“I read this so you don’t have to. It’s all part of the service.”

Neal Stephenson — one of my favorite writers — recently spoke with AV Club about his new novel, Anathem:

AVC: Why base a book in part on topics that you yourself aren’t passionately interested in reading about?

NS: I was trying to run something to ground that had come to my attention when I was working on the Baroque Cycle. That series, of course, was about the conflict between Newton and Leibniz. Leibniz developed a system of metaphysics called monadology, which looked pretty weird at the time and was promptly buried by Newtonian-style physics. Later I learned that some eminent 20th-century thinkers, including Bertrand Russell and Kurt Gödel, had been interested in Leibniz’s work, and that Leibniz had been adopted as a sort of patron saint by some of the people working on Loop Quantum Gravity. When I finished the Baroque Cycle, I still felt as though this was a loose end. In part, Anathem is an attempt to tie up that loose end. To do this, I had to read Kant and Husserl and some other stuff that Kurt Gödel apparently thought of as light reading.

AVC: Has this happened before with any of your books, where you had to fight your way through source material on some specific topic to get what you wanted for the book?

NS: All the time. I read this so you don’t have to. It’s all part of the service.

- @ AV Club: Link.

Tip o’ the hat to JS.

Nanobama: Barack Obama in nanotubes

A technique known as nanolithography was used to build these Obama faces, combining 150 million carbon nanotubes to construct each individual half-millimeter visage. Depending on your political leanings, the result is either the cutest wittle powitician ever or proof that science, in the wrong hands, will engineer miniature robotic Democrats who distract with a message of hope while eating our flesh.

- Mark Wilson @ Gizmodo: Link.

Via The Day They Tried to Kill Me: Link.

See also Wired.com: Link.

“It was sensual and intellectual at the same time — a rare and potent combination.”

David Byrne offers these observations on the 50th anniversary of Bossa Nova:

Everyone has heard “Girl From Ipanema”; it’s one of the most popular songs in the world, after “Happy Birthday,” “Yesterday,” and “White Christmas.” It has become a bit of a lounge cliché, but try playing it using the original Jobim chords — it’ll kick your ass.

I’m no historian of this movement that combined sophisticated jazz chords with incredible pop songwriting and lilting samba rhythms, but I can sense some influences flowing back and forth, north and south, east and west. I hear touches of the quiet vibrato-less vocal style that Chet Baker made famous, the textural harmonies of Debussy and the poetry of Cole Porter and many others. It was sensual and intellectual at the same time — a rare and potent combination. Too bad more art movements can’t share that approach.

- David Byrne: Link.

“Obama … is … placing the first presidential campaign ads in online video games.”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Barack Obama, flush with cash and ramping up his advertising in the final weeks before the November 4 election, is making U.S. political history by placing the first presidential campaign ads in online video games.

The Democratic Illinois senator is using the Internet ads, featured in 18 games through Microsoft Corp’s Xbox Live service, to promote his online voter registration and early balloting drive in 10 battleground states, a campaign spokesman said on Wednesday.

Unprecedented in U.S. presidential politics, the video game buy is targeted mainly at young adult males who are difficult to reach through more traditional campaign advertising.

- Yahoo: Link.

“He was one of the last of the giants. It’s as if a Sequoia has fallen.”

I hate having to say goodbye to Paul Newman.

He was one of the last of the giants. It’s as if a Sequoia has fallen.

And, corny as it sounds, he was on that shortest of short lists: real good guys.

His good deeds, charities and availability for worthy causes should get him into anybody’s heaven.

- Dick Cavett: Link.

“It’s Kirk vs. Spock in Weirdest Presidential Race of 21st Century.”

Leonard Nimoy approves of Barack Obama’s emotional detachment and logical approach to campaigning.

“He is measured and stable,” said Mr. Nimoy, who played Mr. Spock on Star Trek, and who has supported Mr. Obama since they first met about a year and a half ago at a small Los Angeles fund-raiser. “It’s true that he has an intellect that works for him, he handles difficult problems with aplomb. Reliability and stability are very important assets in this race, in these particularly volatile times.”

