It’s a metal form that—when inserted into an opening and turned—draws back a bolt or latch. But the metal key is marked for extinction. Electronic access controls—keycards, keypads, biometric scanners, and the like—are already common in hotels, office buildings, and cars, and they’re gaining ground. What will we lose when the metal key, a form that has endured for centuries, disappears? And what will we gain?
It’s one of those illustrated slideshow-esque articles, but still worth it. Read it!
This looks a lot like a dragon licking up a ball of fire. And even though it’s actually a solar flare on the sun, taken yesterday, I vastly prefer my version:
All credit for this picture goes to: NASA/GSFC/SDO. Click the picture to see a hi-rez version.
If you’re still wondering, physics is actually working on answering the question from whence we came. From an article in the LA Times:
As particle physics revolutionizes the concepts of “something” (elementary particles and the forces that bind them) and “nothing” (the dynamics of empty space or even the absence of space), the famous question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is also revolutionized. Even the very laws of physics we depend on may be a cosmic accident, with different laws in different universes, which further alters how we might connect something with nothing. Asking why we live in a universe of something rather than nothing may be no more meaningful than asking why some flowers are red and others blue.
If you’ve ever seen Hitchock’s “Rear Window”, you will appreciate this video that stitches together the whole view from said rear window, displaying in a time-lapse, well, the whole film. It must have been painstaking work and as is the case so often, I can’t even begin to imagine the time that was put into this:
After having pre-ordered my copy of Richard Ford’s new novel Canada today, I did a bit of stumbling about on the Interwebs, when I found this article from 2007 about an HBO mini-series that was in the pipeline then. Directed by James Mangold of 310 to Yuma fame and written by Mark Bomback, it should have been a six hour version of Ford’s Bascombe novels, titled “The Sportswriter”.
Well, it’s five years later and I can’t find anything about the thing. Not on Mangold’s and not Bomback’s IMDB page. Which looks to me like it’s been shelved, but maybe someone out there knows more about it?
I post a lot of Millions articles here, for the very simple reason that they’re always so damn interesting. Here’s another one: John Kennedy Toole’s biographer Cory MacLauchlin seems to have found the original manuscript of Toole’s only novel:
I had nearly given up on the question of the original manuscript until a year ago when I interviewed Lynda Martin, the sister of Toole’s best friend in high school. “The manuscript?” she said in a soft southern accent. “Yes, well I have it in my closet here at home.” I nearly dropped the phone as she explained Toole’s mother had given it as a gift to her brother after the novel was published. When her brother passed away in 2008, she acquired it. It had a few penned-in edits, she explained, but not drastic revisions. “I don’t know what to do with it, really” she said. “I considered selling it at auction.” Christie’s estimated its value up to $20,000, if deemed authentic. She hadn’t called Sotheby’s yet. “Please” I begged, “just hold on to it. I’m on my way down.”
It’s a charming little story about the value of memories. Read it here.
With “John Carter” in theatres right now (getting mediocre reviews, despite Michael Chabon being partly responsible for the script), you might be interested in this fact about the story’s creator, Edgar Rice Burroughs: the man didn’t just create the Mars epos, he’s also the inventor of Tarzan. So it’s only logical that with the wealth he amassed from his books, he built a farm and named it Tarzana. Said Tarzana is now a city in California (and judging by Google Maps’ satellite photography, people in Tarzana are quite partial to pools):
For more on Burroughs, Salon released a good piece on him today:
For occasional entertainment Burroughs read the early pulp magazines, especially All-Story. Named after the cheap newsprint upon which they were printed, the pulps supplied adventure and romantic fiction to the masses for half a century. By the 1920s and ’30s newsstands around the country would display the lurid and spicy covers of Weird Tales, the Shadow, Amazing Stories, True Confessions, Dime Detective, Astounding, and Black Mask. Pulp writers would include such important literary figures as H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Robert A. Heinlein and scores of others. But in 1911 most of the writers weren’t of this caliber, and Burroughs was convinced he could write better adventure stories and maybe even make a living at it.
