Every Author Is a Celebrity in the James Franco Review - Slog - The Stranger. Hawking: Black holes store information - BBC News. Black holes preserve information about the stuff that falls into them, according to Prof Stephen Hawking. Physicists have long argued about what happens to information about the physical state of things that are swallowed up by black holes. This information was thought to be destroyed, but it turned out that this violated laws of quantum physics. Prof Hawking now says the information may not make it into the black hole at all, but is held on its boundary.
In broad terms, black holes are regions in space where the gravity is so strong that nothing that gets pulled in - even light - can escape. At the same time, the laws of quantum mechanics dictate that everything in our world can be broken down into information, for example, a string of 1s and 0s. And according to those laws, this information should never disappear, not even if it gets sucked into a black hole. But according to Einstein's theory of general relativity, the information must be destroyed.
<em>The End of the Tour</em> Fails to Capture the Energy of its Subject | Michael Darer. Brain drain: ‘Missing link’ discovered in the brain. By Tamar Haspel August 21, 2015 As the world population grows, we have a pressing need to eat better and farm better, and those of us trying to figure out how to do those things have pointed at lots of different foods as problematic. Almonds, for their water use. Corn, for the monoculture. Beef, for its greenhouse gases. In each of those cases, there’s some truth in the finger-pointing, but none of them is a clear-cut villain. There’s one food, though, that has almost nothing going for it.
It’s salad, and here are three main reasons why we need to rethink it. Salad vegetables are pitifully low in nutrition. In July, when I wrote a piece defending corn on the calories-per-acre metric, a number of people wrote to tell me I was ignoring nutrition. One of the people I heard from about nutrition is organic consultant Charles Benbrook.
Those foods’ nutritional profile can be partly explained by one simple fact: They’re almost all water. Take collard greens. Save the planet, skip the salad. Millennials Are Foodies: Consequences for Restaurants, Agriculture, and Grocery Stores. When Eve Turow returned to her college campus for her five-year reunion, she realized that she’d changed: Back when she was in college, she was content subsisting on “gelatinous brown rice, pre-cooked mushy pinto beans, [and] blocks of bouncy tofu.” But if she were in college now, she says, she’d be taking rice-bowl inspiration from Pinterest and making good use of the nearby farmer’s market and the greenhouse attached to the science library. In her recent book A Taste of Generation Yum: How the Millennial Generation’s Love for Organic Fare, Celebrity Chefs, and Microbrews Will Make or Break the Future of Food, Turow, who has written about food for NPR’s website and has worked as an assistant to Mark Bittman, tries to figure out why food came to be something she and her generation obsesses over.
Turow’s theory is that in a digital-first era, many people latch onto food as something that engages all of the senses and brings people together in physical space. Beauty is Shoe. Plato bequeathed us a trio of ultimate values—truth, beauty, and goodness—but through the ages, the arts have been most closely allied with beauty. By the nineteenth century, the romanticist John Keats would open his epic Endymion with the line “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” and close his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” with the paeon “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”
Beauty became a virtual religion for aestheticist poets and painters a few decades after Keats. But at the height of this worship, the winds were already shifting. “The time for beauty is over,” declared Gustave Flaubert in 1852, and one short century of avant-garde experimentation later, the balloon was punctured once and for all. Every age construes beauty somewhat differently, but it has seldom if ever happened that the arts have rejected it outright. But it is no easy matter to say what that difference is. We might begin with Warhol’s “Beauty is Shoe.” Obviously, it was not always so. I hate the whole race. The 50 Best Films Of The Decade So Far. By The Playlist Staff | The Playlist February 26, 2015 at 3:21PM As the dust cleared from our Best of 2014 features, 2015 previews and awards season coverage, we realized something terrifying: we’re now halfway through the current decade.
Five years have passed since the 2010s began, we’re all sixty months (or sixty two?) Older, and literally thousands of movies have hit theaters in that time. So what better time to take stock of the decade thus far? Box-office returns might have been dominated by superheroes, ice princesses and dystopian teen-on-teen murder, but once you look outside the multiplex (or even, very occasionally, within it), it’s clear that cinema is as healthy as it’s ever been, with everyone from A-list auteurs to foreign-language first-timers delivering stunning, boundary-pushing work. But after re-running our best of the 00s series, we began to wonder: what were the very best of the films of the last five years? 50. 49. 48. 47. 46. 45. 44. 43. 42. 41. Businessinsider. TS Eliot and the search for perfection (Lyndall Gordon) by Royal Society Literature. What Each Myers-Briggs Personality Type Is Like As A Friend. ENFP: The excitable yet surprisingly insightful friend who subtly gives you a pep talk every time you hang out and leaves you feeling like you could be the next President.
