In our hyper real 1080p-3D 50mega pixel quest for reality, we assume that things are more accurate with more resolution etc. Laser TV is going to produce 90% of the colors the human eye percieves, your best technology today delivers about 30%.
However reality can sometimes by too garish and gory so it gets edited, distorted or disappears. Here is an interesting technique that makes the real world look safer and under control. Fascinating stuff with a technique called Tilt-shifting and Miniature faking. check out the video. More images and video at Twisted Sifter.
The video below combined with Lo-Fi deep house music in the background just makes sense. Aesthetics in the 17th-20th century vacillated between the romanticized naturalism of an idylic countryside and the modern urban focus on humanities progress.
Perhaps the future aesthetics pendulum will swing between ultra-hi res composed purity vs. the gritty complex authenticity of nature. No change really, just new mediums delivering old messages. Miniature faking seems somewhere inbetween :) Recommended full screen viewing and check out MockMoons other work, very talented
Here is a chateau in the Loire Valley in France for $5m, sounds like a fixer upper, but maybe a good project to hide out with during the recession.
Description: built in 1897 for a French Viscount by the architect Albert Thomas
(1847-1907). Located in the most wooded part of the Loire Valley called
the Sologne, 120 miles from Paris by motorway A10/A71.
Directly inspired by the grandeur of Versailles , the chateau overlooks
the Sologne forests and its private park of 41 hectares (103 acres) in
the French style. There is a 1 mile driveway, courtyard, terraced parterres
and a formal basin with monumental statues. Excellent privacy and
structural condition.
There is about 36,000 square feet of living space, partially renovated, habitable
and decorated. Very high ceilings and huge spaces: hall of 1,700 square feet with
monumental staircase, great drawing room of 1,800 square feet…etc
Symmetrical outbuildings with stables, orangery, chapel, gate house and further potential.
Incredibly prestigious palace, now listed as Historic Monument (Grade 2). more pictures here
Product, toy, creative tool, cultural icon and study in continuous business evolution. Here is the evolution of the Crayola spectrum courtesy of Weather Sealed.
There are couple of stories here from business evolution, cultural mood and product evolution. The math geek in me is fascinated to know if product bifurcation approximates the Feigenbaum constant. Crayola's color count doubles every 28 years.
From a business value analysis perspective, any product that appears to be a commodity, yet survives so long, has such brand recognition must have some hidden moats. What are they, distribution, brand equity, great taste ;) ?
It is estimated by Hernando de Soto that there is $9.3 Trillion worth of dead capital in the world. World bank video here These are resources such as real estate that can't be fully used or valued because they are un registered. The reasons for this are myriad as will be the solutions.
The idea is that by freeing capital via registration it can be used more efficiently. For example if you are a 3rd generation squatter in an urban city in a developing country, you can't officially sell your house. Any value you capture will be at a severe discount. You can't borrow against your home or officially hand it to your family members. If you want to learn more about the opportunity of unleashing resources that already exist in a country check this video out or look around on the site at this link.
Google maps is a tool that allows for people to collectively identify and place resources and assets into the public domain.
From a digital geek perspective, it seems like having various organizations have updatable layers and resource tracking that they could expose to the proper authorities or co-ordinating agencies would be very helpful. Kind of a 3d wikipedia map. Then make it a mashup supporting flickr links etc. so that quick snapshots and notations could be made on the ground.
This all sounds overly high tech, but the tools to do it will get cheaper and easier and are already emerging. Super ordinate tasks such as disaster relief logistics are perfect for this type of thing. Architecture for Humanity is doing some things.
The World Bank of whom I am fairly critical has done some really good work with the Doing Business Reports. It does all the right things in terms of measuring, soft competitive pressure via ranking and public availability of information. I hope they or someone else does the same type of work for property registration and recognition. It is a huge opportunity.
To sum up good maps and live updated detailed maps in place before disaster can save precious hours and days when a disaster happens.
Full Disclosure: I lived in Haiti for 6 months as a small child.
I am a bit of a flight geek. My mom used to teach flying and was rated up to multi-engine class, she also owned and flew a hot air balloon.
My grandfather started flying gliders when he lived in New Delhi, India and subsequently taught my brother and I how to fly at age 15 in Iowa.
