Jim Moskowitz's Friends
[Most Recent Entries]
[Calendar View]
[Friends View]
Below are the most recent 25 friends' journal entries.
[ << Previous 25 ]
| Friday, July 4th, 2008 | |
artoftheprank
|
3:37p |
|
swarthmore
[ randomstrawbery ]
|
9:28a |
Cell phone coverage
Which cell phone companies seem to get the best coverage at Swarthmore? Does it vary from dorm to dorm?
Also, the Housing Office seems to think I should get a phone for the land line. Does anyone actually use their land line? Is there any problem just skipping this and sticking to my cell phone? |
|
bldgblog
|
5:42a |
Chinese Air Bars http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/chinese-air-bars.html In a short post on MadRegale, Wired correspondent Alexis Madrigal suggests that we should open a series of "Chinese air bars" so that people around the world can temporarily experience what it's like to breathe the polluted city air of China.  [Image: The "air" in Beijing on June 20, 2008, with the summer Olympics less than two months away. Photo by James Fallows].China, home to some of the most polluted cities in the world, could thus capitalize on its newest export: vials of urban atmosphere. They'll simply export the sky. They do it already, in any case, with huge oily clouds of industrial particulates blowing halfway around the world to land as dust on the streets of California; this way they'd just make a little money from it. Athletes training for this summer's Olympics could order it by the tankful. It'd be like bottled water – or like Marcel Duchamp's Paris Air, in which a 50cc phial of Paris air was exhibited as a readymade art object. Take something; bottle it; bring it to market. Leading me to wonder: if Marcel Duchamp had lived in a different historical era, would he perhaps have invented bottled water? In any case, it'd be interesting to open not only a Chinese air bar, but a Haitian air bar, and a Paris air bar, and an LA air bar – a whole series of air bars – or just one huge air bar in which all of these airs are served. You could have even air flights: with a weird plastic mask attached to your face, staring deeply into the eyes of your date, you'd breathe in a succession of the rarest airs: Guangzhou followed by Cape Town followed by Rome is a particularly strong sequence. It brings out certain scents. You could even wrap these up into complex, synesthetic packages – call it Café Synesthesia, and you'd appear on the evening news. While eating skirt steak you breathe packaged air from Sacramento. When you sip your wine, the air supply switches to a light southern Italian blend. Pasta dishes go well with air from the mountains of Colombia – and, in fifty years' time, you can read Dave Eggers's books while breathing air from San Francisco stored in 2008. It's vintage. Stored under ideal conditions in steel tanks. Or listen to Mozart while inhaling air from the streets of Vienna. It's the rise of the boutique air industry. Cultural air archaeology. Air harvesters – the preferred summer job for backpackers in 2050 AD – are sent out to capture the sky in vast balloons. Air farms. The balloons are then kept in quarantine at international airports where stunned customs workers, earning minimum wage, look up at bulbous forms swaying inside hangars in semi-darkness. The balloons are labeled: Singapore, Marrakech, São Paulo. Next week your friends come round for a fish dinner – but it's not complete till you seal off the room, twist a valve in the corner... and the air of central Tokyo wafts silently around you. You've never eaten anything so good in your life. Air rooms. Café Breathe. Either way, Chinese air bars are just the start. |
|
artoftheprank
|
6:02a |
|
|
bldgblog
|
5:40a |
|
| Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 |
q10
|
11:01p |
sorta-recommendation
Bill Labov's pamphlet What is A Linguistic Fact? should be required reading, or at least required skimming, for all Linguistics students at some point before they've gotten through 12 months of grad school.
η: choice quote from the concluding section: ‘There is a tendency to see Linguistics as a kind of debating society, where the winner is awarded the privilege of not having to read the papers of the losers, and rewrites the history of the field in favor of some more remote progenitor.’ |
| Friday, July 4th, 2008 | |
xkcd_rss
|
4:00a |
|
| Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 | |
jedediah
|
11:16p |
A city that takes its fireworks seriously http://www.kith.org/journals/jed/2008/07/03/11287.html From up here on Mary Anne's roof, at 11 p.m. on July 3rd, I can see two extensive neighborhood fireworks displays (more than a dozen rockets each just in the ten minutes I've watched), one of which is quite close. (Sadly for me, the closest one tends to prefer noise to pretty colors.) Then there are at least five others in the middle distance that have sent up one to five rockets apiece (or so). And bits of a display off in the downtown direction that may've been the city fireworks over the lake; there was a steady stream of fireworks over there, but I ran downstairs to get a sweater (because it's actually chilly here tonight, for some reason, even though it's Chicago in July) and ran back, and they'd stopped.
