Benjamin Bratton’s We Need To Talk About TED is such an important read, and written like punch-in-the-face poetry:

So I ask the question: does TED epitomize a situation where if a scientist’s work (or an artist’s or philosopher’s or activist’s or whoever) is told that their work is not worthy of support, because the public doesn’t feel good listening to them?
I submit that astrophysics run on the model of American Idol is a recipe for civilizational disaster.
…
But … the corollaries of placebo science and placebo medicine areplacebo politics and placebo innovation. On this point, TED has a long way to go.
…
Instead of dumbing-down the future, we need to raise the level of general understanding to the level of complexity of the systems in which we are embedded and which are embedded in us. This is not about “personal stories of inspiration”, it’s about the difficult and uncertain work of demystification and reconceptualisation.”

Yes.

I (favourite things: maps, collages) am totally blown away by Matthew Cusick’s map collages. Look!

I’m working on a contract at Concordia for the next week or so that basically requires me to be here from 8am to 8pm every day. I have other projects our organization needs me working on throughout the day, and I was really hating the little white windowless basement room we got assigned—I couldn’t focus at all. 

So yesterday I decided I’d pack up, leave a sticky note on the door, and give the staff my cell phone number instead of waiting around for them to pop in to the office. Best decision ever: staff are perfectly fine and I’m way happier since I’ve been working from the Greenhouse.

On these brutally cold dark days, it’s so good to have somewhere warm and green that smells like dirt to hide in. This is one of my favourite places in all of Montreal.

(via Concordia on Pinterest)

I spent some time this morning going through Daniel Egnéus’ strange and beautiful illustration portfolio:

 

So it seems like we’ll be in Peru sometime in the next six months, and it only occurred to me now that we’ll have time to go sandboarding at Cerro Blanco. We had initially planned to do Everest Base Camp this summer, but decided to start with the Inca Trail because our work schedules are a bit complicated and the Lukla airport is slightly less than reliable. Next year — but for now, climbing runes and hurling ourselves down sand dunes just in time for festival season sounds fine to me.

I’ve had this incredibly vivid dream several times now where I’m standing in a warmly-lit room, like a yoga studio, and I have a sort of three dimensional screen in front of me. I have tight blue gloves on, and I’m using the gloves inside the screen space to sculpt a massive slab of clay. The clay, even though it’s just an image, feels heavy and wet and soft through the gloves, and I make all kinds of things with it : an animal shape, a bowl, a cup. Sometimes I press a button, and then rows and rows of the object I made start to appear on a shiny conveyor belt running through my studio room in different colours and sizes. I normally pick one of the objects and leave the room, like this is no particularly big deal at all.

So in my sleep I suppose I dreamt up a 3D sculpting and printing machine — which isn’t much of a far-off idea at all, which is probably the strangest part about it.

Bradbury on science fiction:

“INTERVIEWER
Why do you write science fiction? 

RAY BRADBURY
Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

Imagine if sixty years ago, at the start of my writing career, I had thought to write a story about a woman who swallowed a pill and destroyed the Catholic Church, causing the advent of women’s liberation. That story probably would have been laughed at, but it was within the realm of the possible and would have made great science fiction. If I’d lived in the late eighteen hundreds I might have written a story predicting that strange vehicles would soon move across the landscape of the United States and would kill two million people in a period of seventy years. Science fiction is not just the art of the possible, but of the obvious. Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.”

I really love the artwork of Chia-Chi Yu: a lot of it has a sort of mythical feel. Check out her Flickr gallery here (she also really likes cats).

From a Paris Review interview with Sybille Bedford:

“INTERVIEWER
Then you wrote another book on law: The Faces of Justice. When did you become interested in law?

BEDFORD
When I was twelve and lived in London with a family who let me do pretty well as I wished, I used to go to the law courts in the Strand instead of going to films or matinees. For awhile I toyed with the idea of becoming a barrister. I didn’t have the education, and anyway women at the time were considered to have the wrong voice for it. However, going to law courts is a good education for a novelist. It provides you with the most extravagant material, and it teaches the near impossibility of reaching the truth.”

 

Thanks to Radiolab I’ve started listening to the work of William Basinski, a classically trained composer who experiments with all kinds of strange loops. Here’s his last.fm player: you won’t regret putting on the big headphones and spending the afternoon giving it a listen.

Asimov visits the World Fair in 2014:

“Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books. Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth, including the weather stations in Antarctica (shown in chill splendor as part of the ’64 General Motors exhibit).

For that matter, you will be able to reach someone at the moon colonies, concerning which General Motors puts on a display of impressive vehicles (in model form) with large soft tires*intended to negotiate the uneven terrain that may exist on our natural satellite.

Any number of simultaneous conversations between earth and moon can be handled by modulated laser beams, which are easy to manipulate in space. On earth, however, laser beams will have to be led through plastic pipes, to avoid material and atmospheric interference. Engineers will still be playing with that problem in 2014.

Conversations with the moon will be a trifle uncomfortable, but the way, in that 2.5 seconds must elapse between statement and answer (it takes light that long to make the round trip). Similar conversations with Mars will experience a 3.5-minute delay even when Mars is at its closest. However, by 2014, only unmanned ships will have landed on Mars, though a manned expedition will be in the works and in the 2014 Futurama will show a model of an elaborate Martian colony.

As for television, wall screens will have replaced the ordinary set; but transparent cubes will be making their appearance in which three-dimensional viewing will be possible. In fact, one popular exhibit at the 2014 World’s Fair will be such a 3-D TV, built life-size, in which ballet performances will be seen. The cube will slowly revolve for viewing from all angles.

One can go on indefinitely in this happy extrapolation, but all is not rosy.”

 

The Radiolab episode on BLAME is really worth a listen.

I’ve been in love with the portraits done by Miss Led for ages, and I think this one is my favourite.

“The people who were interesting told good stories. They were also inquisitive: willing to work to expand their social and intellectual range. Most important, interesting people were also the best listeners. They knew when to ask questions. This was the set of people whose shows I would subscribe to, whose writing I would seek out, and whose friendship I would crave. In other words, those people were the opposite of boring.

…The Big Bore lurks inside us all. It’s dying to be set loose to lecture on Quentin Tarantino or what makes good ice cream. Fight it! Fight the urge to speak without listening, to tell a bad story, to stay inside your comfortable nest of back-patting pals. As you move away from boring, you will never be bored.”

From You are boring.