my rendition

This is definitely the most fun I’ve had with a flash application in a while. While I can’t understand a single word of the website, Hokusai’s drawings alone are enough to keep me thoroughly amused. Hokusai Manga was something of a sketch journal published by the prolific Japanese artist, Hokusai. Clicking around on various links finally deposited me at a sketch page (flash required) where I could arrange scenes using Hokusai’s figures. Try it out for yourself. Link via DesignObserver

My most recent musical discovery is Amos Lee. I would take credit, but Bob Dylan beat me to it and took him along for his most recent tour. No where near Houston, of course. Seeing a lot of comparisons to Norah Jones in the review. They both write good songs, mellow… jazz-inflected? Forget it. Comparisons suck. Amos Lee doesn’t though, and bears a passing resemblance to Ben Harper. (Dammit, did it again)

BlueNote throws us a bone with a couple of tracks. NPR does a full interview with tracks. “Country-fried Soul” is apparently what they’re tagging him with. Could be worse.

UPDATE: No sooner had I posted than I noticed KCRW’s ever-fabulous Morning Becomes Eclectic is streaming video of Amos Lee’s recent performance on the show. Click to watch (requires RealPlayer)

Favorite blog Boing Boing left a pleasant reminder of childhood in my RSS aggregator this morning. Behold the glory of the running bat…

Yeah, just so you know, it wasn’t the bats that triggered the memory, but the multi-frame time sequence a la Eadweard Muybridge (I googled it, it’s really spelled that way). I saw them in my mom’s art history textbook. They were the coolest things ever. The Smithsonian has a nice article on Muybridge.

Call out Gouranga be happy!!!
Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga ….
That which brings the highest happiness!!

My inner econo-geek has been a fan of Steven Levitt for a while (see my earlier post on his work with Fryer), so I was more than pleasantly surpised to get my grubby hands on a galley for his new book Freakonomics: A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (amazon) written with journalist Stephen J. Dubner. Dubner, you may remember as the slightly star-struck (and who wouldn’t be?) journalist who profiled Levitt for the New York Times Magazine article “The Probability That a Real-Estate Agent Is Cheating You (and Other Riddles of Modern Life)” in 2003. The book is a treatment of Levitt’s unorthodox discoveries in the field of economics written for the layman. I’m not one for 8th-grade-book-report reviews, so I’ll just cut to the chase.

#1 Should I buy this book? Yes, yes you should. You should buy it this instant. Put down this blog (figuratively), get up and go to Amazon.com (again figuratively), and buy the book (literally). It pays back every penny, particularly if you’re unfamiliar with Levitt’s work. Truly a brilliant and original thinker in economics today.

#2 If I trust you and I buy the book, will I be disappointed? Hmmmm…. depends. A blurb from Malcolm Gladwell features prominently on the cover and much of the tone and structure of Freakonomics is clearly inspired by the success of Blink, which has crowned Gladwell the current king of long-form journalism and will no doubt inspire many imitators, some flattering, some not so much. Many people, however, have a problem with the fundamental proposition of such a book. Despite his name being listed first on the cover, Levitt seems less the author than the source material. (This is the only way I could reconcile the numerous flattering references as anything short of megalomania) Freakonomics is in many ways an extended version of the NY Times Magazine article. It’s journalism, in other words, so if you’re looking for the real meat on these bones with equations and everything head straight for the notes and check out the original papers, most of which are available online from NBER (nominal $$). That being said, it’s very good journalism, so if you find equations a bit scary or just not so much fun to read, then this is an extremely lucid and accessible snapshot of Levitt’s thinking to date. Let’s say you’ve already read some of Levitt’s papers, as I had; Freakonomics will be a lot of deja vu all over again. They’ve assumed you haven’t read them, and they’re probably right for 99.9% of you, and you 99.9 percenters will find a lot to think about in Freakonomics.

One thing that bugs me: and this may be my own conceit, but I find the term “freakonomics” really annoying. Every time I see it, I want to say, no, it’s just freaking economics, there’s no real break with tradition here. He’s just got more imagination than most. If anything, Levitt is a throwback to the days before the equations took over. Economists, when they’re good, tend to come up with really unusual ways of looking at a problem. Levitt is no different than Smith or Keynes or Ricardo in this respect.

Or if Dolly Parton and Doc Watson had a kid, it would sound an awful lot like Loretta Lynn. It goes on and on - Led Zeppelin + Coldplay = Travis. That’s kind of fun. Well, actually Upto11.net makes no reverence to possible love-children but it does provide strong correlations of musical taste. Enter an artist, or two, or three, or more and it comes back with analysis from fans who have those artists in their collections and divines what other artists in their collection you would be likely to enjoy. The design is something only the designer and his mother could love, but it’s functional so check it out.

Update: Geeks will get a kick out of the “secret sauce” description on the About Us page. Apparently the use music collections on P2P networks as their statitical sample and grab artist info from Wikipedia

Oliver Sacks (neuroscientist, author) has a new article Remembering Francis Crick in the New York Review of Books that recounts his relationship with the biologist and DNA co-discoverer, whom he remembers as “a little like sitting next to an intellectual nuclear reactor…. I never had a feeling of such incandescence.”

I remember Francis Crick too, but it was from a blurb in the margin of my biology textbook. It conveyed very little of the incandescence Sacks describes in his article. Why do we insist on making science so boring in school? I was struck in particular by one of Sacks stories of his patients…

He was especially eager to hear stories of visual perception, and was fascinated when I told him of a patient who had consulted me a few weeks before, an artist who had experienced a sudden and total loss of color perception following a car accident (his loss of color vision was accompanied by an inability to visualize or to dream in color).

…which I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since. What must it be like when the fundamentals of perception start breaking down, and so poignantly, in the case of the artist, whose mind has pulled the rug out from under not only his livelihood but his identity?