“One of the misconceptions about the circus was that it was fun and great, but in reality, humor was a high art form in the late ’20s in Paris,” said Alexander S. C. Rower, a grandson of Calder and director of the Calder Foundation, which manages the artist’s estate. “So much so that when Calder performed his circus, all the circus critics came and reviewed it, giving it great dignity instead of minimizing it as something for children, which it wasn’t.”
After 1930, however, Mr. Rower said, “performing the circus was not really his thing.” Like a wily barker, Calder deployed his circus to lure his audience to an attraction that he hoped would seal his reputation: his wire portraits. Modeled on famous personalities like Calvin Coolidge, Kiki de Montparnasse and Josephine Baker, whose sensuous full-length likeness was composed of spirals and whorls, these suspended sculptures softly shimmied as they caught the air. Later came his moving abstractions, the stabiles and mobiles, a collision of art and engineering.”
“Cousteau asked if I’d like to travel with him from Paris to the French Atlantic port of La Rochelle, where the prototype for a new ship, with a wind-propulsion system he and his colleagues had just invented, was being tested. I jumped at the chance, rose at five A.M. in order to meet him at the taxi stand before dawn, and flew with him to La Rochelle. The maritime engineers immediately collared him for meetings, and I spent much of the day walking along the shore. Not until midnight did we board the windship for the test sail. I’d never sailed at night before, and the experience was surreal. In total blackness – with no horizon, no distinction between sea and sky, no perspective – illuminated ociean liners and fishing boats alike seemed to be sailing through space. I stood with Cousteau on the bridge. At some point before dawn, I had an experience unlike any I’ve had before or after: I fell asleep standing up. I shook myself awake just as Cousteau turned and saw me catch myself. He ordered everyone to retire to the dorms on board. He took care to assign me to a couch and left his own door open so that he could keep an eye out for me, the only woman aboard. After about two hours of sleep, he and I had to leave to catch a plane back to Paris. We landed, caught a cab, and were heading from the airport back to the city when suddenly Cousteau interrupted our conversation and said, “I’m going to sleep for fifteen minutes.” He closed his eyes. A moment later his head dropped. He began to snore softly. And then, after exactly fifteen minutes by my watch, he shook to attention and picked up the conversation precisely where we’d left off. After we had entered Paris, Cousteau instructed the driver to stop on the Fauborg St. Honore about a mile from where we each had an apartment. I looked around: We were parked in front of the Elysee Palace. Cousteau got out of the cab and told me that he had a meeting with the president of France. I kept the taxi, went home, and fell into bed. It was eleven A.M. I woke up the next morning. I was thirty-three years old. He was seventy-four. When Simone later recounted a nightmare she’d had, I could only laugh. She’d dreamed that Cousteau, not having enough to occupy his time, had taken a job as a night clerk at the Hotel Royalton in New York.”
The Human, The Orchid, And The Octopus: Exploring and Conserving Our Natural World. By Jacques Cousteau and Susan Schiefelbein
Time Magazine, December 10. 2007. Barack Obama: The Contender
Q: A few months ago, we ran a cover story called “The Case for National Service.”
Barack Obama: One of the things I think I can bring to the presidency is to make government and public service cool again. There’s such a hunger among young people for some outlet for their idealism. That’s why you see these movements around Darfur or climate change. You don’t see it expressed in terms of people wanting to serve in the Justice Department or the foreign service. Why should they, when the core missions of those agencies have been gutted? Q; Would you say Al Gore is really the catalyst for concern about climate change?
Barack Obama: He has been working on this for decades. The country and the world caught up to him.
“The new Google Blog Search is very nice. It’s a big improvement to the old one. But it’s like a lot of Google’s services. All algorithm and no “voice”. It may attract a mainstream audience the way Google News has and that’s fine. But for me, it’s not close to the value that I get from aggregators with an angle. It’s like a mainstream newspaper versus a blog. On one you get the news and on the other you get insight.”
“The campus’s Berkeley Center for New Media has developed a Web site that aims to make charitable giving easier by matching donors to potential non-profit organizations based on their preferences.
The Donation Dashboard site allows new users to rate their interest in 15 sample charities. Based on their responses, the system provides a customized donation portfolio with recommendations for different organizations.
“There are so many great organizations out there and it’s hard to decide where to place your money, especially for young people,” said Ephrat Bitton, an industrial engineering and operations research graduate student, who helped develop the theory behind the project.