I think this has all been going on for a couple of hours. I briefly contemplated going to the city's display, because I think I enjoyed it last time (two years ago), but it ended up feeling like more trouble than it was worth.
So I wandered up to the roof around 11, and have seen lots of fireworks in the past 15 minutes. Still going on, in dribs and drabs. (Added later: the last one I saw was at about 11:40, at which point they were about five minutes apart and I decided to give up and go inside.)
And there'll be more tomorrow. IIrc, on the Fourth two years ago we drove back from seeing Too Much Light, and through the whole half-hour (or so) drive there were fireworks in the sky to the left and the right, in nearly every neighborhood we went through.
So if you like fireworks, Chicago's apparently the place to be on and around the Fourth. Good stuff. |
q10
|
7:25p |
photographers as security threats i don't remember whether i linked to this while it was fresh, but i don't think i did and it seemed humorous. i don't have a principled position on this sort of thing - in general, it seems like hassling ordinary people for nonviolently recording stuff that's already in public view is sorta petty and unlikely to be useful, but one can certainly come up with exceptional cases, and specific facilities should have some freedom to run things as they see fit (although the level of arbitrariness one sometimes hears about can be unnerving). |
reldnahkram
|
9:31p |
It is unfortunate that my friends list has made it apropos to post this, and I wish those affected the best of luck. ( A story of my youth )Best wishes to those of you in affected areas, and hopefully you won't have to flee. Be safe, and stay calm. ( Oh yeah, this too... ) Current Music: Jess Klein - City Garden (head) |
metasilk
|
7:40p |
MonkeyBoy on temperature
Standing up, not wanting to sit down, wails, "Dadda, that's too hot!"
"No, it's not."
Thoughtfully: "Really?"
"Really."
MonkeyBoy sits down and smiles. |
|
rosenbaum_rss
|
2:52p |
|
ccommack
|
10:50a |
Big Blue Sky Obama +5 in Montana! (Yes, all of Political Blogostan is also aflutter over this poll. I don't care. It's just that jawdropping.) In other news, if you live near a Dairy Queen, they have Thin Mint Blizzards this month. They're yummy. Current Music: NPR - NPR: 7AM ET News Summary Podcast - NPR Hourly Newscast |
|
bldgblog
|
12:36p |
Agent of Change http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/agent-of-change.html Geoff Shearcroft, of The Agents of Change, will be coming round tomorrow at 11:30am to speak at the Storefront for Art and Architecture's Pop Up branch here in London. I first found Shearcroft's work – and, thus, The Agents of Change – through a book called Fantasy Architecture: 1500-2036. There, Shearcroft's image of a mouse with a suburban house growing out of its back – as if grafted there, or perhaps cloned – was a tongue in cheek glimpse of what Shearcroft called, in a 2001 paper for the Royal College of Art, "the new biology of architecture."  [Image: "Grow Your Own" by Geoff Shearcroft].The Agents of Change themselves have a huge array of noteworthy projects – including Monsanto New Garden City, in which it was asked: what would happen if global agri-business giant Monsanto were to purchase the London borough of Hackney...? What if they then turned it into an Agricultural Action Zone (AAZ)? "Costly infrastructural components are replaced with a self-sufficient ecology of grass roads, localised rainwater collection, organic solar films and biological compost systems," the architects suggest. The economically depressed borough would present "new growing opportunities," thus "liberating the ground's agricultural potential." There's also a project known as Roof Divercity in which all the roofs of Croydon are activated as new social, economic, and agricultural spaces for the borough's residents.     [Images: Roof Divercity by The Agents of Change].Meanwhile, the AOC's recent proposal for the Birnbeck Island competition is also fantastic, involving a very colorful village and a sort of artificially amplified mountain form on a pier in the west of England. It's geology meets housing, offshore.      [Images: From the Birnbeck Island and Birnbeck Village proposals by The Agents of Change].More germane to this year's London Festival of Architecture, The Agents of Change also designed The Lift, a temporary pavilion which they describe as "a new Parliament."  [Image: The Lift by The Agents of Change].In any case, I could go on and on, uploading images of their work all day. Shearcroft will be speaking at the Pop Up Storefront tomorrow at 11:30am – so come by to hear what he has to say. |
adfamiliares
|
9:25a |
Where you aware of it?
