Tickets are $25 Euros, and the first 50 registered will get a copy of my book. Register here
Hilton Hotel
Northern Cross, Malahide Rd
Dublin, Ireland D17
Eric Ries will be launching 'The Lean Startup Meetup Group' Dublin on January 10th "Lean startup" is a term coined by Eric Ries. His method advocates the creation of rapid prototypes designed to test market assumptions, and uses customer feedback to evolve them much faster than via more traditional product development practices.
London School of Economics and Political Science
Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
54 Lincoln's Inn Fields, WC2A 3LJ
Most new businesses fail. But most of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach to business that's being adopted around the world. It is changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. The Lean Startup is about learning what your customers really want. It's about testing your vision continuously, adapting and adjusting before it's too late. Now is the time to think Lean.
This event marks the publication of Eric Ries new book The Lean Startup
Registration is from 4pm with the talk starting at 4:30pm with an opportunity for Q&A afterwards, followed by drinks and light refreshments. To sign up Please register here.
The Seminar Centre
The Hauser Forum
3 Charles Babbage Road
Cambridge, CB3 0GT
His book, 'The Lean Startup', is an incredible work. Its only flaw is its name. Eric's principles of innovation apply to any organisation of any type and of any size, and not just startups.
Lean is one of the major trends shaping our world and its impact goes beyond just optimizing our supply chains. Lean startups can be the most capital efficient companies in the world, because they strive to prevent energy from being expended uselessly. Human talent, passion, and wisdom is too precious a commodity to allow it to be wasted.
Topics will be focused on current challenges of the Leancamp participants. Early bird tickets are sold out, but more tickets will be released on Saturday, January 7. Register here.
Roberts Engineering Building
University College London
Torrington Place (@ Malet Place)
WC1E 6BT London
Ticket information here
Mermaid Theatre
Puddle Dock
Blackfriars, London, EC4V 3DB
Register here.
TechHub
76-80 City Road, EC1Y 2BJ
London
There are 16 shots in Lars von Trier’s hauntingly beautiful overture to “Melancholia,” a movie about love, family and the apocalypse. The movie, among Mr. von Trier’s greatest, stars Kirsten Dunst as Justine, a young advertising copywriter who, shortly after she gets married endures two separate yet related catastrophes: A wedding party at an oceanside golf resort owned by her brother-in-law ends with her new husband leaving. This in turn brings on the depression that overtakes her and seems to inaugurate the end of the world or her dream of the same. Many of the movie’s themes are introduced in the first eight minutes, a masterpiece in miniature that is a palimpsest of literary, artistic and cinematic allusions.
1A. The movie opens with a fade from black to a close-up of Justine’s head, with a bit of her neck. Her eyes are closed, and her head is slightly to the left of the center of the frame, with the rest of the image taken up by a gray-white sky streaked with pink. She slowly opens her eyes, her gaze directed at the camera (and us), her face impassive. As soon as her eyes are opened, dead birds begin falling from the sky like stones, an intimation of the disaster(s) to come.
1B. On the soundtrack the exquisite prelude to Wagner’s opera, “Tristan and Isolde” (completed 1859), begins to play. Wagner described the opera as “one of endless yearning, longing, the bliss and wretchedness of love; world, power, fame, honor, chivalry, loyalty and friendship all blown away like an insubstantial dream,” for which there is “one sole redemption — death, finality, a sleep without awakening.”
1C. Ms. Dunst’s character shares her name with the title figure in the Marquis de Sade’s 1787 novel “Justine,” about a virtuous woman who endures a crucible of suffering and, after being reunited with her sister, Juliette, is fatally struck by lightning. Mr. von Trier has expressed interest in adapting the novel, and it was one of the inspirations for his 1996 feature, “Breaking the Waves,” in which Emily Watson plays a doomed, sexually exploited, saintlike figure. “In the end,” Mr. von Trier said in a 1996 interview, “Justine thanks God for his goodness in letting her survive all the calamities — after which she is struck by lightning and burns to death.”
2. A long, overhead shot of a green lawn flanked by two parallel rows of teardrop-shaped bushes, a stretch of water at the top of the shot and a large sundial centered at the bottom. The shot evokes the famous garden in Alain Resnais’s “Last Year at Marienbad” (1961) with its topiary, statues and human figures, which alone cast shadows. Of Mr. Resnais’s work the novelist and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet, who wrote “Marienbad,” said: “In it I recognized my own efforts toward a somewhat ritual deliberation, a certain slowness, a sense of the theatrical, even that occasional rigidity of attitude,” which, he added, “suggests both a statue and an opera.” This fits “Melancholia” too.