ESFJ: The friend who lets you live at their house for two weeks after you break up with your significant other so they can make sure you’re eating, sleeping and going to work like a functioning human being. ENTJ: The successful and slightly bossy friend who is constantly challenging you to reach your full potential – because they see it in you, even when you don’t see it in yourself. ISTJ: The super-organized friend who always shows up fifteen minutes early for your hangouts and whom you’d pretty much trust with your life. ENFJ: The wise mother hen who’s there come hell or high water but isn’t afraid to give you tough love if ever and whenever you need it. ISFJ: The undyingly loyal friend who reminds you of your grandmother but in a good way. What did “True Detective” in: How Nic Pizzolatto gambled on a risky plot and destroyed his actual story. Was it bad? Terrible? Pretty good after all? Redeemed by a strong final episode?
The morning-after assessments of the second season of “True Detective” have started to roll in, and most of them aren’t pretty. Many of the posthumous assessments don’t try to figure out if the much-awaited season was any good or not — they just ask what went wrong. How could a show with an accomplished writer, strong actors, the oversight of what may be the best network in the world and what looked like an ample budget get so lost? Over the course of the season, various culprits have been dragged out. Yours truly ventured that the season suffered from excessive auteurism – Pizzolatto’s creative breakup with director Cary Fukunaga, who brought coherence to the first season – and by falling back on excessive violence instead of building characters or theme.
None of these notions are wrong, entirely. We live in an era in which storytelling has been complicated and liberated. Ethan Hawke: ‘Mining your life is the only way to stumble on anything real' | Film. Ethan Hawke cannot get Boyhood out of his system. He will not let it go. Richard Linklater’s sublime meditation on growing up, starring Hawke and Patricia Arquette as separated parents and Ellar Coltrane as their son, was shot every summer from 2002 to 2013.
This year it was released to universal acclaim and became even more a part of his life. “For years I tried to talk to people about it and nobody had any context of it,” he says. “You try to explain to somebody: ‘Hey, I just did this great week of shooting in Austin.’ Over the course of 12 years, Boyhood became an intrinsic, inseparable part of Hawke, and he of it. Hawke has changed a lot over the decades, and he has remained the same. Now 44, he shows no sign of an ego during our hour-long conversation and is constantly reflective. Personal experiences have drawn Hawke to the story. Hawke, it appears, has never found himself in big trouble. “One of the things that was hard for Robin was...” “I don’t know...” Megyn Kelly Responds To Donald Trump: "I Certainly Will Not Apologize For Doing Good Journalism" Adorno’s Essay on “Free Time” | CR. One of my favorite essays of Adorno’s—and one of his most accessible—is his essay on “free time.”
It’s short—just 11 pages in my copy of The Culture Industry—and I think it’s one of his more readable pieces. It’s also a very prescient piece, an essay that has grown more and more relevant as our relationship to free time has grown increasingly fraught. Adorno begins by noting that the phrase “free time” is a recent coinage, as its precursor “leisure” denoted a completely different way of life that was (and is) well out of reach of nearly everybody who has some measure of “free time.” (For context, I believe this essay was written in 1969.) This is the main theme of the essay: the extent to which the hours what we consider to be ours are not really ours, and the ways that the culture industry attempts to colonize that time that us members of the middle class believe to be our free time.
Those who want to adapt must learn increasingly to curb their imagination. Teaching philosophy in schools has huge impacts. Sean Gallup/Getty Images America may be great at many things, but education isn't one of them. It's here that standardized testing creeps behind students like a shadow and where fun experiments take a back seat to rote memorization. But in some ambitious K-12 schools across the country, philosophy courses have made tangible improvements to the way students learn. In these classrooms, teachers tackle big concepts like ethics and epistemology. Inside the classroom Jana Mohr Lone has taught philosophy at all levels, from preschool to college. Over that time, she's learned an important lesson: It doesn't take much to get kids thinking. "Our general approach is to start off with some kind of stimulus," Lone tells Tech Insider.
After the inevitable outpouring of curiosity, Lone says teachers will typically put the lesson to a vote — which question do people want to explore the most? Robert Benson/Getty Images Pretty much anything is up for grabs. Lone was blown away, she writes. Set for life. It’s good to be pretentious! Recently, for the first time in many years, I watched Richard Linklater’s 1994 film “Before Sunrise.” I remembered it well, down to particular lines of dialogue and the movements of background players that might go unnoticed by a viewer less obsessive than myself. Back in the late ’90s, the tape of my VHS copy of the movie stretched and strained between the heads of the VCR, weakening after so many rewinds and repeated viewings. The story of the film is simple enough: Girl and boy, Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke), meet on a train in Europe.