Everyone knows that breast milk is just transmuted blood, right? So why isn't it red?
Answer: So it won't scare babies, of course.
Today's medical nugget of joy brought to you by Dr. Clement of Alexandria.
Current Music: Old Crow Medicine Show, Wagon Wheel |
|
artoftheprank
|
1:17p |
|
|
bldgblog
|
11:57a |
Trainspotting http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/trainspotting.html Another interviewee at tomorrow's event is Simon Bradley, editor of the Pevsner Architectural Guides and author of St Pancras, one of the titles in Mary Beard's ongoing Wonders of the World series.  [Image: Simon Bradley and St Pancras].The book is fantastically interesting, even for an American reader, like myself, who doesn't have regular contact with the structure; the building, it turns out, is full of built-in eccentricities, and its existence as part of a much larger Victorian rail network is significant of remarkable social – and even dietary – changes elsewhere. The internal spacing of the train shed, for instance, is based around a rather unique structural module: the dimensions of a barrel of Bass Ale. Bradley explains that William Henry Barlow, the 19th-century consulting engineer for Midland Railway, dispensed with the normal mid-Victorian structural system of brick piers and arches in favour of even ranks of some eight hundred uniform cast-iron columns. These supported a grid of two thousand wrought-iron girders, which in turn underlay the iron plates on which the tracks and platforms rested. The spacing of the columns at centres just over 14 feet apart was calculated to match the plans of the beer warehouses of Burton-upon-Trent, where the same figure derived from a multiple of the standard local cask. And so, in Barlow's words, 'the length of a beer barrel became the unit of measure upon which all the arrangements of this floor were based'. This, in turn, has structural implications at other points within St. Pancras, ramifying these Burtonian measurements throughout the station's archways. There are loads of other points to bring up here but I'll have to resist, as 1) I'm working on a larger article about St. Pancras in which these other points will be explored, and 2) I'll be speaking to Bradley tomorrow live at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in South Kensington, in a joint interview with Mary Beard, editor of the Wonders of the World series, at 10am. |
metasilk
|
6:31a |
Super Crunchers (Ian Ayres) Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the new way to be smartA light-weight book about massive datasets and the consequences. It encourages us to pay attention not just to data mining and privacy (of which there is probably none, although there certainly can be respect), but to how even basic statistical techniques (regression, multivariable regressions, and standard deviations) can be used when the data sets are large enough. Examples and uses include: - marketing analysis (offermatica.com testing web layout/text choices, google adwords testing differnt ads you write, automatically weight the ones that get more click to appear more often), Amazon's recommendations*
- Ashenfelter's wine quality predictions
- The academic success rate of "Direct Instruction" which was one of the factors underlying "No Child Left Behind"
- Poverty Action Lab testing social policies
- consumer empowerment with Farecast.com (looks at the probability of your chosen airline fare dropping/rising) and such
- evidence-based medicine
It's intentionally introductory as far as stats and statistical technique go. The discussion of how to do regressions is very sparse; the discussion of how intuit and cross-check standard deviations pretty clear (without equations). There's a very weak explanation of causality and almost none of how correlation can be mistaken for causality. The explanations of the need for randomization and comparable datasets is woven in pretty well, and the problem of attrition in longer-term studies. The bits contrasting expert opinion/experience and data-driven "opinion" are interesting in both a touching and slightly scary way. Good endnotes (with citations). *I wish they allowed us to set the "randomization" or variation in those recommendations. |
| Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 | |
bldgblog
|
11:24p |
Time Control http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/time-control.html Tomorrow at 2pm I'll be interviewing novelist Tom McCarthy at the Storefront for Art and Architecture here in London. McCarthy's excellent book Remainder – which just last month won the fourth annual Believer Book Award – is about a man in London who is hit on the head by "something falling from the sky." He thus goes into a coma; he is involved in a lawsuit upon waking; he's awarded £8.5 million in damages. This all takes place in the first few pages.  [Image: Tom McCarthy and Remainder].The rest of the book is about the narrator's attempt to figure out what exactly to do with all that money – as well as how he can recreate, to a hilariously precise extent, a building in which he might (or might not) have once lived. What happens is that he's struck by a moment of déjà vu while in the bathroom at a friend's party, and so he realizes, with a sense of overwhelming purpose bordering on religious epiphany, that he must use his new-found funds to reconstruct the exact circumstances of the moment to which that déjà vu referred. If he can't remember everything about that déjà vu in its entirety, in other words – well, then, he'll just physically recreate it. It's a "forensic procedure." After all, he's got £8.5 million. What else is he going to do? To facilitate this projective act of mnemonic reconstruction, he first gets in touch with real estate agents. In Chapter 5 – a chapter which should be required material in certain architectural design courses – we read: I spoke to three different estate agents. The first two didn't understand what I was saying. They offered to show me flats – really nice flats, ones in converted warehouses beside the Thames, with open plans and mezzanines and spiral staircases and balconies and loading doors and old crane arms and other such unusual features.
