erhebung

Listening to Shulman’s pronouncements, he suggested that he was the only one that understood buildings and that he understood them because they were right and he was right – there was one way of doing things and they knew how to do it. In an artworld marked primarily by flux, contingency, and uncertainty, Shulman’s redoubtable faith echoed both the best and the worst of modernism. Unshakeable certainty is called integrity in some quarters, obdurate in others.

“How do workshops with you work, Julius,” I asked.

“Well, the students take a photograph of a building. I take a photograph of a building. Then, I tell them why mine is better.”

MOSCOW – Russian engineers broke a red wax seal and six men emerged from a metal hatch after 105 days of isolation in a mock spacecraft, still smiling after testing the stresses that space travelers may face on the journey to Mars.

Sergei Ryazansky, the captain of the six-man crew, told reporters at a Moscow research institute near the Kremlin on Tuesday that the most difficult thing was knowing that instead of making the 172-million mile (276-million kilometer) journey they were locked in a windowless module of metal canisters the size of railway cars.

The men, chosen from 6,000 applicants, were paid euro15,000 ($20,987) each to be sealed up in the mock space capsule since March 31_ cut off almost entirely from the outside world.

In the void created by the lack of career capping interviews there are lots of holes and assumptions the computer-based devotees of Kubrick can get lost in. Kubrickian conspiracies are claimed to surround everything from the CIA, FBI, LSD, NASA, fluoride, Manifest Destiny, Royalty, Buddhism, the Kennedy assassination, pedophiles, Satan worship, Sun worship, phallic worship, systematic abuse of women, Jewish, Mason, secret society ruling class theories, nuclear holocaust, prison systems, military conditioning, numerology, Aliens, chess, all schools of philosophy and so many other sub theories it can be a challenge to separate lore and legend from artistic prophecies and true intent. That A Clockwork Orange is rife with it's own presentation of conspiracies as is Dr. Strangelove and many of the passages of dialog in 2001 directly speak of government plans in withholding evidence of extra terrestrials or conditioning the population slowly to accept there presence by design doesn’t help separate what is his belief and what is his satire. EWS is in some ways an extension of The Shining’s pleasure retreat of the world rich and elite as Wendy is told "All the Best People" have stayed at the hotel, directly across from the gaze of a Native American Chieftain. On the surface it is about child abuse but the subtext of The Shining is the annihilation of a people and the expansion westward. Hollywood is in some ways the end result of moving to the west coast and crossed with his observations about making and watching war movies in the middle of his own war movie Full Metal Jacket and with how Lolita’s mentions the “Art Films” Quilty makes, the red carpet rituals in EWS might reflect some thoughts on the Hollywood beauty factory. A Clockwork Orange is in some ways a treatise to the subliminal power of music and the programming power of drugs and movies. Barry Lyndon is the same to visual art and how to read a painting, secondly how to read a movie visually thru symbols and composition. Cross-referencing his films in this way may be over thinking, but better to think than to miss it all.

I go to the police station every day, but they just tell me to be patient and wait,” said Patiguli Palachi, whose husband, an electronics repairman, was taken in his pajamas with four other occupants of their courtyard house. Ms. Palachi said they might have been detained because a Han man was killed outside their building, but she insisted that her husband was not involved. “We were hiding inside at the time, terrified like everyone else,” she said.

A Message From Behind Closed Doors

It's been a terrible and awkward week this week here in Xinjiang, but things are finally calming down.  For the first few days, the entire province was shut down, and although slowly things are being switched back on, sadly, the internet is not one of them.  International phone lines have also yet to be returned.

Rumor around town is that this current phone and internet blackout could last anywhere from 3 more days to three more months (Oct. holiday).  Until this black hole that we are living in returns to life, this blog will be taking a short break.  I see no other solution.  I am also unable to check my email, so please forgive me if I haven't replied to you.  Things have calmed, but life in Xinjiang is definitely changing.

"Saint Peter, a 6th-century encaustic icon from Saint Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai"

Even historians -- or especially historians -- recognize that world events are shaped in part by deep economic, demographic, and technical trends, but only in part. Real human beings make real decisions that have real effects. (Cf: LBJ in 1964, Bush-Cheney in 2001, JFK-Khrushchev in 1962, etc.) If we recognize that a collision with China is possible, but only one of several possibilities, then we act so as to reduce that possibility and increase the probability of better outcomes. If we think breakup is inevitable, as Ferguson is arguing, then the odds of a collision in fact occurring become higher than they would otherwise be. (Because each side interprets the other's moves in the darkest way and responds in kind.)

I come up with a nefarious plot — this time about a bunch of scammers who are trying to get themselves an information channel with lower latency than anyone else has access to, in order to run the mother of all forex front-running scams. (It's the same fake-Asian-Republic scam, but in this remix it's a shell game; what they're after are the rights-of-way to the played-out trans-continental gas pipelines that terminate in the 'stan in question, through which they intend to run dark fibre that will allow them to front-run the big currency transfers that daily travel between Europe and the Pacific Rim by way of undersea cables, which add precious milliseconds of latency as they skirt the edges of continents.)

And then this shows up in my blog-hoovering. Goldman-Sachs, the FBI, and a gigantic can of worms. Possibly there's nothing to it, but some of the more alarming speculation is treading so close to my plot that it's looking like Madoff 2.0. (Specifically: Goldman-Sachs run large chunks of the network backbone for the NYSE. Goldman-Sachs have an automated low-latency trading system. If they were Very Naughty People, which of course they aren't, they could conceivably do deep packet inspection on traffic over the NYSE backbone, look for big trades, throttle the IP packets while the trade was in progress, and get their own trades in a few milliseconds in advance — front-running, in other words, but on an heroic scale. But they wouldn't do that because they are investment bankers and as we all know all investment bankers are utterly trustworthy models of law-abiding probity at all times, even when offered the opportunity to clean up $100M in profits per day with no come-back. NB: Sergei Aleynikov is not, to the best of my knowledge, an investment banker: but all I know about him is hearsay and should be discounted accordingly.)

Gaah.

Truth stranger than fiction. Right now there is thunder and lightning outside. Ominous mood building.

Fearing the genericizing and potential loss of its trademark, Google has discouraged use of the word as a verb, particularly when used as a synonym for general web searching. On February 23, 2003,^[6] the company sent a cease and desist letter to Paul McFedries, creator of Word Spy, a website that tracks neologisms.^[7] In an article in the Washington Post, Frank Ahrens discussed the letter he received from a Google lawyer that demonstrated "appropriate" and "inappropriate" ways to use the verb "google".^[8] It was reported that, in response to this concern, lexicographers for the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary lowercased the actual entry for the word, google, while maintaining the capitalization of the search engine in their definition, "to use the Google search engine to seek online information" (a concern which did not deter the Oxford editors from preserving the history of both "cases").^[9] In October 25, 2006, Google sent a plea to the public requesting that "you should please only use 'Google' when you’re actually referring to Google Inc. and our services."^[10]

Interesting that they discouraged the use of "to google"...

Like A DVR For Life

July 8th, 2009 | people I know

Clayton "Siege" Cubitt:

Clayton Cubitt: I think photography is moving towards seamlessness. The future of photography won’t be about capturing a decisive moment by timing a shot perfectly. Cameras will capture everything – thirty or sixty frames per second. Then you choose. Like a DVR for life.

Tokion Magazine: Doesn’t that sound like cheating?

Clayton Cubitt: If you think a photographer’s creativity comes from their shutter finger, then it’s cheating. But if you think the creativity comes from the setup, the perspective, from the editing and the craft, then I think it’s no big deal.