Another new Bowie video: I’d Rather Be High - Venetian Mix (Wasted Edit)
A peek inside the Mordecai Richler Reading Room at Concordia University - now home to the legendary Canadian author’s more than 5,000 books.
Richler’s books and personal possessions were donated by his family, and came from his cottage on Lake Memphremagog, in Quebec’s Eastern Townships — the place where Richler, who died in 2001, did some of his most important writing.
Writes his son, Jacob Richler, in this story for Maclean’s:
"His top-floor office there was vast and airy, spread out behind an enormous picture window four frames wide that afforded a perfect vantage of the length of Sargent’s Bay. Had you seen it you would likely have assumed that the glorious view had much to do with the comfort and serenity he found working there. But really it was about the peace and quiet. The view was secondary. A closer look at the place revealed that his desk faced away from the window; when his gaze lifted from his typewriter he saw only a wall of books."
Read more: http://ow.ly/raQcn
The Sea
tetw:
A Tetw reading list
Desperate Passage by Michael Finkel - Down in the hold, beneath the deck boards, where we were denied most of the sun’s light but none of its fire, it sometimes seemed as if there were nothing but eyes…
Shipping Out by David Foster Wallace - “On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise”
Holy Water by Bucky McMahon - For fifty years, with cannons, Hellfire missiles, and napalm, the U. S. Navy has bombed the daylights out of Vieques, P. R., whose best-kept secret remains a bay that glows in the dark.
Plastic Ocean by Susan Casey - A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing obesity, infertility…and worse.
The Shipbreakers by William Langewiesche - On a six-mile stretch of oily, smoky beach, 40,000 men tear apart half of the world’s discarded ships, each one a sump of toxic waste.Adrift by Bucky McMahon - One man. One modest raft. One big freakin’ ocean. So bring on the waves, the sharks, the tankers—they’re nothing compared with the mind-bending solitude.
Everest at the Bottom of the Sea by Bucky McMahon - When the ocean liner Andrea Doria sank south of Cape Cod, she took fifty-one with her. Since then she’s taken twelve more, five in the last two summers alone…
Here Be Monsters by Michael Finkel - They did it for the simplest of reasons: adventure. Three friends, on a drunken dare, set out in a dinghy for a nearby island. But when the gas ran out and they drifted into barren waters, their biggest threat wasn’t the water or the ocean—it was each other.
This is something, whatever it is.
My latest feature for Engadget, also in the most recent issue of Distro.
Gaming the system: Edward Thorp and the wearable computer that beat Vegas
"My name is Edward Thorp."
"My name is Edward Thorp."
"My name is Edward Thorp."
It’s 1964 and Edward Thorp is on the television game show To Tell The Truth, sitting alongside two other well-dressed men also claiming to be Edward Thorp, a man so adept at card counting that he’d been barred from Las Vegas casinos. Thorp, the quiet man on the right, every bit the mathematics professor with black-rimmed glasses and close-cropped hair, is the real deal.
Two years earlier, Thorp’s book, Beat the Dealer, was published, explaining the system for winning at blackjack he developed based on the mathematical theory of probability. The system worked so well that Las Vegas casinos actually changed the rules of blackjack to give the dealer an added advantage. Those changes would prove to be short-lived, but Thorp’s book would go on to become a massive bestseller, and remains a key guide to the game of blackjack to this day.
That all this happened as the computer age was flourishing in the 1960s isn’t coincidental. While working to beat the house, Thorp was also working at one of the hotbeds of that revolution: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, he had access to two things that would prove invaluable to his research. One was the room-filling IBM 704 computer, without which, he writes in Beat the Dealer, “the analysis on which this book is based would have been impossible.”
The other was MIT professor Claude Shannon, who worked on cryptography and code-breaking during World War II, and would go on to become known as the father of information theory — and, indeed, the information age. It’s with Shannon that Thorp would revisit a question he had considered years earlier: whether he could apply mathematics to beat the game of roulette as he had done with blackjack. Thorp and Shannon would develop a friendship and, in the process of answering that question, build what is widely regarded to be the first wearable computer.
This is one of the best things I read all week.
Digital card created by Voodoo Darling.
New from me at Engadget, and in the current issue of Distro:
This is Your Life: Facebook and the business of identity
"The story of your life."
With that phrase, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced the company’s new Timeline profile in the fall of 2011. The social network’s original profile page, he explained, was the first place where most people “felt safe expressing their real self” on the internet, but it was only the “first five minutes of your conversation.” A major redesign in 2008 extended that to “the next 15 minutes.” Timeline, though, was the “next few hours.” Your true self, in full.
To illustrate the point, Zuckerberg went on to show a promotional video that put This Is Your Life to shame by recapping one man’s life from his own birth to the birth of his child (and then some) in just over a minute. Facebook has always wanted to be your online identity — your internet, in many ways — but it was now also bringing something else to the fore that once had a tendency to fade into the background; your memories.
Oh hey. New Bowie video.