"It's not unusual features that I'm after," I tried to explain. "It's particular ones. I want a certain pattern on the staircase – a black pattern on white marble or imitation marble. And I need there to be a courtyard."
"We can certainly try to accommodate these preferences," this one said.
"These are not preferences," I replied. "These are absolute requirements. (...) And it's not one property I'm after," I informed her. "It's the whole lot. There must be certain neighbors, like this old woman who lives below me, and a pianist two floors below her, and..." Getting nowhere with the agents of already-existing London real estate, he turns to the services of a firm called Time Control. Time Control can make things happen – very precise things. He soon meets up with Nazrul Ram Vyas, a representative of the firm. "I have a large project in mind," I said, "and wanted to enlist your help." "Enlist" was good. I felt pleased with myself.
"Okay," said Naz. "What type of project?"
"I want to buy a building, a particular type of building, and decorate and furnish it in a particular way. I have precise requirements, right down to the smallest detail. I want to hire people to live in it, and perform tasks that I will designate. They need to perform these exactly as I say, and when I ask them to. I shall most probably require the building opposite as well, and most probably need it to be modified. Certain actions must take place at that location too, exactly as and when I shall require them to take place. I need the project to be set up, staffed and coordinated, and I'd like to start as soon as possible."
"Excellent," Naz said, straight off. He didn't miss a single beat. I felt a surge inside my chest, a tingling. They later discuss what some of these hired residents will do. "What tasks would you like them to perform?"
"There'll be an old woman downstairs, immediately below me," I said. "Her main duty will be to cook liver. Constantly. Her kitchen must face outwards to the courtyard, the back courtyard onto which my own kitchen and bathroom will face too. The smell of liver must waft upwards. She'll also be required to deposit a bin bag outside her door as I descend the staircase, and to exchange certain words with me which I'll work out and assign to her."
"Understood," said Naz. "Who's next?" In any case, to make a long story short, the narrator goes on to audition actors – or re-enactors – and to become increasingly unhinged. Weird chains of events extending well outside the original architectural structure are acted out – including a robbery – and re-enactors are soon hired to re-enact earlier actions by the first group of re-enactors. The whole thing takes on the feel of a nomadic and vaguely schizophrenic opera troupe on the loose in Greater London, performing scenes from a life that never really happened, under the illusion that they're helping an eccentric millionaire to get his lost memories back. Three quick questions, then: 1) On the most basic level, how different are some of the narrator's requests from the precise, arcane, and well-practiced moves of 19th-century butlers and other house attendants? In other words, what appears to be mania in a person hit on the head by an unidentified piece of technology falling from the sky is seen as tradition, class structure, and ritualistic social role in the lives of others.
2) What on earth would it have been like to work for someone like the legendarily eccentric Howard Hughes, who had not £8.5 million to spend on strange projects but literally billions? Or, more interestingly, from the standpoint of a novelist, what other, far more ambitious demands could Hughes have made of his staff? I'm tempted to pitch a novella in which Howard Hughes has sent a small team of actors deep into the Andes where they are required to build a house just like his own, to change their names to Howard for exactly one year, and to act out forgotten moments from his own past on a precisely worked out schedule. There are bells, alarms, and inspections. Until one of them gets fed up...
