Adriano

must see, absolutely amazing ! "Wiltshire takes a helicopter journey over Rome and then draws a panoramic view of what he saw, entirely from memory. [H]e drew it in such great detail that he drew the exact number of columns in the Pantheon." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Adriano

"Dudely Lama: “Life is short and complicated and nobody knows what to do about it. So don’t do anything about it. Just take it easy, man. Stop worrying so much whether you’ll make it into the finals. Kick back with some friends and some oat soda and whether you roll strikes or gutters, do your best to be true to yourself and others – that is to say, abide.” Knowing that, now you can die with a smile on your face without feelin’ like the Good Lord gypped you. And that’s what Dudeism’s all about. See ya later on down the trail." - Adriano

"The idea that I am cutting and pushing through thought itself, that memories, dreams and reflections should have the consistency of soft white jelly, is simply too strange to understand. I know that if I stray into the wrong area, into what neurosurgeons call eloquent brain, I will be faced with a damaged and disabled patient afterwards. The brain does not come with helpful labels saying "Cut here" or "Don’t cut there." Eloquent brain looks no different from any other area of the brain, so when I go round to the Recovery Ward after the operation to see what I have achieved, I am always anxious. There are various ways in which the risk of doing damage can be reduced. There is a form of GPS for brain surgery called Computer Navigation where there are infrared cameras around the patient’s head which show the surgeon on a computer screen where his instruments are on the patient’s brain scan. You can operate with the patient awake under local anaesthetic: the eloquent areas of the brain can then be identified by stimulating the brain with an electrode and by giving the patient simple tasks to perform so that one can see if one is causing any damage as the operation proceeds. And then there is skill and experience and knowing when to stop. Quite often one must decide that it is better not to start in the first place and declare the tumour inoperable. Despite these methods, however, much still depends on luck, both good and bad. As I become more and more experienced, it seems that luck becomes ever more important." - Adriano

"A woman reported missing from a tour to the Eldgjá volcanic canyon in southern Iceland ended up joining the search party formed to find her. The mix-up occurred when the woman left the tour bus and changed clothing. When she returned, the other tourists didn’t recognize her and began to worry about the missing passenger. Going off of the bus driver's description, a search was organized for an Asian woman in dark clothing who spoke English well. The missing woman didn’t recognize the description of herself and joined in the search. The following day, as the coast guard prepared to send a search helicopter, the woman realized her mistake." - Adriano

what was more surreal at the RNC than Clint Eastwood conversing with that empty chair? http://mashable.com/2012... "President Obama is teaming up with a decidedly younger, more hip -- and yes, more stoned -- celebrity in his quest to win the November election: Kal Penn." http://www.hlntv.com/article... - Adriano

Eastwood's appearance at RNC was not only surreal but also sad and embarassing.. :/ - Amira

"The Spanish filmmaker @DavidVictori was the grand prize winner of the first Your Film Festival, an online competition sponsored by YouTube, Scott Free Productions and Emirates airlines, for his short film “The Guilt,” about a man out for revenge after his wife’s murder. The announcement was made at the Venice Film Festival on Sunday after his film was selected from a pool of 10 finalists by a jury that included the director Ridley Scott and the actor Michael Fassbender." NYT http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012... - Adriano

see the entries by the 50 semi-finalists: http://www.youtube.com/user... - Adriano

the Wikipedia entry had numerous errors which needed correction, and the composers from the same recording date were mashed on the same line. (Parenthesis) indicates recording/release years. Left image shows young Gould with Alberto Guerrero. Gould used the same chair, pictured right, for most of his life, and took it with him almost everywhere. It allowed him to pull down on the keys rather than striking them from above, a central technical idea of Guerrero. \\ Most frequent composers, in descending order, are interesting: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schoenberg, Hindemith, Strauss, Brahms -- followed by two compositions by Gould himself, the very first one being a string quartet (1960/1960)! - Adriano

