JessicarulestheUniverse

Goodbye, Eureka

jessicazafra — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 16:00:59 +0000

Of course age is a factor. If I were in school right now, I would think that Wolfram Alpha is the greatest thing ever, the savior that would liberate me from the torments of math. Wolfram Alpha is a search engine that solves calculus, physics, geometry, chemistry problems. You type in the problem, press enter, [...]

The edge of chaos

jessicazafra — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 05:57:28 +0000

HAVE you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as to why you had that particular idea at that particular time? You may think that such fleeting thoughts, however random they seem, must be the product of predictable and rational processes. After all, [...]

Free for free

jessicazafra — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:01:19 +0000

Putting his, uh, no money where his mouth is, Chris Anderson has made his book Free available for free on the net. You can’t download or print it, but you can read it on the browser. Update. Several readers have pointed out that there is a geographical restriction on the site. So Free is NOT free [...]

The Matrix Unbound

jessicazafra — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:00:42 +0000

Edsa, Makati, Thursday afternoon. NYT foreign editor Roger Cohen succumbs to Federer love. People develop Federer obsessions the way teenagers have crushes. They can’t get the guy out of their heads. The late novelist David Foster Wallace, a devotee, said of one Federer forehand against Andre Agassi that, “It was impossible. It was like something out of [...]

Carbon-based life forms

jessicazafra — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:00:22 +0000

After 48 hours of self-quarantine I went to my lunch appointment at Lusso in Greenbelt 5 (facing the garden, across the pond from the museum). To congratulate myself on not having the flu, I had the Lusso demi-pound burger with foie gras. It’s eeevil. I recommend it to anyone who likes meat. However, you may have [...]

The Purest MacGuffin

jessicazafra — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:00:44 +0000

Michael Wood on Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest in the LRB. North by Northwest? Witty, stylish thriller where a man can almost get killed in the middle of nowhere and later scramble about the face of Mount Rushmore? Film where the notion of real-life probability is not just abandoned but lampooned, Hitchcock’s finest attack on the [...]

Is free the future? Is the future free?

jessicazafra — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:00:01 +0000

Malcolm Gladwell reviews Chris Anderson’s Free in TNY. As an author Gladwell is too eager to see connections where there are none (i.e. Nambobola na yata), but this review is solid. . . .“Free” is essentially an extended elaboration of Stewart Brand’s famous declaration that “information wants to be free.” The digital age, Anderson argues, is [...]

You need to see The Fog of War.

jessicazafra — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:27:59 +0000

Robert S. McNamara, Architect of a Futile War, Dies at 93. He had spent decades thinking through the lessons of the war. The greatest of these was to know one’s enemy — and to “empathize with him,” as Mr. McNamara explained in Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary, “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of [...]

Fuet

jessicazafra — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 07:35:05 +0000

For our weekly vino-vino (as opposed to cafe-cafe and sine-sine) Chus and I went to Barcino in the basement of Greenbelt 5. It’s a deli with wine, cheese, cold cuts and a few chairs. First we had Fuet, because how can we resist a fatty sausage called fuet, and Manchego. Then I asked about stinky [...]

Control freaks, it’s time for your nervous breakdowns.

jessicazafra — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:00:33 +0000

In his mind-opening book The Drunkard’s Walk (a mathematical term describing random motion), Leonard Mlodinow points out that in uncertain situations, we use our intuitive processes to make assessments and decisions. “Those processes no doubt carried an evolutionary advantage when we had to decide whether a saber-toothed tiger was smiling because it was fat and [...]

15.

jessicazafra — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 17:32:24 +0000

It’s Roger Federer with grand slam number 15 at Wimbledon, and history. Fifth set: 16-14. He looked altogether too relaxed, even when we had eaten most of our fingernails. Why do you do this to us? Oh right, he doesn’t know we exist. A big hand for Andy Roddick, who repeatedly refused to go away. Not [...]

What are you reading?

jessicazafra — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 16:00:11 +0000

Lisa Ongpin Periquet is switching between the Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories and Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil’s Legends and Adventures. Jerome Gomez is reading Esquire’s Handbook for Hosts. This elegant, smart, funny book was first published by Hearst in 1949. Jerome’s copy is a 1977 edition, a gift from his sister when he recently moved into [...]