February 2012
22 posts
Kiss Me Deadly
Kiss Me Deadly is a 1955 film noir drama produced and directed by Robert Aldrich starring Ralph Meeker. The screenplay was written by A.I. Bezzerides, based on the Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer mystery novel Kiss Me, Deadly. Kiss Me Deadly is often considered a classic of the noir genre. The film grossed $726,000 in the United States and a total of $226,000 overseas. It also withstood scrutiny from...
Fred Wilson
Fred Wilson (born 1961) is a New York-based venture capitalist (active since 1987) and a prominent blogger. Due to his successful investment track record and community involvement, he is recognized as a leading voice of the venture capital finance community in New York. TheFunded.com, a social networking site for technology entrepreneurs, rated him their favorite venture capitalist in 2007. Wilson...
Jackson Pollock Fractal Theory
Famous artist Jackson Pollock was one of the most influential abstract painters of the 20th century. Jackson Pollock drip paintings were developed during the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, and they are believed to contain a mathematical, yet natural, concept called a fractal. The word fractal is derived from the Latin term “fractus” meaning broken or fractured. It is a rough, geometric object that...
Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show
The Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show is a two-day, all-breed benched conformation show that takes place at Madison Square Garden in New York City every year. The first Westminster show was held in 1877. The Westminster Kennel Club staged its 135th Annual All Breed Dog Show on February 14–15, 2011. Its entry limit of 2,500 dogs featured all 179 breeds and varieties recognized by the American Kennel...
Robert A. Heinlein
Robert A. Heinlein (1907 - 1988) was an American science fiction writer. Often called the “dean of science fiction writers,” he was one of the most influential and controversial authors of the genre. He set a standard for science and engineering plausibility and helped to raise the genre’s standards of literary quality. He was one of the first science fiction writers to break...
Downton Abbey
Downton Abbey is a British television period drama series, produced by British media company Carnival Films for the ITV network. The series is set on the fictional estate of Downton Abbey in North Yorkshire, and features an ensemble cast. It was created and principally written by actor and writer Julian Fellowes, and premiered on ITV on 26 September 2010. Reception of the programme was...
Wagyu Beef
Wagyu (literally Japanese cow) refers to several breeds of cattle genetically predisposed to intense marbling and to producing a high percentage of oleaginous unsaturated fat. The meat from wagyu cattle is known worldwide for its marbling characteristics, increased eating quality through a naturally enhanced flavor, tenderness and juiciness, and a high market value. In several areas of Japan, beef...
Thomas Bayes
Thomas Bayes (1701 - 1761) was an English mathematician and Presbyterian minister, known for having formulated a specific case of the theorem that bears his name: Bayes’ theorem. Bayes never published what would eventually become his most famous accomplishment; his notes were edited and published after his death by Richard Price. Bayes’ solution to a problem of “inverse...
The Card Players
It is a painting of startling simplicity. Two farm labourers contemplate their cards above an empty table, their expressions as blank as the austere background against which they are posed, little more than objects in a human still life created by the artist Paul Cezanne. Yet in the crazy 21st-century world of billionaire plutocrats and sovereign wealth funds fighting over the world’s few...
Canter's Deli
Canter’s Deli is a famous Jewish style delicatessen in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles, California, near the border of West Hollywood. The Canter family originally opened up a delicatessen in Jersey City in 1924. They came west along with many Jews from the northeastern United States in the early 1940s, and opened a delicatessen in the Boyle Heights neighborhood, which at that time had a...
Aaron Sorkin
Aaron Sorkin (born 1961) is an Academy and Emmy award winning American screenwriter, producer, and playwright, whose works include A Few Good Men, The American President, The West Wing, Sports Night, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Charlie Wilson’s War, The Social Network, and Moneyball. After graduating from Syracuse University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Musical Theatre in 1983,...
January 2012
27 posts
Edgeworth Box
In economics, an Edgeworth box, named after Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, is a way of representing various distributions of resources. Edgeworth made his presentation in his book Mathematical Psychics: An Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences, 1881. Edgeworth’s original two-axis depiction was developed into the now familiar box diagram by Pareto in 1906 and was...
