Artist’s statement:
“The world seems to me increasingly incomprehensible, and there are times when I feel there isn’t anything that I know for certain. For me, making photographs (or painting, or whatever) is necessary to translate the unintelligible reality of being into a more coherent form. Or at least to illustrate my best guesses. There is vastly more nothing in the universe than something, and I try to create images that recognize the grace by which anything at all exists.”
This is cool because I’ve been reading a book about H. P. Lovecraft and “weird realism” and how all literature (and by extension all art) is an attempt to describe reality which is functionally impossible (and that’s okay) for a variety of reasons.
Also we had those clear, brown Pyrex pots and a gas stove when I was growing up.
(via girlsandguns)
Jane Austen, Game Theorist
Although whiffs of game theory have been discerned in writings as old as Plato, its conventional history begins with the 1944 publication of von Neumann’s seminal “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.” The techniques gained prominence as a means of anticipating attacks and counterattacks among superpowers during the Cold War, and they played a role in determining the quantity and positioning of U.S. nuclear warheads.
“Austen’s novels are game theory textbooks. She’s trying to get readers to use their higher thinking skills and to think strategically.”
In many cases, by making tough choices and predicting how others will respond, Austen’s young (often financially deprived) heroines triumph over seemingly stronger forces, including well-to-do men and older women of higher status, he argues. In so doing, they find happiness and — just as importantly in an era with limited employment and inheritance possibilities for women — financial security.
“They build a theory of strategic thinking, not to better chase a Soviet submarine, but to survive.”
— From SF.
I have never been a huge Jane Austen fan (always preferring her big-R Romantic spiritual daughters the Brontës), but I totally get why she’s important and I think this is a very interesting, pretty valid premise.
I had to study game theory in the driest, purest, most information economics-y way when I was in library school, and I think I would have appreciated any coherent examples that would have tied into my previous life as a liberal arts student.
(Source: newsroom.ucla.edu)
Inadvertently went to get coffee in matching his and hers band hoodie and t-shirt.
Just moments later, a shirtless man 20 yards away played acoustic guitar and sang a song about Pokemon in the style of a frontier ballad.
Buying sandals.
- Him: [Sings Game of Thrones theme]
- Me: Oh, that's very good. I like your fake synthesizer trumpet noise.
- Him: Thank you. I learned it from Mario Paint.
