Takagi Masukatsu

Takagi Masukatsu visual music (watch the video lower on that page).

This is one of the clearest pieces of evidence I've seen that the computer allows us to create worthwhile art which could not be made in any other medium. I think his work is beautiful.

rPhone

rPhone
... If parody is flattery...

James

Excellence does not require perfection.
- Henry James

Finally a perfect quotation.

How to lose a sale by charging too little

How to lose a sale by charging too little.

B-person

In Danish we have the terms "A person" and "B person" ("A menneske" og "B menneske"). The former likes to get to bed early and get up early. The latter likes to stay up late and get up late. (I'm the latter.)

My Danish-English dictionary claims that the terms are the same in English, but from online dictionaries and use, this seems not to be the case. Does anybody know if there are terms in English/American for these concepts? 

Followup on diamonds and shit

Followup on diamonds and shit.

Endings...

Arrrrgh, my two favorite TV shows (I only watch TV shows on DVD though), Sopranos and Gilmore Girls, have ended! I am mortified. I am on my knees, please, somebody make something to replace them. 

BTW, I am happy to hear that my friend Susie Bright and many of her friends have given up TV like I did in 2003. It is very hard to have a TV (connection) and not have it waste your time. 

Keynote

Yes, more Steve Jobs! I'm sorry, but I'm just a very big fan. :)
In the Developer Keynote from Monday, Steve talks mainly about the upcoming upgrade to OS X. It actually looks very promising. (I was a little lukewarm about the last one.) Just one small thing for example: they have finally realized that the active window should be more distinguished from the inactive ones. I've been bitching about that since the beta back in 2000. If only they also have made desktop pictures capable of scaling down a vertical image which is too tall for the desktop! (Such a lame miss that it can't do that.)

One excellent joke Steve makes at the expense of both Microsoft and Adobe: He presents a "basic version", a "business version", an "enterprise version", and an "ultimate version"... all of them at the same price ($129), and all of them containing everything, being just one version obviously. Gotta love that.

Big surprise: Apple Safari Browser for Windows! If you are ever frustrated with Internet Explorer or want compare Firefox to something else, check it out. (For one thing, it's apparently twice as fast as IE.)

Talking about speed, I am bugged by the fact that whenever Jobs demoes something, everything on his machine happens instantly. It does not do that on mine, depite the fact that I have the biggest and fastest Mac money can buy, and stuffed with memory (currently 6GB!). What gives?

Talking more about speed, but this time in a good way: I remember many years ago, trying to download Netscape 3 (I think it was) over modem. It was over 30MB, I couldn't even do it. Now I downloaded the Safari 3 beta for Mac, it was 15MB, and it downloaded in less than half a minute! Kewl.

Update:
Another quick reverse here: In Leopard, networked machines and drives will automatically show up in Finder. That's great! I remember that from working on Windows. Back in 1995.

Gentleness

Consider the word "gentleman". A refined man, a higher kind of man, is a man who is gentle.

In terms of what I'm studying with great pleasure this year, A Course In Miracles, every single second of our life we have a choice of only two attitudes:

1) the viewpoint of the Ego: conflict, fear, anger, attack.
2) the Higher Self: gentleness, love, reach, communication, forgiveness.

And the more often we choose the Higher Self viewpoint, the better we will feel, the stronger we will be, the more peaceful we will feel, and the sooner we will be in heaven/nirvana/source.
---
Terry said:
I spoke with a fellow just yesterday who told me that he gets a rush out of killing animals, a high that he apparently thrives on..........mercy is rarely ever displayed.

Pascal sitting on a cloud said...
That animal killer guy must be horribly insecure. I don't know for mercy, but he inspires me great pity. Poor soul! He's more pathetic than his animal victims.

A real confident person is he who HELPS those weaker, "why? simply because I can".

To briefly analyze the principle, the "bully" abuses his power position to get comfort from seeing himself as the powerful one in a situation. The more extreme the situation he seeks and creates, the greater his unwittingly confessed insecurity.
While the helpful one is so confident, he doesn't fear that his power will be any lessened by sharing it or employing it for others, on the contrary.

It's all about how you see yourself, the Universe and God's purpose, to put it in religious/mystical terms. Do we see our existence as destroying everything else, which we perceive as alien to us? Or as building as much as possible, because we are part of it all, and any progress is beneficial to us in one way or another?

Terry, if you seek mercy, here's a tip on the place you have the best chance of finding it: look inside yourself. And then share it, because the more you share things like love and happiness, the more you'll have. Some things ARE in unlimited supply. It's mathematically proven.

Rented films

If you are curious what films I have rented in the past five years, here's a list.
It's over 1200 movies!
The ratings are not mine, but averages from the rental service's customers.

e e cummings

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.
-- e e cummings

Who also made this poem.

I've long thought that apart from comics, combining words and visuals is a woefully underused art form. There is so much potential there. Alfred Bester, genial SF writer, is one of the few I know of who went there.

Brutality

From a comment on the Golden Compass post below:
"Certain characters deliberately cause suffering and death to innocent victims, and it seems to me that the book excuses those crimes because they were in the service of a greater, noble purpose."

It is very true that brutality is such a common element of this world that we barely notice it. How many of the men Dirty Harry kills did he really need to kill? And how many in the audience really cares? While I am on the back of Clint Eastwood, I was gravely disappointed in Unforgiven. This film was a brilliant anti-violence movie... all up until the last five minutes when it suddenly turned 180 degrees and became a pro-violence movie, so the audience could revel in the brutal shooting by the "hero" of about ten men, most of whom were just in the room at the wrong time.

Two of my favorite books, at least in the past, are Battlefield Earth and Mission Earth, both by L. Ron Hubbard (yes, the Scientology founder, he was a good SF writer). But it is dawning on my how brutal the heroes of those books are. And both of those, unlike the Clint's tainted protagonists, are understood to be true-blue, total heroes, with blonde hair and square jaws and everything.

The hero of Mission Earth once murders a bunch of gangsters by gassing them in a garage. He kills several FBI agents ("nobody important") by blowing up a building. And he kills several attackers by kicking the faces off them with the bottoms of his football boots, which have metal spikes.

And the hero of Battlefield Earth saves the enslaved peoples of the known universe by blowing up the home world of the villain race, with a whole civilization of probably 30 Billion people. It is dryly noted that he found it "hard to take responsibility for that much destruction". Yeah, I imagine.

Indeed, not only are us Earthlings so used to violence and hate and conflict that we barely notice it, and fail to distance ourselves from it, but if you think about it, there is barely a "hero" tale told in books or films which does not include bloody acts of murder against the "villains" of the story.