The Science Friday podcast had a great episode this past Friday featuring Cormac McCarthy, Werner Herzog, and Lawrence Krauss.
You should go listen to the whole thing, but the most amazing part for me was Herzog reading a short selection from All the Pretty Horses; it’s so wonderful I’ve snipped it out and embedded it for your listening pleasure.
There are moments of unintentional comedy in every political campaign. We can always rely on the sight of Harper attempting to interact with actual Canadians—a moment that comes with the implicit warning: I am trying to connect with you on a human level. To avoid injury, please remain still and the moment will pass.
— Vote for anyone else at your peril, Canada - Scott Feschuk - Macleans.ca
Never heard of it”: This has been the natural and traditional response of all sorts of ordinary American humans to all sorts of phenomena. It’s not really about knowledge or information. It’s an argument, for the most part, and a faintly aggressive one — a way of insisting that what you pay attention to really does define the world. What you’ve heard of is real, and everything else is marginal. The center holds, and you are that center. You are normal and aware, and not just some tiny atomized entity that can only hope to know one tiny corner of the universe.
— Arcade Fire, and the ‘Never Heard of It’ Grammys — Vulture
“He happens to have shot, at last count, 800,000 Kodachrome frames over the past four decades.”
(via)
David Foster Wallace once said, “Fiction’s about what it is to be a human being,
—
Caitlin Colford: Broom of the Freedom: A David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen Friendship
Actually, what he said was:
Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.
The most important part of all, which I didn’t get enough time to talk about at the conference, is that you don’t have to be a rocket scientist or hacker extraordinaire to contribute in a big way to an open source project you’re interested in. How do I know this, you may ask? Because I’m neither one of those things.
Sadly, I spent a lot of time on the outside looking in, thinking “I’d just be making trouble” or “I doubt I’d have any meaningful impact even if they did accept my submission”. If you tend to think on the same level, stop. Go fix a bug. Go write a test. Don’t let the fear of someone rejecting your submission stop you from trying in the first place.
