You may have heard the news last week: J. Craig Venter and a team of scientists created the first living organism – a “synthetic cell” – by way of a computer-generated genome. We’re now seeing the beginnings of artificial life. And it’s a big story, with many far-reaching implications. But where does James Joyce fit into this picture? Let me add this little factoid to the mix: According to The Christian Science Monitor, Venter’s team inserted DNA watermark codes into the genome so that they can distinguish between natural and synthetic bacteria moving forward. And when this code is translated into English, it will “spell out the names of the 46 researchers who helped with the project, quotations from James Joyce, physicist Richard Feynman and J. Robert Oppenheimer, and a URL that anyone who deciphers the code can e‑mail.” Lots of smarts packed into the tiniest of packages.
UPDATE: The quotes in watermark apparently read: “TO LIVE, TO ERR, TO FALL, TO TRIUMPH, TO RECREATE LIFE OUT OF LIFE.” — James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; “SEE THINGS NOT AS THEY ARE, BUT AS THEY MIGHT BE.”-A quote from an Oppenheimer biography, American Prometheus; “WHAT I CANNOT BUILD, I CANNOT UNDERSTAND.” — Richard Feynman.
Speaking in New York City, David Simon, the creator of The Wire, wasn’t shy about taking the city to task. “There is no city more vain about its position in popular culture, more indifferent to other realities, more self absorbed than other cities.” “Manhattan is [now] one big pile of money,” which leaves it divorced from the real problems facing other American cities. So why are so many stories and television shows still centered in New York, and how can they tell the real tale of urban America in 2010?
This talk took place at The New School for Liberal Arts in NYC.
The Bill Gates college tour rolled through Stanford University in late April. And Gates brought with him a message for students: Philanthropy counts. No matter how young you are, you can start thinking about giving back.
His visit featured a large public talk where he drove home this point. (Get the full talk in video or audio here.) Then, like any good teacher, he held office hours and answered student questions posed through Facebook. Watch his responses above.
HuffPo has pulled together a list of The 12 Greatest Literary One-Hit Wonders. And it’s a strange list indeed. When you think of “one-hit wonders,” you think of memorable songs recorded by very unmemorable artists – artists who got their 15 minutes of fame and then fell right off the radar. Meanwhile, the HuffPo list includes some of the most enduring names in American literature – F. Scott Fitzgerald, J.D. Salinger, and Herman Melville. They gave us their big novels – The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, and Moby Dick – then wrote some other lasting pieces of fiction, both short and long. They hardly faded into oblivion. And, years later, we’re certainly not asking, “what ever happened to old what’s his name?”
British filmmaker Temujin Doran may be better known for his strong, highly opinionated views on democracy and politics, but his adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s memoir, A Moveable Feast, is something else entirely.
Though still narrated in Doran’s characteristically urgent, restless tone, Spring offers a quiet tribute to Parisian urbanity and the richness of seasonality, captured with cinematic minimalism and eerily indulgent aesthetic austerity.
Maria Popova is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of eclectic interestingness and indiscriminate curiosity. She writes for Wired UK, GOOD Magazine, BigThink and Huffington Post, and spends a disturbing amount of time curating interestingness on Twitter.
I live in Silicon Valley where it’s easy to assume that you’re living at the center of technological innovation. But, as Sarah Lacy reminds us today in TechCrunch, Silicon Valley will probably not realize the promise of e‑learning. Rather, it will be investors and entrepreneurs in Brazil, India, South Africa and other emerging markets. Why will they get the job done? Because their educational systems haven’t fully matured. They’re still a work-in-progress. And this creates an environment much more favorable to innovation. You can get the rest of her thinking here.
This week, TheNew York Times began a philosophy blog called The Stone, moderated by Simon Critchley. The series will address “issues both timely and timeless – art, war, ethics, gender, popular culture and more.” And it will ask: “What does philosophy look like today? Who are philosophers, what are their concerns and what role do they play in the 21st century?”
Not everyone is happy with the choice of Critchley as moderator, but it looks like there will be participants to suit all temperaments: “Nancy Bauer, Jay Bernstein, Arthur C. Danto, Todd May, Nancy Sherman, Peter Singer and others.”
