July 2011
1 post
“Harry potter and the grief of the boys who lived and feared and prevailed and...”
“I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with...”
– Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon. (Interestingly, though this passage appears to borrow heavily from Carl Sagan’s iconic Pale Blue Dot passage, the above was written in 1937 - 20 years before Sputnik)
“There came to him an image of man’s whole life upon the earth. It seemed...”
– Epigraph of You Can’t Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe
March 2010
2 posts
Licensing fonts - an infringer's dilemma
I’ve had some minor interest in typography for years. Ever since I discovered that I didn’t have to use Times New Roman, I’ve come to (unjustly) despise its ubiquity. The much-maligned Comic Sans and Papyrus have been written about elsewhere. I railed against the expectation in undergraduate interpretation of APA that everything be written in Times New, and given some tenuous and...
From Q&A, 15 March 2010
TONY JONES: ...is climate change and global warming a conservative idea? Do you think the scientists are conservative or radical?
WALEED ALY: I think they're being scientists... Let's just all be honest. Most people in this room, unless there are climatologists among us, really have no idea about whether or not climate change is real. What's happening, though, is that we make decisions about whether or not we are going to believe that it is real or not and usually we make those decisions on the basis of what we want the answer to be and that is why you find that at the moment on the conservative side of party politics around the world you are more like to find people who are climate sceptics or denialists because - because that side of politics has overwhelmingly bought into the idea of neo-liberalism and the idea that the free market should be our guiding philosophy. Not just the free market is a good thing, but it's our guiding political philosophy. And when you buy that, climate change becomes very difficult to accommodate. So this becomes an ideological contest for people who are of that persuasion, because the minute they accept the reality of climate change, it destroys the idea that the market is our guiding philosophy, and so they are forced, essentially, to start from a position that says, well, we need to deny this, and then they will look around for data and scientists here and there and so on...
February 2010
1 post
“Much of contemporary developmental psychology is the science of the strange...”
– From a New York Magazine article, Why Kindergarten Admission Tests Are Worthless.
January 2010
1 post
“Astro Boy” is rated PG. A few of the small children in the theater in which I...”
– From Manohla Dargis’ New York Times review of Astro Boy.
December 2009
4 posts
Dear Apple
In Australia, the iPhone has been embraced with fervour. Far from its roots as a stylish, reasonably capable phone for Apple customers, it’s now been adopted as the standard in desirable mobile [cell] phones. I am never the only person on the bus or train carriage with an iPhone. I’m rarely the only person in the lift with one. Sometimes, I’m not even the only person in my...
Radiohead - Talk Show Host / Romeo + Juliet
“We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that...”
– Tennyson, Ulysses
“At the end of time, a moment will come when just one man remains. Then the...”
– Pinbacker, Sunshine.
November 2009
12 posts
“The Coalition are said to be putting together a ‘three-step plan’....”
– Channel 7 news torturing a defenseless metaphor.
“Atoms are nature’s pixels!”
– T-Rex, via Dinosaur Comics.
[lots of fire trucks in the mall]
Matt: I can't see the fire
Zan: that's because it's in MY PANTS
“I’ll get people who are obviously fans of [Glenn Beck] who write me...”
– Motoko Rich for the New York Times, saving families from themselves.
“Students are just peers with less experience.”
– Phillip Long