Moku Teraoka

Yesterday I was wondering around Soho when I came across the new Top Shop. The line was literally around the block and so I figured it could easily wait for another day.

At the end of the line, however, taped up to a sidewalk window, were two pretty hilarious signs. It turned out they belonged to a random one room gallery and performing art space called the Puffin Room, on Broome just east of Broadway.

Seeds of the Wild, their new exhibit, opened last weekend and it is really great. There are a number of artists and a number of mediums. I really enjoyed almost every piece on display, but one certain collection caught my eye. It was a series of about 10 or 12 "scratch paintings" done on paper ripped out of a notebook. Each one had a sentence or two below it explaining where the artist was, what he was doing and or unique insights about that certain trip. I inquired about them and one of the women who works at the gallery told me, that the artist was just there. I actually briefly met him, clueless as to who he was, right when I walked in.

His name is Moku Teraoka and he said that that the way he does these particular pieces is with some type of rare crayon made out of beeswax, then scratches it with some type of utensil (a scratcher??) then repeats it, seemingly countless times. Absolutely incredible.

When I got back home I looked him up as I was very interested to see more of his work. It turns out he has recently completed a documentary called "From Tokyo to the Morava River" (currently on view at Puffin Room) about the year he spent travelling with a Bosnian refugee in the Balkans. I can't wait to go back and watch this. The trailer looks great.

I also love what he says in his profile on the gallery site which is

And, always love to make music, jam session.

New York Moments

Each week is filled with so many small moments that I love I think that this is the perfect place to start putting down a few, here's one from last night and one from a week or so ago.

Last night, walking from the gym to the train at Whitehall Street a young kid (maybe 8 or 9), very bundled up had a tray of brownies that he was obviously selling. Nothing new there but as I walked up to him he did a few steps resembling a moonwalk and said "Hi. I'm an entrepreneur and I'm selling these brownies for a dollar."

Kid, you had me at "I'm an entrepreneur." Love it!

The second was a week or two ago I was in line at Staples when a man got in line behind me with seashells and splattered paint all over his clothes. He was also carrying a portfolio so I asked to see what was in it. He was in a hurry but said "are you on Flickr?" and directed me to his work and some pictures of him. Here are those:

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=taijay&m=text

Chasing the Flame

I just finished Chasing the Flame, the biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello by Samantha Power and was absolutely blown away. I've already written briefly about Sergio and it is very hard to say what has not already been said. All I can say is I strongly recommend reading this. One of my all time favorites and Sergio is truly my hero.

This is a man who spent his entire career helping those most in need. In addition he held his PhD in Philosophy from the Sorbonne in Paris, spoke 5 languages fluently and could mix just as easily with the refugees he was helping as he could with the leaders he was trying to influence later in his career.

In addition to telling Sergio's story, the book is a wonderful primer on the worst conflicts of the latter part of the 20th century as well as the Iraq conflict all while addressing some impossible questions:

- If a Rwandan refugee camp is made up of both civilians as well as "genocidaires" who are literally sharpening their knives for future battle, what is the best thing to do? Should the UN give aid and support murderers, or cut off aid and force more suffering on innocent bystanders?

- Should ruthless leaders be catered to in order to retain channels through which to deliver aid?

These were the kinds of questions that Sergio was forced to grapple with and it is fascinating to see how his beliefs evolved over the course of his life.

Here are a few good links relating to Sergio and Power but please, read the book.

Chasing the Flame - official site of the various projects going on about Sergio, including the book as well as info about the movie planned for this year, being done by the guy who did Hotel Rwanda

The Lives They Lived - great NYTimes piece on Sergio

Superorganisms (the incredible feats of the ant)

Kottke directed me the New York Review of Books article on EO Wilson and Bert Hölldobler's new book Superorganisms. This article is so fascinating I can't even imagine how good this book is. Some highlights:

On what exactly a superorganism is...

