Bookmarks from Saturday June 13th-Friday June 18th 2010
The Burger Lab: How to Make Perfect Thin and Crisp French Fries | A Hamburger Today
this looks awesome. DIY + nerd science!
It’s Complicated David Souter finally tells Americans to grow up.
“Souter’s speech thus represents much more than an ode to a changing Constitution or a forceful admission that something that sounds suspiciously like “empathy” means that “judicial perception turns on the experience of the judges, and on their ability to think from a point of view different from their own.” Souter’s words even transcend his own high-minded call to “keep the constitutional promises the nation has made.” What Souter asked Americans to do in his Harvard speech is to live with ambiguity. To, in his words, acknowledge that there is a “basic human hunger for the certainty and control that the fair-reading model seems to promise,” while recognizing, in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes‘ formulation, that “certainty generally is illusion and repose is not our destiny.” He is telling us to stop dreaming of oracular judges with perfect answers to simple constitutional questions. He is telling us, in other words, to grow up.”
Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors
“interestingly, they also find students whose professor had higher student evaluations typically did worse in subsequent courses. They attribute this to the “teaching to the test” that they think may go on in classes where professors have high student evaluations. Secondly, they find that students who took Calculus I from professors with lower student evaluations did better on subsequent courses. ”
The Civil War as Revenge of the Nerds – Personal – The Atlantic
“There’s a way of looking at the ugliness after Reconstruction–the rise of the Lost Cause, the Klan, the lynchings–as a tragic search for Southern white male identity. First the old slave patrols go. Then the Confederate Army is subdued and humiliated. Then blacks began to dominate “manly” athletic pursuits. Then Martin Luther King exposes the immorality of the Southern system. Reeling from “each successive volley, the Southern racist–and really any white racist–is left with a question: If the Southern white man is proven inferior physically, mentally, and even morally, than what is he?
HEY STOUFFERS! F$$K YOU IN YOUR F$$KING TOASTED A$$HOLE.
via . « Grocery Eats groceryeats.com post very NSFW (but very funny)
Almost All Is Vanity – PostClassic
“We have three markets. There’s a commercial market, entirely determined by huge corporations whose sole interest is money. We’re never going to make a dent in that one. There’s an orchestra-music circuit that you have to enter young, and it’s all about who you know, and the music sucks. And there’s an academic market, which demands a healthy respect for the Schoenberg line and a suspicion against anything populist. I and my 400 closest friends don’t fit any of these markets.”
“Success Is Just Another Form of Failure” – PostClassic
“The artists, on the other hand, are at a permanent disadvantage. The most creative of them cannot present their work with the kind of empirical verifiability that translates as prestige going up the ladder – except by winning awards administrated by other universities. And those who aim for and achieve any kind of popular or commercial success virtually negate the explicit aims of the institution.”
Bookmarks from June 5th through June 11th 2010
“A proof-of-concept written in HTML 5 with JQuery and CSS3. No Flash! Compare to Flash player at scottandrew.com Developed by Scott Andrew.”
link: Scott Andrew’s HTML 5 Audio Player
“I THINK ABOUT food constantly. What will I eat today? What will be in my cupboard tomorrow? Answers are not hard. Lessons I learned from my parents and cost controls I learned in working in restaurants serve me well. Discount stores, ethnic markets and liquidation stores are my shopping salvation: organic heirloom winesap apples (3 pounds for $1.50) that the supermarket doesn’t stock; pork butt I grind into chorizo; $3 truffle oil I drizzle over instant mashed potatoes. Thanks to my knife skills, each salami I splurge on makes a week’s worth of sandwiches.”
“Such large, ambitious marching bands have become a relative anomaly in a city famous for its second-lines, brass bands and musical luminaries, however. More than four years after Hurricane Katrina, band leaders say they are fighting to ensure the tradition thrives in a dramatically altered public school landscape.”
