I haven’t seen any of the Olympics because, well, I guess I don’t care enough. But I was taken by the version of this photo that ran in the Boston Globe today:

Do we really look this blood thirsty, or was this just some good-natured exuberance? Is it typical of American victory yells? Is it typical of other countries? Is it as scary as it looks?

[Tags: olympics phelps sportsmanship victory spahtaaaaaah ]

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On Thursday, we saw Shakespeare & Company’s Othello, in Lenox, Ma. We go frequently to see that company’s productions, but this one was special. In fact, I didn’t want it to have an intermission. The play is too relentless. You know where it’s going (especially if, ahem, you re-read it the day before) and you just want it to get there, to be over, to let you go. It is a play with no distractions and no subplots. (This production wisely dropped the Clown who has a couple of scenes of witty-but-now-incomprehensible Elizabethan badinage.) The plot ticks, but its engine is Othello’s prodigious will. As soon as Iago suggests that Othello shouldn’t suspect Desdemona without proof, you know that “proof” will be forthcoming, and Othello will be unstoppable. Only an intermission stands in his way.

The first half of the play is Iago’s. Iago knows everyone better than they know themselves. Including the audience. Iago is the one who addresses us directly. We may not be on his side, but we are in his world. The second half is Othello’s. But at the end, the play belongs to the women. Desdemona sees clearly. And her maiden (Iago’s wife), Emilia, is a fierce teller of truths and the bravest person on the stage. For all the talk of heroism and military feats, the only truly heroic act Shakespeare shows us is Emilia’s.

I thought the acting surpassed Shakespeare & Co.’s usual high standard. Michael Hammond was a believable Iago. He took Iago’s hatred as a given. Hammond instead convinced us that his power was based on his ability to see into those he used. John Douglas Thompson’s Othello I found harder to appreciate because of the extremes to which his character is pushed: He’s a hard-won general and a charming teller of tales who rapidly is reduced to writhing on the floor. But the depth of his feeling for the woman he kills was apparent. Merritt Janson was a perfect Desdemona. Kristin Wold was a fearsome, riveting Emilia. LeRoy McClain added immeasurably to the play by giving us a sympathetic, rounded Cassio. This was a hell of a production.

And, boy, could that Shakespeare guy write!

Michael Hammond blogs about Iago, painting him as the consummate actor. He adds:

I am also inclined to suspect that by presenting a character so ingenious in his ability to inspire and manipulate others, Shakespeare was offering those who mistrusted or even hated the theatre their worst nightmare.

Given Iago’s understanding of how the world looks to each character, perhaps he’s also the consummate playwright.

Here’s the NY Times’ review. He liked JThompson’s performance a bit more than I did — although he makes a good case and is probably right — and he failed to glow enough over Hammond’s Iago. And here’s the WSJ’s review. [Tags: shakespeare othello ]

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I hadn’t heard of this highly existential and meaningful comic strip until I read a comment about a BoingBoing piece on a different strip that it calls the worst ever.

Tags: garfield comics

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I’m reading a pretty bad serial killer book by a well-known writer in the genre.

The first chapter describes a brutal killing by an unnamed gent.

The second chapter beings with a description of the hero doing something illustrative of her character. In this case, she’s jogging, pushing her physical limits, reminiscing about her time as an Olympic rower, yada yada.

The first words of that second chapter are our hero’s name.

I’m wondering how many other books begin exactly and precisely this way, right down to the hero’s name showing up as the very first words.

[Tags: cliches crowdsourcing bad_books serial_killers ]

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A current Twitter conversation topic: Is the daily comic F Minus the rightful heir to the Far Side?

[Tags: far_side f_minus comics ]

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Im reading Julian Warners “From Writing to Computers,” published in 1994. In a wonderful chapter he looks at the senses in which the Western tradition thought documents contained or were intelligent — written documents “appear to understand what they are saying,” Plato says. Warner looks carefully at Platos Phaedrus, a seminal text for those concerned with the transition from oral to written cultures. Thats the one where Plato worries that the onset of written documents will ruin human memory: Those who acquire the skill of writing “will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of on their own internal resources.”