The pilot system currently includes information on 70 non-profit institutions, including World Wildlife Fund and American National Red Cross, among others. Depending on the amount of interest in the project, the site could expand to include more charities, said Tavi Nathanson, an electrical engineering and computer sciences graduate student who is responsible for developing the software.
“People can discover more charities because (the system) is based on their interests, not just about what they’ve heard of or what is popular,” Nathanson said.”
In the movie I.Q., I discovered that Albert Einstein had been fascinated with compasses since childhood. “When he was four and sick in bed, Albert Einstein’s father gave him a magnetic compass. Albert practiced turning the compass every which way, soon becoming fascinated by the new toy. No matter which way he turned it, the needle would always point in the same direction, much in the way Einstein’s genius and fascination with nature pointed him toward a life of scientific discovery,” writes Richard Duffy in the My Hero project.
(I.Q. is one of my favourite romantic comedies. It’s hard to resist a hero, played here by Tim Robbins, who’d invent cold fusion to win a girl. A chance was missed to link I.Q. to the great 1930’s screwball comedies, though, by not finding a part for Einstein’s pet fox terrier.)
In Technology Review today there’s a review of Google’s 3G phone, Android, comparing and contrasting it with the iphone. There’s one bizarre feature: “The G1 also has one unusual hardware feature: a built-in compass that can determine the direction in which the phone is pointed.”
Language development is a process that starts early in human life, when a person begins to acquire language by learning it as it is spoken and by mimicry. Children’s language development moves from simplicity to complexity. Infants start without language. Yet by four months of age, babies can read lips and discriminate speech sounds. Usually, language starts off as recall of simple words without associated meaning, but as children age, words acquire meaning, and connections between words are formed. In time, sentences start to form as words are joined together to create logical meaning. As a person gets older, new meanings and new associations are created and vocabulary increases as more words are learned. Wikipedia
Sound Designer Ben Burtt (who also created the sound for Star Wars) talks about creating the language for the machines in WALL-E from an array of mechanical devices.
Q: Do you find that sound design is still just as exciting for you now as it was when you first began your career?
BEN BURTT: Sure. I love recording sounds and exploring for sounds and yes, because every film seems to soak up and use everything I’ve got because there is always a need for something more and so I’m always on the alert for new things. They are harder to find because I’ve recorded so many airplanes and explosions and electronic noises that for Wall-E I think I and the team as well recorded every motor we ever came in touch with from appliances to jet planes, whatever. We just went wild. The world is full of sound and we found for a science fiction film like this – and others I’ve done – the idea of taking real natural sounds and imposing them into the fantasy film gives the illusion that these things are real because we kind of recognize them even though we can’t identify them specifically, but you say “Oh, it sounds like it is really a motor so I kind of believe it.” That has been the trick in these films.
Q: What are some of the sources of these sounds?
BEN BURTT: Well there are thousands of sounds. There were more sound files in Wall-E then any single feature film I’ve ever worked on, about 2500, because every character has a set of sounds and there are lots of movement and lots of dense activity. Stories of sounds, well let’s see – Wall-E’s treads, he drives around, he goes different speeds. When he’s going slowly, he makes a little whirring sound and that is the sound I heard it actually in a John Wayne movie called Island in the Sky on Turner Classic Movies. There was a guy turning a little generator, a soldier generating power. I said I like that generator sound, that is cool, and so where can I get one? I found one on eBay. I bought it. It came in its original 1949 box so we could take that into the studio and perform with it to tailor it to the speed of Wall-E. But that’s only good for when Wall-E is going slow.
When Wall-E is going fast, he needed something higher pitched and more energetic. Once again, I went back through my memory of things. I had recorded bi-planes a long time ago for Raiders of the Lost Ark. The old 1930s bi-planes have an inertia starter. It’s a mechanical crank that cranks the engine up. You do it by hand and then clutch – you connect it and it makes a wonderful whirring sound. So I thought I want to get that and do more with it. I couldn’t bring a bi-plane into the studio but on eBay I found an inertia starter, bought that again, and brought it in. So we built these props for many things. You know, it’s a tradition in animation to have sound effects machines. This goes back to the earliest days of Disney cartoons — like wind machines and blowing machines and things like that. We actually built several things so we could perform Wall-E sounds that way.
….
Q: Wall-E reacts when something fascinates or surprises him. Where did those sounds come from?