3. A shot of the painting “Hunters in the Snow” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, which here burns and shows up again when Justine replaces a book of modern paintings on a shelf with a book that has a reproduction of the Bruegel. The painting also appears in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film “Solaris,” including in a scene in which the dead wife of the lead character — or rather his hallucination of her — looks at the painting before the two of them levitate in each other’s arms, as a Bach choral prelude plays. Later the husband will walk through a wintery landscape that resembles that in the painting. “There’s no doubt that Tarkovsky,” Mr. von Trier has said, “is the master of them all.”
4. This shot shows a blue planet, perhaps Earth, seen from outer space, with a red pinprick to its right. This red point turns out to be planet Melancholia, which gives the movie its title and is hurtling toward Earth on an apparent collision course. Within the frame the blue planet is situated in the same location as Justine’s head is in the first shot and both her head and the planet are roughly the same size, which suggests an affinity between the two. One possibility: the world of the movie is nothing other than a manifestation of Justine’s imagination (head). This planetary vision — along with three others in the prelude — encapsulates the movie’s in broad outline.
5. A woman we later learn is Justine’s sister, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg ), holds her son, Leo, in her arms. She’s walking or perhaps trying to run on a hilly golf course, a line of deep, black footsteps trailing behind her. The artificial quality of the light illuminating this night scene along with the enveloping sense of threat recalls the elaborately staged and spectral landscapes in the work of the contemporary photographer Gregory Crewdson, whose influences include the filmmakers David Lynch and Steven Spielberg. Mr. Crewdson has described his photographs as “about the moment of transition between before and after.” The images in Mr. von Trier’s prelude have a similar liminal quality in that each refers to an extracted narrative moment, and in-between feelings, sensations, gestures.By the way, Gregory Crewdson's work is breathtaking and surreal. I had a chance to see some of his photographs at Mass-Moca and was blown away by them. Here is an example of his work from that exhibition (tip from Kevin Anderson):
Guernica: How would you say that the uncertainty—from political violence, from migration—affects conflict in Karachi?
Steve Inskeep: People don’t know where they stand and what they’re going to lose, and that makes things uncertain. The political parties try to meld people together, but then that becomes a problem. There are parallels here to American cities, which, in the ’80s, with massive rural to urban migration, saw incredible amounts of violence. This has quieted down a bit over the years, and part of that may just have been that they’ve been able to work out better governance. You do have this circumstance in Karachi that because people know things are changing, the stakes are higher. Everyone is thinking, “My home is threatened, my job is threatened, my identity is threatened, my world is threatened.” And that creates a very particular sort of climate, that is linked. I mean, some people respond like the men in the sweatshop, holding on desperately to their village. Others may become like Mohammad Nadir; they marry, set down roots, and have to face the question of, “How am I going to make it work for myself here in Karachi?”
Guernica: Do you think this also engenders the religious revivalism in the city, in response to the uncertainty?
Steve Inskeep: The initial migrants from various parts of India that came immediately after partition were attracted to religiously based parties like the Jamaat Islami, since they were trying to figure out questions about what their new political identity as Pakistanis really meant. Then you have the ’80s and the emergence of Altaf Hussain that united the migrants under the platform of the MQM and gave them another way to identify themselves based on their refugee status. So religion becomes a factor. It may well be that people who feel dislocated turn to religion as a substitute for whatever identity they had before. But there are also larger questions for Pakistan that are seminal. What is this country about, what are the values for which it stands?
Guernica: Karachiites often complain, as do Pakistanis, that they don’t control their country’s narrative in the world, that they’re misunderstood. What do you say to this?
Steve Inskeep: So much has been written about partition and that era, but not so much about what happened after. I really have tried, with this book, to continue the story of what happened after. I think it’s fair to say that the country is misunderstood. At the same time, it’s not like everything is going great in Pakistan and nothing is wrong. I hope that Americans reading this book will pause and consider that this is a complex place that cannot be understood in an instant, and it’s not that they’re all against America or against universal human rights. I thought it important to tell the story of a people who, in their own quiet, heroic way…I wanted to capture a picture of a country that is not necessarily at war with the United States, but is at war with itself.
