tik tok

The Tale of the One Thousand Signs Hans Ulrich Obrist : Pierre Huyghe Parkett 66 2002 Luc (Stuls): Robots do not comprehend notions of time...

Derrida on Artaud

bought an old issue of magazine littéraire on Artaud in Paris last summer, which included an interview with Derrida (was trying to translate...

the invisible hand

my podcast from tyler cowen, the medium is the message -- comments to follow

Lousy Anti-Semites

I came across a site which purports to answer this question: How walkable is your house? Was instantly suspicious. Typed my mother's for...

suspense

I'm at Yorckschlößchen. I check e-mails. My personalised podcast from Tyler Cowen has come! I can't listen to the pp at Yn. I'm ...

Can Howard Obliviate Haneef?

"Australia will not be apologising to Dr Haneef," Mr Howard told reporters in Sydney. "Dr Haneef was not victimised and Austr...

homemade flamethrower

Video of Nadine killing fruitflies with DIY flamethrower (lighter plus hairspray) on TAR ART RAT , a technique used by some of the security-...

Rendition

Article in the Observer on Bisher al-Rawi, a British resident who had worked with MI5 and was then kidnapped by US agents and taken to Guan...

Chilling Coke

How to chill Coke in 2 minutes. SPOILER: put ice and water in a bowl, add salt. I used to chill Diet Cokes by putting them in the freezer. T...

Raccoon Steals Carpet

When I first left academia to become a writer I lived in Newfane, Vermont in a cottage in the woods that had belonged to my grandfather. I w...

Bivariate Baseball Plot

Rafe Donahue, a biostatistician at the University of Vanderbilt, has sent me a link to an interactive website that uses the statistical grap...

where did it all go wrong, Ilya? i tried so haaaaaaaard

Perhaps once in a generation, the science of criticism is shaken by a conceptual breakthrough so revolutionary that the literary establishme...

ausgeschlossen again

Got locked out of the apartment again. Discovered strange fact about the neighbourhood. For 49 euros (10% off for online booking) you can ge...

that clinking clanking sound again

Turns out the nasty calculating economist who takes all the fun out of magic has a blog -- but it's anonymous because she was getting ha...

meanwhile back in the real world

Paradoxically, it is precisely the meager financial aid outlays of endowment-rich colleges and universities that make the true miserliness o...

Economics of HP

A reader in Israel says I should refrain from discussing HP until the international readership of this blog has had a chance to read the boo...

Inner Economist personalised podcast

Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution is offering a personalised podcast to everyone who pre-orders his book, Discover Your Inner Economist. T...

obliviating ilya

a commenter on HP7 on making light explains For US readers: pretty much every soap opera and TV serial in the UK, when they want to get rid ...

Elsinore Sewing Club

I read a post on Whimsley on modest heroism which mentioned the story of the village of Eyam, which is said to have sealed itself up when a...

The wrong sort of rain

"There's no such thing as an orderly queue at the moment." Abingdon sees the end of civilisation as we know it. The Guardian d...

i+e again

An e-mail has arrived from John Chris Jones, author of The Internet and Everyone (described in an earlier post ): dear Helen, while dipping ...

Diaspora, Empire

Languagehat has a wonderful post on the Assyrians of Urmia here , drawing on an article by Arianne Ishaya on Nineveh.com. I have a look at ...

Jerry Hadley

Alex Frey's close friend, the tenor Jerry Hadley, shot himself with an air rifle last Tuesday and died July 18. Alex is organising the N...

Clip Rage

Language Log has a post on the animated paperclip that has brought us so much joy, courtesy of Michael Kaplan .

Publishing Insider Comes Out

Young writers often talk to me about getting published, and something they often say is: 'Couldn't I offer to accept a smaller advan...

R

I've been trying for years to write a novel presenting mathematical ways of thinking about chance. I think most non-mathematicians' ...

greek geek

Mithridates has managed to upload Stephen Daitz reading a passage from Aristophanes' Frogs. Fabelhaft. Here .

aside

Before I forget -- have found this wonderful archive of recordings of spoken Arabic, covering dialects across the Arab world. It's the ...

but

OK. I'm cracking up. I'm cracking up. I'm cracking up. I go over to Joel on Software to calm my nerves. Help me, Joel, help me p...

cracking up

too many bad people. i spend a lot of time trying to sidestep the things that will make me crack up and people spend a lot of time helpfully...

Cosseted

Back at Yorckschlößchen, gestresst. I walk up to the bar and ask about crisps. 'Sie haben nur Prawn Cocktail? Oh, und Marmite, schreckli...

Crazy

Bad news, bad news, bad news. I went to the Staatsbibliothek yesterday to pick up Potocki. I got there at 9; the Buchabholbereich doesn'...

Phallicity of the Ruling Classes

These are the penises I saw today. Small, nestled in turtleneck of skin atop testicles like a mother bird guarding speckled eggs. Uncircumci...

The Internet and Everyone

Many years ago I came across a strange book. It was a small, solid object, about 6" x 4" x 3" -- to hold it was to want to ke...

Sisters under the skin

Tar Art Rat sounds more and more like my father facing a TV on which Ronald Reagan is seen ducking into a helicopter, one hand held to a su...

The Potocki Code

I came across this description of Jan Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa at the website of a new independent bookstore in Bath,...

Secondhand Sales & Web 2.0

Hassan Abudu, who has recently graduated from Stanford, is trying to work out how secondhand sales and other exchanges that recycle books mi...

Rasterization Blues

ClearType Sub-pixel Positioning: Is that Possible? Jeff Atwood definitely votes [5] for strict snapping to the pixel grid. My opinion is...

DFW again

I'd just been reading Eagleton's piece on Bakhtin in the LRB (which I came to courtesy of Language Hat who came to it courtesy of ...

Kurosawa on Mifune

After hearing O'Toole on watching Rashomon for the first time and seeing Toshiro Mifune, I went back to the section in Kurosawa's So...

Bats

Jonathan Hanson, who has recently launched a magazine on overland travel, sends this photo of nectar-feeding bats

Black Swans

Freakonomics ran a post Tuesday on the question of whether, if public libraries did not exist, publishers would allow them to be started up ...

The Entertainer

Peter O'Toole tells Charlie Rose how he came to want to be an actor He had no desire to be an actor until he was 20, and then it hit him...

The Show Must Go ON

Just after quoting Goffman came across DFW on the Charlie Rose Show back in 1997, new to me if not to you, which says everything I might hav...

The Show Must Go On

It is important to note that when an individual offers a performance he typically conceals something more than inappropriate pleasures and e...

Alisa Savtchenko's Open House

Hello everybody! this week-end stellen wir as kunststudenten in MonbijouPArk aus--and I'm showing 2 videos. (near Hackescher Markt and ...