August Sander’s 1928 photo of a pastry chef (Konditor in Deutsch, which, given the business name konditori in Swedish, makes sense). This was maybe 12 feet high in sepia at… was it Old Town Bakery? in Pasadena.
Our favorite dish was their zuccotto, orange cream with a chocolate bombe-like cake around it, sprinkled with fine cocoa.
Not only do they have nuclear mutually assured destruction, the US & China have economic MAD. Nowhere is this more obvious than Apple’s supply chain. If either govt disturbs it, Apple’s stock tanks, or Chinese manufacturing gets wiped out. (Or both.)
Lexicon. Pretty simple. If the concept of heteronormative exists — and it clearly does — then the idea of placing the agenda of what great apes want also exists. Thus, primatonormative.
Here we have our cat Boots, obviously thinking our primatonormative agenda doesn’t interest him:
I seem to have originally written this in 2018, as a review for Goodreads. I think it holds up, and is worthwhile.
So. War and Peace. Voina i Mir (Война и мир) Got that done.
First, I prefer Dunnigan’s translation because she translates the swathes of French, as well as the Russian. Pevear & Volokhonsky don’t translate the French in line with the text, but force you to endnotes (paper) or popup footnotes (Kindle). They argue this is to illustrate how the French would seem to a middle class Russian of the 1860s, but me, I just want to read the book, and this decision gets in my way. I understand it, but it’s annoying. Dunnigan is much more fluid.
Tolstoy’s main accomplishment, to me, is he obviously knows where each and every character is at all times, and there are a lot of characters. I’m even willing to give him the usually derided history lecture in Part 2 of the Epilogue, because I see it primarily as an Apologia in the old sense — ie, how and why he wrote the book.
I am not as persuaded he keeps the voices of all those characters distinct. If you want to see someone do an amazing job with narrative voices (Tolstoy writes in 3rd person omniscient), I recommend A.S. Byatt’s Possession.
If you like chess, or go, this is the book for you. So many pieces, moving so many different ways.
But… Well, I see Natasha Rostova as the ur-template for the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. Her flightiness for the sake of flightiness doesn’t always seem driven by the character herself, but because Tolstoy wanted to portray her that way. In fact, I’d say that’s my largest critique — too often you see the puppetmaster, moving the marionettes the way he needs to for mechanical reasons.
I fully appreciate the accomplishment here. Still, to adapt Auda abu Tayi’s line from Lawrence of Arabia, it is not perfect.
“If, on balance, you focus more on remembrances than projects, something (central) in you is starting to decay. This also applies to groups, institutions, and countries.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Twitter
From Humans of New York:
“I’ve danced in every major theater on Broadway. My specialty was screwing up the choreography.”
In The Paris Review, “The Art of Fiction, No. 87”
INTERVIEWER
I was present a few years ago at a panel discussion where you were asked who was the greatest American female novelist, and you said Henry James. I had the feeling you meant something serious about that.
HARDWICK
Such remarks don’t bear scrutiny. Did I actually say that? I do remember saying once that maybe the greatest female novelist in English was Constance Garnett. Sometimes I try to lighten the gloom of discussions but I notice that no one laughs. Instead you see a few people writing down the name.
From a great Lunch with the FT interview with Ted Chiang:
“There was an exchange on Twitter a while back where someone said, ‘What is artificial intelligence?’ And someone else said, ‘A poor choice of words in 1954’,” he says. “And, you know, they’re right. I think that if we had chosen a different phrase for it, back in the ’50s, we might have avoided a lot of the confusion that we’re having now.”
So if he had to invent a term, what would it be? His answer is instant: applied statistics.
“It’s genuinely amazing that . . . these sorts of things can be extracted from a statistical analysis of a large body of text,” he says. But, in his view, that doesn’t make the tools intelligent. Applied statistics is a far more precise descriptor, “but no one wants to use that term, because it’s not as sexy”.
This is going to be a copy/paste of a Facebook post, and a comment thread with Andrew Laurence, a friend of mine. Mostly to stick my flag in the ground… how often do you get to scoop John Gruber?
Regarding Apple’s new $3500 Augmented Reality headset they’ve named Vision Pro that was revealed today: Did you notice how no one in the meetings the wearer is connecting to is also shown using a Vision Pro? No? I noticed that.
I do like the Bank of America Circle-Vision 360 panoramas, though.
Thinking in the long-term, though, they might be prototyping a brainwave sensitive UI. I mean, doesn’t this look like an Oath of Fealty/Minority Report mash-up?
Andrew: I noticed that no users were wearing eyeglasses. They eventually mentioned the Zeiss-provided prescription inserts.
Andrew: I’m skeptical of this entire category.
Me: I am, too. It’s very Dilbert-esque — because they have the tech, they’re doing it, even though it solves no problem. OTOH, in terms of prototyping a UI in preparation for a future physical interface (read: implants), it’s interesting.
Hm. Maybe I’m wrong. They’re positioning it as entertainment (so far). Well… Being a passenger. Either car or plane. Better than those damned tray tables and a laptop — if you can get the wireless pipes to the vehicle. But if driverless cars come about, we’ll all be passengers.
Oh, and I’ll say this before Gruber does: given Apple’s use of the word Pro for products, that implies a cheaper version is in the pipeline. (Checks: yeah, he hasn’t posted on Vision Pro yet. But I’ll bet the Jobs estate he’ll mention this when he does.)
Andrew: Like the Watch’s introduction, I was struck that yes it does new things, but how is it useful? What problems does it solve? The Watch eventually found its market and footing. I‘m sure these AR/VR thingies will too, eventually. (I don’t own a wear any wrist-device. I stopped wearing them nearly 20 years ago and have yet to find a set of usecases that earns back the spot on my wrist.)
Me: Just about every health professional I’ve seen (and I’ve seen many since 2022-01-08) wears one. They’ve got the health sector (not unlike the educational sector with students) locked on the Watch.