And happy birthday dad, einstein, and the rest.
I hope you all ate tremendous quantities of Pi today, and waved your mental hats at Eve A.
Bonus: Congrats to Phoebe who got a beautiful essay published in the New York Times: “If you liked Britannica, you’ll love Wikipedia”
Colbert: What do you think of the current state of children's lit? Sendak: Abysmal. Colbert: There's so much of it though! Sendak: That's what makes it abysmal. Let's talk about some of your competition. Ok. Give me your reviews. Green Eggs and Ham? Good. Good. Green Eggs And Ham, "Good". Everything by Seuss is good. Really? yeah. Give A Mouse A Cookie. Euh! I'm with you on that one. Cause, you shouldn't give a mouse a cookie, Mouse should *earn* the cookie. You should open the door and say 'get the hell out of my house!' The mouse should be exterminated. Yeah. I'm with you on that one. Curious George? Great. Curious George, ok. I don't believe in monkeys in the house either. You don't like it? No, no. they throw their feces. They do, they do throw-- Monkeys bite your jaw off, they will bite your face off He wouldn't have done that. No, no, but he could have at any moment. So have I changed your mind on Curious George? no. So you're in favor of children getting their faces bitten off. I'm in favor of -- ok, you- you've made it clear. Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? you know that one? Isn't that an adult novel? That's kind of prejudiced of you, to say that a book has to be adult, or a book has to be child. Someone who's been so ghettoized in their work, would say that a child couldn't read a book about murder and sadomasochism... You trapped me! you trapped me! Checkmate, sir. Check... You're wrong, but you trapped me. Am i? Am i? Yeah! Oh, so other people can be pigeon-holed, but you can't do that to Maurice Sendak. That's a crime. How about that! H'm!, interesting. Don't I deserve that? Double-standard much, Mo? (laughs) Let's shift gears. Every celebrity is out there cashing in on children's books. And I want in. What does it take for a celebrity to make a successful book? What do I gotta do? Well, you've started already by being... an idiot. That is already the very first demand. Ok, idiot. First is idiot. How do you spell that? (laughs) After that, you know the formula. You just need, like an animal, and... something they've lost. Well yes, I mean most books for children are very bad. The Squirrel Lost Its Mittens. There you go. The Buffalo... Lost Its Gun. You've just written two children's books! I've got a story. can I read it to you! (winces in pain) Do you *really* have to? It's called "I am a Pole, and So Can You!" Ok, yes! I can't wait to hear it. == [Colbert reads] == I AM A POLE AND SO CAN YOU I am a pole, that much is clear to me. But just what type of pole could I possibly be? I tried to be a pole for vaulting, but I couldn't seem to bend. I would love to be a ski pole, but for that I'd need a friend. I wished I was the North Pole, and marked the home of Santa, Or even just a Gallup Poll calling voters in Atlanta. I considered fireman's and fishing, Was a totem for some time. And even tried to be a stripper pole, but I couldn't stand the grime. But then one day, in my depths of despair, Some scouts brought me Old Glory as something to wear. And while she danced and she waved, It became clear to me, I am the best kind of pole you can possibly be. I am an American Flag pole. Now pledge allegiance, or else. == (laughing) What do you think? The sad thing is, I like it! Can I get that as a blurb? Oh, absolutely! "The sad thing is I like it..." The sad thing is I like it. "... --Maurice Sendak." That's a good blurb! And all you need to do is get a popular illustrator who has a horrible sene of design, no taste for type nothing about the aesthetics for what a picture book could look like, and you will probably make a lot of money. Will you teach me how to draw? No. Well that is a lovely offer, I accept. (laughs) == Cut to Sendak's studio == So this is where you do all your work? Yeah, I'm afraid so. Well I'm trying to figure out how to draw a pole. I'm not very good at drawing. Let me draw a pole here... You ever uh, sniff your marker? No... is that good? a good thing? It's a cheap high. be careful... It does, it does! Go ahead, go ahead. I assume you were huffing these things when you drew Where The Wild Things Are "I remember Pearl Harbor... ta da da da da da da... ya da da da, ya da da da, Ya Da DA DA DA DA DA!" See how great these markers are? no really. That pulled the song right out of me, right out of my nose! I got a mountain, got some clouds and half a sun... You drew a Polish woman with a pole! Holding a pole Pole with a pole. She could be a Polish stripper. That's right Any advice, any advice here? No... just, I would leave it alone, because it has a kind of delicacy, and irrationality, and, and... terrible quality of -- ordinariness. "Terribly ordinary!" - Maurice Sendak That's another great blurb! Supremely ordinary! Well, Moishe... I think with my fantastic book idea, my words, my drawings and your blurb, I think we've got a hit here. I've- I know we do. Thank you, sir. == Colbert recaps == Folks, once I get a publisher, I AM A POLE (AND SO CAN YOU!) will be available in bookstores everywhere! In hardcover, paperback, maybe even in ebook. what do you say about that, Maurice? [Flashback to earlier interview] Fuck them is what I say! I hate those ebooks. They *cannot* be the future. They may well be, I will be dead, I won't give a shit! [/Flashback]
This is a transcript… of Stephen Colbert’s interview with Maurice Sendak, from the Colbert Show in 2012.
