Tag: interview

Lady Gaga takes tea

That message, “Find out who you are and be it,” clearly means a great deal to her. Like any simple aphorism it can be made to sound naive or profound according to one’s point of view. I think I’m old enough to know when I’m being fobbed off, bullshitted, lied to or deceived. There was in Lady Gaga’s eyes and voice enough to tell me that whatever else she is, she is no fraud. The “messages” in her songs and albums, the calls to freedom and self-actualisation, the addresses she has made to the American military on the subject of their fatuous and hypocritical “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, the support she has shown for the dispossessed and marginalized in society may cause many to roll their eyes and make the obvious cynical observation that being a friend to the friendless is damned good business. Just look at the figures. Number 1 after number 1, record-breaking releases of singles and albums, record-breaking YouTube visits, record-breaking numbers of Twitter followers. Oh, sure, this is one smart cookie. There’s money to be had in self-publicity and the championing of the lonely ones out there.

Still not a fan of her music but I respect what she does a lot more now.

Ed Boyden

Boyden directs MIT’s Neuroengineering and Neuromedia Lab, part of the MIT Media Lab. He explains the mission of neuroengineering this way: “If we take seriously the idea that our minds are implemented in the circuits of our brains, then it becomes a top priority to understand how to engineer brains for the better…”

2019-04-10:

Are we less creative if all the parts of our mind become allies? Maybe I’m afraid this will happen to me, that I have rebellious parts of my mind, and they force me to do more interesting things, or they introduce randomness or variety into my life. BOYDEN: This is a question that I think is going to become more and more urgent as neurotechnology advances. Already there are questions about attention-focusing drugs like Ritalin or Adderall. Maybe they make people more focused, but are you sacrificing some of the wandering and creativity that might exist in the brain and be very important for not only personal productivity but the future of humanity?

Felicia Day on GTD

Felicia Day: I have been a Lifehacker addict for years, in fact, some of Vork’s (from the Guild) anal-retentive attitude is inspired by the site 🙂 I have tried every method imaginable to organize myself, to varying degrees of success, and I find that Remember the Milk and good old-fashioned daily post-it notes or my “Things to Do” notepads are the best way to get a handle on everyday tasks. And ruthless tagging of emails and bookmarks through del.icio.us saves me a lot of time and hassle.

felicia day++

Engineering Biology

30 years into biotechnology, despite all of the successes and attention and hype, we still are inept when it comes to engineering the living world. We haven’t scratched the surface of it, and so the big question for me is, how do we make biology easy to engineer? For comparison, if you look at other examples of technology, there are many of them. Take modern electronics, during and following World War Two, people are building computers. Von Neumann is building a nice machine in the basement of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The official purpose of this machine is to design hydrogen bombs and compute the trajectories of munitions. And he of course is apparently running artificial life programs on it, because that’s what he’s more interested in Let’s say it was 1950. The Apple One, the personal computer is only 25 years later.

interview with drew endy, the guy behind parts.mit.edu

Wonders of the World

Mary Beard is a Professor of Classics at Cambridge University. She also writes a blog called A Don’s Life, and she is the editor of an excellent new series of books, The Wonders of the World. The latter is “a small series of books that will focus on some of the world’s most famous sites or monuments.”

A few notable titles in that series include Mary Beard’s own book about The Parthenon; her collaboration with Keith Hopkins for The Colosseum; Cathy Gere’s extraordinary look at The Tomb of Agamemnon (previously discussed on BLDGBLOG here); and many others, including books about Westminster Abbey, The Temple of Jerusalem, and The Alhambra, with other titles ranging from the birth of Egyptology to the history of British railways and the First World War.

on books for the “intelligent ignorant”. the series sounds like a must-read