You can’t keep a good man down
Grand unifying theories
Not Loving The Eccentric Use of Caps, but this is a fun thought experiment: New York, Block for Block (via MeFi), or how to weaponise PR-chitecture and show it for the empty-headed uptopianism it so often is / sort of related: condo country, Canada. Toronto then and now, a slider gallery / the house as art: Waxwing, Tod Hanson / when comets come, so does the fever / speaking of fever, ‘Web3 is going great‘ (via MeFi), all the reasons why weavers of handbaskets are getting busy. Also useful, crypto explainers, and info on the parasitic relationship between art, NFTs, and crypto / silly Zillow listing of the week. The running costs will make your eyes water and the planet bleed / other things. A nostalgic look back 8-bit coding, race, and identity in UK / photography by Ben Huff at Pellicola Magazine / A Grand Unified Theory of Buying Stuff / The Matchbook Edition, ‘On hospitality, mementos, and the pocket billboard’ / epic post-rock landscapes by Anyone, Anywhere.
- “Once you recognize the role that the mind plays in investing things with meaning and with reality, then it’s easier to to invest virtual things with meaning, just as much as one can invest physical things with meaning” — a conversation with David Chalmers (NYU) at Vox
- The FBI file on Foucault — and how it relates to his ideas
- “One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world” — Karl Marx interviewed at 3:16AM
- “We seem to have strong evidence that we are biased toward explaining failures of human reasoning by positing biases. Let’s call this the ‘Bias Bias’” — thoughts on bias and paradox from Joshua Mugg (Park U.) and Muhammad Ali Khalidi (CUNY)
- “The empirical investigation of a topic like happiness is only going to be as good as the initial conceptualization that frames the hypothesis guiding the inquiry” — an interview with philosopher Bernard Reginster & psychologist Joachim Krueger (Brown), who team teach a course on happiness
- “Even when they deemed it a fable, there was some degree of uncertainty concerning its existence… making it a heuristic tool to understand the nature of plants” — on the scientific & philosophical value of a mythical lamblike animal-plant (via The Browser)
- Examining utterances that are “always speaking”–most laws, for instance–can help us distinguish different meanings of “meaning” — the Legal-Phi interview blog, run by Lucas Miotto (Maastricht), returns with a conversation with Martin David Kelly (Edinburgh)
Big spenders
The Loumavox (previously mentioned) turns out to be one of those elaborate Piltdown technology projects / IanVisits tracks changes to the London Tube Map / Rowan Moore on the objects that bring him joy / 43 forthcoming games, lots of beautiful environments to explore / Salvage Design by Kristen Meyer (via Colossal) / the Women of Rock Oral History Project / what does $295m buy you in Los Angeles? Related, in Rome, the Villa Aurora is valued at $534m: ‘There’s one small problem for [the buyer], however: the prince’s widow, Princess Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi — née Rita Carpenter, originally of San Antonio, Texas — who still lives in the villa and is more than loath to leave.’ / why have we never visited the virtual Sir John Soane’s Museum? (via MeFi) / the wild, wonderful world of estate sales.
There was a window of time, maybe the first decade of this century, where the cellphone presented an inconvenient obstacle to filmmakers. In order to preserve a sense of isolation and jeopardy, this new technology had to been shown not to work: No Signal Supercut. In the last ten years or so, mobile phones have become far more integrated as plot devices, far less likely to fail at inconvenient moments. Related, what movie plot would have been most easily solved with a simple cell phone?
I THINK I’VE BLOGGED ABOUT THIS BEFORE: The Forgotten Medieval Habit of Two Sleeps. “And far from being a peculiarity of the Middle Ages, Ekirch began to suspect that the method had been the dominant way of sleeping for millennia – an ancient default that we inherited from our prehistoric ancestors. The first record Ekirch found was from the 8th Century BC, in the 12,109-line Greek epic The Odyssey, while the last hints of its existence dated to the early 20th Century, before it somehow slipped into oblivion. How did it work? Why did people do it? And how could something that was once so completely normal, have been forgotten so completely?”