May 2013
1 post
April 2013
1 post
January 2013
1 post
August 2012
1 post
W. W. Norton: Do you ever return to Virginia Woolf? →
wwnorton.tumblr.com
EUDORA WELTY: Yes. She was the one who opened the door. When I read To the Lighthouse, I felt, Heavens, what is this? I was so excited by the experience I couldn’t sleep or eat. I’ve read it many times since, though more often these days I go back to her diary. Any day you open it to will be…
This book.
July 2012
1 post
June 2012
6 posts
How Tim Cook should open the WWDC: →
inothernews.tumblr.com
- House lights completely down.
- Disembodied voice fills the void. Male’s. Is that Tim Cook speaking?
- In perfect diction and cadence.
- “Welcome to the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2012. I’m Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, and I thank all of you for being here today as we present the newest
- items from our product line.”
- House lights come up, and we see an iPhone on a stool in the middle of the stage.
- “Actually, I’m not Tim Cook.”
- The real Tim Cook enters stage left.
- “I’m Tim Cook,” he says.
- “And I am the next version of Siri,” says the disembodied voice formerly thought to be Tim Cook’s.
- Crowd bursts out in wild applause as they realize Siri no longer sounds like a robot.
- “That’s it, really,” says the real Tim Cook. “A vastly improved Siri. That’s all we’ve got.”
- Crowd’s collective brow furrows. They are sad.
- Somewhere, John Malkovich laughs. (via inothernews)
If only Siri’s response to every query was “Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich.”
Yes.
May 2012
9 posts
“When I too long have looked upon your face,
Wherein for me a brightness unobscured
Save by the mists of brightness has its place,
And terrible beauty not to be endured,
I turn away reluctant from your light,
And stand irresolute, a mind undone,
A silly, dazzled thing deprived of a sight
From having looked too long upon the sun.
Then is my daily life a narrow room
In which a little while, uncertainly,
Surrounded by impenetrable gloom,
Among familiar things grown strange to me
Making my way, I pause, and feel, and hark,
Till I become accustomed to the dark.” —Second April, 1921. Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Wherein for me a brightness unobscured
Save by the mists of brightness has its place,
And terrible beauty not to be endured,
I turn away reluctant from your light,
And stand irresolute, a mind undone,
A silly, dazzled thing deprived of a sight
From having looked too long upon the sun.
Then is my daily life a narrow room
In which a little while, uncertainly,
Surrounded by impenetrable gloom,
Among familiar things grown strange to me
Making my way, I pause, and feel, and hark,
Till I become accustomed to the dark.” —Second April, 1921. Edna St. Vincent Millay.
April 2012
18 posts
Tom Stoppard's Arcadia
- Valentine: Well, it is odd. Heat goes to cold. It's a one-way street. Your tea will end up at room temperature. What's happening to your tea is happening to everything everywhere. The sun and the stars. It'll take a while but we're all going to end up at room temperature. When your hermit set up shop nobody understood this. But let's say you're right, in 18-whatever nobody knew more about heat than this scribbling nutter living in a hovel in Derbyshire.
- Hannah: He was at Cambridge--a scientist.
- Valentine: Say he was. I'm not arguing. And the girl was his pupil, she had a genius for her tutor.
- Hannah: Or the other way round.
- Valentine: Anything you like. But not this! Whatever he thought he was doing to save the world with good English algebra it wasn't this!
- Hannah: Why? Because they didn't have calculators?
- Valentine: No. Yes. Because there's an order things can't happen in. You can't open a door till there's a house.
- Hannah: I thought that's what genius was.
- Valentine: Only for lunatics and poets.
- Hannah:
- 'I had a dream which was not all a dream.
- The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars
- Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
- Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
- Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air. . .'
thanks Ryan - how are you?
Wonderful! Enjoying work and writing. Hope you are well—I’ve been enjoying your recent illustrations—they’re beautiful as always!
“A friend of mine has a theory that what billionaires really want to do is pile all their money in their swimming pools and dive in like Scrooge McDuck.”
—Graydon Carter. Vanity Fair. April 2012
Vanity Fair: Fifty Other Shades of Grey →
vanityfair.tumblr.com
1. Whether it’s O.K. to ask for a plus-one at a wedding.
2. How late is too late to cancel on dinner plans?
3. At what point it becomes socially acceptable to text new friends non-logistical texts.
4. Scheduling cocktails at 8 p.m.: to assume food is included or not to assume food is included?
5. Are personalities hereditary?I really, like, really love this.
All of these.
March 2012
22 posts
What Happened to _why? →
slate.com
I’ve always wanted to learn Ruby, and this is one of the better articles I’ve read about hackers and programmers—and it’s a pretty amazing story of how a journalist for Slate learns Ruby, writers her own program, spends hours reading message boards looking for answers, and asks what happened to the hacker _why and why he was important.
A few excerpts:
Discussions of beauty and elegance and utility seemed to me to be ubiquitous among coders, forever reaching for metaphors to describe how what might seem cold and mechanical in fact can feel like an ecstatic act of creation.
And this:
What happened to the ebullient, funny, and prolific programmer who was helping to teach me to program? Where had he gone and why?
Finally, this: a quote from _why:
All you need to know thus far is that Ruby is basically built from sentences. They aren’t exactly English sentences. They are short collections of words and punctuation [that] encompass a single thought. These sentences can form books. They can form pages. They can form entire novels, when strung together. Novels that can be read by humans, but also by computers.
