Uncommon Nonsense

Kyler Spears (CalArts BFA2 Character Animator)

Fri, 03 May 2013 19:00:28 -0700

Kyler Spears (CalArts BFA2 Character Animator)

Matthew Yang (CalArts BFA3 Character Animator)

Fri, 03 May 2013 14:41:31 -0700

Matthew Yang (CalArts BFA3 Character Animator)

Punctuwool by Jacob Streilein (CalArts BFA3 Character Animation)

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:27:00 -0700

Punctuwool by Jacob Streilein (CalArts BFA3 Character Animation)

The Sugar Bugs by John Kim (CalArts BFA2 Character Animation)

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:23:17 -0700

The Sugar Bugs by John Kim (CalArts BFA2 Character Animation)

humansofnewyork: My name is Brandon Stanton and I’m a...

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 15:36:59 -0800

humansofnewyork:

My name is Brandon Stanton and I’m a photographer in New York City. As many of you already know, several months ago I was approached by the fashion label DKNY, who offered me $15,000 to purchase 300 of my photographs. I politely refused the offer. But earlier this week, one of my fans discovered that DKNY was using my photographs anyway— in Asia. (Full Story:http://thebea.st/13ijYt6)

As atonement for this infringement, I publicly requested that DKNY donate $100,000 in my name to the YMCA in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, so that underprivileged children could attend summer camp. DKNY responded on Monday with a $25,000 donation.

Over the next three days, my audience stepped in and raised the full $100,000 themselves. Over 3,000 people chipped in, and raised an astonishing $103,710 in 72 hours. (http://bit.ly/YTy4h3)

I have no interest in vilifying DKNY. It is a company composed of thousands of good people. The founder, Donna Karan, is highly respected around the world for both her creativity and philanthropy.

But I would appreciate if you would REBLOG this post, and lend your voice to my request that DKNY raise their donation to match the $103,710 that we raised.

Together, we could create a $208,000 investment in the lives of children in one of New York’s most vital and diverse neighborhoods. Thank you so much.

Facebook Stories: Valentine’s Day

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 11:52:02 -0800

Facebook Stories: Valentine’s Day

Silly Asses

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 20:26:00 -0800

Naron of the long-lived Rigellian race was the fourth of his line to keep the galactic records.

He had a large book which contained the list of the numerous races throughout the galaxies that had developed intelligence, and the much smaller book that listed those races that had reached maturity and had qualified for the Galactic Federation. In the first book, a number of those listed were crossed out; those that, for one reason or another, had failed. Misfortune, biochemical or biophysical shortcomings, social maladjustment took their toll. In the smaller book, however, no member listed had yet blanked out.

And now Naron, large and incredibly ancient, looked up as a messenger approached.

“Naron,” said the messenger. “Great One!”

“Well, well, what is it? Less ceremony.”

“Another group of organisms has attained maturity.”

“Excellent. Excellent. They are coming up quickly now. Scarcely a year passes without a new one. And who are these?”

The messenger gave the code number of the galaxy and the coordinates of the world within it.

“Ah, yes,” said Naron. “I know the world.” And in flowing script he noted it in the first book and transferred its name into the second, using, as was customary, the name by which the planet was known to the largest fraction of its populace. He wrote: Earth.

He said, “These new creatures have set a record. No other group has passed from intelligence to maturity so quickly. No mistake, I hope.”

“None, sir,” said the messenger.

“They have attained to thermonuclear power, have they?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, thats the criterion.” Naron chuckled. “And soon their ships will probe out and contact the Federation.”

“Actually, Great One,” said the messenger, reluctantly, “the Observers tell us they have not yet penetrated space.”

Naron was astonished. “Not at all? Not even a space station?”

“Not yet, sir.”

“But if they have thermonuclear power, where do they conduct the tests and detonations?”

“On their own planet, sir.”

Naron rose to his full twenty feet of height and thundered, “On their own planet?”

“Yes, sir.”

Slowly Naron drew out his stylus and passed a line through the latest addition in the small book. It was an unprecedented act, but, then, Naron was very wise and could see the inevitable as well as anyone in the galaxy.

“Silly asses,” he muttered.

Written by Issac Asimov (1958)

Generation Sell

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 19:56:00 -0800

Ever since I moved three years ago to Portland, Ore., that hotbed of all things hipster, I’ve been trying to get a handle on today’s youth culture. The style is easy enough to describe — the skinny pants, the retro hats, the wall-to-wall tattoos. But style is superficial. The question is, what’s underneath? What idea of life? What stance with respect to the world?

Previous youth cultures — beatniks, hippies, punks, slackers — could be characterized by two related things: the emotion or affect they valorized and the social form they envisioned. For the hippies, the emotion was love: love-ins, free love, the Summer of Love, all you need is love. The social form was utopia, understood in collective terms: the commune, the music festival, the liberation movement.

The beatniks aimed at ecstasy, embodied as a social form in individual transcendence. Theirs was a culture of jazz, with its spontaneity; of marijuana, arresting time and flooding the soul with pleasure (this was before the substance became the background drug of every youth culture); of flight, on the road, to the West; of the quest for the perfect moment.

