via BoingBoing: Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom

1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article4022091.ece?print=yes&randnum=1233293019614

Bruce Sterling and "Bruno Argento" sound off on 2009 (Hint, they are the same guy)

from the SEED magazine

Bruce Sterling:

If science is discredited, why should mere politics have any intellectual rigor? Just cobble together a crazy-quilt mix-and-match ideology, like Venezuelan Bolivarism or Russia's peculiar mix of spies, oil, and Orthodoxy. Go from the gut — all tactics, no strategy — making up the state of the world as you go along! Stampede wildly from one panic crisis to the next. Believe whatever is whispered. Hide and conceal whatever you can. Spy on the phone calls, emails, and web browsing of those who might actually know something.

If that leads you to a miserable end-state, huddling with the children in a fall-out shelter clutching silver bullion, then you can congratulate yourself as the vanguard of civilization.

So 2009 will be a squalid year, a planetary hostage situation surpassing any mere financial crisis, where the invisible hand of the market, a good servant turned a homicidal master, periodically wanders through a miserable set of hand-tied, blindfolded, feebly struggling institutions, corporations, bureaucracies, professions, and academies, and briskly blows one's brains out for no sane reason.

We can do better than this:

Bruno Argento:

I am a futurist — Italian "Futurismo," 100 years old in 2009, is arguably the world's oldest futurism, after all — so I will venture to predict something that seems to me obvious: Eight years late, the 20th century has finally departed us this year. It will never return.

The "true" 20th century — the Communist century — began in 1914 and ended in 1989. We are now in the true 21st century.

After 1989 we enjoyed a strange interregnum where "history ended." Everyone ran up a credit-card bill at the global supermarket. The adventure ended badly, in crisis. Still, let us be of good heart. In cold fact, a financial crisis is one of the kindest and mildest sorts of crisis a civilization can have. Compared to typical Italian catastrophes like wars, epidemics, earthquakes, volcanoes, endemic political collapse — a financial crisis is a problem for schoolchildren.

Documentary on Architecture in China

China According to China

An interesting interview of 5 or 6 Chinese architects coming to terms with the realities of working in China today.
Section 2: "Speed" with Ma Qing Yun and Section 5: "Architecture" with Ai Wei Wei, are particularly interesting.

At the intersection of Typological and Topological Form

Design portfolio from the 16th Century

Mayan Glyphs

i've become fascinated in mayan glyphs.
just an amazing graphical system.
cracking the maya code

Seed Magazine

Some interesting presentations here

Henry Markram, Greg Lynn, Natalie Jeremijenko, etc.

Situated Advocacy

The book I worked on with Benjamin Bratton + Natalie Jeremijenko has been released and can be downloaded as a PDF here.

This would be funny if it wasn't so damn true...

As my roommate and fellow SCI_Arc grad Ji observed:

There is a considerate difference between our class and the current thesis class. When we were finishing up school, the big decision was whether to try for a design-oriented firm and sacrifice a good salary or go with a more conventional architecture firm and get paid a decent wage. Now, with the economy the way it is, the thesis students are thinking: well, I guess I will just have to start my own firm straight away...

...and take a weekend job at Fry's to make ends meet.

(Maybe there is a silver lining in all this)

Death Note

I've really been enjoying this show.
Very dark, but strangely "satisfying"

death note on hulu

More from Zizek

Pseudo-naturalized ethnico-religious conflicts are the form of struggle which fits global capitalism: in our age of 'post-politics', when politics proper is progressively replaced by expert social administration, the only remaining legitimate source of conflict is cultural (ethnic, religious) tension. Today's rise of 'irrational' violence should therefore be conceived as strictly correlative to the depoliticization of our societies, that is, to the disappearance of the proper political dimension, its translation into different levels of 'administration' of social affairs: violence is accounted for in terms of social interest, and so on, and the unaccountable remainder cannot but appear to be 'irrational'... The proper Hegelian dialectic reversal is crucial here: what looks at first like the multitude of 'remainders of the past' which should be gradually overcome with the growth of a tolerant multiculturalist liberal order is all of a sudden, in a flash of insight, perceived as this liberal order's very mode of existence - in short, teleological temporal sucession is unmasked as structural contemporaneity. (In exactly the same way, what, in the realm of 'really existing socialism', looked like petty-bourgeois 'remainders of the past', that eternal excuse for all the failures of socialist regimes, was the inherent product of the regime itself.)

Welcome to the Desert of the Real, pp 133-2

2 years and $60k later...

My academic portfolio can now be viewed online:
link

Radiohead - No Surprises

Such a strange, wonderful video...

Naom Chomsky William Buckley Debate

1/2


2/2


Chomsky remarks on Buckley's passing in 2008

Literal Take Me On Video

karaoke!

Architecture and Ritual

It is not architecture’s role to fabricate ritual - it can however lend existing ritual a higher degree of coherence, framing it in relation to its often obscured cultural and psychological context.

clinton smackdown on weeny fox news guy

ok, i'm not in any way trying to make this a political blog, but this is just too damn funny...

Pan's concert

"She was frankly disappointed when [Pan] proved to be slighter in stature than her Alobar, and she could barely keep from sniggering at his foul tangles of wool and his silly tail. Even his stench failed to measure up to Alobar's description of it, striking her as more locally naughty than universally nasty. It wasn't until he began to pipe that Kudra got some sense of Who (or What) He Really Was.

At first, his playing, too, seemed slight; it was so simple, careless, and primitive that one had to sympathize with Timolus, who, judging the music contest between Pan and Apollo, had unhesitatingly awarded the prize to the Apollonian lyre, thereby establishing the tradition that critics must laud polish and restraint, attack what is quirky and disobedient, a tradition that endures to this day. Had Timolus not hooked Pan off the stage so quickly, had he possessed the - what? the honesty? the humility? (Timolus, after all, couldn't play shit) the nerve? to actually listen to Pan, to respond with something more genuine than his preconceptions, he might have been affected, as Kudra began to be affected, once she stopped smirking at his obvious lack of formal training and quit comparing him unfavorably with the flutist, Lord Krishna. Pan's song, because it served no purpose, was above all, liberating. It was music beyond the control of the player's will or the listener's will; the will, in fact, dissolved in it (which may explain why it was politically necessary for Apollo, with the compliance of Timolus, to drown it out)... Kudra felt that at Pan's concert she was on less than solid ground, yet, as unsteady as that ground might be, she was driven to dance upon it."

- Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

Free floating in the sewers of architecture

I graduated from SCI_Arc on Sunday, flushed from the institute out into the real world. Wish me luck!

The jury for my final review was nothing short of amazing:

Tom Mayne
Sylvia Lavin
Neil Denari
Emmanuel Petit
Craig Hodgetts
Hernan Diaz Alonso
Benjamin Bratton

The review was, in a word, contentious. Sylvia Lavin and I just don't seem to have common ground.

Zizek on Toilets

my two favorite songs right now

(alternate versions...)

Big Ideas, Don't Get Any, James Houston


Bjork at Coachella, All Is Full Of Love