I have flown in micro-lights and even learned how to fly paragliders off the cost of England on the Isle of Wight.
So here is the mid-life crisis toy that seem like it needs to be checked out. The home-built micro jet, it even sounds like something Wile E. Coyote would own. The full article is at Wired Magazine.
The concept is that skyscrapers are a contrary indicator.
I find these indicators interesting but mostly anecdotal.
My own thesis is that economies and markets for various goods and services have normally bounded rates of growth or decline due to competitive and feedback dynamics. I am working on a project to model these.
Extreme variance from the normal rate of change may sometimes be indicative of a future reversion to the mean.
The extreme growth of banking as a function of GDP in the US is one example. Here is a good paper looking at banking as a % of GDP since 1860.
Technology, finance and un-shakeable faith in the future all coalesce into magnificent projects and works which transcend commercial sensibility, they are collective dreams writ in stone, steel and glass.
The recent opening of the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai is the latest example of this.
For those wishing a deeper dive on the Skyscraper index the 2005 paper which was the source of the image above is here: "Skyscrapers and Business Cycles". The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics8 (1): 51–74.
My guess is that the Great Pyramid in Egypt, the Mayan pyramids and other peaks, monuments and temples or civic structures in civilizations probably coincided with bubbles as well.
At least with skyscrapers, there are some tangible relics for anthropologists to admire later, much more interesting than say the South Sea Bubble, which mostly created paper and frustration. Let face it, if a bubble has to have economically non-viable externalities, buildings sure beat sock puppets.
Full disclosure: I am an architecture, archaeology and design fan so probably lack full economic objectivity in this area and willingly look up and cheer on the dreamers while clutching my own wallet firmly on the ground.
Twitter? Here is a video articulating in a funny way that Twitter has not only jumped the shark, but jumped the Fail Whale as well.
I would pose a counter argument to the Twitter fail whale, but first one has to understand what twitter is and what it does.
Twitter is the technical expression of the physical concept of glance. Glance is how humans relate at the most superficial level. We glance to see the emotional, physical and engaged state of those physically around us.
An interesting socio-biological hypothesis highlighted in The third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond author of Guns Germs and Steel, is that the very size of the whites of the eye or sclera evolved functionally so that we could monitor each others directed glance. Consider the change in your behavior when you can't see where people are looking? When you wish to engender trust you take off your sunglasses, unless of course you are in LA or going through a self conscious hipster phase.
Glance is our first level of social interaction, our outermost degree of connectedness and intimacy.
Social gaze allows us to monitor and feel connected with others. Being in a bar isn't about drinking, it is about capturing a furtive glance or flirt that may escalate into something else. Glance is about feeling engaged, accepted and connected at the most elementary level.
Twitter allows that. Twitter is currently the easiest tool for sending or receiving social glance publicly. The desire to be aware of others or to make others aware of us is innate. Twitter or any medium which facilitates public/private glance will be popular, one can argue the oldest and shortest twit is the emoticon, the digital facial glance proxy.
Logo's and brands are physical glance tools that allow us to signal at a glance our values or those values we purport to telegraph. Whether it be a sports team, individual athlete, style, wealth, power, sense of humour, ascribed social position etc. We first and foremost communicate physically using our clothes, logos etc. combined with an awareness of giving and receiving glance among shared symbols. Branding is the use of money to cultivate shared social values for a set of glanceable(sic) objects or relatable (sic) experiences. Consider how Disney does this at physical park level, shared memory via narrative and finally logo/ icon level.
Twitter facilitates Social Glance creating a slightly closer social space. It is as useful or as banal as those with whom you choose to exchange glances.
Glance is innate, intimate and superficial at the same time. The desire to glance or be glanced is not going away, it will manifest itself in different ways technically. Blogs, Twitter, Mood messages etc. are all digital manifestations of glance, expect to see more of them.
A tough to get a hold of book on how and why we react to various media is The Media equation. Don't let the unusual cover put you off, it is a fascinating distillation of social science research into how we react to media of all types physical and digital. The book is worthy of consideration by anyone involved in media, interaction or design.