The punks were all about rage, their social program nihilistic anarchy. “Get pissed,” Johnny Rotten sang. “Destroy.” Hip-hop, punk’s younger brother, was all about rage and nihilism, too, at least until it turned to a vision of individual aggrandizement.

As for the slackers of the late ’80s and early ’90s (Generation X, grunge music, the fiction of David Foster Wallace), their affect ran to apathy and angst, a sense of aimlessness and pointlessness. Whatever. That they had no social vision was precisely what their social vision was: a defensive withdrawal from all commitment as inherently phony.

So what’s the affect of today’s youth culture? Not just the hipsters, but the Millennial Generation as a whole, people born between the late ’70s and the mid-’90s, more or less — of whom the hipsters are a lot more representative than most of them care to admit. The thing that strikes me most about them is how nice they are: polite, pleasant, moderate, earnest, friendly. Rock ’n’ rollers once were snarling rebels or chest-beating egomaniacs. Now the presentation is low-key, self-deprecating, post-ironic, eco-friendly. When Vampire Weekend appeared on “The Colbert Report” last year to plug their album “Contra,” the host asked them, in view of the title, what they were against. “Closed-mindedness,” they said.

According to one of my students at Yale, where I taught English in the last decade, a colleague of mine would tell his students that they belonged to a “post-emotional” generation. No anger, no edge, no ego.

What is this about? A rejection of culture-war strife? A principled desire to live more lightly on the planet? A matter of how they were raised — everybody’s special and everybody’s point of view is valid and everybody’s feelings should be taken care of?

Perhaps a bit of each, but mainly, I think, something else. The millennial affect is the affect of the salesman. Consider the other side of the equation, the Millennials’ characteristic social form. Here’s what I see around me, in the city and the culture: food carts, 20-somethings selling wallets made from recycled plastic bags, boutique pickle companies, techie start-ups, Kickstarter, urban-farming supply stores and bottled water that wants to save the planet.

Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms.

Call it Generation Sell.

By William Deresiewicz (Nov 12, 2011)

Continue reading the rest of the article at the New York Times.

If your car is ever stolen, call the cab company

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 20:53:57 -0800

If your car is ever stolen, your first calls should be to every cab company in the city. You offer a $50 reward to the driver who finds it AND a $50 reward to the dispatcher on duty when the car is found. The latter is to encourage dispatchers on shift to continually remind drivers of your stolen car. Of course you should call the police too but first things first. There are a lot more cabs than cops so cabbies will find it first -and they’re more frequently going in places cops typically don’t go, like apartment and motel complex parking lots, back alleys etc. Lastly, once the car is found, a swarm of cabs will descend and surround it because cabbies, like anyone else, love excitement and want to catch bad guys.

A tip from a cab driver, taken from Noah Chestnut’s answer to “What can I do to find my stolen car more quickly?”

People die because we don't understand how prior probability screws with our understanding of diagnostic tests

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 20:41:00 -0800

The way that prior probability screws with our understanding of diagnostic tests - we are really, really bad at applying Bayes’ theorem in our heads.

Here’s a hypothetical example.

There’s a disease that’s prevalent in a population. We know that 1 in 100 people have the disease, but they have no symptoms.

Someone develops a test for the disease. It’s a pretty good test, but it’s not perfect. It gives the right answer 99% of the time. So, if you have the disease it will say you have the disease 99% of the time, and if you don’t have the disease it will say you don’t have the disease 99% of the time.

We pick a random person from the population (we can say it’s you, if you like). We test them, and the result is positive.

What’s the probability that they actually have the disease?

You only need two pieces of information: 99% of the time the test gets it right. 1% have the disease.

The answer is 50%. Half of the people who test positive don’t have the disease. You probably got it wrong.

Here’s an example of why that’s the answer. Let’s imagine that we test 10000 people.

Of those 10000 people, 1% have the disease - that’s 100. And the test gives the right answer 99% of the time, so 99 of them will get a positive result.

9900 of those people don’t have the disease, but the test says that 1% of them do. 1% of 9900 is 99.

So weh have a total of 198 positive diagnoses, of which 99 are true positives, and 99 are false positives. Half of the positives are false.

What (almost) everyone fails to take into account is the prior probability of the disease. You have to know the prior probability to understand any test. This is really important if you have an HIV test, or a cancer screening, or a DNA test to see if you were guilty of a crime.

People die, because this is misunderstood. There is, in my opinion, no better argument for numerical literacy.

Jeremy Miles’s answer to What are some of the mind blowing applications/predictions of Probability & Statistics theory in real life?

pierrenguyen: Vote or Shut Up

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 14:07:21 -0800

pierrenguyen:

Vote or Shut Up

govotenov6: Trick: Animated #govote jack-o-lantern to keep away...

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 23:55:05 -0700

govotenov6:

Trick: Animated #govote jack-o-lantern to keep away the ghosts of low voter turnout.