She is going home to Paris; he is stopping in Vienna and catching a plane back to the States in the morning. They talk. The film is, I believe, a high point of the ’90s, a decade second only to the ’70s for great, innovative cinema. A good friend of mine at the time did not agree. “You liked ‘Mallrats,’” I pointed out. “My old girlfriend walked out in the middle,” he added, amused. So what did my friend not like about “Before Sunrise”? Dabrowski’s Theory and Existential Depression in Gifted Children and Adults. Webb, J, Ph.D. When people undergo a great trauma or other unsettling event—they have lost a job or a loved one dies, for example—their understanding of themselves or of their place in the world often disintegrates, and they temporarily "fall apart," experiencing a type of depression referred to as existential depression.
It's very hard to keep your spirits up. You've got to keep selling yourself a bill of goods, and some people are better at lying to themselves than others. If you face reality too much, it kills you. ~ Woody Allen When people undergo a great trauma or other unsettling event—they have lost a job or a loved one dies, for example—their understanding of themselves or of their place in the world often disintegrates, and they temporarily "fall apart," experiencing a type of depression referred to as existential depression. Background But long before I knew about Dabrowski’s theory, I knew about and understood existential depression. Existential Issues and Giftedness Life Meaning. Before Midnight: How Richard Linklater's Trilogy Defined My Generation | The New Republic. In the mid-nineties, I was a college student who wore steel-toed boots and flannel shirts that swallowed my frame, and I spent my days in courtyards and coffee shops talking about boys, and philosophy, and the philosophy of boys.
In other words, I was the ideal demographic for the 1995 romantic comedy Before Sunrise, in which Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy play tender-hearted adventurers Jesse and Celine, exploring Vienna and each other over the course of one fateful night. The characters were very much of their era: Jesse with his fountain bangs and goatee; Celine, with her hippie hair and lumberjack attire. But the film, directed by Richard Linklater, was bravely sincere for its time. While other films dazzled with gunplay and fashionable ennui, Before Sunrise dared to be about nothing more than two people talking.
I skipped Before Sunrise for a few reasons. The third reason, however, is probably the only one that mattered. He and Celine have twin daughters now. Proust on What Art Does for the Soul and How to Stop Letting Habit Blunt Our Aliveness. You End Up Becoming Yourself - The Indy. The Mystery of the Everyday: Boyhood | The Similitude. Ellar Coltrane in Richard Linklater’s Boyhood Boyhood, the new movie from director Richard Linklater, defies comparison; I have never seen anything like it. Filmed over the course of twelve years, it follows one Texas boy, Mason, from elementary school to his late teens using the same actor, Ellar Coltrane.
And not just him, but his entire family as well, with their respective performers: Lorelei Linklater (the director’s daughter), as older sister Samantha; Patricia Arquette, the single mom; Ethan Hawke, their weekend father; and assorted relatives, partners, and friends. As if this casting philosophy wasn’t unorthodox enough, Linklater also eschews conventional narrative and plot devices. Standard dramatic conflicts and visual techniques are nowhere to be found; with fleeting exceptions, he hues to his trademark realism. The film could benefit from a bit more of that conflict and an exploration of Mason’s inner life. At times you wonder what all these disparate moments add up to. As I Walked Out One Evening by W. H. Auden. Full text of "Post Pop Cinema - The Search for Meaning in New American Film" Proust's Ruined Mirror. By Jonathan Wallace jw@bway.net When I was a child, my parents frequently had other adults over to the house.
These were often professional acquaintances whom they didn't know very well. I was expected to put in an appearance, stay for awhile if not the whole duration of the visit, and establish that I was an intelligent, well-mannered child. Since these visits were often appallingly tedious for me, my parents would sometimes, in advance, attempt to pique my interest about a particular visitor. On one occasion, my father, with the air of sharing a morsel that should particularly delight me, told me that a doctor coming to the house that afternoon had once made his own reflector telescope, including grinding the mirror. The reason he expected (correctly) that this would interest me was that I was in an avid astronomy phase, looking at the sky every night through my 2.5 inch refractor, and reading everything I could get my hands on about making reflector telescopes.
The annoying narrator. James Baldwin on the Creative Process and the Artist’s Responsibility to Society. You are your life, and nothing else | New Philosopher. The-Philosophy-of-Creativity-Gaut.pdf.