elsagold: the WUMBLOG

OK. If the company is allowed to advertise to me, I’m...

Thu, 10 May 2012 15:39:25 -0400

OK. If the company is allowed to advertise to me, I’m allowed to advertise to it. Or anyone.

Art Spiegelman visits Maurice Sendak, makes a comic

Tue, 08 May 2012 15:32:00 -0400

Art Spiegelman visits Maurice Sendak, makes a comic:

“Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth!”

Seriously, stop with the booth babes

Mon, 07 May 2012 19:29:05 -0400

Seriously, stop with the booth babes:

“The long-term effects of this are damaging. By being conditioned to treat women as intellectually inferior to men, we are actively discouraging them from joining our environment.”

Black Women and Fat

Mon, 07 May 2012 17:46:00 -0400

Black Women and Fat:

“How many middle-aged white women fear their husbands will find them less attractive if their weight drops to less than 200 pounds? I have yet to meet one.

But I know many black women whose sane, handsome, successful husbands worry when their women start losing weight. My lawyer husband is one.”

[via coco]

[From The Tech at MIT] Opinion: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

Mon, 07 May 2012 12:53:39 -0400

[From The Tech at MIT] Opinion: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell:

“It wasn’t just that I lost all motivation for my job; it was also that it is much harder than one would expect to do unsound analysis. There is an interesting kabuki dance to be done when crafting figures to fit a conclusion. The conclusion may be wrong, but you still need to make it believable. You still need numbers to fill out your PowerPoint slides, and the numbers need to have enough internal consistency not to throw up red flags at a casual glance. Honest analysis, even when it has weak areas, is easy to defend. If the numbers look fishy, there’s an explanation — you didn’t have direct data on such and such and had to use estimates from another report, or made a reasonable assumption somewhere. But when the numbers actually are fishy, and there’s no underlying logic to defend, you can’t have any rough areas for others to poke at. And when you know everything is fishy, you can’t tell what will look fishy to someone who hasn’t seen any numbers before.”

Taco Conf, May 12-13 2012: Bikes & Tacos

Thu, 03 May 2012 14:09:47 -0400

Taco Conf, May 12-13 2012: Bikes & Tacos:

So down.

What Slayer Will Demand if They Play at Your Festival. [via hari...

Wed, 02 May 2012 18:35:53 -0400

What Slayer Will Demand if They Play at Your Festival.

[via hari trishna]

Mobile Food Facility Permits in San Francisco

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:00:07 -0400

Mobile Food Facility Permits in San Francisco:

Check this dataset.

Can't stop won't stop

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 17:49:59 -0400

Can't stop won't stop

"[On General Education at Harvard in the 1950s] Superficially, the positivist message appeared to be..."

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:53:00 -0400

“

[On General Education at Harvard in the 1950s]
Superficially, the positivist message appeared to be an optimistic one, concerning the perfectibility of science and the inevitability of progress. It taught that reason was a liberating force and faith mere superstition; the advance of science would eventually produce a complete understanding of nature. But positivism also taught that all the accumulated nonscientific knowledge of the past, including the great religions and philosophies, had been at best merely an expression of “cultural mores” and at worst nonsense; life had no purpose and morality no justification.

Even as positivism preached progress, therefore, it subliminally carried — quite in contradiction to the intent of Gen Ed’s framers — a more disturbing implication: that absolute reason leads to absolute despair. G. K. Chesterton wrote, “Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad … mathematicians go mad.” Hence Gen Ed delivered to those of us who were undergraduates during this time a double whammy of pessimism. From the humanists we learned that science threatens civilization. From the scientists we learned that science cannot be stopped. Taken together, they implied that there was no hope. Gen Ed had created at Harvard a culture of despair. This culture of despair was not, of course, confined to Harvard — it was part of a more generalized phenomenon among intellectuals all over the Western world. But it existed at Harvard in a particularly concentrated form, and Harvard was the place where Kaczynski and I found ourselves.

”

- From an incredible essay on how the Unabomber became in the Atlantic, June 2000. Page 2 of Part 1.

Video

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 22:49:24 -0400

My coworker just sent me Christopher Walken reading Where the...

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 10:58:37 -0400

My coworker just sent me Christopher Walken reading Where the Wild Things Are, which naturally reinforced how awesome Christopher Walken is. Happy Thursday.

The spambots have finally found Tumblr. And they love my posts.

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 22:28:33 -0500

The spambots have finally found Tumblr. And they love my posts.

This is how this dog sleeps.

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 19:26:44 -0500

This is how this dog sleeps.

The future is here. And it wants Costco.

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 18:35:28 -0500

The future is here. And it wants Costco.

43rd st.

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 21:10:12 -0500

43rd st.

I wasn’t much of a runner until I moved to this city.

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 20:41:38 -0500

I wasn’t much of a runner until I moved to this city.

"The supervisors originally came to a deal with the America’s Cup Event Authority back in December...."

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 12:38:00 -0500

“

The supervisors originally came to a deal with the America’s Cup Event Authority back in December. The concept was — and is — pretty straightforward, the same sort of deal the city has done (or, certainly, the Redevelopment Agency has done) many times in the past. In exchange for putting cash into renovating several piers, Ellison’s group would get long-term leases and development rights on the property. The idea: The city can’t afford to fix the piers. Ellison’s organization can. And once the property is renovated, the developer can make back that initial investment, and a profit, by building commercial space, condos and whatever else the Port decides to allow.

In a perfect world, San Francisco (and the state and the feds) would tax the hell out of people like Ellison, and there’d be public money to rebuild the waterfront as public open space, recreational facilities and the like. And wouldn’t that be utterly cool? Wouldn’t this city have the most awesome waterfront in the world?

But no: The only way the piers are going to anything but a place to park cars until they fall into the bay is if some private developer gets the rights to build something that I won’t like.

”

- “Whats wrong with the America’s Cup deal? A lot”

[by Tim Redmond for the SF Bay Guardian, via http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2012/02/24/whats-wrong-americas-cup-deal-lot]

Bradford Cox has a psychedelic encounter with his 13-yr-old self on stage at Bimbo's

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 21:57:07 -0500

Bradford Cox has a psychedelic encounter with his 13-yr-old self on stage at Bimbo's:

This article from SFWeekly sums it up pretty well — it was magic to witness. Can you imagine being 13 and playing maracas on stage next to your idol? The write-up loses out by not mentioning the Carnivores (Bradford Cox’s best buds) and Frank Broyles, who put on a gripping 1-man set (3 of the acts of the night were solo - very unusual, and captivating).

Welcome to the neighborhood!

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 16:55:05 -0500

Welcome to the neighborhood!