HONEST ARROGANCE

An oldie but a goodie.

Schreiber’s semi-favorable review, which begins in earnest after a six-paragraph preamble comprising a long list of baroquely rendered, seemingly unrelated anecdotes peppered with obscure references, summarizes music as a “solid but uninspired effort.”

I also am a fan of the end quote. Perfectly encapsulates my feelings towards half the music/lifestyle/design blogs I’ve been reading recently.

“overwrought, masturbatory posturing intended to make insecure hipsters feel as if they’re part of some imagined elite beau monde.”

One of the most frustrating things I come across as a law student is how occasionally you have to examine facts as if in a vacuum, isolated from reality to gain an impartial view. In this case, Simon Singh criticised The British Chiropractic Association who responded by suing him. The article was nothing more than opinion, however as usual things got far more complicated.

The case at present hinges on the meaning of “bogus.” In a preliminary hearing, the judge ruled that bogus means deliberately dishonest, rather than a lack of evidence; he also ruled that Singh had written a statement of fact, not opinion, something that will make the case much harder to defend.

Lone Gunman does the maths and concludes that:

The chances of winning the lottery (with average jackpot winnings of £2,053,984) is 1 in 13,983,816. You would therefore need to buy £64 of tickets for a slightly better chance of winning the jackpot than becoming a millionaire through winning the X-Factor.

For when nothing else except the perfect breakfast will do, The London Review of Breakfasts is sure to guide to full english heaven.

We hate bad breakfasts. We hate nudging limp forks at greasy microwaved sausages, miserable pink bacon and the clear and runny white of an unloved fried egg. We hate beans that are room temperature and bread that’s only toasted on one side. We despise cold hard tomatoes. Hate it when we order tap water and it never comes and we don’t know what to say to each other and we have a relationship crisis and suddenly everything seems too cramped and stuffy and the night before embarrassing.

Why are superheroes inhumanely strong and fast while the bad villains are “evil geniuses”? My favourite answers are:

• Partly to appeal to the average person, who can wrap their mind around the concept of faster and/or stronger, but will never really understand genius without being one, and partly because people reading/watching escapist media would prefer to speed or smash things to vent their frustration, rather than think about their problems.
• Because then the hero would have to save the world using his genius brain, and comic book writers aren’t smart enough to come up with the kind of solutions a genius would. So it boils down to intellectual laziness on the part of the comic writers. So much easier to just show your hero smashing something than it is to come up with a compelling plot that requires the use of brainpower to work out.

• Though Professor X is a genius, his mental abilities are pretty much brute force. He forces his mind onto others and controls them, or manipulates their memories, or reads their thoughts. That’s not really an application of intelligence. It doesn’t take a genius to read someone’s mind.

  In fact, most mental abilities have nothing at all to do with intelligence.

Branding a city has always been a bit of a funny one, designers seem to panic and end up creating another shit uncontroversial brushstroke logo.

London is in the lucky but difficult position where people already have ideas of what London is. The London underground sign is far to iconic to ever be forgotten and must either be integrated into the design or left behind. With the problems that came with the 2012 Olympic launch it will be essential London gets this right.

Creative Review give the subject a thorough examination.

The WSJ talks to Disney about the new Toy Story re-release. They discover that rendering speeds are now 86400 times faster than they were 14 years ago which conjures up an initial feeling of ‘no shit’ followed by a realisation of just how quick that is. Scary stuff.

The process of rendering the films — or translating computer data into images — was vastly accelerated by current technology. Where the original “Toy Story” required an hour per frame to create, Mr. Lasseter said, rendering the new 3-D version took less than 1/24th of a second per frame.

(via Watching Apple)

The more I read the more I get confused and wonder how on earth we ended up with such a pernicious system. Reuters tells us of the latest fuck up.

On Friday a U.S. court of appeals overturned a $358 million damages award against software maker Microsoft Corp in a long-running patent dispute with French telecoms equipment firm Alcatel-Lucent.