JR's Dropbox

By Bob Rosney from a blog called Koax! Koax! Koax! (found at BoingBoing!)

Excerpt:

“I’m not really any sadder about Michael Jackson’s death than I already was about his life.

“It was clear that this was a guy whose Maslovian pyramid took a sharp turn somewhere above “safety needs” and ended up with its tip pointing in a direction nobody else has ever been interested in going.  It’s always uncomfortable to see someone who’s been ruined by fame; what was distressing about Jackson was that even though he was ruined by fame before his 20th birthday, he kept pressing the lever, and getting rewarded with still more fame, and still more ruination.  Fame ruined him as an artist and it ruined him as a person, and then it kept on ruining him.

This excerpt I have clipped from the beginning only hints at the genius critical review to come … PLEASE read the whole thing!

Clip:

Critical consensus on Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is overwhelmingly negative. But the critics are wrong. Michael Bay used a squillion dollars and a hundred supercomputers’ worth of CG for a brilliant art movie about the illusory nature of plot.

Oh, and I would warn you that there’ll be spoilers in this review — except that, really, since I still have no idea what actually happened in this movie, I’m not sure how much I can spoil it.

Since the days of Un Chien Andalou and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, filmmakers have reached beyond meaning. But with this summer’s biggest, loudest movie, Michael Bay takes us all the way inside Caligari’s cabinet. And once you enter, you can never emerge again. I saw this movie two days ago, and I’m still living inside it. Things are exploding wherever I look, household appliances are trying to kill me, and bizarre racial stereotypes are shouting at me.

“With the recent release of the new Star Trek, I started to wonder how is this going to affect the kids? Thankfully, mine have heard of and have watched plenty of the original series, so I didn’t have to worry about their state of mind.

But there are a lot of kids out there who think that this new movie is Star Trek. That it’s some flashy action adventure space movie with chiseled young actors and massive special effects. While that’s all well and good, since it’s a reboot for the purpose of gathering new fans, I think it’s important that kids have a sense of history when it comes to things as influential as Star Trek.

Via BoingBoing (where they found it on Kottke):

“Despite all this activity Churchill’s daily routine changed little during these years. He awoke about 7:30 a.m. and remained in bed for a substantial breakfast and reading of mail and all the national newspapers. For the next couple of hours, still in bed, he worked, dictating to his secretaries.

At 11:00 a.m., he arose, bathed, and perhaps took a walk around the garden, and took a weak whisky and soda to his study.

At 1:00 p.m. he joined guests and family for a three-course lunch. Clementine drank claret, Winston champagne, preferably Pol Roger served at a specific temperature, port brandy and cigars. When lunch ended, about 3:30 p.m. he returned to his study to work, or supervised work on his estate, or played cards or backgammon with Clementine.

At 5:00 p.m., after another weak whisky and soda, he went to bed for an hour and a half. He said this siesta, a habit gained in Cuba, allowed him to work 1 1/2 days in every 24 hours. At 6:30 p.m. he awoke, bathed again, and dressed for dinner at 8:00 p.m.

Nothing but 3 frame animations, image captures from movies, some of which are kind of humorous to view …

Mindhacks blog points to a fascinating (though also disturbing and graphic) study conducted in the mid-1980s about hallucinations experienced by the victims of kidnappings, rape, torture — and people who claim to have been abducted by UFOs.

Found at BoingBoing

Written by a programmer named James Iry out of California.

Funny stuff.

Excerpt:

1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave “hello, world” into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not impressed due to the lack of tail call recursion, concurrency, or proper capitalization.

1842 - Ada Lovelace writes the first program. She is hampered in her efforts by the minor inconvenience that she doesn’t have any actual computers to run her code. Enterprise architects will later relearn her techniques in order to program in UML.