Trained as an anthropologist and studying a bit of archaeology and art history, I can totally appreciate that this is probably closer to the truth than these fields would like to admit. ht The Technium
Great math is beauty in form the same way architecture or painting can be poetry in motion. Yes it is a bit of syesthasia for me.
Great communicators are those who illuminate and share new worlds of understanding. Here is Marcus du Sautoy talking about the history of Symmetry. The language of math can be incredible and Marcus seems like a great teacher who is excited to share what he sees and understands.
Thinking about what might be is important for designing better futures. Here is a stunning visual answer to the question, What if the Earth had rings like Saturn?
Visualizing relationships, be they mathematical, cultural or physical is a powerful skill. Here is a great site about an interesting quest for visualizing prime numbers.
I am a big fan of Phi, the Golden Ratio. One of the best books on this is Mario Livio's The Golden Ratio. Livio is a serious mathematician, historian and story teller who brings alive the beauty of seeing how things relate. The golden ratio shows up in many optimal packing and density solutions involving complex systems, it abounds in nature from the circling of an attacking hawk to the positioning of leaves on stems.
My guess is we haven't scratched the surface of applied uses for constants like Phi or Feigenbaums constants. For those interested in how growth and form emerge from nature and complex systems I would suggest studying morphogenesis, starting with the classic On Growth and Form.
All of the above end up relating to and explaining a simple elegant shape such as the a nautilus shell.
The CIO of the USA has put an interesting tool for looking at spending in the US at www.usaspending.gov. It looks pretty whizbang. I haven't checked the data available etc. and what is under the hood, hopefully it has a good signal to noise ratio. I put a little chill Moby into the soundtrack. Watching the govt spend is anxiety inducing enough. The video doesn't show much of a story, just the widgets at work.
For those interested in making videos, windows movie maker is probably on your PC via Microsoft and camstudio video screen capture software is available free. Here are the steps to animate an excel series
Load a data series and chart into excel
Open up the developer section and put in a For loop to increment the appropriate variable
In the For loop tell excel to "activate the chart worksheet" which will recalculate it. you can play with recording you actions to see the code for this.
Run the loop while record the chart region of the screen with Cam studio running
Excel is usually so slow updated charts that you can capture the motion
Import the CamStudio AVI file into windows moviemaker
Create your relevant information slides in powerpoint as graphic stills( titles pictures etc.).
In powerpoint use the saveas:picture setting to export the still frames
import the pictures into movie maker
For extra speed adjustments in the excel video clip use the half speed, or double speed effect in Windows MovieMaker
Season with music to taste by importing MP3 etc into windows movie maker
Upload to video sharing site of your choice
This sounds complicated, but it takes 7-15 minutes once you get the hang of it and can bring data to life for many people. It is a great way to understand data as relationships or time unfold.
For those of you who get it, you will realize this video is a lot deeper in terms of symbolic meaning, linkage, learning and evolutionary creation of symbolic and applied knowledge. For the rest, enjoy the pretty coral.
Margaret Wertheim leads a project to re-create the creatures of the
coral reefs using a crochet technique invented by a mathematician --
celebrating the amazements of the reef, and deep-diving into the
hyperbolic geometry underlying coral creation.
I would be interested in hearing comments about this as most of the really deep math people I know will understand immediately why "play" is important. pushing symbols about isn't interesting, but synthesizing new relationships or constructs within a bounded environment is very cool.
Some of the most interesting creative work is done in groups of collaborators. As a former chief analyst for a European Science incubator and having lived with a designer/architect couple in Sweden, I find the creative spirit and human ingenuity endlessly fascinating. Here is a video from a collective based in an old church in the Netherlands.
Architecture for humanity is one of the more interesting charities in the world as it uses design, information and longer term thinking to help. It works for the designer, anthropologist skeptic in me.
I would recommend buying and reading the book Design like You Give a Damn, that shows great design in situ and process around the world. It all started with 2 people and a few cups of cofee in New York.
The future isn't going to be like the past, netbooks are nice and will have a 3 year life of novelty before they become another banal niche in the silecosystem. Watch this 7 minute video and think about how fast the future is going to be here. The technology that delivers this is unfolding no matter what happens in the economy. The video shows what information anywhere really means. It is a post Jetson's future, the kind that was tough to imagine just 15 years ago.
