with a reader who cares something about that feeling in the stomach which is why we read. Then, the other end of it is very crass, cynical, commercial pieces of fiction that are done in a formulaic way — essentially television on the page — that manipulate the reader, that set out grotesquely simplified stuff in a childishly riveting way.
What’s weird is that I see these two sides fight with each other and really they both come out of the same thing, which is a contempt for the reader, an idea that literature’s current marginalization is the reader’s fault. The project that’s worth trying is to do stuff that has some of the richness and challenge and emotional and intellectual difficulty of avant-garde literary stuff, stuff that makes the reader confront things rather than ignore them, but to do that in such a way that it’s also pleasurable to read. The reader feels like someone is talking to him rather than striking a number of poses.
”David Foster Wallace
Loyalty Oaths for Clinton Supporters Pledging Their Votes to McCain
“Dear ex-Hillary fans who are showing their support for her by ignoring her call to support Obama and supporting McCain,
First, I’d like to congratulate you. You’ve asked yourself WWJMD and you’ve decided to vote against your own interests and principles while furthering Senator McCain’s. Before you’re allowed on the band wagon, we are asking you to sign the following oath. A McCain presidency will mean different things for different people, so we have tailored the oaths accordingly.”
Lewis Black on NPR; Gets Heckled by Caller
This was on Talk of the Nation around noon today. A caller dials in, calls Lewis Black “militant” and “degrading,” but can’t support his position (this is “Steve” at 17:00). The rest of the interview is good too.
OMFG! Let's Talk About Sex
By Verena von Pfetten
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The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.
Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.
If nothing else, self interest should push her in that direction. Mrs. Clinton did not get the big win in Pennsylvania that she needed to challenge the calculus of the Democratic race. It is true that Senator Barack Obama outspent her 2-to-1. But Mrs. Clinton and her advisers should mainly blame themselves, because, as the political operatives say, they went heavily negative and ended up squandering a good part of what was once a 20-point lead.
”“The Low Road to Victory,” New York Times