Treat: Tell your friends to visit rockthevote.com to find their polling station!

animated gif by Bruce Willen

peternyc: Dare I say, the Myspace reboot actually looks...

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 18:30:17 -0700

peternyc:

Dare I say, the Myspace reboot actually looks amazing?!

Holy shit. Whatever team redesigned MySpace has my respect. What a massive effort.

bbbrad: prinncox: askunwellonce-ler: formaldejekyll: jollyjos...

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 14:00:33 -0700

bbbrad:

prinncox:

askunwellonce-ler:

formaldejekyll:

jollyjoseph:

iamtonysexual:

primsore:

Will (Director’s Cut) by Eusong Lee An incredible...

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 13:59:22 -0700

Will (Director’s Cut) by Eusong Lee

An incredible animated short film by CalArts Character Animator Eusong about 9/11 done for his third-year film.

"…Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of..."

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 20:53:44 -0700

““…Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech.””

- “Paul Ryan’s Speech in 3 Words” from Fox News

theatlantic: Apollo 11’s Astronauts Received an $8 Per Diem for...

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 21:39:54 -0700

theatlantic:

Apollo 11’s Astronauts Received an $8 Per Diem for the Mission to the Moon

The astronauts of Apollo 11: Intrepid explorers. Inspirational heroes. Government employees.

Read more. [Image: Reuters]

…eight dollars a day, before various deductions (like for accommodation, because the government was providing the bed in the spaceship).

…

Which is a nice reminder that, as epic as it was as a piece of history, the three mens’ journey to the moon was ultimately the product of the most mundane thing in the world: a government agency. And its costs were handled accordingly.

adverve: ‘People You May Know’ Facebook Stories gives us this...

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 10:47:51 -0700

adverve:

‘People You May Know’

Facebook Stories gives us this awesome tale of one Mayank Sharma. In 2010, the New Delhi resident contracted tubercular meningitis and spent a week at hospital, after which he emerged with zero memory of his illness — or the first 27 years of his life.

To put the pieces back together, he started messaging people who popped up under Facebook’s “People You May Know” feature.

We love this because it’s strange to imagine that so much of who we “are” is the result of projections by others. But maybe that’s why we can’t shake Facebook, even on days — or weeks, or months — that we patently hate it.

good: In Event of Moon Disaster A speech was prepared by...

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 20:53:26 -0700

good:

In Event of Moon Disaster

A speech was prepared by Nixon’s speechwriter William Safire in case of a tragedy that, thankfully, never occurred.

via Buzzfeed

Thoughts on Jack Dorsey, by Steve Jobs

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 10:07:56 -0700

stevejobsspirit:

Jack,

I have no problem with your success. You’ve earned your success; for the most part. The problem is, you wholesale ripped off my identity. Grand theft. I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way. You are not just trying to be the next me, you are trying to be me. I’m already up to my ass with these Android bozos, but willing to go thermonuclear to right your wrong too.

Here are just a few examples.

glasses

Me   http://imgur.com/PeyuB

You  http://imgur.com/djrZW

getting fired

Me   I feel like somebody just punched me in the stomach. Playboy, Sept ‘87

You  It was like being punched in the stomach. Vanity Fair, April ‘11

no one has done this before

Me   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrS7JQv-zgY#t=55m48s

You http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40i21TBC020#t=48m20s

surprise and delight

Me  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUH0U2wEQCc#t=29m4s

You http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40i21TBC020#t=24m32s

magical

Me  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrS7JQv-zgY#t=46m10

You Payment is another form of communication..but it’s never felt magical. Vanity Fair, April ‘11

we’re just people running this company

Me http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrS7JQv-zgY#t=11m44s

You  http://www.livestream.com/cbsstartup @52:20

proud of the things we haven’t done

Me   http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fortune/0803/gallery.jobsqna.fortune/6.html

You  https://twitter.com/jack/status/168477686484836352

beatles

Me http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVCB1vJWQIE

You  http://www.twylah.com/jack/topics/beatles

architect

Me   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Bohlin

You https://twitter.com/jack/status/222396467816579073

put it on the shelf

Me http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrS7JQv-zgY#t=37m50s

You  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjD30MxxRik#t=1m33s

turns out

Me http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMyZwhzy5hE#t=8m4s

You  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40i21TBC020#t=34m50s

eastern influence

Me  http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/story/2011-11-02/steve-jobs-faith-buddhism/51049772/1

You  https://twitter.com/jack/status/231458676349734912,   http://imgur.com/NgNIX

editor in chief

Me   http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/cutline/steve-jobs-really-apple-editor-chief-184857874.html

You  http://imgur.com/uAVbg

the comma

Me   http://www.cultofmac.com/128532/apple-to-htc-theres-no-comma-in-our-name-doofus-humor/

You https://squareup.com/letters/onward

Catch my drift? Stop trying to be me. Stop trying to be the next me. Be the first Jack Dorsey. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living my life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the result of my thinking.

Steve

Sent from the iClouds in a galaxy far, far away….