What We Eat
Jun 29, 2003 food, keepingItTogether
In keeping with the previous post, I’ve decided to examine my own terrible eating habits and see how they can be improved. Cooking at home is the focus here. My question to all, rather, both of my loyal readers is:
What do you eat at home? Descriptions of complete meals, general concepts, which ingredients you buy at the supermarket, recipes – all of these are welcome here.
I’ll kick it off. Cereal for breakfast. Most common dinner options: couscous, tofu marinated with soy-sauce-ginger-honey, tuna salad, assorted canned soups and meals, hamburgers. Favorite ingredients: tofu, broccoli, scallions, string beans, sesame oil, chicken breast, soy yogurt, Grape Nuts 
.
So who’s gonna bite?
Food Porn
Jun 27, 2003 coolSites
So I was sitting at my desk, minding my own business, eating a plate of couscous and marinated tofu, when suddenly….
OH MAN!
Yes, that’s right. Food Porn. Scintillating shots of the savoriest meals. This shouldn’t be named after porn though. After seeing these images, I’ve realized that porn should be named after food.
Just the thing to make the poor bachelor in his studio apartment despair about his terrible cooking prowess….
Apple does it again?
Jun 24, 2003 outsideNews
So today Apple dropped a bombshell today: the new Powermac G5.
But more importantly, they introduced the developer preview of OS 10.3, aka Panther. Why would I say more importantly, you ask? Especially when the so-called G5 (built around a chip totally unrelated in composition or even manufacturer to the previous G3 and G4) looks like it really does finally live up to Apple’s claims of being the fastest desktop computer ever, defeating PC’s in actual benchmark tests rather than just Photoshop filter bakeoffs? When the G5 accepts up to 8 GB of RAM, and has blindingly fast 1 Ghz system buses?
Because computers will always get faster. In the grand scheme, this is inevitable and each upgrade essentially meaningless. What should be important to us as human beings is how we will interact with these computers as their capabilities become more and more grotesque and we become more and more dependent on them for our own creative work and for the infrastructure of our society. As Alan Kay often says, we’re still using the same windowing paradigm that he invented over 20 years ago at Xerox, which Apple then “borrowed,” which Microsoft then “stole,” and which formed the basis for basically every other major system since then (BeOS, KDE/Gnome, NeXTStep, the list goes on…).
Kay’s own Open Croquet, built in Squeak, a programming language / development environment originally developed at and still technically owned by our own Apple Computer, provides a notable counter-example.
It’s debatable whether a 3-D avatar system is really the next step in interface design, but at least it’s something different – something that attempts to rethink the immense computing resources we have at our disposal.
Now back to the topic at hand: Panther. Let’s start with Exposé. This handy little fella lets me manage my windows with some cool minimize-in-place, tiling windows, show all windows for a single app, and show desktop features. Any of this sound familiar? It should, because none of it is even the littlest bit revolutionary. These features are all just managerial tools to deal with the current static window paradigm – what about sticky windows, so that I can actually use two apps at once, without having to do the magic dance of rearranging their windows so they don’t overlap? How about providing some the focus options that the Linux users that Apple’s been trying to convert for so long have been screaming about for so long? Exposé is dope, but it represents a fundamentally stuck in the mud paradigm.
Next: the new Finder. So it looks different (many would say uglier). But what does it do? It’s got this funny little Places bar on the left that you can use as a main navigation point. As far as I can tell, thats it! What happened to the rumors of the database file system, the smart folders? What happened to this OS being like nothing we’ve ever seen before?
On the whole, fast as these new G5’s are, what I got from this keynote was that if I want some totally different shit, I’m gonna have to wait it out or just keep playing with Squeak. Cause Apple, creative as they might be, doesn’t have the luxury right now of altering the user paradigm.
That said, Xcode is the dopest. I mean, changing code for an already running application?! On the back end, they’re making a lot of big changes to desktop computing at large – when do the users get some?
US Troops Admit To Shooting Iraqi Civilians
Jun 22, 2003 outsideNews
From the Mirror:
And in an admission that directly contrasts with the line coming out from the Pentagon’s spin doctors Specialist Corporal Michael Richardson added: “There was no dilemma when it came to shooting people who were not in uniform, I just pulled the trigger It was up close and personal the whole time, there wasn’t a big distance. If they were there, they were enemy, whether in uniform or not. Some were, some weren’t.”
What more can I say?
[via TooMuchSexy.blog ]
Savant For A Day
Jun 21, 2003 outsideNews
This New York Times article describes the technique of transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS which can cause subjects to “suddenly exhibit savant intelligence — those isolated pockets of geniuslike mental ability that most often appear in autistic people.”
They have the author of the article draw a couple of cats before they pop the electrodes on his head, and the guy CAN’T draw. I mean, he’s better than I am, but that’s basically it. After 10 minutes of TMS, his drawings could be straight out of a New Yorker cartoon!!
Have you ever felt like you were capable of much more than actually comes out of you? Like your brain is swimming in a fog that’s covering your true inner brilliance? This seems like pretty good evidence to me that we all exist in this state. Some counterarguments are presented, but they seem more like skeptical dismissal than refutations of the actual evidence.
We all know that we don’t really understand the human brain at all, but this is some totally next-level shit. Would you test this out if you got the chance? What would you want to try to do while with the electrodes on your head? I’d love to be able to strap in when I’m musically blocked and just record while I play transcranial magnetically stimulated piano and then work with the resuts for the next month or so. (Or would I? It would probably be dangerous and addictive as hell.) Thoughts?
Escher’s Birthday
Jun 18, 2003 outsideNews
Google seems to have jumped the gun by a few minutes, but their title image tells me that today is M.C. Escher’s birthday! Well, it would be if he hadn’t been born 105 years ago. His art has lost some of its mind-bending power through overexposure, but the stairs from Labyrinth are a great example of his lasting influence.
Escher’s art, while great fodder for college dorm room posters, is also a jumping point off for brilliant discussions on recursion and counterpoint in another favorite book of mine, Goedel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid. Zeno’s paradoxes of motion, explaining why motion is impossible, Lewis Carroll’s Tortoise and Achilles, Alan Turing, and an artificial intelligence named SHRDLU all make fascinating appearances. This book was formative in my intellectual growth as a youngster, but only after rereading it recently did I realize that I hadn’t understood any of it. Douglas Hofstadter is clearly a mad genius. Check it out if you can – -it’s HUGE, but you can read sections one by one.
Not only does he make dreams, he READS too!
Jun 16, 2003 Keepers
Guess it’s been a big week for our friend Morpheus from Sandman, as I just ran across this great poster on Metafilter. P. Craig Russell was the artist on the first Sandman issue I ever had, an amzaing story about the mythical city of Baghdad and its transformation. Now he and the Sandman are promoting reading too. The only question is whether I should get this thing – I mean, I already know how to read…
Tags: Waiting
Which Sandman character are you?
Jun 15, 2003 pollsAndSurveys
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Which Sandman Character Are You?
Ran across this at bingtek.com. I was Dream, of course. I wouldn’t have had it any other way – in fact, I can’t think of any fictional character who’s cooler than Dream. If you’re not hip to it yet, the Sandman series was one of the best thing ever to happen to comic books. Neil Gaiman went from reinterpreting Shakespeare to Greek mythology to redesigning the whole universe from scratch, and it always worked so well. This stuff is basically required reading for anyone interested in mythology, dreams, the collective unconscious, and, above all, fantastic stories.