It is the best Kid Lit Interview. Ever. And perhaps the best Colbert interview, too. Update: see also Part 2 and Part 3.
Grim Colberty Tales w Maurice Sendak
Colbert: Mr. Sendak, thank you so much for talking with me today. Sendak: It's a pleasure. Colbert: Now, tell me about children's literature. Don't you think that by writing books for children, you are sending children the message that reading is important? Sendak: Very much so. yes. Let's talk about kids. I don't trust 'em. Is that true? They are just biding their time until we're gone, and then they get our stuff. That's really good. And they take our place. Uh-huh, that's an interesting point of view... Thank you. ...but not interesting to me, particularly. There is something in this country that is so opposed to understanding the complexity of children, it's quite amazing. What do you mean 'the complexity of children'? because children have it easy, they get driven everyplace we feed them, we dress them. Newt Gingrich said it: children don't have a work ethic. But Newt Gingrich is an idiot. Of great renown, I'll give him that. He's a historian, you know. Yes but there is something so hopelessly gross and vile about him, that it's hard to take him seriously. so let's not take him seriously. well let's agree to disagree. sure. Why write for children? I don't. write. for children. You don't? No. I write. and somebody says, "that's for children!" I didn't set out to make children happy, or to make life better for them, or easier for them. Do you like them? I like them as few and far between as I do adults. Maybe a bit more, since I really don't like adults, at all, practically. Let me just get that down. Maurice Sendak: "Children: Eh." Alright, didn't know that. New topic: book signings. Dreadful. Really? You must have groupies. Yes, you do -- but they don't mean anything! Hot young moms coming up to you? right? Where the wild MILFs are? That would not affect me because I am a gay man. Sorry, what? I said, "That would not affect me because I am a gay man." I think, I'm sorry, I must be mishearing you, I think you just said you were a gay man. Yeah. Ok... Why are you allowed to write children's books? Why not? You aren't allowed to head boy scout troops. I wouldn't dream of wanting to. But... What does a gay man care about children? They're people, they're people... Gay men can't have children. Of course they can! No they can't. Do you know how it works? They're capable... Sir, excuse me. you are completely misguided if you think that gay men-- You *can* do that! I'm sure you've put some effort into it. But it will not work, sir! (laughs) Let's go on to a new subject. Why not. You've expressed frustration in the media sometimes that all they ever want to talk about is Where The Wild Things Are. True. let's talk about Where The Wild Things Are. (winces in pain) Why not do a sequel to this? It's a natural. Because it is the most boring idea imaginable! "Where the Wild Things Are 2: Still Wildin'!... featuring Vin Diesel" Who's Vin Diesel? Oh, he's incredible. Have you seen Fast and Furious? No or... Too Fast Too Furious? I don't go to the movies. We do this book, we get a tie in with Burger King or Taco Bell, it comes with a Where the Wild Things Are snack pack... It is so bad, that it not only will sell, it will make pots and pots of money for you. Can I get the blessing of your estate? Absolutely. (to the cameraman) You've got that on tape? But it's got to be as bad as that looks like it is. Well listen, let's let the public judge whether it's bad, by whether they buy it. Believe in the free market? No. Ok, well I can't help you there. By the way, in Where the Wild Things Are, "the wild rumpus": is that... is that... It can be! Is rumpus... sex? Sure. "the wild rumpus begin"? Yes! the whole bed going up and down, yes The mother screaming, the father saying "shut up" You know -- making love. Making love. And being happy. Let's talk about In the Night Kitchen for a second. can we? Sure. This one gets banned all over the place. You know why. He's got a dick. He's got a tallywhacker, okay? A tallywhacker? I never heard that. Oh yeah, yeah. a johnson. A johnson? A johnson, you never hear of johnson? A schvantz. (nods in recognition) You've got kiddy schvantz in your book. Why are you printing a smutty book? Because... he's a boy. Yeah, yeah. But you don't have to rub it in our face. Why... Boys wear pants. Not when they're dreaming...! Have you never had a dream, yourself, Where you were totally naked? No. I think you're a man of little imagination. Well I love the book, but I've just made some adjustments to it. I - every copy I have, I've removed all the penises from it. Oh my god, you have!! Yes, so you can see, there's nothing there. I removed the penises, I removed the butt crack over here, okay. I've taken the penis out over here. You don't have to worry about the penis offending anybody. (wiggles finger through cut-out hole) Not at all. Wow. But I keep all the penises, I cut them out and I put them in a little plastic bag. I also cut out all the other penises I see in the books and magazines. I've got a couple hundred here. (holds up bag of penis cut-outs) And there's nothing wrong with you, of course. I come across a lot of penises. I am so impressed. [Flashback to earlier interview] It is a miracle that I have lived this long without having destroyed a person. I still have a little bit of time. To kill someone? To kill someone. Yeah. [/Flashback]
AdB, building on ideas from his recent book Religion for Atheists, is designing atheist temples in London, with Tom Greenall Architects.
