Scottunder

Or did you mean recursion?

I love this: if you Google recursion, Google asks, "Did you mean recursion"

Penguins

I don't know why these amuse me so.

Automatic Hands-Free Tea Timer

 

Steam Penguin Hard Surface Steam Cleaner

 

Crane Adorable 1 Gallon Cool Mist Humidifier

 

Crane Five Stage Air Purifier

 

Polished Stainless Steel Penguin Cocktail Shaker

 

Penguin Stainless Steel Ice Bucket

The Social Science of Sports

I first read this article, Social Science at 190 MPH on NASCAR's Biggest Superspeedways by David Ronfeldt, many years ago. I'm not a NASCAR fan; in fact, I'm not even a sports fan, and this article is one reason why. Not because I think sports are beneath me. This article has helped me understand sports enthusiasts better, and I think I appreciate the point of obsessive attention to the smallest details much more than I did before. (I still think fandom is ridiculous, but that's a separate discussion.)

To paraphrase Ronfeldt's intro, the need for drafting (also called slipstreaming) in NASCAR races provides a social science view into: 

• complexity theory (as racers self-organize into chaotic and ordered structures),
• social network analysis (as actions in previous races affect how drivers treat each other throughout the race and especially in draft lines), and 
• game theory (the so-called Prisoner's Dilemma, as cooperation and defection play out in the course of a race, a season, and a career)

This article has had a surprising effect on me since I read it around 2001. For context: I grew up as a baseball fan, because (due to asthma) it was the one sport I could play well enough to excel. When I was young I played Little League and one year of Pony League at age 13. I wasn't a box-score-following fan, but I followed the SF Giants -- I could tell you the starting lineup in 1969 -- and later the Oakland A's. I read about Sandy Koufax (fellow lefty) and famous or unusual baseball games.

As I grew older I followed the game with less intensity, but I played in softball leagues until my early 40s, coached my sons in Little League, and attended a couple of pro or minor-league games a year. Now I barely watch one game a year, live or on TV, but to this day I feel there are few things more beautiful than a 6-4-3 double play.

Anyway, the biggest lesson for me from the article was in understanding that the background of the players is vitally important in each event, and it can be a little silly to watch a single competition. It's a bit like watching a single episode of General Hospital (is that still on?): without understanding the characters, their actions make little sense. 

So, while I enjoyed watching the mechanics of a single baseball game, without knowing the potential performance of each player -- does he choke in the clutch? Is he their home-run hitter? -- the game for me had none of the thrill it holds for longtime viewers. 

So even NASCAR, derided as "cars turning left for 500 miles," has a number of extremely interesting features -- but only if you follow it. A single NASCAR race will likely bore you unless you know that last year, Driver A did a little bump-and-run that cost Driver B the win, so look for sparks today when B drafts A in this race. This "soap opera" is far from incidental to the enjoyment of sport. It's the whole thing.

The Social Science of Sports

I first read this article, Social Science at 190 MPH on NASCAR's Biggest Superspeedways by David Ronfeldt, many years ago. I'm not a NASCAR fan; in fact, I'm not even a sports fan, and this article is one reason why. Not because I think sports are beneath me. This article has helped me understand sports enthusiasts better, and I think I appreciate the point of obsessive attention to the smallest details much more than I did before. (I still think fandom is ridiculous, but that's a separate discussion.)

To paraphrase Ronfeldt's intro, the need for drafting (also called slipstreaming) in NASCAR races provides a social science view into: 

• complexity theory (as racers self-organize into chaotic and ordered structures),
• social network analysis (as actions in previous races affect how drivers treat each other throughout the race and especially in draft lines), and 
• game theory (the so-called Prisoner's Dilemma, as cooperation and defection play out in the course of a race, a season, and a career)

This article has had a surprising effect on me since I read it around 2001. For context: I grew up as a baseball fan, because (due to asthma) it was the one sport I could play well enough to excel. When I was young I played Little League and one year of Pony League at age 13. I wasn't a box-score-following fan, but I followed the SF Giants -- I could tell you the starting lineup in 1969 -- and later the Oakland A's. I read about Sandy Koufax (fellow lefty) and famous or unusual baseball games.

