slide from her presentation for lab group meeting on Casimir Force. 

I <3 Lululululululululu

so I don’t believe in ergonomics really after dealing with RSI/tendonitus for a year and a half. Perhaps I’ll post about that over the holidays. However, I have trouble with keeping my head back and not yoking my neck like a turtle over my screen, so perhaps a laptop stand is in order..

I dig how the keyboard tucks away. I want to build something less pretentious than this, but it’s a nice shape to think about.

At a certain point, you have to leave childish things behind, like the sense wow-I-can-draw, or in my case, wow-I-can-read, until you have what is called a talent. But as you become an adult and if you have to make things, you have to kind of give up the idea of processing the talent otherwise you would have spent your life painting beautiful fruit bowls and I would have certainly written stories that sound exactly like Agatha Christie. You have to move from facility to something else.

Zadie Smith on talent. Also see Smith’s 10 rules of writing and more sage advice on writing from famous authors. (via explore-blog)

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnOfomPgETs?wmode=transparent&autohide=1&egm=0&hd=1&iv_load_policy=3&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&showsearch=0&w=500&h=375]

Loove of the harmonies that start at 2:36. Really funky. Took that movie ending to the next level. 

Also Lulu is basically Holly Golightly, or rather the other way around. 

(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)

New Apt for the New Year. I’m about to be such an adult. Weird.

Philip Greenspun and Web Dev of the 90's

In October 1995, the MIT Media Lab threw itself a tenth anniversary party. I skipped it so that I could take snapshots of colored trees in Vermont, but my friends said that the physical event was fabulous: little gifts for everyone, cleverly packaged; a Photomosaic poster by Rob Silvers; women in plastic pants. As an adjunct to the physical event, the Media Lab was going to create the best Web site ever. They got NYNEX to bring in a 45-Mbps T3 network connection; you wouldn’t want millions of users to get slowed down working their way through MIT’s 100-Mbps backbone. They got Hewlett-Packard to donate a huge pile of multiprocessor machines with disk arrays. They hired expert consultants to plug all the computers in and hook them up to the network. They hired professionals to do graphic design and site layout.

After getting back from foliage country, I visited http://www.1010.org with high hopes. There wasn’t any magnet content. Nobody had bothered to write stories or take pictures. Every day a Media Lab editor posed a question and then sat back to watch a USENET-style discussion evolve. There were only a handful of postings in each area. One user had contributed a smiley face. Colon dash right-paren. That was his entire message. This didn’t really shock me until I noticed that on a scale from 1 to 7, this post had been rated 4.3 by other users. Yes, several other users had taken the trouble to rate this three-character posting. When the 10-day Web event was over, the massive disk arrays held almost enough user-contributed data to fill two 3.5 inch floppies.

Inspiring.