Napping
A nap is like rebooting your computer after a long period of use: it clears out your cache, wipes away the cruft of memory leaks.
Shadow Art
Shadow Art: extremely complex objects built to cast simple, familiar shadows.
If you showed me some of those objects I wouldn't have any idea what shadow they'd cast.
To have substantial exchange, you need to be fully present. That is why facing one's accuser is a fundamental right of the accused.
Jaron Lanier on the fundamental problem of online anonymity.
Check out the big brains on Brett
If having a large brain is such an advantage for humans, and it seems hard to argue considering where we've ended up in the pecking order of species, then how come more creatures don't have large brains?
This article in Discover magazine cites a few explanations from scientists:
- the brain is a huge energy-consuming piece of tissue, and humans had to evolve smaller, more efficient guts to compensate for the additional energy allocation to the brain
- we altered our diet to higher density energy sources like meats and seeds
- genetic mutations reduced energy transport proteins to muscles in favor of those funneling energy to the brain
If you were creating species like you were creating videogame characters and had to allocate a fixed energy supply among brain and other body parts, evolution came down in favor of dedicating more to the brain when it came to humans.
One of the intriguing and repeated tropes in comic books was that a person with an abnormally large brain inevitably turns to a life of crime and is in fact often a literal criminal mastermind. It's as if the only logical outcome for such a dominant intellect is to turn to a life of crime as any other behavior -- altruism, generosity -- would be inefficient and illogical. It may also reflect some deep-seated distrust of people who are too smart.
NY and SF: dining rivals
A reader asked San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer why celebrity NY chefs and restauranteurs didn't open outposts in San Francisco. Bauer's theory:
We’re a little provincial, a little smug about our homegrown talent, and a little less enthralled with big-name chefs who garner fame elsewhere and then bring a concept here.
As you can imagine with a topic like this, the comment thread escalated immediately into a bar fight between left and right coast foodies (if you see people and bottles and chairs flying out saloon windows, avoid the place).
If that's true, it's a loss for San Francisco, which does have a high density of hard-core foodies. Insularity is not healthy when it comes to dining, not in this day and age where chefs and diners can grow up learning and tasting so many different types of cuisine. It used to be that the sacred rule of thumb was that you didn't eat at an ethnic restaurant unless the clientele comprised a large number of people of that ethnicity. While it's still a useful diagnostic shortcut for more obscure cuisines or less diverse geographies, it has started to let me down more and more in the major US cities.
Chefs apprentice all over the world now, but even if they stay close to home, they usually have access to kitchens preparing all types of cuisine. Specialized ingredients are easier to source anywhere in the world now. Information wants to be free, and ethnic culinary secrets are no exception.
It's nonsensical that foodies who pride themselves on openness to all types of cuisine would not have that same attitude towards chefs from other cities.