these models were inside the museum
these larger than life versions were on the front lawn - WOW
Saw these at the Barber Motorsports Museum near Birmingham, Alabama recently
Mach I
I cannot seem to get these to load in order but you get the idea - two brothers I think - the garage and an evolving vision. I was much more interested in these world travelers. The maps are on their saddlebags. Any body ready to go?
more pictures of the short vacation later
You can spend hours wandering through the amazing objects, graphics and assemblages put together by Keith LoBue. The question is can you take inspiration from the work of others, take your hands off the keyboard and do something. It is a difficult question. What is the point of making things even beautiful, intriguing objects? What is the point of studying and understanding a topic no matter how difficult if you do nothing with that knowledge?
Kierkegaard on the Couch
The author makes the point that having a healthy spirit does not necessarily mean happiness and certainly does not result from getting everything you want. It is difficult for me to grasp the distinction between having a negative world view; despairing of permanent improvement and being depressed. Maybe despair is not something to escape from but a depth or insight to understand and use to your advantage for the growth of your soul / spirit - resiliency.
"ancient distinction between psychological and spiritual disorders, between depression and despair"
I am in the profoundest sense an unhappy individuality, riveted from the beginning to one or another suffering bordering on madness, a suffering which must have its basis in a mis-relation between my mind and body, for (and this is the remarkable thing as well as my infinite encouragement) it has no relation to my spirit, which on the contrary, because of the tension between my mind and body, has gained an uncommon resiliency. . . . Kierkegaard
"The spirit is one thing, the psyche another: The blues one thing, despair another. . . . the issue of spiritual health looms up with regard to the way that we relate to our emotional lives. Again, for Kierkegaard, despair is not a feeling, but an attitude, a posture towards ourselves. . . . But the spiritual travails only begin when that chagrin consumes the awareness that we are something more than our emotions and projects."
Gordon Marino is professor of philosophy and director of the Hong/Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn.
Dancers at the Hippodrome, Toronto, April 1923
M. O. Hammond
Black and white negative
Reference Code: F 1075
Archives of Ontario, I0001063
63%
David Brooks
10/21/2009
In Homer's poetry, every hero has
a trait. Achilles is angry. Odysseus is cunning. And so was born one
picture of character and conduct.
These traits, as they say, go all the way down. They shape who we are, what we choose to do and whom we befriend. Our job is to find out what traits of character we need to become virtuous.
But, as Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Princeton philosopher, notes in his book "Experiments in Ethics," this philosopher's view of morality is now being challenged by a psychologist's view. According to the psychologist's view, individuals don't have one thing called character.
The psychologists say this because
a century's worth of experiments suggests that people's actual behavior
is not driven by permanent traits that apply from one context to
another. Students who are routinely dishonest at home are not routinely
dishonest at school. People who are courageous at work can be cowardly
at church. People who behave kindly on a sunny day may behave callously
the next day when it is cloudy and they are feeling glum. Behavior does
not exhibit what the psychologists call "cross-situational stability."
The psychologists thus tend to gravitate toward a different view of conduct. In this view, people don't have one permanent thing called character. We each have a multiplicity of tendencies inside, which are activated by this or that context. As Paul Bloom of Yale put it in an essay for The Atlantic last year, we are a community of competing selves. These different selves "are continually popping in and out of existence. They have different desires, and they fight for control — bargaining with, deceiving, and plotting against one another."
The philosopher's view is shaped like a funnel. At the bottom, there is a narrow thing called character. And at the top, the wide ways it expresses itself. The psychologist's view is shaped like an upside-down funnel. At the bottom, there is a wide variety of unconscious tendencies that get aroused by different situations. At the top, there is the narrow story we tell about ourselves to give coherence to life.
The difference is easy to recognize on the movie screen. Most movies embrace the character version. The hero is good and conquers evil. Spike Jonze's new movie adaptation of "Where the Wild Things Are" illuminates the psychological version.
At the beginning of the movie, young Max is torn by warring impulses he cannot control or understand. Part of him loves and depends upon his mother. But part of him rages against her.
In the midst of turmoil, Max falls into a primitive, mythical realm with a community of Wild Things. The Wild Things contain and re-enact different pieces of his inner frenzy. One of them feels unimportant. One throws a tantrum because his love has been betrayed. They embody his different tendencies.