Plato has another complaint: Writings cant respond to questions: “writing involves a similar disadvantage to painting. The productions of paintings look like living beings, but if you ask them a question they maintain a solemn silence.” Ive taken these quotes from Plato from Warner pp. 58-59.

Makes you wonder what Plato would have made of chat, IM, and SMS.

Tags: plato julian_warner chat sms im

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I am a crotchety old man about graffiti. 99.9% of them — and, as usual, all my statistics have been authenticated by having been made up — impose an adolescent narcissism. But I also think: (a) I don’t really understand the cultural positioning behind it, (b) some of it is public, rebellious art, and (c) it’s not like the commercial exploitation of public space is so great.

So, the documentary Bomb-It looks very interesting. (The initial trailer is meatier than the new one.) (Thanks to RageBoy for the link, for this follow-up, and for posting the beautiful poster.)

[Tags: graffiti bomb-it art ]

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Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School and Ned Gulley of MathWorksMathLab are giving a Berkman talk called “The Dynamics of Collaborative Innovation: Exploring the tension between knowledge novelty and reuse.”

Karim begins by looking at research by Meyer on the airplane’s hidden collaborative history: It didn’t spring whole cloth from the brow of the Wright brothers. E.g., Chanute served as a hub for pre-Wright research and innovation. The Wright brothers actively corresponded with him. Once the Wright brothers patented their inventions, innovation moved to Europe (which is why so many of our aviation terms are French … l’fusilage, anyone?).

Ned talks about the contest MathLab (where he works) runs every six months– sixteen times so far — designed to encourage the free flow of ideas. It’s a week-long open collaborative competition for MATLAB programmers. Entries are displayed, scored, and ranked immediately. Anyone can modify anyone else’s code and resubmit it as their own. The leader is determined objectively by putting it through some hidden tests that judge its efficiency. (They don’t make the optimization suite public because they don’t want people to “game” it.) The prize is a t-shirt or baseball cap, although the real prize is reputation.

Ned shows a graph of entries and processing times. It’s quite a dramatic set of cliffs. On the other hand, there are lots of dots representing people who make “improvements” that aren’t improvements. This may be people with bad ideas or people whose ideas happen not to work the way MATLAB prefers.

The winning entries on average have contributions from 30 people. Ned says that when some code leaps ahead, you’ll see “splash” as tweakers try to improve it marginally, often making it marginally worse.

Q: In the commercial realm, what happens when an early innovator patents it?
You don’t get collaborative innovation.

People name their entries, and sometimes sell social signals with them: “Tweakfest” or “I wish I knew how this works.”

Ned says that if a chicken is only an egg’s way of making another egg, then a hacker is only code’s way of making more code.

Karim talks about some statistical analysis of entries into the contest. He looks at how many lines an entrant borrows and how many times the entry’s reused. There is a power law distribution: A few lines are used thousands of times, but most are used zero to three times. His analysis shows that when it comes to entries that become leaders, borrowing pays off more than novelty.

Q: Have coders evolved in these games?
Yes. More collaborative. And more sophisticated in their gaming of the contest.

Topcoder.com uses this model to develop code solving practical problems. [Tags: berkman Karim_Lakhani ned_gulley collaboration ]

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Yes, that’s how devout Americans are. Even a bunch of our atheists believe in God.

[Tags: religion atheism improbable_results ]

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Stowe Boyd, responding to Nick Carr’s provocation in The Atlantic that argues that “Google is making us stupid,” anticipates some of a piece I’ve been thinking about writing for a few months: The sort of long-form argument that some say the Web is killing is vastly over-rated. It’s actually difficult to find books that are long arguments (not multiple illustrations of one point, but an argument that develops over the course of multiple chapters) that don’t go off the rails relatively quickly. And, yes, I include Immanuel Kant in this. Darwin’s Descent of Man is an exception.

I meant to get around to writing about this. I still do.

[Tags: stowe_boyd nick_carr ]

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