My guess is devices similar to this will be in the 3rd world in 7 years and in the developed world in 2-3 years. As former chief analyst for a research institute Modeled on the MIT media lab, I have seen a few things and can assure you this video is a window into the very near future.
If this video doesn't shake you up a little bit, you need more coffee :;
If you want to see where this is all heading, read the singularity is near by Kurzweil. I don't make book recommendations lightly, as it is the time of your life we are talking about.
There is an old British Colonial Joke that goes like the following:
Jr. Officer rushing in concerned and afraid :"Sir! Sir! The natives are revolting!"
Sr. Commanding officer drinking cup of tea calmly replies: "I quite agree."
In that vein the following diagram and phrase is offered.
As a tax paying hedgie who returned +19.80% w/ 1.02 Sharpe in 2008 and got $0 bonus due to the team nature of our firm, I stand firmly in Joe Public's circle.
Most risk failings and opportunities for designing better futures deal with imagination.
Being able to draw it on a cocktail napkin like this book teaches or sum it up in 1-2 sentences, is a test for good ideas. Jessica Hagy is one of the more funny picture thinkers. Her site is here she also has a book. XKCD is funny technical picture thinker. Gaping Void by Hugh McLeod is also a brilliant picture thinker. I garuntee you won't find answers to technical finance problems at these sites, but you may find inspiration or at least a smile. Both are important and rare assets these days. Share them.
FYI: I am creating a new section of the blog called thinking in pictures in order to sharpen my own thinking.
Wow if you are a designer or want to learn about how to impact the world, here is a very interesting woman who teaches and makes things happen. Way to go MIT, we need more educational programs and more people like this.
I was playing around with Matlab thinking about vector clustering algorithms over the weekend. Something out of my depth really. While thinking about complex data sets and vectors, I remembered PhotoSynth from microsoft. Then I thought about facial biometrics which usually use a few bio points to reduce a face to a few key vectors. Companies like Animetrics do this. That got me thinking about a social application mash-up. In the human animal the gaze is important as we are highly socially evolved. Our eye have small irises relative to the "white" of the eye compared to the Gorilla or Chimpanzee. One theory behind this adaptation is that it allows us to track the gaze or focal point of others. Think about how finally tuned we are to gauge trust based on eye tracking, contact etc.
Social gaze is our desire to watch others behaviours and in times of uncertainty to mimic it. This occurs not just during the teenage years but throughout life. Look at any market. Charlie Munger writes about this.
Social gaze is a powerful tool, it is the basis of marketing. Facebook and Twitter allow for social broadcast & gaze at an information but not physical level with people continuously answering the question, "what are you doing right now?"
One can easily imagine the following applications being developed. Variants are probably already in use at Darpa etc or being nurtured in silicon valley. PeopleHistoryWhere: combine Photosynth for creating location tags and vecotors. Then use similar technology for clustering social vectors extracted from the images, overlap the data sets and from a large pile of public photographs, you could probably determine location, time and social network (relationships). My guess is that the vector clustering could even indicate passage of time using standardized clues to evolve crude social spatial chronology.
This would make a very interesting form of historical journalism, genealogy from public photos of who with whom, where and when. The immortal why of history would be up to the historians. Imagine getting an e-mail from a photograph asking, "what were you thinking at this moment?" The moment and actors in any space could theoretically be recreated. Disneyland pictures 2.0.
Given the human animals social instincts and relatively tight clustering behaviour you could probably infer who was holding the camera where, when and most likely during what time of day and day of year if the picture was outdoors and there are enough shadows a latitude could be approximated. This could be done using photographs of well photographed landmarks from any period. This would be very interesting for historians.
The Flitter application mentioned in the title needs less technology overhead, simply register your camera phone or account and start-uploading photos. Each time a photo is updated an approximate time could be guessed at as to when it was taken and where assuming it was outdoors or indoors near a well photographed (tagged or untagged) landmark.
Most photos of people are taken next to physical or social landmarks. A social landmark is a birthday party filled with people for example. given the small quick nearest neighbors set that a social network allows, it wouldn't be to tough to identify and tag the photo participants automatically. The software could even prompt the user for confirmation.
