Monthly Archives: September 2011

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  • The Valve – A Literary Organ | Disney Agonistes: Night on Bald Mountain

    Make no mistake, that’s what Disney was dealing with in that carnival of animal dancers, appearance and reality. That’s one of the major themes in cartoons. It is central, for example, in that most austere of cartoon premises, the Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons of Chuck Jones. To deny it of Disney in the film he planned as a showcase for this new medium, a film in which, among other things, he showed the origins of life on earth and the death of the dinosaurs, to deny a central interest in the play of appearance and reality is to be deeply and perhaps willfully mistaken about the nature of the medium in which Disney so deliberately and brilliantly worked.

    literary-criticism Walt-Disney Fantasia film-criticism symbolism doesn't-anybody-else-remember-the-symbolists?

  • Nathan Allan, Masters of Glass – Core77

    Collectively, Nathan Allan Glass Studios Inc. is an artist, and glass is their canvas. The Canada-based company produces glass in dozens of unique textures, and the company's focus on R&D aims to retain an innovative and competitive edge by coming up with surfaces that others cannot.

    interior-design industrial-design finishes tesselations

  • Clever Dolphins Use Shells to Catch Fish | Wired Science | Wired.com

    Also unknown is how conching emerged: as a lucky discovery, perhaps, or in flashes of insight from creatures whose intelligence may rival our own but happen to lack fingers and hands. Because Shark Bay’s dolphins are very territorial, however, and conching has been witnessed in disparate locations on its east and west sides, the researchers believe conching was discovered several times independently.

    If, as with sponging, conching is taught primarily by females to other females, then conching could have been an invention of single mothers trying to feed their families. That it’s being witnessed with more frequency suggests Shark Bay’s dolphins are learning about it. Perhaps those four who watched Con were taking a lesson.

    nature biology human-equals-hubris

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  • Odlyzko

    "Gullibility is the principal cause of bubbles. Investors and the general public get snared by a “beautiful illusion” and throw caution to the wind. Attempts to identify and control bubbles are complicated by the fact that the authorities who might naturally be expected to take action have often (especially in recent years) been among the most gullible, and were cheerleaders for the exuberant behavior. Hence what is needed is an objective measure of gullibility."

    bubble economic-crisis economics social-dynamics pragmatism-it-ain't

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  • Everything We Think Can in Principle Be Thought By Someone Else: A Plea for Open Scholarship

    "This is just to say that if we think keeping our scholarly work primarily out of public sight [except for the occasional conference presentation] until its penultimate moment of publication in a conventional venue such as the academic journal or book, at which point quite a few years of our lives [mainly spent in the solitude of studies and libraries or other semi-private spaces where we could manage a foothold] may have been devoted to that work whose “arrival” in print may even occur long after we have moved on to other projects, then we risk working too much in the dark, apart from the world which has bequeathed to us our objects and methods of study and reflection [I might also add here that this traditional way of doing things also keeps our work sequestered within the academy, and does not allow us to reach a more broadly public audience, which, in my mind, is a real perversion of the term "humanities"]. We also do our work largely apart from the very peers whom we hope will welcome and even love it when it is “finished.” Yes, for the kind of work we do, quiet is required, even long stretches of solitude [because this is when ideas often arrive to us that could never have arrived any other way and also because it's hard to translate medieval Latin when people are milling all around you], but you’ve got to get outside every now then. And maybe also reflect on the fact that even the supposed inside/outside divide is primarily an illusion."

    academic-culture openness publishing gatekeeping coscience

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  • Welcome to Middle-Class Poverty— Does Anybody Know the Way Out? – Sara Horowitz – Business – The Atlantic

    "The short-term way to level the playing field is to update the New Deal so it includes and addresses the current workforce. We need to accept that many people don't work full-time for an employer and that "jobs" no longer mean just W-2 employees, as Douglas Rushkoff explained. Richard Cass, a self-employed technical and business consultant and Freelancers Union member, also puts it well: "Government programs that promote small business generally focus on companies with scores of employees and millions of dollars in annual revenue, which is short-sighted." That has immediate implications for our economic and job policies.

    But to really bring a thriving middle class back to life, we need a dramatic shift in thinking, institutions, and assumptions. The role of policy should be to foster newer, more self-sustaining systems that follow this new mutualist paradigm. In the long run, our institutions need to move away from regarding the office as the center of a person's economic life, from business as the provider of benefits, and from government as the provider of social supports. The middle class does not have to be built by focusing on individual wealth. Instead, we can build stable markets and societies where people make a living, communities flourish, and businesses survive — and not at the expense of others. It's not utopian — it's a necessity if we want a successful middle class again."

    coworking freelancers economic-crisis public-policy government revolution