Tag: youtube
Robert Trivers on his theory of Parental Investment
Should Politicians be Honest or “Electable?”
The Beatles – a musical appreciation and analysis – by composer Howard Goodall
juan Gabriel (1950 – 2016)
gene wilder (1933 -2016)
jaime davidovich (1936 – 2016)
Saami Brothers Qawwali
Are We Beating the Islamic State?
The Church For People Who Are “Spiritual, But Not Religious”
Lo And Behold, Reveries Of The Connected World
Amara D. Angelica in KurzweilAI:
In the movie “Lo and Behold, Reveries Of The Connected World,”, legendary documentarian Werner Herzog discovers and explores the internet in a series of ten impressionistic vignettes. These range from internet pioneers (Leonard Kleinrock, Robert Kahn, Danny Hillis), AI/roboticists (Sebastian Thrun, Tom Mitchell, “Raj” Rajkumar, Joydeep Biswas), and Mars explorers (with Elon Musk — Herzog volunteered to go) to dystopians — how a solar flare could crash our internet-based civilization in a few days, electrosensitive hermits living off the grid, online-game addicts, black-hat hackers (Kevin Mitnick), government intrusion (Jonathan L. Zittrain), a family cruelly harrassed by trolls, and smartphone-obsessed Tibetan monks. KurzweilAI readers may not find much new in the film, but I found it compelling anyway, thanks to explorer-poet-philosopher Herzog’s soft-spoken, quirky humor (“Does the Internet dream of itself?” was one question he asked) and unrushed, contemplative — almost meditative — style, plus awesome, unobtrusive music.
More here.
Joseph Stiglitz: It’s Time to Get Radical on Inequality
See real democracy in action – how Chinese third-graders elect a class monitor
[Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]
The Culture of Information Technology
by Mathangi Krishnamurthy
“Kar le kar le, tu ik sawaal,
Kar le kar le, koi jawaab,
Aisa sawaal jo zindagi badal de…
[Ask a question,
Try and answer,
The kind of question that will change your life]
It's just a question of a question.”
—Title track, Kaun Banega Crorepati
Light bursts forth like rays from the sun. The Indian film star Shahrukh Khan pirouettes across a set, made deliberately larger than life. It is glitzy, neon inundated and disproportionate. Women in some form of modernized traditional Indian clothing stand behind the so-called King Khan as he exhorts the audience to ask a question. The irony, of course, is that in this Indian version of “Who wants to be a millionaire?” it is Khan who asks the questions. As he swiftly changes clothes from scene to scene, a rapper in one moment, a suave sleazy conman of some sort in the other and an overgrown American teen hipster in yet another, his supporting cast range from close cropped capped rappers to women of unidentified nationality in golden and silver lamè. In another frame, Shahrukh in waistcoat and trousers dances with women in tartan mini-skirts and white shirts. They all gyrate to a catchy tune that repeats the mantra of the one question that can change lives.
Slowly seducing the audience with song and dance, Shahrukh coaxes them into participation, insisting that they must come out with their deepest desires since this opportunity might not arise again. Assuring them that they will win the game he asks them to strengthen their hopes. He ends with the oxymoronic question “Is a hot chick cool or a cool chick hot?” On the poorly manifested and highly pixellated version that I watch on the Internet, the paucity of this content seems glaringly obvious.
Danny Boyle's film Slumdog Millionaire, is set in Mumbai and chronicles the unexpected success of a contestant on Kaun Banega Crorepati, the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. A rags-to-riches chronicle of a protagonist called Jamal Malik who wins the game show, the plot is nothing if not predictable. The twists in the plot and the form of resolution are, however, what are interesting to this essay. Jamal is also what Prem, the character who portrays Shahrukh's counterpart in this reel life version of reel life, refers to as a slumdog. By winning the game's prize of Rupees one crore, Jamal stands as testimony to what chance can offer even the most underprivileged, as long as they have the hunger to grab it.
The Wastefulness of Modern Dining, as Performance Art
Nora Caplan-Bricker in The New Yorker:
The sly and playful Austrian performance artists Sonja Stummerer and Martin Hablesreiter want to make us reëxamine the culinary mores that we take for granted.
The leap to high-concept performance happened almost by accident: they wanted to submit photos of people eating for an exhibition about table manners at the 2011 Gwangju Biennale, in Korea, and a tight budget forced them to serve as their own models. “Many people liked these photos so much that for the next book, ‘Eat Design,’ we decided to make forty or fifty photos of ourselves eating,” Hablesreiter said. Eventually, they began making videos as well.
More here.