Many critics have noted that, in the movie version, the Wild Things are needlessly morose and whiney. But in one important way, the movie is better than the book. In the book, Max effortlessly controls the Wild Things by taming them with "the magic trick of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once."
In the movie, Max wants to control the Wild Things. The Wild Things in turn want to be controlled. They want him to build a utopia for them where they won't feel pain. But in the movie, Max fails as king. He lacks the power to control his Wild Things. The Wild Things come to recognize that he isn't really a king, and maybe there are no such things as kings.
In the philosopher's picture, the good life is won through direct assault. Heroes use reason to separate virtue from vice. Then they use willpower to conquer weakness, fear, selfishness and the dark passions lurking inside. Once they achieve virtue they do virtuous things.
In the psychologist's version, the good life is won indirectly. People have only vague intuitions about the instincts and impulses that have been implanted in them by evolution, culture and upbringing. There is no easy way to command all the wild things jostling inside.
But it is possible to achieve momentary harmony through creative work. Max has all his Wild Things at peace when he is immersed in building a fort or when he is giving another his complete attention. This isn't the good life through heroic self-analysis but through mundane, self-forgetting effort, and through everyday routines.
Appiah believes these two views of conduct are in conversation, not conflict. But it does seem we're in one of those periods when words like character fall into dispute and change their meaning.
The Official Trailer
And of course the book by Maurice Sendak
Radical Militant Librarian tee
Just ran into a Norwegian librarian at Internet Librarian International in London wearing this killer tee-shirt, created in protest of the PATRIOT Act's provision to force librarians to reveal which books their patrons were checking out. The Latin translates as "We know what you read, and we're not saying."
We know what you read, and we're not saying
Previously:
- Benjamin Franklin True Patriot Act - Boing Boing
- Boing Boing: Benjamin Franklin True Patriot Act
- Patriot Act gag-order on the Internet Archive clobbered by EFF and ...
- A Librarian slams the PATRIOT Act - Boing Boing
- Boing Boing: Update: "DHS visits student over Little Red Book" report
- A librarian on PATRIOT - Boing Boing
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10:08 AM (10 hours ago)
Complex derivatives are "intractable" -- you can't tell if they're being tampered with
"Computational Complexity and Information Asymmetry in Financial Products," a new paper by Princeton computer scientists and economists Sanjeev Arora, Boaz Barak, Markus Brunnermeier, and Rong Ge suggests that complex financial derivatives are computationally intractable: that is, once you have mixed together a bunch of weird-ass securities and derivatives, you literally can't tell if the resulting security is being tampered with as it pays off (or doesn't). Freedom to Tinker's Andrew Appel likens it to cryptography: you can mix together a bunch of known quantities to get a new number that can't be turned back into the old numbers.
The paper shows the example of a high-volume seller who builds 1000 CDOs from 1000 assert-classes of home mortages. Suppose the seller knows that a few of those asset classes are "lemons" that won't pay off. The seller is supposed to randomly distribute the asset classes into the CDOs; this minimizes the risk for the buyer, because there's only a small chance that any one CDO has more than a few lemons. But the seller can "tamper" with the CDOs by putting most of the lemons in just a few of the CDOs. This has an enormous effect on the senior tranches of those tampered CDOs.
In principle, an alert buyer can detect tampering even if he doesn't know which asset classes are the lemons: he simply examines all 1000 CDOs and looks for a suspicious overrepresentation of some of the asset classes in some of the CDOs. What Arora et al. show is that is an NP-complete problem ("densest subgraph"). This problem is believed to be computationally intractable; thus, even the most alert buyer can't have enough computational power to do the analysis.
Arora et al. show it's even worse than that: even after the buyer has lost a lot of money (because enough mortgages defaulted to devalue his "senior tranche"), he can't prove that that tampering occurred: he can't prove that the distribution of lemons wasn't random. This makes it hard to get recourse in court; it also makes it hard to regulate CDOs.
Intractability of Financial Derivatives
Previously:
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10:04 AM (11 hours ago)
New in the Maker Shed: Creepy CRAFT Bundle
The Creepy CRAFT Bundle from the Maker Shed teaches you all about making creepy adorable hand-sewn mini monsters. Before you know it, these little creatures will overrun your entire house.
