“remixes”

Manuel Lima’s Visual Complexity is a massive—350 works—showcase of cognitive art and a beautiful tour de force.

Pay for Performance—Death and Taxes—USA Air—Figurative system of human knowledge—Flickr User Model—Map of Scientific Paradigms—Time Graphs: Sunsets by time (also check Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner)—Visual Correlation for Situational Awareness (read the paper, it’s worth it)—Mark Lombardi’s Narrative Structure, and Inside cobot’s head rank among my favorites, what about you?

Tufte’s Museum of Cognitive Art^ELZR is in the offing, I can smell it. La coyuntura es propicia.

Ironically, I must confess I sometimes preferred to reload the project’s homepage and quickly hit stop. The mosaic is beautiful and impressive, but also overwhelming. The thumbnails’ plain titles were more useful for the exploratory browsing I needed to digest the hugeness of it all.

vs.

I can’t believe I forgot to put a link to this feature when I read it three months ago. Anyway, Fortune’s How I Work is a gallery of in-depth looks at how 13 leaders (mostly executives) work through their day. Well worth the read.

It is trapped inside some hideous, caging frameset, so here are some links (and pictures!) straight to the content.

A 2005 Inc. feature, I found it fascinating, even when uneven. Particularly recommended is Richard Branson’s writeup—rarely does one read so inspiring a portrait, an instant eemadge.

Here’s a compact index of each of the 26 entrepreneurs.

1. Martha Stewart: because she took one for the team
   
2. Richard Branson: because he’s game for anything. In fact, everything.
   
3. Michael Dell: for being brilliantly straightforward
   
4. Jim Sinegal (Costco): because who knew a big-box chain could have a generous soul?
   
5. Diane von Furstenberg: for staging an elegant comeback
   
6. Julie Azuma: for offering hope and help to the parents of autistic children
   
7. Fritz Maytag: for setting limits
   
8. Ray Kurzweil: because he is Edison’s rightful heir
   
9. Craig Newmark (Craigslist): for putting the free in free markets
   
10. Jack Mitchell: because his family business makes an art of customer service
    
11. Frank Robinson: for whipping an entire industry into shape
    
12. Mark Melton: for giving immigrants their shot at the American Dream
    
13. Michelle Cardinal & Tim O’Leary: for rewriting the rules for husband-and-wife teams
    
14. Mike Lazaridis: because someone had to stand up for all those frustrated engineers
    
15. Trip Hawkins: for still scrapping
    
16. Warren Brown: because only in America will someone quit a secure job as a lawyer to start a bakery
    
17. Muriel Siebert: for being a notable first with a worthy second act
    
18. Chuck Porter: for verging on reckless
    
19. Katrina Markoff: for setting a completely unreasonable goal for her business
    
20. Barry Steinberg & Craig Sumerel: for showing the power of the peer group
    
21. Victoria Parham: for serving as a mentor to military spouses
    
22. Tom LaTour: for staying at fleabag hotels so that we don’t have to
    
23. Mitchell Gold & Bob Williams: for creating a true comfort zone
    
24. Izzy & Coco Tihanyi: for kicking sand in the face of conventional wisdom
    
25. Tony Lee: for saving 16 jobs, including his own
    
26. Rueben Martinez: for simultaneously building a business and nurturing Latino culture
    

Some things take time to sink in, time for time (and memory) to do its culling and for us to look at them with fresh eyes. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s email to his deceased brother was one of those things. I’ve been rereading it about once every week, for one reason or another, since I discovered it 52 days ago, and each time it has resonated ever more deeply inside me. Its call to action is ever more urgent. Its wisdom ever more piercing. Its optimism ever more evident—there’s some brutally naive optimism in this letter, one that stares at us in the face, but one that we refuse to see… because it’s so damn hard to simply entertain the thought, because the moment we accept we might be able to do something about death itself, the 150,000 human deaths every day become 150,000 murders that could be prevented.

I don’t want to forget it. I’ll paste it in my wall and create new remixes of the content, and in this spirit I spacified the whole thing into a 30k PDF. Opinions on both the text itself and the utility (or lack thereof) of the spacifying will be most appreciated.

There have been many boy-is-this-comic-good moments amid my reading of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman^WP: the convention of serial killers (with panels, keynote speakers, chit chat—the whole shebang); the 100-year meetings of Dream and Hob (a mortal who simply doesn’t believe in death; “death’s a mug’s game” were his words); the utterly disturbing cafeteria slaughter; the prisoner muse Calliope (to draw inspiration from her, one has to, “naturally”, rape her)... but the very first one was Dream’s stand-up-comedy-esque fight in hell for his helmet:

Impossible Ideas Before Breakfast

Series Blenders

I must confess that I love Spanglish in a kitschy, campy, and yet honest kind of way.

It all started with Molotov and their ¿Dónde jugarán las niñas? album of my early adolescence. I loved their mongrel insults (”fuck you puto baboso!”) and their Voto Latino song:

More recently, a song by Yolanda Perez (featuring “Don Cheto”), Estoy Enamorada, has brought it all back to me:

Akwid, a recently famous group from Los Angeles, is a slightly different matter. Their music itself, for one thing, is something both truly different —mixing Mexican Pacific brass band with hip-hop— and truly good —the tuba “burping along like a nimble elephant.” But they don’t really speak Spanglish. It’s mostly just Spanish, but a different one from mine. One even more imbued with American influence.

They have a song called Pobre Compa in which the singer tells about a romantic triangle between him, his best friend and a girl. There’s a voice-over at the middle of the song in which the singer addresses the girl. One hears knocking, a door opening, and the following brief dialogue:

You can’t tell by the text, but the girl speaks her 5 words with a distinct accent that I love: crisp Spanish with an English cadence —which, btw, is completely different to gringo Spanish: broken Spanish with no cadence at all; an English tongue trying to mimic, unsuccessfully, Spanish sounds. And there was something else, beyond the accent, that I found interesting and appealing but couldn’t precisely pinpoint. I know now: it’s that “pienso que si”; a perfectly valid Spanish sentence, of course, but it feels somewhat unnatural to my Spanish sensibilities. “Pienso que si” mimics the English “I think so” where I would have more naturally said “creo que si” (“I believe so”).

It’s similar to the phrase “dulce para mi ojo” in their Taquito de Ojo song. That’s a quintessentially English phrase, “eye candy”, translated to Spanish inside a song with a quintessentially Spanish phrase as its title: “taquito de ojo” (“eye taco”). I like that.

Truth is, I love this blending whatever the language involved, I “delight in mélange.” Just to give an example, yesterday, via Diana, I found about a French Canadian group called K’maro and I was thrilled. They have true talent for Franglais, just look at this gem:

Or think about how “weekend” is now a French word. It’s much more natural to French cadence that the clunky “fin de semaine”.

(Parental Advisory: Some barely concealed nipples ahead.)