He imagines a network of them one day, but is far from his usual eloquence when talking about them. To offer inspiration, surety, and perspective — and to develop cultures to sustain such glorious monuments — will require a more assured and positive description of why they exist.
It has been 12 hours since the blackouts protesting SOPA and PIPA started. Below is coverage from the English-language Net.
Best quotes so far:
“Wikipedia blacked out. Fine, I’ll buy some used encyclopedias from Craigslist. WTF? I’m going to Reddit to complain about this. OMG!!”
“Icanhazcheezeburger?! OK, this is serious now.”
In Wikipedia land:
Elsewhere on the Web
In Washington, politicians are beginning taking notice. They seem to be seriously considering and commenting on the demonstrated failings of the legislation on hand, not just backing off (as GoDaddy did) to await ‘consensus’.
Other coverage online:
Every January I spend a weekend in the Land of Mystery, tucked into a facet of MIT: that is, the MIT Mystery Hunt.
It is somewhere between a religious experience, performance art, and an exercise in observation, pattern matching, and problem solving. It is also wickedly tricky, a pinnacle of amateur puzzle contests: teams of 50+ people spend two full days solving a series of interlocked puzzles to find a coin hidden somewhere on campus.
This past weekend I took my annual pilgrimage across Cambridge to MIT for the Hunt, but for the first time my team was running the event, rather than competing. This was our tenth anniversary as Team Codex (we started out the year before as the aduni team, then adopted a proper codename), and producing the Hunt was a fitting way to celebrate. Many of us had a backlog of puzzle ideas that were converted into working puzzles over the course of the past year, with much iteration and satisfaction. Few of us had ever designed Mystery Hunt-caliber puzzles before, though we knew in principle how it was done.
We staged the first musical-themed Hunt on record, in an effort to encourage teams to share their own creativity while solving. Max and Leo from The Producers showed up at MIT, now out of jail and looking to make goo^B^B^B out like bandits, this time for good. They staged a short production of their own to get everyone in the mood, and then invited students to help them research and put on a series of guaranteed musical flops… While this didn’t work out exactly as planned, along the way were fancy cocktail parties with potential stars, swimming-pools full of Sets of ducks, research into the private peeves and longings of theater critics, campus spelunking, video game hacking, and a denouement in which, unbelievably… . . . well, it’s complicated. You’ll just have to explore the Hunt site itself to see how the saga ended.
We had roughly 70 active people on our organizing team, and everyone played multiple roles — writing, testing, and implementing puzzles, software, and skits. Our lead performers, in addition to being fine actors and musicians, happened to be professional puzzle writers and editors, and wrote many of the Hunt’s 107 puzzles as well as the book for our productions. Our lead editor also kept the production team together through stressful moments, providing black humor as needed, and preserving a fast editing pace all Fall without upending our minimal-heirarchy team. Hotshot solvers shifted gears to rewrite swaths of code. When puzzle-lover Neil Patrick Harris declined to MC the awards ceremony, we called on a home-grown rock star instead. Dozens of people joined the cast in the final weeks and picked up their parts without a hitch.
Having been involved with organizing perhaps a dozen events of similar size, I can say without hesitation that this was the most satisfying and life-affirming. We had varied and prolific organizers, an elaborate and dynamic schedule, a completely committed audience, and an extraordinary host-participant collaboration, with continual feedback. While the event ran for only 1500 people, its primary output was a broadly valuable story, told through puzzles: something that may be enjoyed for years or generations to come: a set of curious, colorful, maddening, marvelous puzzles, illustrated and interlinked, free to solve and repurpose. Just one more Act in the perennial romance between creative puzzlers and scientific endeavour.