As I grew older I followed the game with less intensity, but I played in softball leagues until my early 40s, coached my sons in Little League, and attended a couple of pro or minor-league games a year. Now I barely watch one game a year, live or on TV, but to this day I feel there are few things more beautiful than a 6-4-3 double play.

Anyway, the biggest lesson for me from the article was in understanding that the background of the players is vitally important in each event, and it can be a little silly to watch a single competition. It's a bit like watching a single episode of General Hospital (is that still on?): without understanding the characters, their actions make little sense. 

So, while I enjoyed watching the mechanics of a single baseball game, without knowing the potential performance of each player -- does he choke in the clutch? Is he their home-run hitter? -- the game for me had none of the thrill it holds for longtime viewers. 

So even NASCAR, derided as "cars turning left for 500 miles," has a number of extremely interesting features -- but only if you follow it. A single NASCAR race will likely bore you unless you know that last year, Driver A did a little bump-and-run that cost Driver B the win, so look for sparks today when B drafts A in this race. This "soap opera" is far from incidental to the enjoyment of sport. It's the whole thing.

The other Joe Jackson

Not Michael's miserable father, and not Shoeless Joe. The Brit, the New Waver. Is She Really Going Out With Him. That Joe Jackson.

I've just read A Cure for Gravity: A Musical Pilgrimage, Joe Jackson's autobiography from 1999, and it's easily my favorite book by a musician. I've long admired Jackson, but this book did a lot to put his musical meanderings into a context. The book take us from his childhood in Portsmouth to the release of his first album. (Read the intro here.)

Jackson writes that before he'd identify himself as male, white, or British, he'd describe himself as a musician. Though he was born in a working-class dock town to parents with no musical leanings, he was drawn to classical music early on. A gawky, asthmatic, and uncomfortable child, he was beaten up often, and had trouble fitting in. But he could hear music differently from most others around him, and played violin and percussion until discovering the piano. He managed to play well enough to get a grant to attend the Royal Academy of Music, where he learned composition and played piano in a jazz group (and met folks such as Annie Lennox and Simon Rattle).

Eventually, though, he tired of the musical snobbery he found there, not only from "serious" musicians in regards to pop and punk, but from modern classical enthusiasts toward more romantic music. He longed to make music that reached people, and he found value in most everything. He writes with passion about The Damned and The Clash as well as Shostakovich and Beethoven.

To earn money he played piano in bars and clubs, in everything from cabaret acts to the Playboy Club to pub-rock bands. He eventually abandoned jazz and standards but continued to write classical pieces until he shook off his hesitation and formed his own band -- as he says, not out of confidence but out of determination. He had, as he saw it, no other choice and no other skills. Along the way, he discusses his surprising influences (the complex jazz voicings of Steely Dan; the funky rhythms of Little Feat), the unfortunate effect of musical criticism, the self-pigeon-holing of musicians into uncommunicative genres, and lots of horrifying stories of playing music of drunken sailors, violent skinheads, and idiot club-owners.

I'm not certain why Jackson's sexuality interests me, but I was surprised to read that he lived with bassist Graham Maby's sister for a couple years, and later was married to an woman of African descent who "stuck out like a fistful of sore thumbs" in Portsmouth. He mentions that likes he both boys and girls but doesn't discuss any early gay experiences in the book, and I guess I was slightly disappointed that he didn't include more of his personal journey there. As I say, I'm not sure why I'm interested, but if he managed to tell us about his phimosis (NSFW) and subsequent surgery, I wondered why he drew a line.

Back to the music, here's Jackson on the Old Grey Whistle Test, an excellent BBC show that apparently had nearly everyone on it at one time or another. Great to see him here right around the release of the first album.

Here, he's doing Steely Dan's "Any Major Dude Will Tell You," which makes their influence on his music startlingly clear -- this sounds like a Joe Jackson song.

And here's one that represents a good example of where I think he wanted to go all along, nicely combining pop sensibilities with complex, layered arrangements of diverse instruments -- chamber pop, I think of it -- with two bassoons, a string quartet, two keyboards, and more. This is actually two pieces, "Passacaglia" and "A Bud and a Slice," recorded on the sadly defunct Sessions at West 54th program. The profoundly deep-voiced Brad Roberts of Crash Test Dummies shares the lead vocal.