"Suppose I spent a decade publishing books and papers arguing that, contrary to theoretical computer science’s dogma, the Church-Turing Thesis fails to capture all of computation, because Turing machines can’t toast bread. Therefore, you need my revolutionary new model, the Toaster-Enhanced Turing Machine (TETM), which allows bread as a possible input and includes toasting it as a primitive operation. You might say: sure, I have a “point”, but it’s a totally uninteresting one. No one ever claimed that a Turing machine could handle every possible interaction with the external world, without first hooking it up to suitable peripherals. If you want a Turing machine to toast bread, you need to connect it to a toaster; then the TM can easily handle the toaster’s internal logic (unless this particular toaster requires solving the halting problem or something like that to determine how brown the bread should be!). In exactly the same way, if you want a TM to handle interactive communication, then you need to hook it up to suitable communication devices." - Adriano

"Complexification does not stop with individual self-awareness. It is ongoing and, indeed, speeding up. In today’s technologically sophisticated and intertwined societies, complexification is taking on a supraindividual, continent-spanning character. With the instant, worldwide communication afforded by cell phones, e-mail, and social networking, I foresee a time when humanity’s teeming billions and their computers will be interconnected in a vast matrix — a planetary Übermind. Provided mankind avoids Nightfall — a thermonuclear Armageddon or a complete environmental meltdown — there is no reason why this web of hypertrophied consciousness cannot spread to the planets and, ultimately, beyond the stellar night to the galaxy at large." - Adriano

yeah, baby, it's all in the network: http://ff.im/11FZ7n -- push a synaptic button and Über suddenly has a limo waiting at my doorstep :-) - Adriano

"Story of 85 year-old Jiro Ono, considered by many to be the world's greatest sushi chef, proprietor of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a 10-seat, sushi-only restaurant inauspiciously located in a Tokyo subway station: It is the first restaurant of its kind to be awarded a prestigious 3 star Michelin review, and sushi lovers from around the globe make repeated pilgrimage, calling months in advance and shelling out top dollar for a coveted seat at Jiro's sushi bar. For most of his life, Jiro has been mastering the art of making sushi, but even at his age he sees himself still striving for perfection, working from sunrise to well beyond sunset to taste every piece of fish; meticulously train his employees; and carefully mold and finesse the impeccable presentation of each sushi creation. At the heart of this story is Jiro's relationship with his eldest son Yoshikazu, the worthy heir to Jiro's legacy, who is unable to live up to his full potential in his father's shadow." - Adriano

On his commitment required to become and remain a master at a craft: "You must fall in love with your work. I do the same thing over and over, improving bit by bit. There is always a yearning to achieve more. I’ll continue to climb, trying to reach the top, but no one knows where the top is." --Jiro ONO - Adriano

Restaurant review w/ photos: "The sushi courses came out at a rate of one per minute. 19 courses in 19 minutes. No ordering, no real talking -- just making sushi and eating sushi. After the sushi is done you are motioned to leave the sushi bar and sit at a booth where you are served your melon. We took that melon at a leisurely 10 minute pace, leaving us with a bill of over $300 per person for just under 30 minutes time. At the end of the meal, Jiro went outside the restaurant and stood guard at the entrance, waiting to bid us formal adieu. At over 10 dollars a minute I have no problem letting an 86 year old man stand and wait for me to finish my melon if he wants to." --Dave Arnold, http://www.cookingissues.com/2012... - Adriano

« Les formes s'effaçaient et n'étaient plus qu'un rêve, - Une ébauche lente à venir, - Sur la toile oubliée, et que l'artiste achète - Seulement par le souvenir. » - Adriano

"Featuring instrumentals from all five seasons of the show, you now have the perfect tunes to play while cooking, bugging an F.B.I. field office, or playing with magnets." E.g. the composition, "Cleaning House" http://soundcloud.com/madison... - Adriano

Expressive beautiful set... - Adriano

for Primer on 3D Printing (additive manufacturing), see http://ff.im/QeVCT - Adriano

"The 13.7 billion years is the currently measured time to the Big Bang and 379,000 years is the number of years after the Big Bang when the universe cooled off enough to become transparent. The mostly visible light photons from the hot plasma that filled the universe at that time have been traveling since then and have now been red-shifted down into the microwave range. This is the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation that has been very accurately measured by the WMAP satellite. We will not be able to see back further in time with photons since the universe was opaque to photons before that time. It's theoretically possible to see back to 10^-30 seconds after the Big Bang IF we could measure the possible gravitational waves that could have been generated at the end of the inflationary period of the Big Bang at that time." --Frank Heile - Adriano