"In explaining what a superorganism is, Hölldobler and Wilson draw up a useful set of "functional parallels" between an organism (such as ourselves) and the superorganism that is an ant colony. The individual ants, they say, function like cells in our body, an observation that's given more piquancy when we realize that, like many of our cells, individual ants are extremely short-lived. Depending upon the species, between 1 and 10 percent of the entire worker population of a colony dies each day, and in some species nearly half of the ants that forage outside the nest die daily. The specialized ant castes—such as workers, soldiers, and queens—correspond, they say, to our organs; and the queen ant, which in some instances never moves, but which can lay twenty eggs every minute for all of her decade-long life, is the equivalent of our gonads."

On similarities and differences between humans and ant "superorganisms"

Parallels between the ants and ourselves are striking for the light they shed on the nature of everyday human experiences. Some ants get forced into low-status jobs and are prevented from becoming upwardly mobile by other members of the colony. Garbage dump workers, for example, are confined to their humble and dangerous task of removing rubbish from the nest by other ants who respond aggressively to the odors that linger on the garbage workers' bodies...

However, ants clearly are fundamentally different from us. A whimsical example concerns the work of ant morticians, which recognize ant corpses purely on the basis of the presence of a product of decomposition called oleic acid. When researchers daub live ants with the acid, they are promptly carried off to the ant cemetery by the undertakers, despite the fact that they are alive and kicking. Indeed, unless they clean themselves very thoroughly they are repeatedly dragged to the mortuary, despite showing every other sign of life.

The means that ants use to find their way in the world are fascinating. It has recently been found that ant explorers count their steps to determine where they are in relation to home. This remarkable ability was discovered by researchers who lengthened the legs of ants by attaching stilts to them. The stilt-walking ants, they observed, became lost on their way home to the nest at a distance proportionate to the length of their stilts.

And the most amazing part of the article on the "attines" the most advanced species, mindblowing!

The progress of ants from this relatively primitive state to the complexity of the most finely tuned superorganisms leaves no doubt that the progress of human evolution has largely followed a path taken by the ants tens of millions of years earlier. Beginning as simple hunter-gatherers, some ants have learned to herd and milk bugs, just as we milk cattle and sheep. There are ants that take slaves, ants that lay their eggs in the nests of foreign ants (much like cuckoos do among birds), leaving the upbringing of their young to others, and there are even ants that have discovered agriculture. These agricultural ants represent the highest level of ant civilization, yet it is not plants that they cultivate, but mushrooms. These mushroom farmers are known as attines, and they are found only in the New World. Widely known as leafcutter ants, they are doubtless familiar from wildlife documentaries....

You may not believe it, but like the sailors of old the leafcutter ants "sing" as they work. Leaf-cutting is every bit as strenuous for the ants as hauling an anchor is for human beings, and their singing, which takes the form of stridulation (a sound created by the rubbing together of body parts), assists the ants in their work by imparting vibrations to the mandible that is cutting the leaf, enhancing its action in a manner akin to the way an electric knife helps us cut roasts. The leafcutters also use stridulation to cry for help, for example when workers are trapped in an underground cave-in. These cries for help soon prompt other ants to rush in and begin digging until they've reached their trapped sisters.

The fungus farmed by the leafcutter ants grows in underground chambers whose temperature, humidity, and acidity are precisely regulated to optimize its growth. The fungus, which produces a tiny mushroom, grows nowhere else, and genetic studies reveal that various attine ant species have been cultivating the same fungus strain for millions of years. In truth, after tens of millions of years of coevolution such is their interdependence that the ants cannot live without the fungus, nor the fungus without the ants. The system is not perfect, however, for the ants' fungal gardens are occasionally devastated by pests. One of the worst is an invasive fungus known as Escovopsis, whose depredations can become so severe that the leafcutters must desert their hard-won gardens and start elsewhere anew. Often a colony so beset evicts a smaller attine colony, taking over the premises and enlarging them to suit.

try, fail, try, fail, eventually, you'll get it right

I keep seeing story after story of the value of simply doing rather than thinking about doing.

Here's two from the past three days:

http://cstadvertising.com/blog/2009/02/18/do-it-then-fix-it/

http://www.kottke.org/09/02/art-and-fear

I hope that I'm doing enough of this

increasing our human capital

I recently had an idea that I'm really interested in hearing some opinions on; so for the first time it's prompting me to write to some of my favorite bloggers and get their input (hopefully). I'll add any responses to the post.