New Orleans Mardi Gras marching bands are incubators for more than music | NOLA.com
looking forward to hiking this trail this summer
Corralitas Red Car Property: Red Car Property: Tales of Trail Demise Are Greatly Exaggerated
“This movie, released in 1991 in France and in 1992 in the US, is the result of a collaboration between a novelist, Pascal Quignard, a director Alain Corneau, and a musician, Jordi Savall. Corneau wanted to do a movie on music and the 17th century; he met Quignard, who had already written about the viol, and suggested that they do the story of Marin Marais (1656-1728), one of the best viol players and composers of the time, and his teacher Sainte Colombe. Quignard had discovered the music of Sainte Colombe through a recording made by Jordi Savall in 1976. Quignard wrote the book, Corneau took the book and worked with Quignard and Savall to make the movie. Savall plays the music on the soundtrack.
The subject of the movie is the life of the French viol player and composer Sainte-Colombe. What little evidence there is on his life was woven into a fictional narrative by Pascal Quignard in a novel written specifically for this project. He then adapted his own novel for the screen, in collaboration with Corneau and with advice from Savall.The casting is as follows: Gérard Depardieu plays Marin Marais when old, Guillaume Depardieu (son of Gérard) plays Marais when young, Jean-Pierre Marielle plays Sainte-Colombe, Anne Brochet plays Madeleine, the elder daughter of Sainte-Colombe.The title comes from a sentence in the novel: “Tous les matins du monde sont sans retour,” meaning literally “all the mornings of the world [leave] without [ever] returning.” It can be translated as “Each day dawns but once.”
link: Tous les matins du monde
“It saddens me to think that it took Justice Souter 19 years of heavy constitutional lifting and departure from the court before he could turn to the American people and explain clearly that much as we might want judging to be easy, it never can be. It terrifies me even more to think that we’ve crafted a confirmation process in which the consistent message is that judging is so simple that any old bozo can do it. If we continue to believe that this is so, we will be on the road to confirming any old bozo that stumbles along”
David Souter finally tells Americans to grow up. – By Dahlia Lithwick – Slate Magazine
“Part of Banksy’s project is the imaginative creation of a public identity itself, unhinged from biography — the name itself, one masked and clouded and layered and fully immersed in the matrix of our media plugged and holistically branded world. How does a vandal/hoax artist negotiate his commercial fame in a subculture that allows only an underground rebel the status of authenticity? Make authorship the work of art, without adhering to standard rules of genre or typical expectations circumscribing where art begins and ends. Once the author is completely unfettered from the authored, then the work can become something of a Trojan Horse, unexpectedly fighting its battles where we least notice, and making us laugh silly at our ridiculous ways all along.”
Banksy’s Self-Mythologizing: A Review of ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’ « THE HYDRA
“Still, the research seems to validate claims of harm on a larger scale. Twenty percent of those interviewed said they distrusted the sanitation of food sold on the streets, and some stakeholders told researchers that gang members charged rent or they were fearful that street vendors’ association with gang members could lead to dangerous situations. Other stakeholders complained that obstructed sidewalks forced people onto the street, and that open flames are hazardous to the community. Besides unfair competition, other disadvantages identified in the study include: increased traffic and pedestrian congestion, reduced property values and reduced quality of life through pollution of public spaces.advantages of street vending were: affordable products and services for low-income residents, income opportunities for immigrants and lower-income residents seeking employment, and increased foot traffic that contributes to “the revitalization of the community’s street life.”
Lots of ‘Grey Area’ In Street Vending Issue : Eastern Group Publications
“No, we didn’t recover it all … a few thousand dollars remained on the plastic to be paid off. But ultimately a marvelous artistic weekend was created where new works were inspired and friendships were born and renewed. And no government help was needed nor obligation incurred. The artists (and perhaps this is more important in the practical psychology of a rural area) the public saw as working hard, accomplishing much, and doing it all at their own behest.”
Dennis Bathory-Kitsz: The 2001 Ought-One Festival: How We Did It Ourselves — All of Us
