I just read “Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Musak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong,” written by Joseph Lanza and published in 1994, around the same time as V. Vale’s and Andrea Juno’s cult classic book, “Incredibly Strange Music.” Lanza’s book was witty, thought-provoking, and informative, and I liked it a lot. It reminds of the […]
Archive of posts filed under the Art category.
Meg Wolitzer and George V. Higgins
Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a Meg Wolitzer fan (see here and here). During the past year or so I’ve been working my way through her earlier books, and I just finished Surrender, Dorothy, which was a quick and fun and thought-provoking read, maybe not quite as polished as some of […]
“Maybe the better analogy is that these people are museum curators and we’re telling them that their precious collection of Leonardos, which they have been augmenting at a rate of about one per month, include some fakes.”
Someone sent me a link to a recently published research paper and wrote: As far as any possible coverage on your blog goes, this one didn’t come from me, please. It just looks… baffling in a lot of different ways. OK, so it didn’t come from that person. I read the paper and replied: Oh, […]
Le Detection Club
I just read this BD. It was great, reminded me a bit of Knives Out.
From the Archives of Psychological Science
Jay Livingston pointed me to PostSecret, which I’d never heard of before, and the above image, which apparently first appeared in 2011. P.S. The image and the title of this post do not quite align. My concern with the journal Psychological Science is about incompetent work rather than made-up data.
Best comics of 2010-2019?
X linked to this list by Sam Thielman of the best comics of the decade. The praise is a bit over the top (“brimming with wit and pathos” . . . “Every page in Ferris’s enormous debut is a wonder” . . . “An astounding feat of craftsmanship and patience” . . . “never has […]
Quino y Mafalda
Obit by Harrison Smith, full of stories: She was a wise and idealistic young girl, a cartoon kid with a ball of black frizz for hair, a passionate hatred of soup and a name, Mafalda, inspired by a failed home appliance brand. Although her creator, a cartoonist known as Quino, drew her regularly for just […]
“Pictures represent facts, stories represent acts, and models represent concepts.”
I really like the above quote from noted aphorist Thomas Basbøll. He expands: Simplifying somewhat, pictures represent facts, stories represent acts, and models represent concepts. . . . Pictures are simplified representations of facts and to use this to draw a hard and fast line between pictures and stories and models is itself a simplified […]
Thomas Basbøll will like this post (analogy between common—indeed, inevitable—mistakes in drawing, and inevitable mistakes in statistical reasoning).
There’s a saying in art that you have to draw things the way they look, not the way they are. This reminds me of an important but rarely stated principle in statistical reasoning, the distinction between evidence and truth. The classic error of novices when drawing is to draw essences—for example, drawing a head as […]
Coding and drawing
Some people like coding and they like drawing too. What do they have in common? I like to code—I don’t looove it, but I like it ok and I do it a lot—but I find drawing to be very difficult. I can keep tinkering with my code to get it to look like whatever I […]
Come up with a logo for causal inference!
Stephen Cole, Jennifer Hill, Luke Keele, Ilya Shpitser, and Dylan Small write: We wanted to provide an update on our efforts to build the Society for Causal Inference (SCI). As you may recall, we are creating the SCI as a home for causal inference research that will increase support and knowledge sharing both within the […]
Calling all cats
Those of you familiar with this blog will have noticed that it regularly features cats. For example the majestic cat featured last week, this lover of Bayesian data analysis here and even my own cat, Jazz is featured here. Sometimes there’s not quite the right cat picture out there – Andrew has even resorted to […]
Resemblance
They’re playing My Morning Jacket on the radio. I think Off the Record sounds just like the Ramones, but nobody agrees with me. Please tell me I’m not insane.
Miscreant’s Way
We went to Peter Luger then took the train back . . . Walking through Williamsburg, everyone looked like a Daniel Clowes character.
Tony nominations mean nothing
Someone writes: I searched up *Tony nominations mean nothing* and I found nothing. So I had to write this. There are currently 41 theaters that the Tony awards accept when nominating their choices. If we are being as generous as possible, we could say that every one of those theaters will be hosting a performance […]
Works of art that are about themselves
I watched Citizen Kane (for the umpteenth time) the other day and was again struck by how it is a movie about itself. Kane is William Randolph Hearst, but he’s also Orson Welles, boy wonder, and the movie Citizen Kane is self-consciously a masterpiece. Some other examples of movies that are about themselves are La […]
The evolution of pace in popular movies
James Cutting writes: Movies have changed dramatically over the last 100 years. Several of these changes in popular English-language filmmaking practice are reflected in patterns of film style as distributed over the length of movies. In particular, arrangements of shot durations, motion, and luminance have altered and come to reflect aspects of the narrative form. […]
Columbia Data Science Institute art contest
This is a great idea! Unfortunately, only students at Columbia can submit. I encourage other institutions to do such contests too. We did something similar at Columbia, maybe 10 or 15 years ago? It went well, we just didn’t have the energy to do it again every year, as we’d initially planned. So I’m very […]
3 recent movies from the 50s and the 70s
I’ve been doing some flying, which gives me the opportunity to see various movies on that little seat-back screen. And some of these movies have been pretty good: Logan Lucky. Pure 70s. Kinda like how Stravinsky did those remakes of Tchaikovsky etc. that were cleaner than the original, so did Soderbergh in Logan Lucky, and […]
Old school
Maciej Cegłowski writes: About two years ago, the Lisp programmer and dot-com millionaire Paul Graham wrote an essay entitled Hackers and Painters, in which he argues that his approach to computer programming is better described by analogies to the visual arts than by the phrase “computer science”. When this essay came out, I was working […]