Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 721

What Tech Startups Are Really Like

*Basically, founding a start-up company almost exactly like winging it in the world of art or literature, except without any art or literature.

*It's not a job, it's an adventure.

http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html

(…)

"The Super-Pattern

"There were a few other patterns, but these were the biggest. One's first thought when looking at them all is to ask if there's a super-pattern, a pattern to the patterns.

"I saw it immediately, and so did a YC founder I read the list to. These are supposed to b...

Mapping Favelas… whether they like it or not

*I wonder how many people living in favelas can read and comprehend this kind of Ivy League archispeak. More than you might think, I reckon. Given that architects exist in legions and are hard-put to get any honest work in a real-estate crash, there must be rather a lot of architecture graduates haunting "informal housing" these days.

*The key to understanding favelas is not that there are poor people in there; it's that poor people are being *compressed* in there by the organizational...

Bollywood YouTube Dance Contest: the winners

*I like the knowing fans who don't merely dance, but also indulge in some of the cornball physical banter than precedes a fit of Bollywood dancing.

http://www.yashrajfilms.com/movies/movie_specials.aspx?movieID=13cfd746-68a1-40f3-ac4a-1de4766539bf&special=2

Mayor of London Rescues Climate Activist From Teenage Female Hooligans.

*This is some story…. teenage girls are mugging women in London with iron bars? And the Mayor arrives? And he, like, scolds them empty-handed, and they scamper off and they don't even manage to steal a purse or a mobile? It's so weird it must be true.

*However, if you put an incident like this in a novel, readers would throw it across the room.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/nov/03/boris-johnson-saves-franny-armstrong

Boris Johnson came to the rescue of a high profile climate...

Augmented Reality: yet another business card

*But this one's got a live Twitter hack built in!

http://www.augmentedplanet.com/2009/11/best-yet-augmented-reality-business-cards/

Severe Texan drought receding

*Now that the weather's gorgeous, I'm gone, of course.

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/2009/11/01/1101drought.html

TEXAS CLIMATE

Drought map shows dry conditions disappearing

Sunday, November 01, 2009

At long last, the red is beginning to disappear from Texas' drought map.

After two years in which Central Texans nearly forgot what rain looked like, heavier-than-average rainfall in late September and much of October reinvigorated water supplies and restored greenness to t...

Dead at 98: Rocketeer of Communist China

*This American emigre guy was probably never a Communist, but since he did know Jack Parsons in Pasadena, he may have taken part in weird Crowleyite sex rituals with

L. Ron Hubbard before creating the Chinese space program.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Par...

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0911/02china/

(…)

"After earning his Ph.D. in 1939, Tsien joined the Caltech faculty."

"He was very impressed by people who could really perform at a high level," said Iris Chang, author of a Tsien...

Waziristan versus the banks

*Clearly they meant to kill Pakistani soldiers rather than Pakistani bankers, but a suicide attack on a bank is a remarkable development. Sounds like they were listening to the US Secretary of State when she taunted extremists with being unable to build any prosperity.

*I suppose there's some reasonable prospect that destroying Pakistani banks would actually *increase* Pakistan's prosperity. And given that most Al Qaeda guys are Saudi, you have to wonder if a heap of cash is likely to...

The top 12 things he heard from VCs when pitching Augmented Reality

*It's pretty good stuff. Very fly-on-the-wall.

http://www.curiousraven.com/home/2009/10/30/venture-capital-and-augmented-reality.html

*I wonder what'll happen to our civilization when people realize that financiers don't really do very much for the privilege of mishandling all the money. They work extremely hard, don't get me wrong — they just don't allocate funds very effectively. Societies top-heavy with financiers are in visible, physical decline — empty houses, unhealthy populations...

Italian Organized Uncrime

*It's the part about the people in the postal queue *not even leaving the queue* and then nodding in knowing sympathy at the robber's distress: that's what makes this anecdote super-Italian.

http://www.ansa.it/web/notizie/rubriche/english/2009/10/28/visualizza_new.html_991490764.html

(ANSA) - Genoa, October 28 - A man who turned to robbery when he fell behind with alimony payments broke down in tears when a sympathetic post-office cashier told him a life of crime wasn't for him.

Antonio M,. a...