Zeitoun & Lowboy

Last week, I bought Dave Eggers's latest book, Zeitoun. I started reading it Sunday and finished Monday. I'm not a fast reader, and I can only think of a couple times I've polished a book off that fast. Abdulrahman Zeitoun grew up on Jableh, a small island off the Syrian coast, and spent years as a seaman before he finally settled in New Orleans. He started a family with his Louisiana-born wife, who had already converted to Islam, and the two of them had built a well-established painting and contracting business throughout New Orleans, in addition to owning a few rental properties. When Hurricane Katrina came, he determined to stay in the city to protect his investments, and things took an unexpected and unjust turn.

It's difficult to review this book without giving away the plot, which is best experienced a page at a time. so I'll just say that Eggers did a great job at turning an oral history into a compelling narrative. Like Eggers's last book, the likewise powerful What is the What, the story is retold as a novelist would, with recreated scenes and dialogue, but it's no less true because of that. In these books, you're given portraits of decent and admirable men already coping with extraordinary circumstances who are suddenly faced with an entirely nasty side of their fellow humans. You somehow simultaneously shake your head in disbelief while nodding with knowing resignation, as if all your fears were confirmed. To paraphrase Leonard in Full Metal Jacket, we are in a world of shit. 

Just before that I read, only slightly less swiftly, Lowboy by John Wray. This novel came recommended to me by a friend after we were discussing mental illness, and I mentioned Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn (about a young mook with Tourette's and OCD) and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (written in the form of diary entries by a 15-year-old autistic savant who runs away to London).

Lowboy is a 16-year-old boy with paranoid schizophrenia, who's escaped from the hospital on an urgent quest, the goal of which only slowly unfolds for the reader, through his mirror-world inner dialogue and disjointed conversations. Lowboy spends much of his time in the New York subway, though he occasionally surfaces in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. Chasing Lowboy are his unusual mother and a missing-persons NYPD detective, who has his own split personality: his father changed his birth name from Rufus White to Ali Lateef.

The treat here, as with the other books, is a sympathetic view into the workings of an off-kilter mind. Lowboy sees the world differently and makes internally consistent but otherwise baffling connections, and his runaway quest and whether he can continue to elude his pursuers is less interesting than Wray's authentic-sounding recreation of Lowboy's pinball cascades of words and ideas.

Cameratruck

Shaun Irving has been a mailman, a copywriter, and a graphic artist, but he's always had a passion for photography. In 2003, he turned a used delivery truck into a giant camera he called Peanut that got some press in Wired. A few years later, after a tour with Peanut fell through, Irving started from scratch with a new truck and took a 5000-mile road trip around Spain, shooting pictures of the countryside. He shares the result on his website Cameratruck.

These are decidedly large-format images: they average 7 feet wide by 3.5 feet tall. The best part is that Irving is literally inside the camera as he makes each shot. The exposure timing is haphazard, and the developing method even more so. The resulting images are streaked where the developer or fixer isn't evenly applied, which gives the final print an organic and even eerie quality.

It also makes the entire technique visible, which is an issue with much photography. The painter David Hockney, who used Polaroid prints and 35mm snapshots to create large-format art, pointed out that the trouble with photography as art is that there's no time in the finished piece -- not only is the final image an impossibly brief slice of reality, but much of the artist's process is hidden from the viewer. Irving's prints, made with buckets and sponges on the floor of a dark van, make the process more tangible and gives the prints that missing quality of time and effort.

The New York Times Lens feature has a nice profile of Irving, and this Discovery Channel piece shows Irving exposing and developing a negative. This YouTube video is less informative, but still worth watching.

Pearblossom Hwy

While looking for something else, I came across this short, tiny-size film of David Hockney discussing the thinking and process behind my favorite of his photographic collages, Pearblossom Hwy. Ten days of shooting! 200 shots for the sky alone! I always enjoy hearing Hockney speak about his work; he's always enlightening without sounding pretentious or self-aggrandizing. Looks like he's got an official website now, too -- oh, my, gorgeous stuff there -- and plenty of YouTube videos.

Pearblossom Hwy., 11 - 18th April 1986, #2, at the Getty. The original is 78 x 111 inches.