Wind, Sand and Stars
Wind, Sand and Stars (French title: Terre des hommes —Land of people, or literally, Land of men) is a memoir by the French aristocrat aviator-writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and a winner of several literary awards. It was first published in France in February 1939, and was then translated and published in English by Reynal and Hitchcock in the United States later the same year In his...
Issey Miyake
Issey Miyake (born 1938) is a Japanese fashion designer. He is known for his technology-driven clothing designs, exhibitions and fragrances. Miyake was born in 1938 in Hiroshima, Japan. As a seven year-old, he witnessed and survived the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. He studied graphic design at the Tama Art University in Tokyo, graduating in 1964. After graduation, he worked...
Gross National Happiness
The assessment of gross national happiness was designed in an attempt to define an indicator that measures quality of life or social progress in more holistic and psychological terms than only the economic indicator of gross domestic product (GDP). The term “gross national happiness” was coined in 1972 by Bhutan’s then King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who has opened Bhutan to the age...
Leonard Cohen
One of the most fascinating and enigmatic — if not the most successful — singer/songwriters of the late ’60s, Leonard Cohen has retained an audience across four decades of music-making interrupted by various digressions into personal and creative exploration, all of which have only added to the mystique surrounding him. Second only to Bob Dylan (and perhaps Paul Simon), he...
Eames Lounge Chair Wood
The Eames Lounge Chair Wood (LCW) (also known as Low Chair Wood or Eames Plywood Lounge Chair) is a chair designed by husband and wife team Charles and Ray Eames. The chair was designed using technology for molding plywood that the Eames developed before and during The Second World War. Before American involvement in the war, Charles and his friend, architect Eero Saarinen, entered a line of...
The Nude Maja and The Clothed Maja
La maja desnuda (known in English as The Naked (or Nude) Maja) is an oil on canvas painting by the Spanish painter Francisco Goya (1746–1828), portraying a nude woman reclining on a bed of pillows. It was executed some time between 1797 and 1800, and is sometimes said to be the first clear depiction of female pubic hair in a large Western painting. The painting has been in the Museo del Prado in...
Beowulf
Beowulf is the conventional title of an Old English heroic epic poem consisting of 3182 alliterative long lines, set in Scandinavia, commonly cited as one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature. It survives in a single manuscript known as the Nowell Codex. Its composition by an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet is dated between the 8th and the early 11th century. In 1731, the manuscript...
Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984) was an American photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West, especially in Yosemite National Park. With Fred Archer, Adams developed the Zone System as a way to determine proper exposure and adjust the contrast of the final print. The resulting clarity and depth characterized his photographs and the work of those...
Nosferatu
Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (translated as Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror; or simply Nosferatu) is a classic 1922 German Expressionist horror film, directed by F. W. Murnau, starring Max Schreck as the vampire Count Orlok. The film, shot in 1921 and released in 1922, was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with names and other details changed because the studio...
Space Elevator
A space elevator is a proposed non-rocket spacelaunch structure (a structure designed to transport material from a celestial body’s surface into space). Many elevator variants have been suggested, all of which involve traveling along a fixed structure instead of using rocket-powered space launch, most often a cable that reaches from the surface of the Earth on or near the equator to...
IDEO
IDEO is an international design and innovation consultancy founded in Palo Alto, California, with other locations in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Boston, London, Munich, Shanghai, and Singapore, as well as Mumbai, Seoul, and Tokyo. The company helps design products, services, environments, and digital experiences. Additionally, the company has become increasingly involved in management...
Liu Xiaobo
Liu Xiaobo (born 1955) is a Chinese literary critic, writer, professor, and human rights activist who called for political reforms and the end of communist single-party rule in China. He is currently incarcerated as a political prisoner in China. Liu has served from 2003 to 2007 as President of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, an organization funded by the National Endowment for Democracy,...
December 2011
26 posts