BEN BURTT: There are a multitude of sounds like those little eyebrow type things are a Nikon camera shutter and his arms are the sound of a tank cannon, the asmyth motor on a tank. Name something and I will try to tell you what it is. There are a lot of things.
Q: There is one obvious sound joke which is the Mac boot-up sound. Are there others?
BEN BURTT: Once again, Andrew, that was his idea. I attribute that to him.
I went to see WALL-E today. The branch of robotics I write about isn’t anthropomorphic. Machines that allow one to work with something from a distance began with the Manhattan project with the scientists being able to manipulate the radioactive materials from a safe distance, and it’s hard to romanticise that kind of creation myth. I write mostly about the projects and theories of Dr Robert Ballard, whose remotely operated robots found the wreck of the Titanic, and Ken Goldberg, an engineer and artist who is now head of the new media center at Berkeley. Their robotic mechanisms are tending towards the deep background of invisibility and while the interfaces are simple, they don’t simplify the mathematical language and concepts for anyone wanting a more direct connection with the robotic devices.
But I’m susceptible to the charm of anthropomorphic robots, and given my gypsy lifestyle might well have satisfied my longing for owning a fox terrier by acquiring Sony’s robotic terrier, AIBO (”man’s next friend”) if it hadn’t been discontinued. I’m fascinated by the mythological framework of WALL-E. We’re in an era where changes to the natural environment are caused by humankind, by domesticated flora and fauna and the machines we’ve created. Back in 2004 scientists were observing that the “Anthropocene age” has arrived: “Scientists are beginning to accept that Earth has entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, so named because humans have come to rival nature in their impact on the global environment. The EuroScience forum in Stockholm heard on Thursday that climate change was the most obvious of a complex range of man-made effects that is rapidly changing the physics, chemistry and biology of the planet.Paul Crutzen, the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist who first proposed the term Anthropocene four years ago, said the concept was winning wide acceptance from colleagues in other fields.”
WALL-E is a tender, dear-hearted machine charged with the responsibility of cleaning up after the humans who have abandoned the planet. He creates skyscrapers of compacted consumer refuse that sit among the skyscrapers of Manhattan. The landscape reminded me of Alexis Rockman’s musings about the environmental future of Manhattan, particularly the cover of the book he collaborated on with Peter Ward, who says, in his introduction: “I explained the thoughts that make up the subject of this book, starting out with the basic assumption that colours all that follows: for the biological life span of the planet, humanity is essentially extinction proof, and, if we manage to develop effective interstellar travel, completely extinction proof as long as the galaxy survives…It is far more likely that the future will be … a digital wilderness of humans co-evolving with machines, or a wilderness of genetically altered plants escaping from agricultural fields to change the world into a landscape of weeds, or a wilderness of cloned sheep walking amok among their even more staid and normally bred bretheren.”
Like a Victorian naturalist WALL-E saves paleontological wonders: a rubik’s cube, a light bulb, garden gnomes, strings of fairy lights. He wonders about love. His only frame of reference for love and connection with another creature is a video of the movie musical, “Hello Dolly” and a pet cockroach.
I’m reading everything the Australian explorer, environmentalist and paleontologist Tim Flannery has ever written and the book I’m reading right now is Country, where he talks about his yearning to be a paleontologist in order to understand the history and magnificence of the kangaroo. He observes that Australia’s environmental woes have been exacerbated by the ill-suited European agricultural systems and flora and fauna introduced by the British settlers. But to walk away from the land and leave it untended would be a worse fate. The land and its creatures can only regenerate with our help, he writes. He was mortified by a farmer killing a steer in front of him when his scientific colleagues made a request to buy some meat: “Would it not be morally preferable to avoid eating meat?” he wonders. “What, then, would become of the outback, which is unsuitable for agriculture? Without industry no-one would live there and manage the land, so central Australia would become a vast degraded reservoir of feral animals, in which native species and introduced ones alike would, in drought, suffer and die by the millions. Care for our ecology must underpin everything we do, for without a viable ecosystem humans and animals will not survive.”
WALL-E tends the destroyed environment and cares for the creature he lives with, his pet cockroach. And he’s rewarded with the regeneration of plant life. The story of a fearless, big-hearted robot saving the human race, which returns to earth to help him regenerate the planet, is highly entertaining and exquisitely rendered. There are sweetly ironic references: when WALL-E powers up he plays the Mac start up chord. And Eve, WALL-E’s love resembles the Roswell alien. The movie is seen from the robots’ point of view, the demons and heroes are their demons and heroes, the malevolent computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and R2D2 (there’s an homage to its trash compactor sequence from Star Wars.)
