June 2010
26 posts
When the Doctor says it's cool, it's cool.
River Song: What in the name of sanity have you got on your head?
Doctor: It's a Fez. I wear a Fez now. Fezzes are cool.
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“You are joining a special profession. Doctors and scientists, we are all in the...”
– Atul Gawande, speaking to the graduating class at Stanford’s School of Medicine (via haunted).
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“You play with some ideas as a composer, you want them to show you something....”
– German composer Wolfgang Rihm, speaking about his work in an interview with The Guardian.
I imagine that that music composition, more so than writing or visual art, lends itself to conversational creativity as described by Rihm - by its very nature it’s a labile media and responds to the...
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“The Isner-Mahut battle is a bizarre mix of the gripping and the deadly dull....”
– The Guardian’s Wimbledon 2010 live blog at 4.05pm, in what turned out to be only the early stages of this record breaking stalemate - Play suspended after 10 hours played and 59 games each in the fifth set.
I loved Henman’s suggestion that the umpire should have called...
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The one where the guy kills his wife
CJ: I understand you've got a big date tomorrow night. [...] You're taking her
to the opera?
Bartlet: Verdi's Othello, romantic eh?
CJ: Isn't that the one where the guy kills his wife?
Bartlet: It's in Italian, I'm hoping she won't notice.
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WatchFinally found a full, if very low quality version of Infra from McGregor/Richter/Opie. It’d be great if the BBC broadcast it again.
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ajohnny asked: Hi - I stumbled across your blog while doing a tumblr search for Wayne McGregor, and I find it pretty interesting. I must say that you're one of the most personally interesting academics I've encountered!
No refills →
The Atlantic:
Tougher safety and efficacy standards may also be keeping good drugs out of the public’s hands. Most people agree that today’s FDA would not have approved aspirin; even penicillin, the miracle drug that helped dramatically extend the human lifespan when introduced in the early 1940s, is questionable. Allergic reactions to penicillin kill a higher percentage of its takers than...
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“At any rate I have known since about 1931 […] that the future must be...”
– George Orwell, 8 June 1940.
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“In the middle of a fearful battle in which, I suppose, thousands of men are...”
– George Orwell, 8 June 1940.
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An open letter to David Karp
David,
I’m sorry to say that I thought Tumblr’s recent “heart-of-BP-executive black” dashboard fundraising effort went slightly too far.
I have no issues with, an indeed applaud, business for holding high moral standards; actively lobbying government and other corporations; or making political and charitable donations from its profits. However, when these otherwise...
Give Me Something To Read: collecting long-form... →
I had to say something about the terrible AmE twang of “Berkshire County, England” in this peice. The correct (BrE) would be “The Royal county of Berkshire”, or Berks, as one would write on an envelope. As a side note, to call someone a “berk”, whilst sounding like an innocent schoolboy taunt is actually somewhat ruder: Shorthand for Berkshire Hunt, which is...
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“The fullness of form, the tautness of form, all these things are connected with...”
– Henry Moore
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The Orwell Diaries →
2.6.40:
“The usual Sunday crowds drifting to and fro, perambulators, cycling clubs, people exercising dogs, knots of young men loitering at street corners, with not an indication in any face or in anything that one can overhear that these people grasp that they are likely to be invaded within a few weeks, though today all the Sunday papers are telling them so.”
The Orwell Prize...