Alan Jacobs

The men in the workshops told me stories about the master craftsmen who once worked in Hatton Garden. “We had one old Jewish chap I used to sit next to, called Lapidus,” said Dave Harris, a former diamond-cutter, “who had been born in Russia in about 1860. He ran away from home and got apprenticed in Germany, earning nothing. He told me he used to lodge in a room with just a bed and a chair and live on bread and water. In the 1900s he moved to Paris and became a master jeweller and in the 1920s he moved to England. He was in his late seventies when he came to us. He worked piecework, so his wages never came to more than three pounds a week, but he made the most exquisite pieces of jewellery I’d ever seen, which often took him up to three months to make. The most beautiful thing I saw him produce was a rose-shaped diamond brooch, set in 18-carat gold, with enamelled petals, covered in precious stones and diamonds, commissioned by a Russian princess.”

In those days every pearl that ended up in a British jewellery shop, every precious stone, every diamond, rough or cut, came through Hatton Garden. Today the majority of the jewellery sold in the street is either cast or imported. A few of the master craftsmen remain but when they die, their knowledge will be lost.

Great Comics That Never Happened — YET.

I’ve long suspected, based on observations of myself as well as observations of society, that, beyond the psychological and cognitive strains produced by what we call information overload, there is a point in intellectual inquiry when adding more information decreases understanding rather than increasing it. Taleb’s observation that as the frequency of information sampling increases, the amount of noise we take in expands more quickly than the amount of signal might help to explain the phenomenon, particularly if human understanding hinges as much or more on the noise-to-signal ratio of the information we take in as on the absolute amount of signal we’re exposed to. Because we humans seem to be natural-born signal hunters, we’re terrible at regulating our intake of information. We’ll consume a ton of noise if we sense we may discover an added ounce of signal. So our instinct is at war with our capacity for making sense.

I think I am a genius, but not a rebel. I have my life, my world, I do what I want, without annoying anyone. I believe I am more intelligent than the average person. It is said that geniuses are misunderstood. So perhaps genius is so different that people don’t understand. The talent God gave me is beautiful and wonderful, but it is difficult because you are always facing other people keen to judge you. There are few people with such talent, so there are few able to judge what I am doing.

— from a recent interview

Doc Watson, “Down in the Valley to Pray”

mwfrost:

countryandwestern:

Folklore Productions reports that Doc Watson has passed. 

R.I.P.

Link updated in reblog.

Sad, sad news. What a man Doc was.

Acocella misunderstood my essay on usage in the American Heritage Dictionary. It never declares that “there are no rules” but, rather, begins from the opposite premise: “What kind of fact are you looking up when you look up a word in the dictionary? A fact it certainly is. It is not just a matter of opinion that there is no such word as misunderestimated, that the citizens of modern Greece are Greeks and not Grecians, and that divisive policies Balkanize rather than vulcanize society.” My goal was to use the answer to this question to distinguish bogus rules of usage from defensible ones. One cause of bogus rules is a phenomenon called false consensus, in which, say, no expert believes that split infinitives are ungrammatical, but everyone mistakenly thinks that everyone else believes they are. A false consensus can solidify when people fear censure for flouting it, as they did during witch hunts, Red scares, and other popular delusions. Acocella got distracted by the example, imagining the “clear political meaning” that “prescriptivists are witch-hunters, Red-baiters.” It is like reading an explanation of global warming and mounting an indignant defense of greenhouses. Acocella shoehorns her misunderstanding into the hoary narrative in which usage debates are a kind of class warfare, and excoriated the Dictionary for hypocrisy in publishing my supposedly anti-prescriptivist essay. This pointless dudgeon could have been avoided had she looked up the difference between “simile” and “analogy.”

60ansdevadrouille:

Au Temple du Ciel à Pékin : voûte du temple des Saisons (Prières pour de bonnes moissons), prouesse de l’architecture de bois.  aout 1985.

Valve has no formal management or hierarchy at all.

Now, I can tell you that, deep down, you don’t really believe that last sentence. I certainly didn’t when I first heard it. How could a 300-person company not have any formal management? My observation is that it takes new hires about six months before they fully accept that no one is going to tell them what to do, that no manager is going to give them a review, that there is no such thing as a promotion or a job title or even a fixed role (although there are generous raises and bonuses based on value to the company, as assessed by peers). That it is their responsibility, and theirs alone, to allocate the most valuable resource in the company – their time – by figuring out what it is that they can do that is most valuable for the company, and then to go do it. That if they decide that they should be doing something different, there’s no manager to convince to let them go; they just move their desk to the new group (the desks are on wheels, with computers attached) and start in on the new thing. (Obviously they should choose a good point at which to do this, and coordinate with both groups, but that’s common sense, not a rule, and isn’t enforced in any way.) That everyone on a project team is an individual contributor, doing coding, artwork, level design, music, and so on, including the leads; there is no such thing as a pure management or architect or designer role. That any part of the company can change direction instantly at any time, because there are no managers to cling to their people and their territory, no reorgs to plan, no budgets to work around. That there are things that Gabe badly wants the company to do that aren’t happening, because no one has signed up to do them.

So here’s a prediction: long before the Berkshire Hathaway warrants expire, many of the papers Buffett has invested in will have reduced both print days and their newsroom staff, and journalists will be writing the “What went wrong with the Media General deal?” story.

The answer to that question is already apparent: Buffett wants to talk like a philanthropist and an investor at the same time, not understanding that the public good and the bottom line have diverged. A newspaper used to be both a profitable business and a public service, but this was just an accident of the competitive (or rather uncompetitive) media landscape. His commonsense approach to saving papers won’t work, because there is no longer any commonsense business model for a former monopoly that is still seeing its revenues erode faster than its costs.