Linkage

I plan to follow the standard accrete-and-deploy method with interesting links, but with one notable departure: trying to control, to some degree, for the recency bias that dominates link-sharing. I'll link you up with new stuff, no doubt, but my interest is more to the stuff that's stood the test of time — which, on Internet, means like three to twelve years.

• High-quality text interviews of sound curator David Toop and WFMU manager Ken Freedman from Perfect Sound Forever. They've got many others in the archive, including Teo Macero, Ikue Mori and John Lurie (who's popped up in much of what I've read/watched/heard lately).
  
• I'll occasionally spend a stretch of time searching for solid philosophy blogs to read, usually in vain. The ones I do find are usually long-abandoned or too obscurantist to be relevant. Katja Grace's Meteuphoric seems different, so different that I'm about to take the near-unprecedented step of adding it to my RSS reader right away. Grace discusses philosophical issues both accessible and nontrivial — a rare feat indeed. This passage sold me:

  If something complicated is obvious, such as anything that anybody seriously studies, then for it to be simple you must be abstracting it a lot. When people find such things obvious, what they often mean is that the abstraction is so clear and simple its implications are unarguable. This is answering the wrong question. Most of the reasons such conclusions might be false are hidden in what you abstracted away. The question is whether you have the right abstraction for reality, not whether the abstraction has the implications it seems to.

• Victim of the Brain, a Dutch television docudrama on "the ideas of Douglas R. Hofstadter." (It's loosely based on The Mind's I.)
  
• "What do I need to do in daily life that I don't realize I need to be doing?", one of the most popular (and practical) Ask MetaFilter threads in recorded human history.
  
• Anthony Lane, probably my favorite film critic on pure style points despite the fact that I rarely look to his work for viewing direction, wrote a fine profile of Leica cameras and the enthusiasts who worship them. While I admit the silliness of any sort of purism, the fact remains that, were I to break down and finally buy a camera, it's Leica or nothing; using such a work of art of a tool would disincentivize my further pollution of the photographic world with badly-framed me-standing-in-front-of-monuments shots.

Comments

[Health News]

Thank you for introducing me the wonderful information.And .....Totally boring.!