Upon uploading to your flitter account, the photo is automatically indexed and placed in either a physical or social context. This would most likely be a popular social gaze application building on top of existing social software and allowing for interesting auto-tagging.
Like all technologies, it is ethically agnostic. It is more a matter of when rather than if this happens in the public sphere. This technology will of course manifest itself through our cultural filters of greed, lust, fear etc. Lets hope it provides a better understanding and appreciation of our relationships with each other rather than stalking and finger pointing.
Middle English, from Latin vulgaris of the mob, vulgar, from volgus, vulgus mob, common people
Date:
14th century
1 a: generally used, applied, or acceptedb: understood in or having the ordinary sense <they reject the vulgar conception of miracle
— W. R. Inge>2:vernacular<the vulgar name of a plant>3 a: of or relating to the common people :plebeianb: generally current :public<the vulgar opinion of that time>c: of the usual, typical, or ordinary kind4 a: lacking in cultivation, perception, or taste : coarseb: morally crude, undeveloped, or unregenerate : grossc: ostentatious or excessive in expenditure or display : pretentious5 a: offensive in language : earthyb: lewdly or profanely indecent
Words go in and out of fashion as their perceived phenomenological acknowledgment waxes or wanes within a culture. Many cultural trends like markets are only seen to be bubbles in retrospect.
In that vain I submit that America may discover a rising market in the recognition and acknowledgment of the concept and perhaps recognition of the concept of vulgarity. Conspicuous consumption, the cult of ever growing self importance matched only by its tiresome lack of taste may wane for a bit as a bit self awareness arises during a period of introspection and thought for others.
For those unaware of contemporary symbols of vulgarity, I submit the following images below.
Don't be embarrassed by the man, rather feel embarrassed by a culture that raised him to the levels he has achieved. The Donald would be just another Huckster without his audience and culture's support.
Trade recommendation: short vulgarity and self promotion or self-importance in all its forms personal professional. Long: patience, compassion, humility and consideration.
On my personal list of vulgar, anyone who yells on television or the media to be heard: all of CNBC, Fox, etc. anything bling, loud, action oriented cultures vs. thoughtful ones. Non-vulgar things include listening and thinking. Feel free to contribute your own non-vulgar or vulgar cultural artifacts and behavioural traits.
No shock for this blogger. Art had crossed the line and become a pure prestige good. According to the behaviour of such an environment and typical crash similar to a Sornette event. Expect all your favorites artists to be selling at 80-90% off in the near future.
Perhaps a Warhol for the garage? Still tough to figure out where to hide the Hirst, which will be embarrassing for quite some time.
They may not sell originals at Wal-mart any time soon, but then that wasn't the point of owning it in the first place was it?
More isn't just more, its different. Our culture is entering the realm of the Tera Dollar. That is $100 trillion dollars in debt. It is estimated that JPmorgan at one point had $100 trillion in notional derivatives outstanding at one point. Please note (notional) don't panic just yet.
The US debt, (our debt) for most of you reading this just passed $10 trillion dollars. I decided to see how fast we were clocking things up. Change seems so fashionable, so lets talk about the rate of change. Using data from the Treasury we can see how things are going. As of Oct 31. 2008 the debt was $10,574,094,462,968.2...Boo.
I took the debt starting from 2006 and calculated its growth rate to Oct 31, 2008. We arrive at a date for the US debt to reach Tera Dollar status $100,000,000,000.00 on Sept 16, 2025. This excludes unfunded liabilities and a whole host of other serious issues. This is more entertainment than economics. Is it me, or is it starting to smell like Zimbabwe around here? Data here:Download teradollarsahead.xls
To understand what this money means take a look at an interesting artist Chris Jordan who does fantastic visualizations of large numbers. Bigger isn't just bigger it is different. The photo below is actually a composite of 125,000 $100 bills $12.5m. I guess now I understand why people are long dollars, they grow like crazy or at least the IOU flavor.
Here is the federal code showing the amendments to the US debt ceiling, for those of you who like to see the sausage being made. Walter wriston of Citibank realized that information and money were really the same thing. We are entering the age of tera on many levels.
