Review: "Harakiri"

As you probably know, harakiri (or seppuku) is a gruesome form of ritual suicide. It was practiced by the samurai in Japan and was perceived as an honorable death, preferable to being executed, or continuing to live in dishonor. The samurai would sit down, cross-legged, and disembowel himself with a knife or his short sword (his wakisashi). Another samurai (the second) decapitates him with a katana (the long sword of a samurai) once the messier work is done.

Essay: "Why Pay for Art?"

Do you remember those stupid anti-piracy ads they used to run before movies? There was this one with a guy who supposedly painted sets, talking about how piracy personally hurt him. I remembered snickering: yeah, that’s what happens when a movie flops – they stop painting the sets.

The older I get, and the more I learn, the more I think that there isn’t really any good rationale for paying for art at all.

Essay: "Batman, Broken Windows, and the Uncanny Valley: Part Two"

Tim Burton is attracted to weirdos and outsiders and so his explanation for Batman’s war on crime is very simple: Bruce Wayne was a little nuts. Keaton’s Wayne is reclusive and eccentric. He has trouble interacting with people and comes off strangely in ordinary social situations. Only in his hideout (the Batcave) is he relaxed and calm, in control and confident. For him, dressing up as Batman satisfies a deep need, or compulsion. Although it’s not sexual, I would say it’s almost like a fetish. Batman is who he really is.

Essay: "Batman, Broken Windows, and the Uncanny Valley: Part One"

I saw Tim Burton’s Batman in theatres when it came out. I was nine years old and it blew my mind. But at that age, the Adam West Batman television show also blew my mind, and so I have learned to take my youthful assessments of artistic representations of the Caped Crusader with a grain of salt. I recently re-watched Batman for the first time since the Chris Nolan movies came out. I think the general consensus on the Internet is that the Nolan movies are much better than Burton’s but I was pleasantly surprised to see that it has held up very well.

Essay: "Haters Gonna Hate"

You know which phone first had iTunes? The Motorola Rokr. I have been the proud owner of this phone since around 2006. It was not great back then, and like most mobile phones, it did not exactly age like a fine wine. And so although I’ve got a Blackberry through my work, it’s time for a new phone, probably.

Essay: "Black Swans and Game of Thrones"

Warning: This essay contains spoilers about the first season of Game of Thrones and the first book in the series A Song of Ice and Fire.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb defined a "Black Swan" event as follows:

"First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.  Second, it carries an extreme impact.  Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable."

What's great about Taleb's book is how it points to a simple phenomenom that most of us (myself included) managed to ignore: how bad we are about predicting the future, and how good we are about forgetting about how bad we are about predicting the future.

Memoir: "The Burden of Control"

Last year, about this time, I went on a trip to Uganda to visit my little sister, who spends a lot of time in Africa doing research for her PhD (she's in AIDS research).  Now Uganda is very, very poor.  The roads are terrible and dangerous, the buildings are all falling down, and there's not much infrastructure.  So there's not a lot of "culture", per se.  The local people eat simple food and have simple hobbies.  Furthermore, unlike, say, Asia or the Middle East, "civilization" is a relatively new thing.  Most of the cities were founded in the late nineteenth century.  So there's not a lot of history you can see.