randomWalks

I just think that this paragraph is a gratuitously base aside that actually makes you look like a knuckle-dragging, bigoted garbage person, instead of just a conventionally lame political editorialist.

This Richard Cohen column — and perhaps all Richard Cohen columns — should be read as a memo to Jeff Bezos, the new owner of the Post. Cohen is saying, perhaps subconsciously, that he has nothing to offer the Washington Post. He adds no value. “Buy me out,” Richard Cohen begs, between the lines. “Pay me to go away and stop embarrassing this once respected newspaper.” How much will it take? I am not sure, but Jeff Bezos is a very rich man, and I think he can afford it. Indeed, if his mission is to invest in quality journalism, paying Richard Cohen to go away would be one of the quickest and simplest ways to advance that mission.

Almost every teacher in that school came to understand the history they were teaching on—the destruction of the Black Bottom neighborhood, the scattered draft cards of many African-American men drafted into the Vietnam War, and the issues that doomed the school from the very start. … These weren’t the closings of buildings. These were the closings of families and communities.

It seems the only language we have for expressing success is numeric. It may be a universal language, but it’s an impoverished one. Maybe we need a word for “never having to sit in a meeting where someone reads long power point slides out loud.” Maybe we should have an expression that captures the level of success you’ve achieved when you do exactly what you love every day.

Certainly it helps that all these smart people grew up in America, where they never had to worry about clean water or good public schools or political instability. The privileges we enjoy in the United States allow us to succeed on this level, and it’s why I challenge Twitter to extend these kinds of opportunities more broadly by expanding the diversity of its board, and in the process better reflecting its increasingly international and diverse user base.

A feeling I got from working at Google was that technology could solve any problem. Yes it’s fantastic, but what I realized later was there’s technology and there’s people. Google had its list ordered: Technology. People. And I think the right order is: People. Technology. You have to think about people first and technology second. Hopefully technology gets out of the way.

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movieposteroftheday:

1959 Polish poster for DESIRE (Vojtech Jasny, Czechoslovakia, 1958)

Designer: Jerzy Flisak (1930-2008) [see also]

Poster source: Danish Film Institute

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empty rooms of Twin Peaks x

Wow! I’ve never watched Twin Peaks, and nothing has made me want to watch it more than this.

"I like gray skies now, because #drones don’t fly in gray skies.” #dronesbriefing

— Noor✞Mir (@thedronalisa) October 29, 2013

I wrote a thing about OS X Mavericks.

It’s telling a new acquaintance you’re biracial, then furnishing a photo of your family when she insists that you’re lying. You have to do this, though, show her a picture — because you might be the one person who can change her mind about what blackness looks like.

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I often get email intended for a different Sudama. Once in a while it’s really great.

If in some way, you could contribute significantly to the way humans could handle complexity and urgency, that would be universally helpful.

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babylonfalling:

I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood

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"My intention is to give some of the wow and wonder of science."

http://miriam-english.org/randomwalks/index.html

I just got a report from someone who did this for six weeks, and his question to me was, ‘Is there any reason to stop?’

I’ve made it a goal to complete a photographic random walk at every subway station in New York City.

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unlikeableprotagonist:

how did that cat get in the sock though

And I thought, how crude, how cruel, how ignorant, how disrespectful of these children. What a set-up. Who would do that to kids?

This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.

I told him he should ask his friend to come over for pizza and play video games but his new friend always had an excuse.

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Brownian motion. Recording random movement as a continuous line. (via Brownian Examples Processing.org)