Start out your monster-making experience by reading the DIY hand-sewn, free-range, monster tutorial found in CRAFT, Volume 06. Next, crack open the DIY Mini Monster kit and make your first adorable little monster. When you're all done, use the included Maker's Notebook to sketch out some new designs.
Halloween Special: Use promo code "SAMHAIN" at checkout and receive FREE 3 day FedEx on our Creepy CRAFT Bundle (contiguous US only).
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10:02 AM (11 hours ago)
The Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre by REX and OMA
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10:02 AM (11 hours ago)
What?
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10:02 AM (11 hours ago)
Around the Interwebs
OMG SQUIRREL!!1! … at Daily Squee
Remember Dreaming of Kittens and its rival Dreaming of Puppies? Well, both of the web’s greatest forces of unrelenting cuteness have decided to combine their efforts to bring you Daily Squee, the most ridiculously adorable gallery of baby animals to ever exist! Warning: looking at all of these cute animals may cause you to… SQUEE!
It’s Ok, I’m Saving Some For Later
My First Fail
WTF well done…
Crazy Things Parents Say
No one gets me
College Humor
The World’s Saddest Dog Is Back and More Depressed Than Ever
Urlesque
Radical Militant Librarian tee
Slovakia: The Forbidden Languages
István Deák
Viktor Hulik’s sculpture of a sewer worker, Bratislava (Rudy Sulgan/Corbis)
On September 1, the Slovak parliament made it largely illegal for its citizens to use any language other than Slovak. The use of minority languages in “official” situations is now punishable by fines of up to €5,000 (US $7,270)—and possible offenses include:
a fireman responding in Hungarian to a call for help from a person in a burning building; a civil servant discussing job opportunities with an unemployed Roma in Romany; a German book club discussing a book in German without first introducing it in Slovak; a [train] conductor addressing a passenger in Hungarian on a train from Slovakia to Hungary; a radio station broadcasting in English without Slovak translation; failure to re-carve a 50-year-old grave marker [into Slovak]
(I know from experience that not even manhole covers in Slovakia are allowed to display the old Hungarian-language inscriptions.)
How these rules will be enforced in daily life is another matter; the law appears to rely, at least in part, on denunciations. It’s enough to scare public employees in Slovakia—including even doctors, teachers, postal workers, and railroad clerks—into self-censorship.
What accounts for this law, from a recently minted EU country no less? According to the Slovak government’s twisted reasoning, the law is designed to ensure that “no Slovak citizen…feels disadvantaged or discriminated against” because of the language she speaks. But its real impetus seems to be fears on the right about the country’s minority populations.
Yet these populations—including Hungarians, Rusyns, Roma, Czechs, and Germans—make up only 15 percent of Slovakia’s population and their numbers are steadily declining. Moreover, to meet the requirements for EU membership, which it was awarded in 2004, Slovakia was supposed to adopt more—not less—liberal policies toward its minorities. But Slovakia has swung to the right since it joined the EU; the Slovak National Party, known for its suspicion of the Hungarians and other minority groups, has been a member of the government since 2006.
What is certain is that the country’s ethnic minorities -Hungarians in particular—are frightened. The Hungarian community has already shrunk in recent decades from 30 to 11 percent of the total population, as a result of forced assimilation, urbanization, emigration, and, especially after World War II, deportation. The Beneš Decrees of 1945 turned Germans and Hungarians in Czechoslovakia into noncitizens and general pariahs. Ironically, these cruel decrees were revoked by the Communists after they came to power in 1948, but now a democratic government, made up of a coalition of ex-Communists, socialists, and super-nationalists, seems prepared to revive the ethnic hostilities that surfaced at the end of World War II.
Some observers speculate that the new language restrictions are designed to help right-wing parties in next year’s elections by reinforcing the notion that the ethnic situation at home—as well as deteriorating relations with Hungary—are threatening the country’s ethnic Slovak majority. If the right-wing coalition is victorious in next June’s parliamentary elections, the European Union will be further weakened by what its leaders like to describe as a “quarrel between two of its member states.” Strong international condemnation might persuade the Slovak government that linguistic diversity will enrich, not impoverish, the country.
Read more » | 5 comments | October 8, 2009, 5:07 pm
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"the law appears to rely, at least in part, on denunciations" -- a true dystopia
Can the European Union vote them out for failing to live up to their promises?
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