sublimeguile things I find interesting

I don’t roll on Shabbas

I’ve been working a lot lately. We’re in that state of the project where we’ve been two weeks away from launch for a couple of weeks now, and every couple of steps forward uncovers, fractal like, a bit more stuff that we need to do. I’m sure most other computer types recognize crunch […]

Nail Polish

Our office is on Broadway between 19th and 20th. It’s filled with a lot of young companies I’m guessing, and a lot of them seem to employ women in their 20s. Of course, this is what the fashion industry is filled with so I’m familiar with that breed from working at JCrew and […]

There will be Hype

Metacritic is normally my favorite site to go for movie reviews.  Similar I guess to rotten tomatoes, a site which could be great but I’ve never really checked out, metacritic scans the web and looks for movie reviews and their ratings.  It then aggregates them to give an overall score of the movie, which is normally […]

Century of the Self by Adam Curtis

This is a series about how Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the unconscious mind have been used by those in power to control the masses in an age of democracy.
Each part is about an hour.
Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

The Long Now

Last last year I joined the Long Now Foundation. There’s some similarity to the Slow Food movement, but it’s more of a place trying to encourage long term thinking and planning rather than eating local and savoring every morsel, though I get the feeling that both groups would enjoy a long drawn-out meal with […]

From the Crummy Biography Department

From the wikipedia page on John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding and friend/mentor to the likes of Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, before driving them off with his “winning personality”.
His father was a cold, impersonal, and unaffectionate electrical engineer. His mother, Dorothy (née Strahern) was warm but changeable of character and had an […]

Rabies in Africa

I have two cousins, sisters, who were in Africa this year. One of them is back now after being in the peace corps, and the other is still there. Courtney had a rabies scare, a disease which if not treated within 72 hour is 100% fatal. Horrifying. (That would be a […]

Cheap Ikea Furniture, or, Time for a Diet

Went to Ikea yesterday to pick up a replacement bed. Why you say? Check it:

This is exactly at the point where I sit on the bed. It actually cracked from the bottom up, but was connected until I propped it up with the books at which point crack.

Comparative Planetology and the shifting of Genres

From the BLDGBLOG interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, who wrote the Mars Trilogy:
BLDGBLOG: I’m interested in the possibility that literary genres might have to be redefined in light of climate change. In other words, a novel where two feet of snow falls on Los Angeles, or sand dunes creep through the suburbs of Rome, would […]

TED: Climate Change

Just to continue on yesterday’s doom and gloom, here’s an non-sci-fi sci-fi moment from Ted where we’re discussing terraforming the Earth to deal with climate change.
And here’s the video, for those who aren’t seeing it embedded: Here

American author William Gibson, who has spent much of his career creating fictional futures, says it’s hard to write […]

Theater: Au Revoir Parapluie

Been under the weather this week so I haven’t been feeling chatty enough to write stuff for the blog, but last night Robin & I went to go see Au Revoir Parapluie over at BAM. It’s a sort of acrobat, dance, mime, circus thing. Pretty funny too. I don’t know if it […]

Sustainability

Many years ago I spend a few months of my travels working at the Aravind Eye Hospitals in Madurai India. It was, by the number of cataract operations it did a year, one of the largest hospitals in the world, doing something like 150,000 operations a year. (I remember my mother saying that […]

Subprime mortgage meltdown explained

Now this is some dry humor:

(Here’s the link if you can’t see it in your newsreader.)

Thanksgiving!

This year Robin and I hosted Thanksgiving at our new apartment in Brooklyn. Thanksgiving is always one of my favorite holidays. It’s a no stress holiday, where all you need to do is show up and eat. My family — parents, sister and her boyfriend Matt — as well as our friends […]

Overheard in Brooklyn

I’m sitting in a burger place for lunch today, and the couple next to me is commenting on a article in the New York Times about child bullfighters in Mexico. She’s reading parts out load to him, fluctuating between incredulity and outrage. They are shocked, shocked that those kids can make thousands — […]