The credits roll over civilisation forming, again, with humans and machines intertwined, that might be a scenario from Will Wright’s game, Spore. Equivalents to the cave paintings at Lescaux, Egyptian, Greek and Etruscan mythologies, all the way up to the present. And then … ? I’m tempted to buy a version of Spore for the iphone, if there’s one in the app store. I want to know how this ends, again.
Dr Robert Ballard speaking at the TED conference May 29, 2008
We're entering a new golden age of exploration Dr Robert Ballard told the audience at the TED conference in May. He's commandeered a US Navy Boat, the Okeanus Explorer. "It's mission is as good as you can get. Its mission is to go where no-one has gone before on Planet Earth." He has no idea what he'll discover. It might be the wreck of an ancient trading ship, an unknown sea-life form, or an anomalous geological feature. But whatever his remotely operated robots come across deep in the ocean will instantly be seen in a command centre connected to universities and schools on internet 2.
The tools he's laboured to develop will allow many humans to feel the electrifying thrill of discovery as if they were actually there, not thousands of miles away plugged into a computer. He wrote about the experience of telepresence in his book Adventures in Ocean Exploration. "Now I looked back at the shimmering image, suddenly no longer in the van but virtually hovering a few metres above the wreck, my eyes absorbing what the video camera saw. This was the precious sense of 'telepresence' that I had struggled with my colleagues from Woods Hole's Deep Submergence Laboratory to achieve over the previous two decades."
Marvin Minsky coined the term in 1980 to explain the engaging of the senses with something that's happening at a remote location. This can happen through time as well as space. When Robert Ballard found life-forms that thrive without light or oxygen in the hydrothermal vents of the Galapagos Rift, and wondered how they might have contributed to the evolution of life on earth, he reflected upon Charles Darwin's observations of variations and similarities between animals in the Galapagos region that were the foundation for the theory of evolution.
Minsky made a distinction between virtual reality - which engages people with a simulated environment - and telepresence. Ken Goldberg's Telegarden project demonstrates how people, from a distance, can affect an environment. Over the internet people could direct a robot arm to plant and water seeds and weed a garden plot. Considering Ken Goldberg's telerobotic art and science projects in tandem with Robert Ballard's illustrates what Ballard means when he talks about the most important part of the exploration being bringing home insights gained on the mission and applying them to everyday life.
CONE Sutro project in San Francisco
Ken's created a set of smart robotic cameras that can be controlled remotely, collaboratively by scientists. The CONE project is currently operating in Texas, tracking changing migrational patterns of birds but it was first installed on the deck of the home of Craigslist founder, Craig Newmark, on the outskirts of San Francisco and operated by amateur birdwatchers.
The tools of telepresence are now in mobile phones. In his keynote address for this year's Apple Conference Steve Jobs stressed the GPS location tools in the new, cheaper 3G i-phone and that its operating system has been opened up to third party developers. I imagine that it will be possible to access Outside.in's Radar on an i-phone. In 2006 Steven Johnson and John Geraci started Outside.in, a service that aggregates hyperlocal news by geotagging posts from blogs, newspapers, twitter posts and discussion threads to places displayed on Google Earth maps.
"Radar organises the news in dynamic, concentric circles around you. First it looks for news and conversation immediately around you, within 1,000 feet. Then it searches for stories in your neighbourhood, then in your city. You can set up your radar to track specific places you care about, anywhere in the US."
Travelling to a place, metaphorically, through telepresence is only one part of the equation. Radar gives us a way to bring mentally organise information that's far away with what's close, constantly telescoping between them. It's something Steven Johnson's termed "the long zoom" and that he started talking about in his 2001 book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software.
"Imagine a kind of tracking shot of life two or three years from now, a movement from scale to scale - like the wonderful Charles and Ray Eames film, Powers of Ten, which starts with a view of the Milky Way and steadily zooms all the way to a person lying in a park in Chicago, and then all the way to subatomic particles contained within that person's hand."
Tom Waits performs “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” with lyrics by E.Y. Harburg. Photographs are scenes from the Depression of the 1930’s.
