http://OliviaB.stumbleupon.com/ OliviaB's recent comments & reviews on StumbleUpon en-us Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:54:52 -0800 Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:02:29 -0800 http://OliviaB.stumbleupon.com/ http://cdn.stumble-upon.com/images/logo_su_36x36.png Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:06:52 -0800 http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/1hf1uw/2st.jp/kmrimg/l2/6.html/t:4af3f26c98370;src:reviews http://OliviaB.stumbleupon.com/review/37444870/

I'm laid low with the flu
and this Japanese painter's gentle work
was somehow just what I needed to see.

]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/2st.jp/kmrimg/l2/6.html Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:03:51 -0800 http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/1lNkzs/www.edge.org/3rd_culture/schirrmacher09/schirrmacher09_index.html/t:4af3f26c98370;src:reviews http://OliviaB.stumbleupon.com/review/37438980/

a few snips from
this great talk.
top image from here

the age of the informavore




It's the question: what is important, what is not important, what is important to know? Is this information important? Can we still decide what is important? And it starts with this absolutely normal, everyday news. But now you encounter, at least in Europe, a lot of people who think, what in my life is important, what isn't important, what is the information of my life. And some of them say, well, it's in Facebook. And others say, well, it's on my blog. And, apparently, for many people it's very hard to say it's somewhere in my life, in my lived life.





~





"And so what interests me is that we are, because we have the Internet, now entering a phase where Darwinian structures, where Darwinian dynamics, Darwinian selection, apparently attacks ideas themselves: what to remember, what not to remember, which idea is stronger, which idea is weaker."



Gerd Gigerenzer, to whom I talked and who I find a fascinating thinker, put it in such a way that thinking itself somehow leaves the brain and uses a platform outside of the human body. And that's the Internet and it's the cloud. And very soon we will have the brain in the cloud. And this raises the question of the importance of thoughts. For centuries, what was important for me was decided in my brain. But now, apparently, it will be decided somewhere else.







evolution images via the greate with thanks.

]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.edge.org/3rd_culture/schirrmacher09/schirrmacher09_index.html Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:32:28 -0800 http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/Ajdhin/www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/gallery/cartoon14.html/t:4af3f26c98370;src:reviews http://OliviaB.stumbleupon.com/review/37382294/

I love the cat one.

]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/gallery/cartoon14.html Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:51:04 -0800 http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/AFHz5e/news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7010202.stm/t:4af3f26c98370;src:reviews http://OliviaB.stumbleupon.com/review/28397267/ a repost
Corot painting via the scrumptious libero with thanks.
burma campaign news and links! excellent resource. Thanks Mizz T.

















I keep thinking about the people of Burma,

the silenced population and activists and monks

suffering daily under a brutal dictatorship,

invisible now that so many protestors

are imprisoned or killed.

Please spare them a thought,

and if it's your thing, a prayer,

and if there's any opportunity to help them,

seize it.

Thanks.


~
















~~~









some buddhist goodies, audio and video











~~~

















calligraphy for Breath/Spirit
by Kaz at Brushmind.






~








Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7010202.stm Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:03:50 -0800 http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/1DFWI3/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%8Dshi_Yoshida/t:4af3f26c98370;src:reviews http://OliviaB.stumbleupon.com/review/37380484/










Toshi Yoshida was an artist of great breadth and vision. Known primarily for his woodblock prints,

he was also a remarkable painter and illustrator. His style cannot be easily summarized, because he

was constantly innovating and pushing the boundaries of the woodblock medium. His work ranges from

realistic landscapes to imaginative abstract designs to detailed portraits of animals in their environments.

]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%2525C5%25258Dshi_Yoshida Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:15:31 -0800 http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/7BAK5O/www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/world/europe/04levistrauss.html?_r=1/t:4af3f26c98370;src:reviews http://OliviaB.stumbleupon.com/review/37379510/

Vale, Claude,
and thanks for all the great ideas.



















Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called "primitive man" and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and '70s, has died at 100.

"He was France's greatest scientist," said writer Jean d'Ormesson, fellow member of the Academie Francaise which brings together the elite of the country's intellectual establishment.

He argued that linguistics, communications and mathematical logic could be used to reveal fundamental social systems.

He was also big on music and myth, arguing that, with the fading of myths power in the modern West, music had taken on myth's function. Music, he argued, had the ability to suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society.

But Mr. Levi-Strauss rejected Rousseau's idea that humankind's problems derive from society's distortions of nature. In Mr. Levi-Strauss' view, there is no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape itself out of nature's raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the essential tools.

This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found across all cultures and times. He became known as a structuralist because of his conviction that a structural unity underlies all of humanity's mythmaking, and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies, even in the ways a village was laid out.

For Mr. Levi-Strauss, for example, every culture's mythology was built around oppositions: hot and cold, raw and cooked, animal and human. And it is through these opposing "binary" concepts, he said, that humanity makes sense of the world.

This was quite different from what most anthropologists had been concerned with. Anthropology had traditionally sought to disclose differences among cultures rather than discovering universals. It had been preoccupied not with abstract ideas but with the particularities of rituals and customs, collecting and cataloguing them.