First letter out to Freakonomics guys:

programming as foreign language
1 message

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Adam Winski	Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 1:05 PM
To: levittdubner@freakonomics.com
Steven and Stephen, I enjoyed your book a great deal and have been a regular reader of your blog for over a year now. It's definitely one of my favorites. I love the both of your perspectives on the world and really appreciate the quality of your guest contributors and question takers. The reason I'm writing to y'all is recently, as I was reading What the Doormouse Said by John Markoff, I was struck as to how similar learning a computer language appeared to be to learning a foreign language. I do not know what kinds of computer classes are being taught in the elementary, middle and high schools in the US so the following may be moot but; what if schools were to offer as an option the opportunity for students to elect programming classes as an alternative to foreign language? I do think that learning languages is important and learning about other cultures is crucial. However, in a world of limited (and seemingly ever moreso) resources, I think it could make a great deal of sense to teach a pragmatic skill over one that is less so. This is especially true when, in my experience, a nontrivial percentage of people do not take learning a foreign language in school very seriously. I would be really interested in hearing your thoughts on this. Thanks so much again for all of the great work and effort that y'all put into your blog. Best, Adam Winski Update 1/28: Sent to Tyler Cowen (Marginal Revolution) Update 1/29: Response from Tyler! On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 7:12 PM, Tyler Cowen wrote: I am all for this and note there have been a few good articles lately about "R"... Tyler Not sure what he means by "R"? but I asked him to please send the articles to which he's referring...hoping to be able to deduce from there. update 2/24/09 - just came across this: http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2009/02/teach-kids-programming-mr-president.html and sent it over to Freakonomics guys as well as a letter to Cuban. update 2/25/09 - one more thing I forgot to mention in the initial post is that I think that this should first be instituted in the lowest performing schools. I can see the argument that those would be the kids who would get the least out of it but I believe the opposite. Teaching underprivileged kids such a useable skill could go a long way towards the employment opportunities those children have, even without the benefit of a degree.

Best of 2008

I've seen a few of these (Kottke.org and Michael Arrington) in different forms and they're great. I wanted to create my list of some of my favorite articles and other various media or just sites in general in 2008:

Sheep Market & Amazon Mechanical Turk - Sheep market is both audacious, hilarious & fascinating (the things people will do for 2 pennies!?) and also, by introducing me to Mechanical Turk proved to be a great resource for help. Number one of the year!

Michael Lewis in Portfolio on "The End" - Hands down best article of the year by one of my all time favorites. He also just wrote a great NYTimes op-ed with David Einhorn (Part I Part II)

Dick Fuld and the downfall of Lehman

New Yorker profile of Ben Bernanke

Washington Post three-part article on AIG

The Man Who Invented New York by Tom Wolfe - classic portrait of New York Magazine founder Clay Felker. A couple of highlights:

"I remember Clay saying, “Look … we’re coming out once a week, right? And The New Yorker comes out once a week. And we start out the week the same way they do, with blank paper and ink. Is there any reason why we can’t be as good as The New Yorker? … Or better. They’re so damned dull.”'

"They became known as the “art birds.” As late as 1989 Japanese art collectors liked to have these pretty little American girls by their sides in the front rows for the “important” auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. They loved the pretty things’ lithe young legs with their epidermi of sheerest ravage-me nylon shimmering up to the most tumescent swells of their thighs as they crossed and then re-crossed and then re-re-crossed and then re-re-re-crossed them shimmer shimmer shimmer shimmer beneath the downlighters."

Another fascinating piece by Tom Wolfe (granted from 1965) on the rise of stock car racing (precursor of Nascar), the drivers & fans, particularly the first superstar, Junior Johnson. One of the "7 Greatest Esquire stories ever published."

Basically this whole New York Times series "The Reckoning" is phenomenal but my particular favorites were the articles on Merrill and Citi

I could not put down the epic seven-part post election Newsweek series "Secrets of the 2008 Campaign" Probably will win a Pulitzer. Not that I have any idea as to what the criteria are for a Pulitzer but amazing comprehensive coverage from the primaries through election day.

Best law passed all year. In Texas of course.

Daily Show was really on point covering the election with some HILARIOUS stuff

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

The Best F#&king News Team Ever - Small Town Values

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Sarah Palin Gender Card

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video