*asks Count Orlok* - Big Joe Silenced

I think that image is from Nosferatu (1922) by F. W. Murnau -- only 90 years ago, which seems like a very long time ago :-) - Adriano

See also this intriguing question: "If there was a mirror a million light years away and I looked at via telescope, how far back would I see in the past?" http://www.quora.com/If-ther... :-) - Amira

Terence Tao's obit: "Thurston was also an amazing mathematical expositor, having the rare knack of being able to describe the process of mathematical thinking in addition to the results of that process and the intuition underlying it. His wonderful essay, which I highly recommend, is the quintessential instance of this." \\ Non-technical discussion of progress (and polite fiction :-) in mathematics that are not captured by formal proofs of theorems, especially in Thurston.own work -- presented with unusual frankness and clarity about the "personal understanding" beyond knowledge of mathematics. [Animated GIF illustrates the Poincaré disk as a model for hyperbolic geometry.] - Adriano

"I think that mathematics is one of the most intellectually gratifying of human activities. Because we have a high standard for clear and convincing thinking and because we place a high value on listening to and trying to understand each other, we don’t engage in interminable arguments and endless redoing of our mathematics. We are prepared to be convinced by others. Intellectually, mathematics moves very quickly." -- ibid. - Amira

"He was a pioneer in the field of low-dimensional topology. In 1982, he was awarded the Fields Medal for his contributions to the study of 3-manifolds." \\ Terence Tao's obit: "Thurston provided one of the strongest pieces of evidence towards the truth of the Poincaré conjecture, until the work of Grisha Perelman in 2002-2003 proved both the Poincaré conjecture and the geometrisation conjecture by developing Hamilton’s Ricci flow methods. There are now several variants of Perelman’s proof of both conjectures; in the proof of geometrisation by Bessieres, Besson, Boileau, Maillot, and Porti, Thurston’s hyperbolisation theorem is a crucial ingredient, allowing one to bypass the need for the theory of Alexandrov spaces in a key step in Perelman’s argument." http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2012... - Adriano

"The inner force that drives mathematicians isn’t to look for applications; it is to understand the structure and inner beauty of mathematics." --Thurston, from NYT obit http://www.nytimes.com/2012... \\ See his recent lecture, Mystery of 3-Manifolds (2010, Paris) http://youtu.be/4jdmkUQDWtQ [59-min, Smale in the first row :-] - Adriano

"In this age of constant communication, we turn conversation into a series of data-point exchanges. There is no time for the murky exploration of feelings. The result is a deep-seated loneliness. Maybe we combat this sense of loneliness by accumulating thousand friends and sign off our digital dispatches with "I love you." Clearly those words muttered at the end of a phone call or thumbed at the end of a text aren't a big deal anymore. \\ Write someone a note or letter on actual paper or stationery. You may find that "Love ya" looks a little naked against the blank stationery, so say something else. Be specific if possible. That should do the trick." --Jim Sollisch - Adriano

"All literature is an attempt to make life real. As all of us know, even when we don’t act on what we know, life is absolutely unreal in its directly real form; the country, the city and our ideas are all absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our own selves. Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary." \\ concurs with Everything is Fiction, http://ff.im/12p2ZV - Adriano

must see, really extraordinary! -- "This technology may someday be used to build cameras that can look "around" corners or see inside the body without X-rays." See also computational photography, http://femtophotography.info where Raskar is Project Director at MIT Media Lab: "We exploit the simple fact that the photons statistically will trace the same path in repeated pulsed illuminations. By carefully synchronizing the pulsed illumination with the capture of reflected light, we record the same pixel at the same exact relative time slot millions of times to accumulate sufficient signal. Our time resolution is 1.71 picosecond and hence any activity spanning smaller than 0.5mm in size will be difficult to record." - Adriano