In New York City, an abandoned railway track overgrown with grass, bushes and even trees, was turned into a recreational park and opened to the public in the late 2000s. It’s an interesting story which took quite a bit of perseverance from local activists. You can read about it here.
The reason I’m writing about it now is that via the magic of Google Maps’ Street View, you can actually walk the length of the whole park. It’s a charming exploration of an urban oasis, slightly elevated above the hustle and bustle of Chelsea. Click the image to have a look yourself.
What’s actually happening in the brain, though, isn’t completely clear. Faith isn’t easy to categorize or study. Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, has conducted several brain-imaging studies of people in moments of extreme devotion. The limbic system, the center for our emotions, begins to show much higher activity, while the frontal lobes, which might ordinarily calm people, start to shut down. “In extreme cases, that can lead to hallucinations, where someone might believe they’re seeing the face of God or hearing voices,” Newberg says. “Your frontal lobe isn’t there to say, ‘Hey, this doesn’t sound like a good idea.’ And the person winds up engaging in behaviors that are not their norm.”
Like to read? Like your Tumblrs? Well, now you can have it both. The Millions just posted a stupendously extensive list of tumblrs pandering to people exactly like you:
For convenience, I’ve broken this list up among several categories, but I haven’t put these in any preferential order. “Single-Servings” are the most quintessentially Tumblr-like Tumblrs: blogs that fill one particular, ultra-specific niche. “Reviewers,” “Publishers,” “Magazines,” and “Booksellers/Libraries/Foundations” are exactly what they sound like. Sites classified as “Marginalia” are streams of miscellaneous book factoids, images, and, well, marginalia. I’ve tried to avoid listing personal Tumblrs except for a few here and there. Finally, I’ve included a “Wish List” of entities I’d like to see enter the world of likes and reblogs.
I’m a sucker for documentaries on food, especially on seemingly random food places. Cause you know what, it always turns out that there’s nothing random about these places. Here’s one about the Prime Burger Restaurant in NYC.
The Oscar nominations are out and I’m utterly underwhelmed. Here’s a link, these are the nominees for best picture:
The Artist
The Descendants
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
The Help
Hugo
Midnight in Paris
Moneyball
The Tree of Life
War Horse
I can’t believe they’ve actually nominated Tree of Life. As much as I sang praise for this film before seeing it, after seeing it I can’t believe how this convoluted, messy and evangelical piece of nonsense could get nominated. Well, maybe it’s time to admit that the Oscars are finally beyond relevant.
My choice for – at least – best picture and directing? Drive. Too bad it’s not nominated.
Beginning of this year, James Joyce’s main body of work was released into the public domain. Most people are happy about it but the good fight against Joyce’s sole heir Stephen Joyce is not yet over, writes The New Yorker:
Sam Slote, one of the academics D. T. Max interviewed, now teaches English literature at Trinity College Dublin, and is a prominent figure in Joyce studies. When I spoke to him, he was careful to disabuse me of any impression that the estate might now be out of Joyce scholars’ lives for good. He pointed out that the status of the posthumous publications—the letter and manuscripts, for instance, as well as “Stephen Hero” (an unfinished autobiographical novel which Joyce radically revised as “A Portrait”) and “Giacomo Joyce” (a fragmentary, poetic account of Joyce’s relationship with a female student)—is still unclear.
So the inevitable happened and Christopher Hitchens succumbed to pneumonia yesterday. Vanity Fair, for which he wrote – tirelessly even while cancer ate away at him – announced his death:
“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for this magazine a piece on U.S.-Pakistani relations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, a portrait of Joan Didion, an essay on the Private Eye retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin, and a series of frank, graceful, and exquisitely written essays in which he chronicled the physical and spiritual effects of his disease. At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades.
For everyone who is not familiar with his ways, I recommend watching this fine video:
It’s sad to see, as we’re constantly moving towards an age of un-enlightenment, an eloquent, unrelenting and witty voice like Hitchens’ silenced forever. RIP Christopher Hitchens.
