Some trajectories 1–6

Peer review
Zachary Sachs 22 days ago

West German postage depicting Immanuel Kant, issued in 1974

Crooked Timber, maintained by seventeen contributors — scholars from across the English-speaking world — covers a variety of academic disciplines (but largely politics, economics, sociology, and philosophy), often summarizing but not unduly diluting recent research. Highly readable and usually topical, it takes the intrinsic biases of instant publishing and pits them against the sluggish tendencies in academe. Most surprisingly, the readers’ comments are frequently cogent and on-topic. For followers of the New York Times blogs, for example, this last aspect is welcome reprieve.

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We will resume
Christopher Balla 24 days ago

The following note appeared on Morrissey’s website, itsmorrisseysworld.com, last Monday:

I am very pleased to confirm that we will resume at Luxembourg this coming Friday (5 June), absorbed and collected. I have been reconstructed by a Wiltshire hospital and I am as close to good health as I’m likely to get. I apologize to everyone caught up in the to-ing and fro-ing, but the disappointment of postponement is less than the disappointment of hearing me sing on one engine. I should stress that nothing has been canceled. The four London concerts are repositioned in July, and both Birmingham and the Royal Albert Hall are October fixtures. I’ve endured a titanic struggle against an intolerable virus lately, and although Hull, Hartlepool and Manchester were nights that comprised a whole life, the physical limits were reached. False notes crush the soul. Besides Luxembourg and beyond, I am excited about the October release of Swords, which is an 18-track compilation of b-side of singles from the last three albums. This will be a Polydor release. Thanks to everyone who bought ‘Years of Refusal’. We were the number one seller in the UK for the week of release, but, as with ‘You Are The Quarry’ and ‘Your Arsenal’, we were booted off the number one spot on the last hour of the final day. We cried.

I would like to point out that some passable creature is using my name and sending sharply chiseled replies to people via Twitter, MySpace and Facebook. This person is not me. Not enough happens in my life that I would wish to share it with others. I do not scan these sites – or whatever they are – so I can only hope that whoever is posing as me is at least worth talking to. Beware of false imitations. Thanks for reading these unvarnished facts, and thanks for giving us some greatly enjoyable nights on the Refusal tour.

Absolutely Yours,
Morrissey.

Toilet training
Richard Funkhouser 25 days ago

Mimesis and marmalade in architecture
Zachary Sachs 31 days ago

In mid-April, Cameron Sinclair, a founder of Architecture For Humanity, participated in a discussion about ethics in architecture at the Barbican Centre in London. He appeared alongside with several other prominent historians and designers, including Charles Jencks and Sean Griffiths. Following an apparently shambly presentation by a representative for Zaha Hadid, Sinclair achieved some notoriety with the jaunty claim that,

Inviting Zaha Hadid to talk about ethics in architecture was like getting Robert Mugabe to discuss human rights.

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Today in sports: the theoretical basketball
Doug Schrashun 36 days ago

Malcolm Gladwell recently wrote an article for The New Yorker entitled “How David Beats Goliath,” which, dealing as it does with the superiority of the full court press as a defensive strategy in the game of basketball, has caused no little amount of beard-stroking among those of us who welcome the intrusion of theoretical constructs in our sports.

Gladwell’s point is basically that in basketball, but also any other type of armed or unarmed conflict, a severely overmatched side serves its own interests best by breaking the unspoken rules of engagement in order to meet the stronger adversary on their own terms. Gladwell goes as far afield as discussions of batch processing and obscure war games to illustrate the ubiquitous applicability of his theory of David overcoming Goliath through a combination of outside the unspoken playbook strategy and devoted effort, but basically ignores two of the greatest arguments against it.

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Note to subscribers
Zachary Sachs 51 days ago

A screen capture of the Yahoo Pipes online application.

I’ve finally gotten around to combining the XML feeds for our features, notes, and videos (the compiled feed can be found in the toolbar above or here). This ordeal led me into the strange world of Yahoo Pipes, which is a beta web application for flexible processing of Internet data sources. It lays out a broad array of possible joinings, sortings, formattings, conjunctions, disjunctions, etc. I only had to mix together different data sources, but the plumbing that is provided has a lot of dynamic potential beyond that, with the ability to draw from any data sources available anywhere on the web, and subject them to elaborate layout strategies. It offers the fluidity of familiar (to some) software development processes like loops, regular expressions and conditional clauses. I am curious to see more elaborate uses of this technology, which seems at first glance to be an immense invention, but one without any immediate necessity.

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