I know this guy from college, name of Robi Mookerjee. I hope that in some way I can claim he’s my friend, although I’m not sure I deserve that honor for the small ways I’ve been connected to him over the years.

Robi is a unique human being. It’s really hard to describe the [...]

Since my recent post arguing that artists should not receive public funds for the purpose of making art, I’ve been thinking a lot about how theater artists earn money.

You know, in terms of business models, just about anything beats theater:

The product can not be mass-produced.

At best, you can replicate it a few hundred seats at [...]

Congratulations! You’ve had a brilliant idea. Now you’d like to share it!

But how? The answer is probably: words. The marketplace of ideas has shown strong year-over-year growth in the “musical” and “visual arts” mediums, but let’s face it, friend: Written and spoken language remains the number 1 preferred method to transfer [...]

Over the course of an election season, presidential candidates must get their hair cut at least, what, a handful of times.
Working backward:

American popular opinion is driven by the media.
The media is dominated by image.
A candidate’s appearance is their primary image.
A candidate’s appearance is, briefly, under the complete control of the person who cuts their hair.

Somewhere [...]

You must have recognized a moment in your life when you were positioned within easy reach of a compulsive lie. Not a lie for gain. Not a lie for defense. A lie for the sake of lying. A lie for the thrill. A thrill proportional to the size of the [...]

I usually use (pardon, “borrow”) the yellow bag. I didn’t know about the carts. More specifically, I didn’t know about the finely engineered, high-performance wheels on the carts. These carts are to grocery store carts what Ferraris are to Ugos. These carts are capable, even under the load of curtain, ottoman, [...]

Back at UNC, I took a class on information visualization. The subject covers all kinds of interesting questions:

How do you categorize data before you choose a way to visualize it? (Is it in two dimensions? Three? Is the data nominal? Ordinal? A ratio?)
What are you trying to see [...]

Today on NPR they carried a story about cops using a new kind of laser gun. This technology allows the po-po to use more laser guns. Also, it allows them to give tickets for tailgating.
That’s cool, because tailgating sucks.
The device measures your transgressions in seconds. The recommended distance in time between cars is [...]

When you take a picture with your camera, you are collecting light from the world onto a thin sheet where it is recorded. Now, the trouble with the world is that the stuff in it is sending out light in a trillion different directions at once. This makes it tricky for taking pictures. You can’t just hold up a piece of photographic paper in front of your favorite cat and expect the image of the cat to be transferred to the paper. No, the paper would be instantly bombarded with so much light from so many directions it would shortly become saturated and useless. Instead, you have to figure out a way to put a filter between the paper and the world, a way of saying “Mr. Photon, are you coming from my kitty? Okay, you’re in. The rest of you rabble, out.”