keruako pezalas
o vaikeliai, tik nesugalvokit įsivelti į tokį beviltišką reikalą, kaip Jack Kerouac – The Subterraneans & Pic perskaitymą. kankinausi beveik du metus kol įveikiau šį keruako sąmonės pezalą. žinau, kad petras mane atjaučia ;]
taigi, ši plona knygelė sudaryta iš dviejų novelių. antroji, pavadinimu pic, visai nieko: mažo negriuko pasakojimas pirmu asmeniu apie jo kelionę iš kaimo į niujorką ir tolyn. vienintelis kabliukas – visas tekstas: tiek dialogai, tiek pasakotojo monologai, parašyti tuometinių (1958) negrų tarme, su milijonu gramatinių klaidų. shush your mouf, woman, this man ain’t got no time for sinful ways. sunku persilaužti, bet po keliolikos puslapių pradedi jausti ritmą ir pradeda patikti.
antroji gi dalis - the subterraneans yra tikrasis išbandymas. vos devyniasdešimties puslapių autoriaus išpažintis apie nelaimingą meilę juodaodei moteriai. bet tekstas supiltas beveik be paragrafų ir sakiniai nenormalaus ilgio – vyniojasi net per kelis puslapius. o ir turinys toks beviltiškas, persmelktas pasibaigusios meilės kartėliu. ne, šis tekstas tik ypatingiems keruako ar bytnikų gerbėjams (įvykiai pagrįsti realybe ir dalyvauja istorinės asmenybės, tik pakeistais vardais). dabar net bijau paimti on the road orginalą, kurį jau senokai žadėjau perskaityti.
pkmk tmblr
iškarpos iš interneto. sukauptos per tumblr.com servisą. nereguliariai ir neįpareigojančiai.
The New York Times does not use Web metrics to determine how articles are presented, but it does use them to make strategic decisions about its online report. We don’t let metrics dictate our assignments and play, because we believe readers come to us for our judgment, not the judgment of the crowd. We’re not ‘American Idol.’
Bill Keller (via soupsoup)
TSP art
The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is an old and well-studied problem in computer science. Given a collection of cities on a map, a salesman must make a tour of the cities, visiting each once, and returning to the city from which he started. Of all the ways that he could travel from city to city, he must find the one that requires him to travel the least total distance (our salesman is nothing if not frugal). Mathematically, we can view this form of the TSP as finding the minimum length closed path connecting a collection of points in the plane.
We can exploit this relationship to produce a new halftoning algorithm (halftoning is any process that approximates a continuous-toned image with black-and-white marks). We distribute cities with a density that locally approximates the darkness of a source image, and pass the cities to a program that finds a TSP tour. The result is a kind of twisty closed path that resembles the original image.
People can be teachers and idiots; they can be philosophers and idiots; they can be politicians and idiots … in fact I think they have to be … a genius can be an idiot. The world is largely run for and by idiots; it is no great handicap in life and in certain areas is actually a distinct advantage and even a prerequisite for advancement.
Iain Banks, The Crow Road. (via travors)
At the very least, outsiders need to understand that China is controlled for the benefit of insiders. The insiders know when to sell, and so one would expect the businesses that have been made available to the outside world systematically to underperform those ventures still controlled by card-carrying members of the Chinese Communist Party. “China” will underperform China, and a “China” bubble exists to the extent that investors underestimate the degree of this underperformance.
The Optimistic Thought Experiment | Hoover Institution (via Instapaper)
Under more normal circumstances, one would not have thought that the same mistake could happen twice in the lifetimes of the people involved. One might be tempted to invoke extraordinary psychosocial explanations — for example, that all of this was driven by baby boomers who destroyed their minds on drugs in the 1960s and therewith merit the dubious distinction of being America’s Dumbest Generation.
The Optimistic Thought Experiment | Hoover Institution (via Instapaper)
Apocalyptic investors will miss great opportunities if there is no apocalypse, but ultimately they will end up with nothing when the apocalypse arrives. Heads or tails, they lose.
The Optimistic Thought Experiment | Hoover Institution (via Instapaper)
