“At first, I thought that the series’ portrait of Nikki might be a little bit mean, but then I remembered that back in the days when Nikki and I were still pals, she suddenly, without the slightest warning, wrote a nasty and vituperative post about one of my columns. We haven’t spoken since.”
Tag: 04.22.10
The Universe’s Building Blocks? Information
“Vlatko Vedral, an Oxford physicist, examines the claim that bits of information are the universe’s basic units, and the universe as a whole is a giant quantum computer. He argues that all of reality can be explained if readers accept that information is at the root of everything.”
Canadian TV Networks, Cable Have A Good Year
“The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission said the country’s cable, pay-for-view and specialty broadcast services posted revenue of $3.1 billion in calendar 2009, a gain of six per cent versus 2008’s $2.9 billion.”
Explosive Growth In Chinese Movie Business
“The potential prize for all this effort: a piece of a box-office gross that grew 43% to $908 million in 2009, after an average of 25% growth in each of the preceding five years. In 2009, 10 Chinese-language films grossed more than 100 million yuan (about $14.6 million), compared with four two years earlier.”
Seattle TV Station Lets Arts Group Buy Coverage
“The practice, while intended to help improve arts coverage in the city (a noble cause), looks (to me) like the payola radio schemes outlawed by Congress in 1960: trying to create a false perception of popularity when the song (or the theater) had to pay for play.”
Lang Lang Plays Encore On the iPad
It was “Flight of the Bumblebee” and it happened at a San Francisco Symphony concert.
Have You Ever Seen God and Stephen Sondheim in the Same Room?
“Perhaps in a delayed response to a 1994 New York magazine issue that asked ‘Is Stephen Sondheim God?,’ Mr. Sondheim [has written] a cheeky, self-deprecating number for the show” Sondheim on Sondheim.. The song’s title: “God.”
NY Public Library’s Wondrous New Machine
The library used to have a lot of trouble recruiting people to do the tedious, repetitive work of sorting the countless books that get sent from one branch to another. Now the NYPL has an automated conveyor, nearly 2,000 feet long, that scans a bar code on each book and sorts it. “It’s sort of like a baggage carousel that knows which bag is yours and deposits it at your feet.”
The Problem With Chief Wahoo And The Atlanta Brave
“When activists petition to remove Native American mascots from the logos of sports teams, the answer of traditionalists often boils down to: What’s the harm? Newly published research provides an unexpected answer. It suggests exposure to one stereotype – however whimsical or benign in its intent – apparently activates others.”
Remembering Dance Classes With Alwin Nikolais
Phyllis Lamhut: “[L]et’s say he was working on how do you transfer your focus to points in space? How do you work with your body to indicate points in space? We would improvise and figure it out. … Or he’d say, ‘How would you use gravity?’ He didn’t tell us how to do anything. ‘Where is it? What would you do?'”