E.Y. (Yip) Harburg wrote the lyrics for “April in Paris” by taking an armload of travel brochures to a diner on 7th Avenue. He’d never been to Paris. He wrote the lyrics for “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and the song, added to the soundtrack of “The Wizard of Oz” at the last minute, gives the movie its sense of magical hopefulness.
He hadn’t intended to become a songwriter. He’d made investments in the stock market that he expected to provide a healthy income for him, but when they were wiped out in the crash of 1929 he considered it a blessing in disguise.
“With the crash I realized that the greatest fantasy of all was business,” he told Studs Terkel in 1968. “The only realistic way of making a living was versifying, living off your imagination. We thought American business was the Rock of Gibraltar. We were the prosperous nation, and nothing could stop us now. A brownstone house was forever. You gave it to your kids and they put marble fronts on it. There was a feeling of continuity. If you made it, it was there forever. Suddenly the big dream exploded. The impact was unbelievable.”
During the Depression, walking along the streets of New York City, he’d hear men asking “brother, can you spare a dime?” These were men who’d made a contribution to society, they’d built the skyscrapers, and railroads, and fought for their country. Now they were struggling.
“In the song the man is really saying: I made an investment in this country. Where the hell are my dividends?” said Harburg. “Is it a dividend to say ‘Can you spare a dime?’ ‘What the hell is wrong?’ Let’s examine this thing. It’s more than just a bit of pathos. It doesn’t reduce him to a beggar. It makes him a dignified human being, asking questions – and a bit outraged too, as he should be.”
Yip Harburg told Studs Terkel that the song struck a nerve, and that coming into an election in America — which the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt would win — the Republicans tried to suppress, or ban, the song. But it had already taken hold.
In office President Roosevelt halted a run on the banks and if he couldn’t feed his citizens he at least tried to nourish their spirits, creating federal works programmes in theatre, art, literature, photography and music.
from “Sullivan’s Travels” by Preston Sturges
The film tells of the ‘mission’ of ‘Sully’ (Joel McCrea), a big-shot Hollywood director of lightweight comedies to experience suffering in the world before producing his next socially-conscious film of hard times – an epic titled ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ about the common man. [Film-makers Joel and Ethan Coen paid homage to Sturges and his admirable film by naming their own 21st century film O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000)?] After some failed attempts dressed as a hobo and companionship on the road with an aspiring blonde actress simply called The Girl (Veronica Lake in her second picture following her work in I Wanted Wings (1941)) and wearing boy’s clothes, he succeeds in losing his freedom, identity and name, health, pride and money. Incarcerated in a prison work camp as the end result of his misadventures, and as part of an audience of chain-gang convicts watching a screening in a Southern black church of a Walt Disney cartoon (starring Mickey Mouse and Pluto), he retains one final ability – - to laugh. He succeeds in understanding that his attitude toward the poor had bordered on patronization. He finally realizes the uplifting power of laughter, and decides to return to his true calling – the making of entertaining comedies to entertain rather than to edify.
Fire by Alexis Rockman from a new show of his paintings.
He applies paint with abandon, using tools such as turkey basters, eye droppers, toothbrushes, and sponges. He depicts landslides, waterspouts, hurricanes, crumbling Arctic ice, and other weather-related phenomena. The paintings look like Abstract Expressionist works, save that along the edges he applies his talent for realist rendering, adding oil derricks, swimming pools, and mountain shacks, tiny in scale alongside the daunting forces of nature.
“This is the aftermath of ‘Manifest Destiny,’ ” Rockman says, looking around the gallery at the Rose. “It’s a response to the seven years I worked on that piece. I was so sick of painting a very specific building. . . . I wanted to get the same kind of content, but not as much information.”
That content has a pointed political agenda about global warming, a longtime subject for Rockman.
“I’m very worried,” he says. “My feelings have changed over the last 10 years. I’m cautiously hopeful about culture shifting to take it seriously. I’m skeptical that corporate America will do the right thing.”
Weather – visually operatic, so affected by climate change – was the perfect next step. “I want to paint about alchemy and intuition, which you can’t do when you’re painting architecture,” he says.