Here is a sampling of this year’s puzzles, drawn from my favorites. Happy hunting! The average puzzle takes 2-10 person-hours to solve, depending on your experience and how quickly the right insights come to you.
Sounds Good To Me
(my all-hunt favorite)
Slash Fiction
(best casting and music, and the most expensive puzzle production)
Paper Trail
(an elegant, satisfying black box)
Yo Dawg I Herd You Like Puzzle Hunts
(yo dawg, i herd you like herd you like)
Itinerant People Of America
(man, this one is a hodge-podge.)
Picture An Acorn
(the final aha! will make you chump for joy)
The Rainbow Connection
(Now that’s rainbow-bright…)
Google Bodyslam
(“so, we’re working on a pro wrestling puzzle. what should we call it?”)
JFK SHAGS A SAD SLIM LASS
(the puzzle consists of nothing more than the title)
Coming To A Location Near You
(a wikipedia-based scavenger hunt)
The XO-3 design is almost finished. And there is a steady stream of loving video and photo coverage of the first prototypes, from the gadget-geek journalists at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
I have a less flashy version of the prototype on my desk, but have yet to touch acquire one of the magical solar tablet-covers. (yes, it’s what you think. yes, it makes sense for all devices below a certain power-to-area ratio… a ratio that gets larger in the tropics.)
fuseproject‘s design work is, as usual, interstellar.
Hat tip to Neal Stephenson for extra inspiration this time around. (Update: as Kim Bruning notes, now we need to write the primer.)
Update: a video of an XO powered only by a solar panel twice its area. that’s using the least expensive solar tech; panels twice that density can be had for under $4/Watt .
Do everything publicly. Life is too short; the only good idea is a shared and implemented idea.
Exceptions where demanded by legal or social obligation, or (temporarily only) by inflexible tools and process — in which cases, publicly describe and summarize those private demands.
An example of deep understanding vs. casual understanding:
Matt Strassler provides an eloquent, balanced summary of what we have recently learned about a possible Higgs particle (or particles). He notes that recent data have simplified the possible answers to an important question, there are a limited number of possibilities left, and we can find an answer among those possibilities within the next year. He offers a useful diagram of what we know and don’t know, as it has changed over the past year — the most significant change is the broad realm of possibilities we can now exclude, leaving a small gap to be explored further:
In a related post he noted both the hints in recent data that suggest there could be a single Standard-Model Higgs particle, but also some of the contrary evidence: cross-sections of the data which should show the same signal but do not, or hints that there might be something more complicated going on.
In contrast, Phil Gibbs of viXra (an alternative to arXiv.org requiring no peer vetting) offers a deceptively neat faux distribution of observations, optimistically combining data from different experiments and suggesting the result likely corresponds to a single Higgs-like particle massing around 125Gev. Note how more jargon is used here, and less historical perspective; with a focus on coming up with The Answer, rather than providing a broad picture.
Then there are physicists who take this opportunity to promote their own pet theories, quickly publishing preprints that suggest those theories predicted this all along — subtlely modifying their past work to hone in on the remaining possible energies for a Higgs particle.
Strassler’s approach is universally useful. It teaches others about this particular experiment, about the field of particle physics, and about how to do science.
Gibbs’s approach is a quick hack, of temporary value in the current discussion, but gives a limited understanding of the state of research and may give the wrong idea about how to analyse and interpret research.
Scientists trying to ride the coattails of a pending discovery often have received no new information about whether their ideas are right or wrong. To show their work in the best light, they misstate the current understanding of their own field, give students a harmful model to follow, and damage the public understanding of what science does and how to understand it… in addition to possibly promoting ideas that are simply wrong.
Dr. Poduvan is a 75-year old farmer from Tamil Nadu and Wikipedian. He captures everything I love about Wikipedia in a few sentences:
So it is. Please remember to contribute to Wikipedia, one list and article at a time. (in Hindi · in Tamil)
Jonathan Harris is a reimaginary nomad hacker artist storyteller.
cowbird is his work of inspiration – the kind once ascribed to a muse reaching through the artist.
it may change the way you see.
The Occupy movement has a nice set of websites up for many of the major metropoles in the US. They even have a meta-website up (how can you not love that?) covernig the links between them, Occupy Together. Right now it is focused on the US, even though there’s already an Occupy Canada movement (ok, no surprise, since Adbusters was a driving force behind the original idea).
