The way the tech press is treating the coverage of new iPhone releases is sort of like how Hollywood treats sequels. By now, iPhone 7 is as boring as the idea of The Batman 7 or The Matrix 7 but they don't know what else to talk about.
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- Enjoyed your blog over the years, before FB.. For me, thinking about... thinking opens up discovery of new thoughts and viewpoints.. Perhaps one day you will contemplate/blog Phenomenology or The Bias Blind Spot and Cognitive Bias.-- Language, Wittgenstein and Semiotics can be fascinating. Your writings when I'm in a bookstores to browse, read, indulge myself with joy considering other views are in my mind. Thanks See More
- Thanks for the simple but poignant article,it was "eye-opening" : )... I am a dancer type who is often finding myself very engaged in most jazz while moving my body. I dance with others,but short a partner I often dance alone.I notice with utter incomprehension how most,sometimes all of the audience seems not to be listening at all. If they aren't engaged in conversation, they will take out their smart phones. Once more dancers are enticed,others will watch,and seem to reconnect to the music too. See More
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One of the advantages of digital publishing is that you can learn a lot about your audience. I've noticed, for instance, that a piece that appeals to the people I know does not appeal to complete strangers, and vice versa. I'm not sure if this is just me, but when I get strong reactions from my friends on Facebook, I get nothing publicly, and when I get strong reactions from the general public, I get nothing from my friends.
It's interesting to think about what this means.
Be careful with meditation.
I jumped on the bandwagon and started meditating about six months ago. I was expecting that I would be a happier person but that’s not what happened. Even if I am indeed a happier person now, the effect is too subtle. The only noticeable effect of meditation for me is that now I value human beings m...
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They need to introduce A+ and A- to the health inspection grades for restaurants. I think many Chinese restaurants are confused without the plus and minus, so they are not motivated to get an A.
A- being "Asian F", "B" or "C" is just too abstract for them to understand; so they don't care. If there is no way to get an A+, they lose interest.
I watched the cult classic, Coming Apart (1969), last night (DVD from Netflix). The experimental format was promising but I don't think the director, Milton Moses Ginsberg, pulled it off in the end. There was no psychological depth to the process of "coming apart". Wikipedia says it's a "schizophrenic breakdown," but I don't see how schizophrenia manifests in any of the characters.
It just so happens that I also watched Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata (1978) on the same day. (...Watched it twice, the second time with the commentary by some British film critic.) Almost the entire film was shot in a single house, so its claustrophobic feeling is similar to that of "Coming Apart."
Bergman's format was not as experimental as Coming Apart, but it has the psychological depth that the latter lacks. How the relationship between the mother played by Ingrid Bergman and the daughter played by Liv Ullmann comes apart is painfully realistic and convincing. I think a director like Bergman could make a good use of the experimental format of Coming Apart. Without the depth, the experiment comes across as being self-indulgent or gimmicky. I think artists who are "experimental" tend to have this problem.
In art, I think most of us tend to crave a certain balance. Even in commercial products, this may be true; like a mobile phone that is highly functional but ugly, or beautiful but unusable. Writing that is informative but boring, or entertaining but empty. The term "experimental" often connotes a certain sense of incompleteness. Experimental artists and engineers, in a way, experiment with certain aspects or parts without being concerned about how they can be used to create a whole, like a guitarist who can come up with great sounding riffs, but can't compose a song.
I’m coming around to the idea that reading and writing through physical mediums (books, pen, and paper) is better for learning. I believe it is because of the inefficiency. It is precisely because digital mediums are so efficient that we don’t remember what we learn. How we humans learn is inherently inefficient so we need inefficient ways of learning.
For instance, research has shown that we remember better when a textbook is set with a typeface that is hard to read. We of...ten remember where on the page some piece of information appeared. We also remember what kind of notebook and pen we used to write down something. These types of contextual information have no direct relationship to the actual content we want to retain or retrieve but play a significant role in how we remember.
I think inefficiency in general plays an important role in improving the quality of our lives but we all assume efficiency to be a universally desirable quality. Our relentless pursuit of efficiency has already passed the optimal point for the quality of our lives. It is beginning to decline because of efficiency.
In New York, if you let a 7-year old take the subway on her own to go to school, and if something were to happen to the kid, the parents would be blamed for being irresponsible and negligent. Part of the reason why the Japanese parents can encourage their kids to be independent is because they have the opposite societal pressure; not allowing kids to be independent is seen as bad parenting. This little video clip makes it pretty clear.
In the US, there is a vicious circle whe...re parents being over-protective makes the society more dangerous for kids. Because there are no kids running around on their own, there is no need to implement any safety mechanisms to accommodate them. Drivers, for instance, are not used to kids suddenly running into street. And, since we rarely see kids on their own, the few out there would draw attention of the predators too. It's like finding a bicycle parked unlocked. This vicious circle would get worse and worse if we don't resist it.
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By Western standards, Japanese culture emphasises independence and self-reliance from an extraordinarily young age. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SBS2Au...
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The fact that there are many things in life we cannot control is rendered meaningless by the fact that there are so many things in life we can control because we couldn't possibly address everything in life that is controllable. There are just too many of them. So, what use is there in lamenting about things we can't control?
I finally watched "Finding Vivian Maier" after getting recommendations from numerous friends. I agree with one of the people interviewed in the film who said her story is more interesting than her work. In fact, because the story of the discovery is so romantic—a perfect Hollywood story—that it's hard to look at her work on its own merits. The story distorts the work. A question I have is: Would she have succeeded as an artist without that story? That is, what if she tried to... show her work? Would it have stood on its own without the story?