…. Mr. McCain, of course, is the passionate, emotional and all-too-human candidate who strikes a chord with voters but can often be seen to be doing battle in real time, Kirk-like, with the enemy within.

During the first presidential debate in Mississippi, he persistently avoided eye contact with Mr. Obama despite the moderator’s entreaties for the candidates to engage directly with one another. Mr. McCain’s advisers said afterward that he had done so deliberately in order to avoid becoming enraged.

- Jason Horowitz @ New York Observer: Link.

Via Boing Boing.

Illustration by Drew Friedman.

“A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty.”

Rolling Stone recently published a relentlessly critical biography of John McCain:

When McCain was not shown the pampering to which he was accustomed, he grew petulant — even abusive. He repeatedly blew up in the face of his commanding officer. It was the kind of insubordination that would have gotten any other midshipman kicked out of Annapolis. But his classmates soon realized that McCain was untouchable. Midway though his final year, McCain faced expulsion, about to “bilge out” because of excessive demerits. After his mother intervened, however, the academy’s commandant stepped in. Calling McCain “spoiled” to his face, he nonetheless issued a reprieve, scaling back the demerits. McCain dodged expulsion a second time by convincing another midshipman to take the fall after McCain was caught with contraband.

McCain’s self-described “four-year course of insubordination” ended with him graduating fifth from the bottom — 894th out of a class of 899. It was a record of mediocrity he would continue as a pilot.

- Tim Dickinson @ Rolling Stone: Oct 16, 2008: Link.

“Your soul adheres to a place because souls are notoriously fragile and places stick around a lot longer.”
- Bob Oswald

I found this interesting:

All communities are intentional, but some are more intentional than others.

… We all came here (or in the rare case of the true natives, stayed here) for a reason. Your soul adheres to a place because souls are notoriously fragile and places stick around a lot longer. You adhere because every day, you invest yourself into where you are.

- Bob Oswald @ Belltown Messenger: Link.

“They were beating drums, tearing it up, hurling horses over cliffs.”
- Bob Dylan

I recently read Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, Volume One with considerable pleasure.

It’s an engaging book: Dylan combines reminiscences about his inner life with thoughtful anecdotes about people he’s known over the decades.

This passage really caught my eye:

Danny [Lanois] asked me what I’d been listening to recently, and I told him Ice-T. He was surprised, but he shouldn’t have been. A few years earlier, Kurtis Blow, a rapper from Brooklyn who had a hit out called “The Breaks,” had asked me to be on one of his records and he familiarized me with that stuff, Ice-T, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Run-D.M.C. These guys definitely weren’t standing around bullshitting. They were beating drums, tearing it up, hurling horses over cliffs. They were poets and knew what was going on. Somebody different was bound to come along sooner or later who would know that world, been born and raised with it … be all of it and more. Someone with a chopped topped head and a power in the community. He’d be able to balance himself on one leg on a tightrope that stretched across the universe and you’d know him when he came — there’d be only one like him. The audience would go that way, and I couldn’t blame them. The kind of music that Danny and I were making was archaic. I didn’t tell him that, but that’s honestly how I felt. With Ice-T and Public Enemy, who were laying down the tracks, a new performer was bound to appear, and one unlike Presley. He wouldn’t be swinging his hips and staring at the lassies. He’d be doing it with hard words and he’d be working eighteen hours a day.

- Bob Dylan: Chronicles, Volume One

I love that phrase, “hurling horses over cliffs” ….

Over at Total Dick-Head, PKD scholar David Gill reports:

My wife works at the library, and occasionally people will donate books that are too old or in such bad shape that the library gives them away rather than shelving them. Look what I got:

Yep, that’s the screenplay for Burrough’s film Blade Runner, the source for the title of [Ridley] Scott’s adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

- David Gill @ Total Dick-Head: Link.

