Waters unendingly full of life move along the old aqueducts into the great city and dance in the many squares over white stone basins by day and lift up their murmuring to the night that is large and starry here and soft with winds. And gardens are here, unforgettable avenues and flights of stairs, stairs devised by Michelangelo, stairs that are built after the pattern of downward-gliding waters— broadly bringing forth step out of step in their descent like wave out of wave. Through such impressions one collects oneself, wins oneself back again out of the pretentious multiplicity that talks and chatters there (and how talkative it is!), and one learns slowly to recognize the very few things in which the eternal endures that one can love and something solitary in which one can quietly take part.
One of the reasons I am involved with #OWS, and advocating for an occupy movement on the UC campus, is to fight privatization and austerity in the UC system, and fight rising tuition costs. I think that citizens have the right to get an education regardless of economic condition.
Source: Boing Boing
These issues go to the core of what democracy means. We have a major economic crisis in this country that was brought on by the greedy and irresponsible behavior of big banks. No banker has been arrested, and certainly none have been pepper sprayed. Arrests and chemical assault is for those trying to defend their homes, their jobs, and their schools.
These are not trivial matters. This is a moment to stand up and be counted. I am proud to teach at a university where students have done so.
Consumer debt to pay for higher education has cracked the $1 trillion dollar mark, making the total larger than all outstanding credit card balances. We have seen over the last few weeks that a lot of the personal angst that enrages Occupy protesters is driven by college loans that are too large for them to pay off and which can’t, by law, be discharged like other debt in bankruptcy.
Source: rahmin
You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need, I think-and I’m not saying I’m the person to do it. But I think what we need is seriously engaged art, that can teach again that we’re smart. And that there’s stuff that TV and movies- although they’re great at certain things- cannot give us. But that have to create the motivations for us to want to do the extra work, you know, to get these other kinds of art.
DFW in ”Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself”.
I think services like Quora and Tumblr are teaching us that people fundamentally want to share their knowledge and creativity with the world (instead of just passively consuming)— the challenge is to enable them to do so as easily as possible. I’m trying to keep this in mind when building Polymath.
The Social Graph is Neither
A solid post from the guys at Pinboard on the problems with our existing model of the “social graph”, and the social networks we’ve built on top of it.
Some good quotes:
This obsession with modeling has led us into a social version of the Uncanny Valley, that weird phenomenon from computer graphics where the more faithfully you try to represent something human, the creepier it becomes. As the model becomes more expressive, we really start to notice the places where it fails.
(As anyone who’s organized a G+ circle will tell you)
Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.
Because their collection methods are kind of primitive, these sites have to coax you into doing as much of your social interaction as possible while logged in, so they can see it. It’s as if an ad agency built a nationwide chain of pubs and night clubs in the hopes that people would spend all their time there, rigging the place with microphones and cameras to keep abreast of the latest trends (and staffing it, of course, with that Mormon bartender).
We’re used to talking about how disturbing this in the context of privacy, but it’s worth pointing out how weirdly unsocial it is, too. How are you supposed to feel at home when you know a place is full of one-way mirrors?
A big part of why I’m uncomfortable using Facebook.
My hope is that whatever replaces Facebook and Google+ will look equally inevitable, and that our kids will think we were complete rubes for ever having thrown a sheep or clicked a +1 button. It’s just a matter of waiting things out, and leaving ourselves enough freedom to find some interesting, organic, and human ways to bring our social lives online.
They’re making a few different points here:
Our social connections are too varied, ambiguous, and evolving for one “graph” to accurately capture all that nuanced activity, at least with current methods;
A lot of the activity on “social” networks isn’t inherently social from the user’s perspective (asking people to explicitly define relationships, for example);
Social networks these days are designed around getting you to broadcast as much information as possible in order to mine that data (and store it forever to use as they like)— that’s troubling.
—
tl;dr: The social graph (modeling our offline relationships online) obviously has value. With current implementations though, it’s tough to model a completely “accurate” pervasive single social graph, and even tougher to build something meaningful on top of that graph. Here’s to figuring it out.
The first is a shift in the nature of power and influence. It goes by many names and takes many forms. It is open-source software and encyclopedias written by crowds and revolutions seeded on Internet portals. It is the idea of the United States “leading from behind” in Libya rather than fiercely commanding. It is newspapers linking to other newspapers on their Web sites rather than walling everything in. It is Kickstarter, Meetup and Ushahidi and any number of other platforms that allow disparate, diffuse strangers to marshal the kind of influence that once only centralized institutions could.
BRYCE DOT VC: A Little Perspective on Khan Academy Numbers
As a single data point, in its current form the content nor the platform appeal to my kids. Despite multiple attempts in various categories, both self guided and dad enforced, it simply fell flat.
Source: brycedotvc
More from Kurosawa
More salient passages from Kurosawa’s Something Like An Autobiography:
On editing:
I learned a mountain of things about editing from Yama-san, but I think the most vital among them is the fact that when you are editing you must have the intelligence to look at your own work objectively. […]
Yama-San in the editing room was a bona-fide mass murderer. I even thought on occasion if we were going to cut so much, why did we have to shoot it all in the first place? I, too, had labored painfully to shoot the film, so it was hard for me to scrap my own work.
But, no matter how much work the director, the assistant director, the cameraman or the lighting technicians put into a film, the audience never knows. What is necessary is to show them something that is complete and has no excess. When you are shooting, of course, you film only what you believe is necessary. But very often you realize only after having shot it that you didn’t need it after all. You don’t need what you don’t need. Yet human nature wants to place value on things in direct proportion to the amount of labor that went into making them. In film editing, this natural inclination is the most dangerous of all attitudes.
I’m fascinated by how this language echoes that of great product creators like Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, etc., which I suppose reinforces the idea that making an excellent, evocative product that someone can repeatedly use is akin to creating a great work of art.
On work ethic:
In the middle of the night I woke up. When I turned over, I saw light coming through the cracks around the door of Yama-san’s room. I got up and very softly walked over and peeked in. I saw Yama-san seated on top of his bed with his back to the door. He was reading.
He was poring over the manuscript of my Sugata Sanshiro screenplay. He was going through it very carefully page by page, sometimes turning back the pages and rereading. In that concentrated silhouette there should have been some sign of the exhaustion of the day’s shooting and the evening’s drinking. Not a trace. The barracks occupants had all gone to sleep; there wasn’t a sound anywhere, except for the pages turning. I wanted to say, “You have to get up early in the morning— it’s all right, you don’t have to do this for me, please go to sleep.” But for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to speak. His seriousness was intimidating. I sat down and waited with my back erect for him to finish reading. I will never forget that view of Yama-san’s back and the sound of those pages turning.
I was thirty-two years old. At last I had climbed to the base of the peak I had to scale, and I stood gazing up at my mountain.
Simple, clean, refreshing: reading Kurosawa write about his life is like drinking a cool bottle of Oi Ocha on a warm day.