Critchley begins with a question bound to invite snarky comments: What is a Philosopher? Such comments have a long history (I’ve included a YouTube clip of my all-time favorite parody above). And so the natural starting point for any answer to that question is the popular conception of philosopher as bullshit artist and “absent-minded buffoon”: “Socrates tells the story of Thales, who … was looking so intently at the stars that he fell into a well.” That’s a conception that, I have to admit, troubled me when I was a philosophy graduate student and led me to drop out. And it has troubled philosophers historically: many a sober treatise begins with the unflattering comparison of philosophy to the empirical sciences and the stated goal of remedying this deficiency. And some strains of analytic philosophy argue that the solution to philosophical problems is to realize that there are no such problems, and that philosophy has a relatively modest supporting role in clarifying the foundations of science.
True to my philosophical pedigree, I think that the question is in a way its own answer: philosophical problems naturally elide into the problem of what philosophy is and what it is that philosophers do. One level of reflection tends to lead to the next, and doubt to self-doubt. Philosophers are people who spend their time trying to figure out what they’re doing with their time and why they’re doing it. And so for instance, questions about how we should live (ethics) and what we can know (epistemology) are also questions about whether the life of the mind is worthwhile and whether philosophical pursuits are properly scientific. The unavoidable state of affairs here is that philosophy falls perpetually into one crisis (or well) after another –recent department closures are just one example.
One way of remedying the nagging thought that philosophy is merely a retreat from worldly affairs, practicality, and life in general is to do precisely what TheNew York Times has done here, and try to initiate more popular and less academic conversations about the subject. (And to get in a plug, it’s what I and two other philosophy grad school dropouts have tried to do with our podcast, The Partially Examined Life; and what I think Open Culture does with its focus on the intersection of education and new media).
For Critchley, the question of time is paramount to answering his opening question: newspapers and blogs are typically focused on timeliness rather than timelessness, and they’re meant for busy people who want to quickly absorb “information.”
But that tension is inherently philosophical.
Wes Alwan lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he works as a writer and researcher and attends the Institute for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture. He also participates in The Partially Examined Life, a podcast consisting of informal discussions about philosophical texts by three philosophy graduate school dropouts.
As Robert Bly noted in his book, The Science in Science Fiction, some of the most intriguing scientific ideas have originated not in labs, but in sci-fi books and movies. With Iron Man 2 hitting the screens, Sidney Perkowitz, a physicist at Emory University, talks about whether the science in the new pop movie has any roots in scientific reality – or, for that matter, whether it might inspire any new scientific thinking down the road. He offers his thoughts above. In addition to writing Hollywood Science: Movies, Science and the End of the World, Perkowitz sits on the advisory board of the Science and Entertainment Exchange, a National Academy of Sciences program that tries to bring more scientific accuracy to mass market entertainment.
David Lynch is no stranger to commercials. In the past, he lent his filmmaking talents to Calvin Klein, Giorgio Armani and others (watch the ads here). And now it’s Dior. Shot in Shanghai, Lynch’s internet movie, Lady Blue Shanghai, runs 16 minutes and stars the Oscar-winning French actress Marion Cotillard. Although largely given free reign here, Lynch had to include a few basic elements: images of a Dior bag, Old Shanghai, and the Pearl Tower. The short movie is the third in a series of mini-features launched on christiandior.com. You can watch the first part above, the second part here.
You can now find Lady Blue Shanghai in our collection of Free Movies Online, along with several other short David Lynch films.
Viktor Frankl, a trained Austrian psychiatrist, spent five long years in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, eventually ending up in Auschwitz. During this time, he helped fellow prisoners cope with their ordeal and worked out a new approach to psychology called Logotherapy. This theory embodied Frankl’s belief that we’re all fundamentally driven by a “search for meaning.” It’s what makes us human, and we can continue this search even in the worst of situations. Not even the Nazis could take that away. This belief sustained Frankl during his imprisonment, something he wrote about in his epic work of survival literature called Man’s Search for Meaning. (It’s a must read.) The grainy footage above was recorded at a conference held in Toronto (probably during the 1960s). It gives you a quick introduction to a man who, despite personally confronting the worst humanity had to offer, still believed in our core goodness and possibilities.
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You may have heard the news last week: J. Craig Venter and a team of scientists created the first living organism – a “synthetic cell” – by way of a computer-generated genome. We’re now seeing the beginnings of artificial life. And it’s a big story, with many far-reaching implications. But where does James Joyce fit into this picture? Let me add this little factoid to the mix: According to The Christian Science Monitor, Venter’s team inserted DNA watermark codes into the genome so that they can distinguish between natural and synthetic bacteria moving forward. And when this code is translated into English, it will “spell out the names of the 46 researchers who helped with the project, quotations from James Joyce, physicist Richard Feynman and J. Robert Oppenheimer, and a URL that anyone who deciphers the code can e‑mail.” Lots of smarts packed into the tiniest of packages.