Markets are social phenomenon. Damian Hirst's, The Kingdom (seen in picture to the left) recently sold for $18m. My belief is that the level of awareness and nature of the art market means that this piece will in the next 5 years trade for at or below $3.6m. Most Hirst work will trade for below the 08 mark and discount at 80% of peak prices. Overly popular markets tend to be followed by 70-80% declines. Read Sornette to see this at work from a mathematicians perspective. Nothing against Hirst, I am sure he is a nice fellow, just that more people want to be seen owning his work than probably really believe in its artistic merit. In a few years, that preserved animal will be seen as a bit of tat in the corner and moved from a place of prominence in homes and galleries to a rather more discrete area in the same home or gallery.
Excessive pride of place is often quickly followed by discrete retrenchment to a quiet corner to save the owner public embarrassment.
Everyone got a little carried away. Here was the peak in my estimate of his $145m sale written up in the FT. He seems like a friendly fellow in this interview:
In retrospect he may be seen as an interesting artist and the most successful taxidermist since PT Barnum. Many will assume the incredible monetary decline in the price of his art will change its value, not true, it will just mean the wandering eye of the money circus is focused elsewhere.
Price and value bump into each other occasionally like drunks at a party and then go on their merry ways. My own interests are works from the Edo period of Japan, Mughal dynasty India and modern Scandinavian, sometimes in fashion and sometimes not. Hirst has made a contribution to art, just don't be fooled if recent price doesn't reflect long term value.
Sometimes group input isn't always the best way to arrive at a decision. Some studies have shown that a dictator, consensus model can sometimes be more effective. This is a model of group behavior in which the group elects an arbiter for decisions and then entrusts that individual. This goes against my democratic political philosophy but I think I understand it more after watching the video above.
An interesting book with tips on how to lead, manage groups and make better decisions. is "The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making." It is a brilliant book packed with snippets from social science research (caveat emptor) on personal and group decision making. Warning the book is expensive, but then so is ignorance or poor decision making. The book includes concepts on listening management styles and other applicable aspects of the human and group psyche.
The process of decision making important to understand as it is the pre-cursor to both belief forming and behavior.
Anthropology is a very interesting way of attempting to separate oneself from cultural biases and understand the behaviour of the human animal. My anthropology background has been incredibly rewarding and I would recommend the major to anyone wanting to learn more about the people around them. Anthropology is broken into 4 major sub fields: social, linguistic, physical and social. I am most interested in socio economic anthropology ans sustainable development in cultures.
Have a look, it is pretty interesting to see new media the space it creates for culture.
As someone who is rhythmically challenged and has size 15 feet, I admire this guy, good spirit, good intentions and takes some action. Don't know about the final outcome, but we need more like him.
Intel is going to be shipping chips with thousands of cores in the near future. You can now purchase a graphics card that performs a teraflop (1 trillion calculations per second) for your PC. Today's breakthrough is tomorrow banal trinket or play thing.
The singularity which is kind of a rapture for geeks is approaching. The ebb and flow of politics and economics are going to become more driven by technology than we have ever imagined.
I used to work in an institute designed to discover applied science for 100 years in the future. I toiled away as Chief analyst for 70 PHd's working to create the technologies in nanoscience, bioscience, artificial intelligence, energy and materials science that would shape the future. We had 2 noble laureates and Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT media lab on our board. It was a powerful learning experience about science and applied research with fascinating and brilliant people.
What does all this technology mean?
In my mind, the book that highlights what the technical progress will become most effectively is the singularity by Ray Kurzweil. Trained as an anthropologist, I can guarantee that how these technologies are applied and used is impossible to predict, but the sheer power and magnitude of change will be overwhelming and culturally transforming. The singularity is Utopian, I constantly remind people we are only apes with opposable thumbs and the gift of language. To fully appreciate this read The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond author of Guns, Germs and Steel.
The great science fiction writer William Gibson once said the future is already here, it just arrives in different places at different times. If you have ever experienced telepresence in a halo room or felt in awe watching the graphics in the latest video game or some new technical breakthrough, expect to have the sensation more often as the future starts showing up in more places in your life.