3) There was an interesting article in The New Yorker several months ago about the use of immersive, 3D simulations of war scenes from Iraq to help treat post-traumatic stress disorder in returning soldiers. The general idea was that, by confronting, over and over again, the very thing that once traumatized you, you could nullify its long-term psychological effects. But what if these immersive simulations didn't have to take place on computer screens inside military labs? Perhaps a returning soldier – the son of a refrigeration billionaire – will take matters into his own hands on a large estate in South Dakota, building vast stage sets... Remainder 2: Return to Basra. So I'll be speaking with Tom McCarthy tomorrow, July 4th, at 2pm, in South Kensington. Feel free to stop by! |
|
bldgblog
|
11:05p |
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/i-thought-itd-be-useful-and-even-quite.html I thought it'd be useful, and even quite fun, to look at a few projects by the people who I'll be interviewing here at the all-day event tomorrow in London, especially as some of you might not be familiar with their work. So, over the next hour or two, and in no particular order, I'll be going through some books, projects, papers, images, and so on by the interviewees. Again, then, if you're in London tomorrow, on the 4th of July, feel free to stop by the Storefront for Art and Architecture's Pop Up space in South Kensington; it's only steps away from the South Ken tube stop, and we'll be surrounded by huge Lego structures by the Bjarke Ingels Group, from roughly 10am to 6pm, asking questions, recording answers, talking about the built environment. Beware, however, that the space will be tight – and I think it's even standing room only. |
| Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 |
jere7my
|
1:03a |
Pleasant surprise, low content review So, the Bridge to Terabithia movie that came out last year? Quite, quite good, and quite faithful to the book that every generation X'er read in middle school. If you were turned off by the Bridge to Narniabithia-style trailers, as I was, ignore them safely. Current Mood:  pleasedCurrent Music: Light Up My Room by Barenaked Ladies |
| Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 |
uncleamos
|
10:27p |
Ga-whew
Dear Ryan Howard,
Do not, I repeat DO NOT, attempt to single handedly throw ballgames by committing MULTIPLE ERRORS IN THE 9TH. OK???
Dear Brad Lidge,
I love you forever. Good work effectively recording 5 outs thanks to bone-head Howard and his errors, and that one out two on full count slider for a strike was a thing of beauty.
Dear American League,
Good riddance! We'll see you in (let's be honest here) March. Ugh.
46-39 on the season. |
crystalpyramid
|
9:42p |
tetris with wood and cardboard boxes The move happened. ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) msarcher's stuff is at a sublet and in storage, mumbly_joe's stuff is in, while ccommack's stuff presumably got sent FedEx, except for whatever needs to get ferried to New York. In the morning, I took the train to Wakefield, walked a few blocks to Mount Vernon, picked up the U-Haul, drove to Larchmont, helped load Greg's stuff, drove to Harlem, unloaded everything, helped carry it up three flights of stairs, loaded the van with Jean's stuff, drove to her sublet, dropped off a couple things, drove to the mini-storage place, packed everything onto dollies and took it up to a small metal box in a long white hallway eerily reminiscent of several creepy science fiction movies. Deep thanks to sbeath for showing up on almost no notice and lugging boxes with us for pretty much no reward. Driving a U-Haul is less technically difficult than driving a stick shift, but more of a constant paranoid headache. Driving in Manhattan is surreal — where you expect cars to go in straight lines and lanes, there's this beautiful organic weaving motion that is impossible to drive in. Until you realize the answer is that obviously if there's a U-Haul there, the cars won't be able to be, so you should be assertive and dash across lanes just as boldly. While making sure things are mostly clear, of course. Also, I don't know what's up with 110th St at 5th Avenue, where it does odd things with direction. Needless to say, I am kind of sick of driving for a while. And packing boxes. And the combination of driving and packing boxes that is moving. While I am proud of having pulled off the U-Haul thing by myself, it would be nice if I didn't have to do this again for a while. My reserves were low at the end of the school year, depleted by the road trip, even before I got back to New York Philadelphia. I haven't had a free day in New York to sit and do laundry and dishes and organize my life and brain since sometime during exams. I still have to write up the roadtrip; I haven't even had the free time to digest that yet. Much less see movies and enjoy life with my boyfriend and run roundsings and otherwise keep sane. Tomorrow is my day of rest, except for a brief excursion to New Jersey and a little packing and thought-organizing. And then it's off to Boston for a spiritual retreat that I hope I can somehow cobble together the headspace for, enough resources to overcome the activation energy and get something out of it. In college, every year ended with a sense of infinite possibilities lost, time flowing by too fast, people slipping out of your fingers and into their own alien lives. This was a year like that. I'm really excited to be living with mumbly_joe for the next year. It surprises me how much I'm looking forward to that. I'm excited about my sister being close at college at fall, about prisminawindow being here for law school. But that's it, those are the good changes. The rest was wonderful, or could have been, and somehow slipped away. |
ruthling
|
8:09p |
blog-o-versary for rant-o-matic Started this day in 2004. Weird. As usual, I proclaim a period of f-list amnesty: want off? want on? go for it! Current Mood:  sleepyCurrent Music: red sox vs. devil rays |
ortsorfragments
|
4:50p |
|
[ << Previous 25 ]
|
