insomniphilia
So sad. For a few months, I lived across the street from their 24 hour UWS location, which was a hard-to-top luxury. They’ll be missed.
Interesting post on a video game designed to entertain farmed pigs, but to do it in a way that allows humans to engage with the animals that are being grown for consumption:
Pig Chase is played with an iPad or other tablet device. Players will see a live video feed from a pig barn on their screen. By touching the screen, players move a ball of light around one of the walls of the enclosure of the barn. The goal is to attract a pig to the light and, with the help of the pig’s snout, move the ball to a target shown on both the barn wall and the player’s iPad. Early on, game designers discovered that pigs respond strongly to lights and will follow them.
…
Philosopher Driessen says he doesn’t expect the game to turn people into vegetarians. But, he says, he hopes it will get people to think more about the issues surrounding farmed animals.
Had a big cooking night…the first in a long time. Roasted squash plus cream/milk, pasta water, and ricotta became a squash sauce for 1½ lbs pasta. With this, we blanched and sautéed a cauliflower remnant, à la Bittman, and made an absolutely delicious kohlrabi salad that il introduced us to.
Can’t get over how awesome this is. An Ancient Greek Punishments Flash game. Sisyphus, Tantalus, Danaids, Prometheus, and Zeno for good measure.
I’m very glad someone like David Remnick is following this. The transition to democracy can be so perilous, especially in a troubled economic climate; but in Russia’s case, a sense of former greatness and 80 years of the Soviet brainwashing machine also take their toll.
Just seeing this video now: a cartoon of the rise of factory farming and mass animal feeding, soundtracked by Willie Nelson (doing a Coldplay cover). Sponsored by Chipotle….
From PBS, a short (7 min.) video on generative art.
Off Book: Generative Art - Computers, Data and Humanity (by PBS Arts)
Related to something I’ve been thinking about lately — how we’re surprisingly out of touch with what makes us happy, how advertisers have figured that out, and how we make a lot of choices that end up being bad for us and bad for the planet. (via Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice)
I had a dream in which I was re-reading “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and the “In the room, the women come and go” couplet was suddenly much longer, and went into a lot of interesting stuff. I wish I remembered what it said. I’ve had a long history with Prufrock, including memorizing it, reading the sections Eliot excised following Ezra Pound’s advice, and working on a poem in the style of Prufrock (“The Homework of J. Albert Potter”), so it would’ve been interesting to see if those things influenced my dreamed version of the poem. But probably I just dreamed up some gibberish.
Marking duplicate files with ipython
I use (and love) Notational Velocity for storing and quickly retrieving notes on OS X. Recently, I accidentally enabled both SimpleNote and DropBox syncing on two different computers, which resulted in many duplicate notes. Some quick IPython hacking fixed the problem.
Notes are stored in files like Title.rtf, and duplicate notes ended up in files like Title.1.rtf. I first found and extracted all the base filenames, and counted how often each occurred:
files = !ls
R = re.compile(r'(.*?)(\.\d+)?.rtf')
m = map(R.match, files)
c = collections.Counter([mm.group(1) for mm in m
if mm is not None])
Next, I created a list of all the extra files (I was lazy, and used glob for this, rather than using my original list of filenames), and used the command line to color-label the extra files in Finder (based on this hint):
extra_files = [glob.glob(fn + ".*.rtf")
for fn, count in c.iteritems() if count > 1]
extra_files = reduce(list.__add__, extra_files)
for fn in extra_files:
!osascript -e "tell application \"Finder\" to set label index of alias POSIX file \"$fn\" to 1"
Voilà! The duplicate files were all labeled orange. I went through them using QuickView, to make sure I wasn’t deleting anything important, and cleaned up my Notational Velocity directory.
