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Saturday, April 14, 2012
Friday, April 13, 2012
Happy Birthday, Hitch: A Letter of Advice to Young Contrarians
Happy Birthday, Hitch: A Letter of Advice to Young Contrarians:
‘Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others.’
Today would have marked the sixty-third birthday of acclaimed author and professional contrarian Christopher Hitchens, who succumbed to esophageal cancer last December. “One should try to write as if posthumously,” he famously — prophetically even, were such a contention not to be blasphemous to him — declared three days before he became gravely ill in 2010. Perhaps he had this dictum in mind when he penned, on a challenge from his New School students, Letters to a Young Contrarian, condensing years’ worth of his advice “to the young and the restless” into a series of letters written as if to just one of them — a form borrowed from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.
This particular excerpt distills a great deal of Hitch’s lens on life in just one short paragraph:
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‘Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others.’
Today would have marked the sixty-third birthday of acclaimed author and professional contrarian Christopher Hitchens, who succumbed to esophageal cancer last December. “One should try to write as if posthumously,” he famously — prophetically even, were such a contention not to be blasphemous to him — declared three days before he became gravely ill in 2010. Perhaps he had this dictum in mind when he penned, on a challenge from his New School students, Letters to a Young Contrarian, condensing years’ worth of his advice “to the young and the restless” into a series of letters written as if to just one of them — a form borrowed from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.This particular excerpt distills a great deal of Hitch’s lens on life in just one short paragraph:
Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for your.These words of wisdom join other astute advice to young guns from such cultural figures as John Steinbeck, C. S. Lewis, Albert Einstein, and Jackson Pollock’s dad.
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.Thursday, April 12, 2012
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Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Your Afternoon Cry: Older Gentleman Reacts to Music from His Own Era [Video]
Your Afternoon Cry: Older Gentleman Reacts to Music from His Own Era [Video]:
Henry is a 10-year resident of a nursing home who barely recognizes his own family. He is "inert, maybe depressed, unresponsive and almost unalive," that is until a nurse brings him an iPod full of his favorite songs from his youth. Suddenly, Henry becomes animated and verbal, even going as far as singing his favorite Cab Calloway song. When asked what music does, Henry responds, "It gives me the feeling of love." Us, too, Henry! More »
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Morning Routine for Android Forces You to Wake Up and Start Your Day by Scanning a Barcode [Video]
Morning Routine for Android Forces You to Wake Up and Start Your Day by Scanning a Barcode [Video]:
Android: We've shared tons of Android alarm clock apps here before, but Morning Routine takes a fresh new approach to forcing yourself awake. When the alarm goes off, you have to scan a barcode—like, the one on your carton of orange juice in the fridge—in order to turn it off. More »
Monday, April 09, 2012
IT Calls of Shame
IT Calls of Shame:
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's JR Raphael offers up six memorable tales of trouble and triumph from the tech support desk. 'Working in tech support is a bit like teaching preschool: You're an educator who provides reassurance in troubling times. You share knowledge and help others overcome their obstacles. And some days, it feels like all you hear is screaming, crying, and incoherent babble.' Pronoun problems, IT ghosts, the runaway mouse — when it comes to computers, the customer isn't always right."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's JR Raphael offers up six memorable tales of trouble and triumph from the tech support desk. 'Working in tech support is a bit like teaching preschool: You're an educator who provides reassurance in troubling times. You share knowledge and help others overcome their obstacles. And some days, it feels like all you hear is screaming, crying, and incoherent babble.' Pronoun problems, IT ghosts, the runaway mouse — when it comes to computers, the customer isn't always right."
How Long Is a Piece of String? BBC and Comedian Alan Davies Explore Quantum Mechanics
How Long Is a Piece of String? BBC and Comedian Alan Davies Explore Quantum Mechanics:
Making sense of 319.44 millimeters of infinity.
The fine folks at BBC’s Horizon series have previously explored such intriguing topics as the nature of reality, the age-old tension between science and religion, how music works, the volatile history of chemistry, and what time really is.
In How Long is a Piece of String?, they enlist standup-comic-turned-physics-enthusiast Alan Davies in answering the seemingly simple question of the film’s title, only to find in it a lens — a very blurry lens — on the very fabric of reality. Along the way, Davies asks some of the world’s top scientists to measure his piece of string, gets repeatedly discombobulated by mathematician Marcus du Sautoy (he of The Number Mysteries fame), and turns to quantum mechanics to try to work out where the individual atoms and particles that make up the string actually are. The result is as enlightening as it is entertaining.
↬ @kirstinbutler
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and remains banner-free. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.
Making sense of 319.44 millimeters of infinity.
The fine folks at BBC’s Horizon series have previously explored such intriguing topics as the nature of reality, the age-old tension between science and religion, how music works, the volatile history of chemistry, and what time really is.In How Long is a Piece of String?, they enlist standup-comic-turned-physics-enthusiast Alan Davies in answering the seemingly simple question of the film’s title, only to find in it a lens — a very blurry lens — on the very fabric of reality. Along the way, Davies asks some of the world’s top scientists to measure his piece of string, gets repeatedly discombobulated by mathematician Marcus du Sautoy (he of The Number Mysteries fame), and turns to quantum mechanics to try to work out where the individual atoms and particles that make up the string actually are. The result is as enlightening as it is entertaining.
Your string does not actually possess a length. Somehow, by measuring it, we create a length for the string.
The matter of everybody in the world, the whole of the human race, amounts to a sugar cube. The rest is just space.
Reality, in some sense, does not exist unless we’re actually observing it. And it’s our act of observation that makes things real.For a deeper dive into these most fascinating frontiers of human thought, you won’t go wrong with Brian Cox’s The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen.
↬ @kirstinbutler
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
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