It's ironic in that the reason the story is so romantic is because it is about artwork having its own merits without a self-promoting and self-aggrandizing artist. Especially in today's society where nothing seems authentic, we crave for stories of authenticity. But it's a catch-22 situation. If she had promoted her own work, her work would have to win the audience without this romantic story. Would she have succeeded? I have my doubts. I believe there have been countless photographers of her caliber we haven't heard of. If you take a hundred thousand photos, some of them will, of course, be good. We are only seeing a small fraction of her work. Curating your own work is a crucial part of being a photographer/artist. Just as photographers must choose what to take pictures of, they also need to select which photos to show. That is a critical part of the art of photography especially in our postmodern era where readymades have artistic value. Maier did not do that.
The director, John Maloof, I think, is a great entrepreneur. He made a very risky investment in Maier's work. He knew how to negotiate, tell the story, market, and monetize it. In a way, Vivian Maier is his startup.
This intriguing documentary shuttles from New York to France to Chicago as it traces the life story of the late Vivian Maier, a career nanny whose previously unknown cache of 100,000 photographs has earned her a posthumous reputation as one of America’s most accomplished and insightful street photog…
findingvivianmaier.com
Every time I go into a Chinese supermarket in Chinatown, I'm awestruck by the sheer amount of mystery in front of me. I could only buy a few things to try. My lifetime would not be enough to understand and appreciate everything in the relatively small store.
I don't understand people who pay thousands of dollars to travel to China. They came here! We don't need to go there. If there are plenty of apples we can pick right in front of us, why bother walking to a tree many miles away? It's another manifestation of not being happy with here and now; something far away and in the future is always somehow better.
The problem I see with retirement is that, without work, we would have no compelling reason to connect with other people. In business, we tend to build a network of diverse people. In friendship, we tend to stick to our own kind, which means we would be socializing only with people of our age. Younger people would have no compelling reason to socialize with us. Since our friends will start dying, our network of bingo players will keep shrinking. Our only hope then would be ou...r kids to come visit us if we nag them enough.
Building a network of human connections is time-consuming, so once we let it fall apart, building it back up again would be hard, especially if we are old. In this sense, retirement is social suicide. It's a sure way to paint ourselves into a corner of loneliness.
What this means to me is that we have to be able to enjoy working. If working is not enjoyable, it might seem natural to assume that not working is better. But that is only an assumption. It could in fact be worse.
What differentiates artists from non-artists, especially in this postmodern era, is the willingness to expose their own neurosis. It's not about talent or skills. Most people are simply too scared to share such intimate inner selves. But if nobody did what artists did, we would all be more neurotic because our standards of normal behavior would keep going up, which in turn will alienate us further and make us more neurotic.
One's ability to understand appears to be almost entirely separate from one's ability to use it to create something of value. Schools focus only on the former mainly because it is measurable, but the latter is the ultimate goal of the former. Being able to understand something does not automatically translate into being able to create value.
If you cut up a large photo into a thousand little pieces like a jigsaw puzzle, and if you put it back together, I'd be impressed, but by exactly what? What does the final solution allow us to do that we could not do with the uncut original?
Some critical theories have a similar effect. Because they model the reality in such a complex way that when they put it all back together, we feel impressed by the image we see.
In observing a group of girls in "tweens," I'm struck by how different their standard of emotional sensitivity is from boys. When someone says something that could potentially hurt the feeling of someone else, a collective counter force emerges to achieve an equilibrium. With boys, offensive remarks are either brushed off or taken to the extremes of physical fights.
Even as an observing adult, if a girl says something that is potentially offensive in a group of girls, you end... up feeling like stepping in to remedy the situation, to achieve the emotional equilibrium again.
The standard is noticeably lower for boys. We essentially assume that boys are emotionally dumber, so we allow them to say more offensive things.
But this troubles me (as a father of a girl). It has been shown in some studies that "emotional intelligence" is highest at the middle management level of any corporation. This makes sense. Middle managers' primary responsibility is to maintain the cohesion of internal teams. It's very much like the role of a traditional mother who has to make everyone get along with one another at home.
But emotional intelligence declines at the higher levels of businesses. This also makes sense because top executives' primary responsibility is to interface with the outside world and with the harsh realities of the free market capitalism. You have to be able to brush off insults or be willing to fight.
With the emotional sensitivity that we expect from girls, wouldn't we be training our girls to be middle managers? Wouldn't they be ill-equipped to be entrepreneurs, politicians, and CEOs?
Risk and creativity are two sides of the same coin. You can't be good at one without being good at the other. This is why government funding of arts ultimately doesn't serve arts. It only encourages people who THINK they are creative to enter the art world, crowding the market, and weakening the private market. If you were truly creative, you will creatively figure out how to make a living, like John Cage did. He was proud of his own ability to do so.
There are people you'd love to marry, and there are those you should marry. The former make your ego bigger and heart smaller. The latter make your ego smaller and heart bigger.
There are two ways by which people are driven to pursue higher standards or taste: curiosity or insecurity. For those motivated by curiosity, achieving a higher standard is a means to discover something about himself or the world. Once this is achieved, the objects that represent their higher standards or taste become disposable. On the other hand, for those motivated by insecurity, those objects are the end that fill the void within themselves. They cannot feel secure without them. This is why they turn into snobs; their lack would trigger existential insecurity or anxiety, which is projected onto others who lack those higher standards.
“Refactoring” in computer science means to reorganize the code without changing what it does. Programmers could spend many months refactoring their code, and at the end of their hard work, the users would not notice any difference. Why do they do such a thing? There are many reasons, but the main on…
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I sat in the back of the yellow school bus with a bunch of fifth graders in front of me, including my daughter. We were headed to the skating rink uptown. My daughter told me that if I didn't go, she would be the only kid without a parent. As it turned out, I was one of the few parents who were suck…
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