Lost avant-garde painting shows up in Stuart Little

A long-lost avant garde painting has returned to Hungary after nine decades thanks to a sharp-eyed art historian, who spotted it being used as a prop in the Hollywood film Stuart Little.

Gergely Barki, 43, a researcher at Hungary’s national gallery in Budapest, noticed Sleeping Lady with Black Vase by Róbert Berény as he watched television with his daughter Lola in 2009.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw Bereny’s long-lost masterpiece on the wall behind Hugh Laurie. I nearly dropped Lola from my lap,” said Barki. “A researcher can never take his eyes off the job, even when watching Christmas movies at home.”

Crazy story. Berény was said to have dated Marlene Dietrich and Anastasia, the daughter of Nicholas II.

Forks model of disability

You would think that you would start doing productive things and then wind up in a beautiful virtuous cycle where you do things, and the things give you more forks, and then you spend more forks on doing things, until the forks are not only spilling out of the drawer but they’ve filled the kitchen and are making headway into the bedroom. This is probably true of some people: they’re triathletes with four successful startups who are considering going for a PhD in physics (you know, just for the fun of it).

Unfortunately, some people– like me– are, for whatever reason, stuck with chronically low forks. Chronically low forks leaves you in one of the most perverse situations ever: when you know that if you did a particular thing, you would be happier and more able to do things, but you don’t have enough forksnow to do the thing. (Unlike spoons, you cannot borrow forks from future selves.) If I worked on my homework, after like fifteen minutes I would feel like I could take on the world, but right now all I have the energy to do is browse Tumblr. If I ate, I would totally be able to cook an awesome meal, but right now I’m too hungry to cook.

(As someone who regularly winds up with too few forks to cook: MealSquares are a goddamned lifesaver.)

There is a second problem, which is that you don’t always get the forks. For instance, I’ve found I get socializing forks if the people seem to like me and want to hang out with me, working forks if I feel like I’ve accomplished something, and eating forks if I actually manage to eat the food. If I hang out with people who are only sort of vaguely tolerating my presence, or I discover that my two hours’ work is wasted, or I get halfway through cooking but don’t finish making it, I don’t get the reward but I still have to pay the forks. That is probably fine for our startup founder PhD triathlete, since the only consequence for her is that she now has a sleeping place that isn’t covered with cutlery. But if you have low forks to begin with– particularly if you’d spent your last handful of forks on trying to do the thing– it can be disastrous.

This is the forks model of disability, not to be confused with the spoons model of disability.

I'm always suspicious of analogies and metaphors, I think the tech industry in particular relies upon them much more than is useful, but as a way to empathize with aspects of the human condition, like our limited reservoirs of discipline, such mental models are useful

The Three Golden Rules

I've had this tab open for months, I have no idea what led me to it: The Three Golden Rules for Successful Scientific Research.

The first rule:

"Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward."

The second:

"We all like our work to be socially relevant and scientifically sound. If we can find a topic satisfying both desires, we are lucky; if the two targets are in conflict with each other, let the requirement of scientific soundness prevail."

The third:

"Never tackle a problem of which you can be pretty sure that (now or in the near future) it will be tackled by others who are, in relation to that problem, at least as competent and well-equipped as you."

What struck me, reading these, is how much they could, with a few simple substitutions, be the three golden rules for successful startups.

Harvard's discrimination against Asian Americans

A similar injustice is at work today, against Asian-Americans. To get into the top schools, they need SAT scores that are about 140 points higher than those of their white peers. In 2008, over half of all applicants to Harvard with exceptionally high SAT scores were Asian, yet they made up only 17 percent of the entering class (now 20 percent). Asians are the fastest-growing racial group in America, but their proportion of Harvard undergraduates has been flat for two decades.

...

The most common defense of the status quo is that many Asian-American applicants do well on tests but lack intangible qualities like originality or leadership. As early as 1988, William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions, said that they were “slightly less strong on extracurricular criteria.”

Even leaving aside the disturbing parallel with how Jews were characterized, there is little evidence that this is true. A new study of over 100,000 applicants to the University of California, Los Angeles, found no significant correlation between race and extracurricular achievements.

The truth is not that Asians have fewer distinguishing qualities than whites; it’s that — because of a longstanding depiction of Asians as featureless or even interchangeable — they are more likely to be perceived as lacking in individuality. (As one Harvard admissions officer noted on the file of an Asian-American applicant, “He’s quiet and, of course, wants to be a doctor.”)

That's Yascha Mounk, a Harvard professor, in a NYTimes op-ed. There is a particular sting in this discrimination coming from Harvard since, as any Asian American first generation kid like myself will tell you, Harvard remains, for our parents, Earth's academic holy grail.

Given how hard it is to distinguish one extremely qualified applicant from the next (regardless of what admissions committees might claim), it would be more fair to set some bar for qualifying to get into Harvard and then put all those who pass the bar into a lottery for admission.

Outrun

Whether you liked the movie Drive or not (I was lukewarm), most everyone dug the soundtrack with its 80's vibe.

It turns out there's a name for that very specific niche of music: outrun. According to the subreddit, “Outrun electro is a modern subgenre of electronic music that focuses on synthesizers and 80’s themes.”

That's a bit tautological, but as with the difference between art and pornography, you know it when you see it. Or hear it, in this case.

Put on some outrun, open a can of Jolt, crack open Ready Player One, and go back to a decade when this counted as high intensity interval training.