From the meta-site, I discovered that Noam Chomsky recorded a video supporting Occupy Boston, and found a link to some charming footage of an afternoon party in the Cipriani Club on Wall Street, where partygoers in black tie on a second-floor balcony smiled and waved at the march passing underneath their balcony. They seem cheerful, interested, and friendly to the passing crowd, waving and taking photographs – just like so many of the observers down on the street. But even if their body language is essentially the same, their setting and clothes set them apart in the eyes of many. Almost every comment on the video that I’ve seen, is scornful of the partygoers — assuming they represent the Other the crowd is implicitly targeting and opposing with their chants. Only one of hundreds of people pointed out that they are probably at a wedding or other formal celebration at the club, and many likely support the ideals of the marchers.
How can we bridge the gap created by surface appearances — communities with different dress codes, social circles, and ways of expressing themselves — to get at underlying agreement? The fundamental requests and needs of these protests are no only supported by the sorts of people who celebrate at black tie events, but also at some of the wealthy “1%” – Warren Buffett most notable among them. Yet certain kneejerk reactions and stereotypes are set up as barriers to cooperation even before people have a chance to meet. We have foun many solutions over the generations to the more omnipresent problem of bridging cultural divides across national and language barriers when immigration or war brings different societies together. How can we learn from that to bridge this gap in the debates over how to allocate a nation’s resources?
Photographer David Slater, travelling in a park in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, spent three days travelling alongside a group of friendly crested black macaques. They befriended him and ruffled his pack in curiosity, exploring his camera and discovering how to use it — one of them started shooting photos with it, taking some 300 in all, including two brilliant self-portraits and a priceless shot of Slater asking with a smile to have his camera back:
Simian harmony: holding hands, playing keepaway
Since then, the grinning monkey self-portrait rocketed to internet memedom (right) … now it’s with us for the long haul. But it’s the shot of the photographer, with one of the macaque clan lightly holding his hand, that will stay with me. Not only does it tell the whole story in a glance, but what description of our kinship with these fellow creatures could be more clear?
Hat tip to bro Sebastian for sending this my way, before the meme took off.
Launching next year in the Big Red Topological Sphere: a Museum devoted to the Queen of the Sciences and supported by local New York organizations and by Google. Learn about the Musem of Mathematics and what they have planned:
Brows the syllabus and photos from the amazing course Human-Computer Interaction +Rapid Prototyping +Learning Sciences + Constructionism + Critical Pedagogy which is given by Paulo Blikstein at Stanford’s beyond bits and atoms group. Does that sound like something you’d be interested in doing in a town near you?
It something in between the Media Lab’s lifelong kindergarden group, fablabs, and an peruvian olpc robotics lab, for grad students.
Working inside the box
OLPC Afghanistan currently works with school in Kabul, Jalalabad, Herat, and Kandahar. This is one of our most politically complex and interesting deployments. The initial schools involved tend to be on the wealthy side, but are still often in areas with poor power and connectivity.
Jalalabad also houses Afghanistan’s only FabLab – which set up the first “FabFi” mesh network to serve the surrounding community. After the deployment of OLPC laptops to a local school there, families began to have access to the Internet, and to Wikipedia, for the first time. Here are three generations of one family, outside on their roof, browsing Wikipedia together:
An Afghan family browses Wikipedia together outside
(As it happens, one of the university students who helped localize the software into Dari and Pashto is also a Wikipedian.)
Over a year after that deployment finished, I am working with FabLab folk to figure out what a similar lab and community wifi setup might look like in Herat, where we also have an OLPC school and may add another. They’re refreshingly fun and competent people to work with, and full of great stories about young Afghans taking interesting ideas and running with them, turning them into amazing art projects or montages or startups. Any city trying out cool new technical innovations should have a fablab to amplify the joys of being on the cutting edge.
Today we have 4,000 families connected to eachother and to the Internet in Afghanistan through OLPC; we hope to have thousands more by the end of the year. And now I’m wondering if we can get fablabs started in the US cities where there are significant OLPC projects.
My brother Sebastián Gray Avins, architect and essayist, have a lovely new website up for their architecture firm, Bresciani Gray Arquitectos. Now you can see their recent projects, from municipal buildings to the Chilean display at the Venice Biennales. They include both images and floorplans in most cases. I should find out if they have high-resolution images up to complement the overviews.
One of my favorites is Librería Ulises — a bookstore with the glory and scope of a library. What I wouldn’t give to have such a store in my city! You can also see it in the upper-left of the gallery below. And I learned a few things from their design of the new Psychology building at the Pontifical University of Chile. Props to the architects – browse some of their work if you need a break from the everyday.
