February 2008!
I know it’s a shorter month and all, but there were a lot less good posts from this month. Must have been when I was into that whole “school” and “homework” business. *shrug*
Memorable Quotes:
- “‘Sustainability’ means a situation in which your descendants are able to confront their own problems, rather than the ones you exported to them. If people a hundred years from now are soberly engaged with phenomena we have no nouns and verbs for, I think that’s a victory condition.” - Bruce Sterling on Sustainability
- “The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.” - Lewis Mumford
Funny Stuff:
- Bill Hader’s impression of There Will Be Blood’s Daniel Plainview is still excellent, and the sketch he used it in was basically an excuse to deliver it. As you can tell from the laugh track, not very many in the audience had seen the movie and caught the reference. I enjoyed the hell out of it, though.
- I think I have almost seen this ten-minute clip-collection from Batman & Robin more than the actual film. All the boring interludes have been distilled out, just leaving the hilariously awful stuff that remains.
Wacky Images:
Interesting Links:
- How cheap electricity enables the internet has become especially interesting as all the chip designs - across the board - start to move their way towards maximizing performance/watt rather than simply performance. Power-conscious designs used to be only important in the mobile domain, but watching your watts has proved to be useful in the desktop space as well. Servers are likely to follow, if they haven’t already.
- Depression in Wes Anderson films. I think this grappling-with-depression is what draws me to Anderson’s films. It’s a particular type of dramatic conflict, one that can’t rely on an easy “This is what Character A wants and this is how Character B is blocking it.” It gives his stuff this strange, disconnected, floaty feeling.
- Michael Lewis gave an interview to The Morning News earlier, and is now hailed as one of the strongest voices to speak on the current economic calamities. And to think, at the beginning of this year he was probably most popular for his sports-related writing. I guess that speaks to the benefits of not intellectually-pigeonholing yourself.