Mr. Levi-Strauss's "structural" approach, seeking universals about the human mind, cut against that notion of anthropology. He did not try to determine the various purposes served by a society's practices and rituals. He was never interested in the kind of fieldwork that anthropologists of a later generation, like Clifford Geertz, took on, closely observing and analyzing a society as if from the inside. (He began 'Tristes Tropiques' with the statement "I hate traveling and explorers.")

To his mind, as he wrote in 'The Raw and the Cooked' ,translated from 'Le Cru et le Cuit' (1964), he had taken oeethnographic research in the direction of psychology, logic, and philosophy.

In radio talks for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1977 (published asMyth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture'), Mr. Levi-Strauss demonstrated how a structural examination of myth might proceed. He cited a report that in 17th-century Peru, when the weather became exceedingly cold, a priest would summon all those who had been born feet first, or who had a harelip, or who were twins. They were accused of being responsible for the weather and were ordered to repent, to correct the aberrations. But why these groups? Why harelips and twins? more at the link.///link via the great shitao with thanx.

interview with L-S /// the anthropology of levi strauss












~

]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/world/europe/04levistrauss.html%253F_r%253D1 Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:17:37 -0800 http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/2yVEqE/www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/11/kleptocapitalism-and-how-to-fight-it.html/t:4af3f26c98370;src:reviews http://OliviaB.stumbleupon.com/review/37363928/


klepto capitalism -
great coinage, great essay, provocative solution.

kelpto capitalism





It is not a question of merit, talent, fairness, or income disparity; it is a question of theft.

Corporate executives are raiding their companies' coffers, and the victims are you and me.

What we have in the United States is no longer capitalism but klepto-capitalism:

a system where publicly traded corporations are run not to produce value for shareholders but to provide loot for a new class of corporate mega-thieves.

How do we stop this rampant pilfering, particularly in an era of American politics when at least half the nation's political class is averse to government intervention in the economy?

By being as greedy and as smart as the thieves.






~

]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/11/kleptocapitalism-and-how-to-fight-it.html Sat, 31 Oct 2009 03:22:26 -0700 http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/1ZVtK3/www.smh.com.au/environment/toll-rises-as-sea-life-feed-at-oil-spill-20091030-hprl.html/t:4af3f26c98370;src:reviews http://OliviaB.stumbleupon.com/review/37289747/

Thanks to the great advena
for posting this outrageous story.
Part of the outrage is that the government
keeps saying everything is hunky dory.
Comment from advena's page. image andrew brandou.














It is unbelievable how little coverage this ongoing tragedy has been getting. After seeing the scale of the oil slick, which is spread over 4223square kilometres, Dr Watson told the Herald: ''I am amazed at how little Australia really cares about this. This is a huge oil slick.'' The well in the Montara oil field has been leaking 400 barrels of oil a day, by the company's estimate, since August 21 after an accident at the site. The leak is now entering its 10th week and the company conceded on Thursday it was unlikely to be contained for several more weeks."







~

]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.smh.com.au/environment/toll-rises-as-sea-life-feed-at-oil-spill-20091030-hprl.html Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:03:40 -0700 http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/7iDZCF/news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8146078.stm/t:4af3f26c98370;src:reviews http://OliviaB.stumbleupon.com/review/37279888/

you thought they didn't own you? Wrong!












~






the smile police'


A Japanese rail firm has introduced a system to check that staff are smiling enough at all times.

Computerised scanners around 15 Tokyo stations will measure the smile's curvature to ensure it is broad enough.

Those failing to measure up - literally - will be advised to look less serious and more cheerful. "


:::





AND the technology to make the job easier.

"A wearable conditioning device that detects if you're smiling and provides pain feedback if you're not. Frowning creates intense pain but a full smile leaves you pain free! The first in a series of Tools for Improved Social Inter-Acting."(more at the link)


Social conditioning more like it!















:::

]]> http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8146078.stm Fri, 30 Oct 2009 02:32:38 -0700 http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/229DVe/www.theamericanscholar.org/living-on-500000-a-year/print/t:4af3f26c98370;src:reviews http://OliviaB.stumbleupon.com/review/37263944/ via kottke.org with thanks.

~





Living on $500,000 a year




Who knew that a long article about F Scott Fitzgerald's tax returns could be so interesting?



The five months of furious short-story writing in 1923-24 had left him with a stake of $7,000. In Great Neck, that would only cover two and a half months of expenses. How could he stretch the $7,000 to gain the time to finish Gatsby? Earlier, as he was struggling to save, a friend wrote from France to suggest that Fitz-gerald join the many Americans living well in Europe on the strong American dollar. The friend wrote that it cost one-tenth as much to live in Europe: he had just finished "a meal fit for a king, washed down with champagne, for the absurd sum of sixty-one cents." Fitzgerald thought, based on the friend's recommendation, living expenses on the off-season Riviera would be low enough to let him finish Gatsby without any short-story interruptions.




~

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