I’ve created a new late-August banner for the blog:

Photography by John Symchych: see Nice Tomatos.

JES Photography @ Flickr.

“There are no American political parties … because we have none, we have no opposition to those who rule us.”

We don’t have political parties, let’s begin with that. And we’ve never had them since John Adams said “I want a nation of laws, not of men.” Well that’s very lofty, of course, but what he meant was he didn’t want faction. Well, faction is political parties. Now, without faction you don’t have any kind of, well, motion going within the state … we’re suffering from it now.

- Gore Vidal, interview (wmv format) - via The Young Turks

See also:

Wikipedia: What Went Wrong in Ohio by John Conyers.

Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio: Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff (pdf)

Henry Rollins Interviews Gore Vidal @ YouTube

The amazing likeness has come to light as part of a sale of ancient antiques by the auction house Bonhams.

… The Roman Elvis is in fact a genuine marble acroterion — a kind of architectural ornament often found for decoration on the corners of a sarcophagus, a stone tomb or burial chamber.

It forms part of a collection owned by Melbourne-based Graham Geddes — one of the world’s most foremost collectors — which is estimated to sell for more than £1m when it goes on sale in October.

- Niall Firth @ MailOnline: Link.

Via Boing Boing, via Neatorama.

BiblioOdyssey recently posted scans of a 16th-century fighting manual by fencing master Achille Marozzo, illustrating various techniques.

My brother is interested in such things so I sent him the link. He responded with this essay:

I have actually practiced Marozzo’s techniques for disarming an opponent of his dagger — they’re pretty effective.

Marozzo’s work is one of only a handful of medieval & renaissance martial arts texts that survive. They are enjoying a resurgence of interest and good translations are starting to appear.

It has been the tendency to think of Asian martial arts as being preeminent, although it is really the western martial arts that predominate globally (think of guns, missiles, etc.).

What has been forgotten are the pre-modern European hand-to-hand combat systems, many of which were very highly developed. Unfortunately, many of them were never recorded, as schools tended to be secretive about their techniques.

Even systems that were recorded are difficult to reconstruct; the meanings of terminology and references is often obscure, and knowledge taken for granted by the authors no longer exists. Still, much progress has been made, and it is clear that these systems were very sophisticated and effective, and integrated a variety of weapons and unarmed techniques.

- Geoff Jones

Philip Zimmermann is the author of ZRTP, a technology for encrypting Internet telephone calls. So far, not even teams of supercomputers and cyberspies at the National Security Agency have cracked ZRTP.

Zimmermann spoke with Forbes recently about the future of internet telephony, also known as Voice Over IP (VoIP):

With traditional telephony, our threat model was mostly government wiretapping. With VoIP, anyone can wiretap us: the Russian mafia, foreign governments, hackers, disgruntled former employees. Anyone.

Historically, there’s been an asymmetry between government wiretapping and everyone else wiretapping that’s been in the government’s favor. As we migrate to VoIP, that differential collapses. The government itself is just as vulnerable. Wiretappers can reveal details of ongoing investigations, names and personal details of informants, conversations between officials and their wives about what time they pick up their kids at school.

… Everyone thinks that VoIP is the future of telephony. It’s cheaper, more versatile, more feature-rich. So technological pressure herds us towards VoIP; we’ll have to encrypt it. Wiretapping will become so easy that the criminals — not just governments — will be able to do it routinely. There will be insider trading, blackmail, organized crime spying on judges and prosecutors, key witnesses killed before they can testify.

- Phillip Zimmermann, interview @ Forbes (03.18.08) : Link.

ZFone Project

“Zfone is a new secure VoIP phone software product which lets you make encrypted phone calls over the Internet. Its principal designer is Phil Zimmermann, the creator of PGP, the most widely used email encryption software in the world. Zfone uses a new protocol called ZRTP, which has a better architecture than the other approaches to secure VoIP.”

Zfone is open source, and it’s free. Link.