The collective ranking of 250 top films since 1902 http://ff.im/12Aw1d was smoothed using exponential moving averages, and then plotted (in blue) -- which allows us to eyeball the general trends (in red). Image enlarged: http://i.imgur.com/iwm0d... The data indicates that the quality of cinema appears to be getting worse since the 1950s :( - Adriano

I don't know how to interpret this :( - Amit Patel

Amit, the best film produced next year will roughly have a 1.2 rank lower than this year's best -- at the rate estimated by the post-1950 trend. - Adriano

Shouldn't that metric decline even if films are just as good? The overall number of films is increasing so the probability that the next film is better than previous ones should go down over time. Maybe I'm misunderstanding :) - Amit Patel

Done in principle: when Craig Venter and colleagues created the first synthetic cell in 2010, they watermarked their names into its DNA code... "Researchers encoded an entire book into the genetic molecules of DNA, then accurately read back the text. "A device the size of your thumb could store as much information as the whole Internet," said molecular geneticist George Church. In a viscous liquid or solid salt, a billion copies of the book could fit easily into a test tube, and last for centuries under normal conditions. The DNA book wasn't inserted into a living cell but kept in a laboratory container. If incorporated into a living cell, the stored DNA data might be changed or erased by the normal process of cell biology. The Harvard effort stands out for its large scale. It took several days to write the DNA form of the book, and even longer to read it back." http://online.wsj.com/article... - Adriano

poet Christian Bök on The Xenotext: "It's written in such a way that, when it's translated into this gene sequence, and then implanted, it can cause the organism it's implanted in to produce a viable protein in response -- a protein that is itself a completely different poem. So I'm genetically engineering a bacterium that won't just archive my own text in its DNA, but also becomes a machine for writing a poem in response. It's a very masculine assertion about the aesthetic creation of life. The organism reads the poem, and writes in response a very melancholy, feminine -- almost surreal in tone -- poem about the aesthetic loss of life." http://t.co/AifggLku - Adriano

Quentin Tarantino's film ranked 133 in the British Film Institute top 250: http://ff.im/12Aw1d -- great script! (and bad mofo wallet :-) - Adriano

"After 50 years at the top of the Sight & Sound poll, Orson Welles’s debut film [Citizen Kane] has been convincingly ousted by Alfred Hitchcock’s 45th feature Vertigo – and by a whopping 34 votes, compared with the mere five that separated them a decade ago. Hitchcock, who only entered the top ten in 1982, has risen steadily in esteem over the course of 30 years, with Vertigo climbing from seventh place, to fourth in 1992, second in 2002 and now first, to make him the Old Master: http://ff.im/12zgRY Back in 1962 a brand-new film, Antonioni’s L’avventura, vaulted into second place. If there was going to be an equivalent today, it might have been Malick’s The Tree of Life, which only polled one vote less than the last title in the top 100. In fact the highest film from the new century is Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, just 12 years old, now sharing joint 24th slot with Dreyer’s venerable Ordet." - Adriano

Only three made ​​in the last twelve years, and four in thirty? - Amira

all films nominated: http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightan... -- search on "(20" for this century. Embargo lifted on top 250: http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightan... -- ranking within this century: 26 In The Mood For Love, 28 Mulholland Dr, 107 The Tree of Life, 130 Tropical Malady, 155 Cache (Hidden), 172 The Werckmeister Harmonies, 202 The Death of Mr Lazarescu, 207 There Will Be Blood, 208 WALL-E, 212 Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, 215 Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, 216 Russian Ark, 218 Spirited Away, 231 The Turin Horse, 237 Melancholia. - Adriano

Timeline, top 250 in chronological order: http://goo.gl/mGwCh Cinematic history! - Adriano

"What fascinates me is that both films are intensely personal and autobiographical. Welles gives us a portrait of a gargantuan man of unlimited ambitions and appetites, whose excesses outran his resources. Hitchcock gives us a man obsessed with control, who had a fetish not simply for blondes in general but for the specific features of a specific blonde. Both plots are labyrinthine. Kane as a character turned out to be uncannily prophetic of Welles's own life. Scottie as a character reflected not only Hitchcock's fetishes but his fears. The films originated in the self-knowledge of their makers. They guide our eyes: "Look here... now there... focus on this... now that... make this connection... feel this absence. That is the best I can say about what it is like to be me."" - Adriano