Bestselling, award-winning, author Kim Stanley Robinson continues his groundbreaking trilogy of eco-thrillers-and propels us deeper into the awesome whirlwind of climatic change. Set in our nation’s capital, here is a chillingly realistic tale of people caught in the collision of science, technology, and the consequences of global warming-which could trigger another phenomenon: abrupt climate change, resulting in temperatures… When the storm got bad, scientist Frank Vanderwal was at work, formalizing his return to the National Science Foundation for another year. He’d left the building just in time to help sandbag at Arlington Cemetery. Now that the torrent was over, large chunks of San Diego had eroded into the sea, and D.C. was underwater. Shallow lakes occupied the most famous parts of the city. Reagan Airport was awash and the Potomac had spilled beyond its banks. Rescue boats dotted the saturated cityscape. Everything Frank and his colleagues in the halls of science and politics feared had culminated in this massive disaster. And now the world looked to them to fix it. Whatever Frank can do, now that he is homeless, he’ll have to do from his car. He’s not averse to sleeping outdoors. Years of research have made him hyperaware of his status as just another primate. That plus his encounter with a Tibetan Buddhist has left him resolved to live a more authentic life. Hopefully, this will prepare him for whatever is to come…. For even as D.C. bails out from the flood, a more extreme climate change looms. With the melting of the polar ice caps shutting down the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, another Ice Age could be imminent. The last time it happened, eleventhousand years ago, it took just three years to start. Once again Kim Stanley Robinson uses his remarkable vision, trademark wry wit, and extraordinary insight into the complexity between man and nature to take us to the brink of disaster-and slightly beyond.
Synopsis of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Fifty Degrees Below, from Google Books
BLDGBLOG: I’m interested in the possibility that literary genres might have to be redefined in light of climate change. In other words, a novel where two feet of snow falls on Los Angeles, or sand dunes creep through the suburbs of Rome, would be considered a work of science fiction, even surrealism, today; but that same book, in fifty years’ time, could very well be a work of climate realism, so to speak. So if climate change is making the world surreal, then what it means to write a “realistic” novel will have to change. As a science fiction novelist, does that affect how you approach your work?Kim Stanley
Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, I’ve been saying this for a number of years: that now we’re all living in a science fiction novel together, a book that we co-write. A lot of what we’re experiencing now is unsurprising because we’ve been prepped for it by science fiction. But I don’t think surrealism is the right way to put it. Surrealism is so often a matter of dreamscapes, of things becoming more than real – and, as a result, more sublime. You think, maybe, of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, and the way that he sees these giant catastrophes as a release from our current social set-up: catastrophe and disaster are aestheticized and looked at as a miraculous salvation from our present reality. But it wouldn’t really be like that.
I started writing about Earth’s climate change in the Mars books. I needed something to happen on Earth that was shocking enough to allow a kind of historical gap in which my Martians could realistically establish independence. I had already been working with Antarctic scientists who were talking about the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and how unstable it might be – so I used that, and in Blue Mars I showed a flooded London. But after you get past the initial dislocations and disasters, what you’ve got is another landscape to be inhabited – another situation that would have its own architecture, its own problems, and its own solutions.
To a certain extent, later, in my climate change books, I was following in that mold with the flood of Washington DC. I wrote that scene before Katrina. After Katrina hit, my flood didn’t look the same. I think it has to be acknowledged that the use of catastrophe as a literary device is not actually adequate to talk about something which, in the real world, is often so much worse – and which comes down to a great deal of human suffering.
"Through this evening's tide of faces unregistered, unrecognised, amid hurrying black shoes, furled umbrellas, the crowd descending like a single organism into the station's airless heart, comes Shinya Yamazaki, his notebook clasped beneath his arm like the egg case of some modest but moderately successful marine species. Evolved to cope with jostling elbows, ruthless briefcases, Yamazaki and his small burden of information go down into the neon depths."
William Gibson. All Tomorrow's Parties.
Send mail to Jillian whatyamazakireads at yahoo.com
Q: A few months ago, we ran a cover story called “The Case for National Service.”
“The new Google Blog Search is very nice. It’s a big improvement to the old one. But it’s like a lot of Google’s services. All algorithm and no “voice”. It may attract a mainstream audience the way Google News has and that’s fine. But for me, it’s not close to the value that I get from aggregators with an angle. It’s like a mainstream newspaper versus a blog. On one you get the news and on the other you get insight.”
In the movie I.Q., I discovered that Albert Einstein had been fascinated with compasses since childhood. “When he was four and sick in bed, Albert Einstein’s father gave him a magnetic compass. Albert practiced turning the compass every which way, soon becoming fascinated by the new toy. No matter which way he turned it, the needle would always point in the same direction, much in the way Einstein’s genius and fascination with nature pointed him toward a life of scientific discovery,” writes Richard Duffy in the 