Change is one thing that seems universally loathed by all cultures and people in general. We are creatures of habit and social caste, the rate of change which is now taking place will drive many further into thier core ethnocentric beliefs. I anticipate the pursuit of greater ethnocentric ideals within many cultures as the pace of change accelerates. This is not necessarily a good thing. This could mean greater chances for misunderstanding and conflict among self identified groups. Let's hope the anxiety induced by rapid change is overcome by a sense a shared humanity. The record among groups of third chimpanzee's for this is not great.
Deviant behaviour is what makes history. Most people think of deviance in the negative, but deviance is by definition anything outside of the norm.
As the anthropologist Margaret Meade said,
"A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
In that vein Simon Schama a brilliant Historian delivers the goods and the people that shaped great events.
My wife and I don't own a TV (sorry we are heretics, have been for years), we do watch DVD's on a projection screen and have spent hours watching Schama explain British History and Art History. This post is nothing more than a plug for a brilliant set of DVD's and education about the deviant people who shaped the history of art, England and the world.
If you like happy go lucky history watch some Ken Burns, if you like someone who will dish the dirt and make it personal, then Schama is your man. The BBC is really at the top of its game in these productions.
My old school is up for sale in Paris. I came across an ad in the back of Last weeks Economist. The school has moved to a larger more effective building. I am glad I got to play etudiante in the old place.
The Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chasuees is selling their building in the heart of the 6th arrondisement. 10,000 square meters of history on the block. The ENPC is considered the oldest Civil engineering school in the world and one of the elite schools in France, and boy do the French know how to do elite ;) I think our mascot was the beret.
I learned how to smoke like a pro, drink coffee and cop a French accent while writing my masters thesis on quantitative approaches to commodity hedge funds and hanging out in the Jardin de Luxembourg. As an anthropology & art history undergrad, Paris was an amazing place to experience art and another culture. Unfortunately my French grammar skills never let me be more than a man of the present moment, Je suis...... I can still order wine and a tasty meal in French, but gave up the smoking while living in Sweden one summer. Ah Scandinavia...
Being a fan of technology design and finance, I came across a few interesting posts recently. The current U.S. Economy is in the doldrums and many foreigners view us as a "reach for the gun society". So here are the latest tools in that arena.
I am currently involved deeply in the esoterica of CDOs, CDSs, bond insurance, default risk, off shore re-insurance and whole bunch of things which I find quite interesting. Hey I dig simplifying complicated problems and this one is a $2.3 trillion issue that is going to be hitting home soon. Write to me if you want to learn more.
Problem solving and thinking laterally and counterfactually are the skills of a good investor. On that vein here is some cool stuff I looked at this weekend. Step ells in India. Here are some large infrastrucure projects from the past that served important functional and social needs in a culture now gone. Cultures change and evolve over time, Today's american would find the average 1950's american to be similar to someone from a different english speaking country, different experiences, beliefs, behaviours and expectations.
So a blast from the Indian past. Indian Stepwells. WAN is a great site by the way.
Here is an interesting video, maybe creepy for some, but an interesting message about the pursuit of beauty and image in a video centric era. It represents a bit of a cold dystopian view, but is interesting all the same.
Some of the best design comes from Japan. One of my favorite periods of cultural explosion was the late edo period during the Meiji restoration. Here is a very interesting video highlighting modern Japanese architecture in a very interesting way. A lot of people don't know that the impressionists from France in the mid 19th century took a lot inspiration from a huge influx of Japanese prints and art works.
Our interactions shape our beliefs. Here is a new way of interacting with things. Remember when people, used the "drive" metaphor for a computer. He or she knows how to drive a computer. If you are under 35, you probably don't. Touch, and gesture are natural anthropic behaviours.
Here is a very anthropic, what is commonly called "friendly" or ergonomic way to interact...oh and its cool as well. thanks new launches
I recently bought Mercedes a copy of Spy Wars a great book about the CIA counter intelligence efforts during the cold war. Never under estimate the Russians, which probably holds true today as well. Here is some real spy gear that never made it to the field. Read more about it here at new Launches
Thanks Core77. Johnny Cheung Lee is pointing the way to the future of interaction and is a great hacker. Lets hope the digital hardware designer out there are watching his work here.