Yasujirô Ozu's "Tokyo Story" places third overall, but Ebert recommends "Floating Weeds." See filmography: http://www.imdb.com/name... \\ "Tokyo Story" finishes first in the BFI Ten Greatest Films of All Time, as chosen by 358 directors: http://www.bfi.org.uk/news... - Adriano

"The 2D tessellation becomes a collection of shadows, a fake and poor copy of the real world, an idea strongly reminiscent of the Socratic theory of forms. The two races or species finally reconcile in the foreground by shaking hands in the new, three dimensional world. The strongest feature of the engraving is indisputably the illusion of interplay between the 2D and 3D worlds. By some invisible source of light hovering centrally above, the creatures’ shadows radiate from the center of the scene, some seemingly still half attached on the tessellation. It is exactly there that the boundary between the two dimensional world of the shadows and the three dimensional world of the dancing creatures becomes vague and undecided." - Adriano

About 325,000 years ago, the European range and the African range became separated. The European range evolved into Neanderthal, the African range eventually turned into modern humans. New research raises questions about the theory that modern humans and Neanderthals at some point interbred, known as hybridisation. The findings suggest that common ancestry, not hybridisation, better explains the average 1-4% DNA that those of European and Eurasians share with Neanderthals. PNAS, 14 Aug 2012 http://www.pnas.org/content... - Adriano

"A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be. Like Saint Jerome, a writer should work in his cell. Turn the back. Writing is a view of the spirit. “The world is my representation.” Humanity lives in its fiction. This is why a conqueror always wants to transform the face of the world into his image. Today, I even veil the mirrors." - Adriano

« Écrire est une vue de l'esprit. C'est un travail ingrat qui mène à la solitude. » --Blaise Cendrars, L'Homme foudroyé, Le Vieux port IV (1945) - Adriano

"I try to embrace the fiction of all things. Fiction gives us everything. It gives us our memories, our understanding, our insight, our lives. We use it to invent ourselves and others. We use it to feel change and sadness and hope and love and to tell each other about ourselves. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones -- they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor -- please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience -- with our senses and our nerves -- is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos." - Adriano

"If all stories are fiction, fiction can be true -- not in detail or fact, but in some transformed version of feeling. If there is a memory of paradise, paradise can exist, in some other place or country dimensionally reminiscent of our own. The sad stories live there too, but in that country, we know what they mean and why they happened. We make our way back from them, finding the way through a bountiful wilderness we begin to understand. Years are nothing: Story conquers all distance." — Jayne Anne Phillips - Amira

"You are nothing but a speck in this universe. Your whole life is nothing but a speck in the line of time. A speck that'll stay together for about eighty years and then disintegrate into the universe again. Some of them disperse into the atmosphere becoming a part of the air that some animal completely strange to you will breathe in. Some might remain to be a part of the soil, maybe entering into a plant's roots. Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back in the same box. But you don't lose anything. You don't own anything. The universe owns you. It made you from its belongings. You are just a random rearrangement of its playstuff." - Adriano

When you're in another country, Google.com usually redirects to a local version of the Google page—like Google.fr for France, or Google.de for Germany. Here's how to easily visit the regular Google.com in another country: head to http://google.com/ncr where NCR stands for "No Country Redirect", and it'll take you back to the regular, English-speaking U.S. version of Google.com -- without all the local results. Note that it will redirect to Google.com, so if you won't see the /ncr after you enter the address. \\ Another trick is to use Duckduckgo with the !g operator. - Adriano

"You’re a complete incomplete idiot, and I’m not going to apply this patch because it’s obviously broken and is a total piece of sh*t. And here’s why… If you still don’t like it that’s ok: that’s why I’m boss. I simply know better than you do. Furthermore, I claim that anybody that hasn’t noticed by now that I’m an opinionated bastard, and that “impolite” is my middle name, is lacking a few clues." - Adriano

there were no credits listed :( The first is a look at the Golden Gate Bridge from Marin county. Fill in the blank _________ for the second... - Adriano