To Pakistanis, I would emphasize the urgent and absolute need for them to take back their history. People who want a different Pakistan have to find a way to go back into their own past and revive the vision of their founders, that was clearly a tolerant and diverse one, so that they can distinguish it from the one that has been imposed upon it. If they can do that, they can take back this city and their country. Tradition has to be retaken by the liberal forces, so that they can show their values of tolerance and democracy not as novel western ideas but as ones indigenous to Pakistan, as a part of its very creation.
Guernica: Aren’t there Pakistanis already engaged in that project?Read the full interview here.
Steve Inskeep: Let me name three of the people who influenced me, although it’s definitely not a complete list. Ayesha Jalal, the formidable Pakistani-American historian, has rigorously re-evaluated Jinnah’s political strategies leading up to Partition. The result is revealing. Jinnah was not seeking an all-Muslim homeland but rather seeking a way to protect the political rights of people who were Muslim. Akbar Ahmed, a former diplomat and now a distinguished scholar, has documented Jinnah’s life as a man who welcomed, worked with, and even married people of other faiths. Ahmed has argued that Jinnah did not need to choose between a Muslim society or a pluralistic one—rather, that Muslims could welcome minorities in ways that were fully in accord with their faith and its traditions. Ahmed calls attention to Jinnah’s August 11, 1947 speech in which Jinnah called upon his people to set aside “color, caste, or creed.” And then there is Ardeshir Cowasjee, the great Parsi newspaper columnist, who in his mid-80s is a kind of living history of all of Pakistan, old enough to have known Jinnah himself. Cowasjee’s Parsi father, a shipping magnate, was asked for help in creating a national shipping line in 1947. I can imagine no clearer evidence of Jinnah’s intentions, or of his views on diversity, than sitting at Cowasjee’s table in Karachi and listening to this man from a religious minority who was a witness to what Jinnah did and to all that has happened since.
Did anyone ever receive a more exquisite New Year's gift than was given to the German scholar Johannes Matthäus Wackher von Wackenfels, 400 years ago? A booklet of just 24 pages, it was written in 1611 by his friend Johannes Kepler, court mathematician to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. In De nive sexangula (On the Six-Cornered Snowflake), Kepler attempts to explain why snowflakes have their striking hexagonal symmetry.
In his introduction, Kepler writes that he had noticed a snowflake on the lapel of his coat as he crossed the Charles Bridge in Prague, and so came to ponder on its remarkable geometry. This charming, witty work seeded the notion from which all of crystallography blossomed: that the geometric shapes of crystals can be explained in terms of the packing of their constituent particles.
Kepler's analysis of the snowflake comes at an interesting juncture. It unites the older, Neoplatonic idea of a geometrically ordered Universe that reflects God's design with the newly emerging mechanistic philosophy, in which natural phenomena are explained by proximate causes that may be hidden, or 'occult' (like gravity), but are not mystical.
“There must be a cause why snow has the shape of a six-cornered starlet,” Kepler wrote in De nive sexangula. “It cannot be chance. Why always six? The cause is not to be looked for in the material, for vapour is formless and flows, but in an agent.” This 'agent', he suspected, might be mechanical: the orderly stacking of frozen 'globules' that represent “the smallest natural unit of a liquid like water” — not explicitly atoms, but as good as.But when it didn't work, he appealed to the occult forces:
...
Kepler asserted that hexagonal packing “will be the tightest possible, so that in no other arrangement could more pellets be stuffed into the same container”. This assertion about maximal close-packing is known as Kepler's conjecture. It was proved using computational methods only in 1998, by US mathematician Thomas C. Hales, whose proof was published 7 years later (Ann. Math. 162, 1065–1185; 2005). Kepler's vision of crystals as stackings of particles also informed the eighteenth-century mineralogical theory of René-Just Haüy, which forms the basis of all crystallographic understanding today.
Yet in the end, Kepler is defeated by the snowflake's ornate form and plate-like shape. He realizes that although the packing of spheres creates regular patterns, they are not necessarily hexagonal or flat, let alone as ramified and ornamented as that of the snowflake. His failure to explain the regularity of the snowflake is no disgrace, for not until the 1980s was this seen to be a consequence of branching growth instabilities biased by the hexagonal crystal symmetry of ice.
Kepler instead fell back on Neoplatonic occult forces. God, he suggests, has imbued the water vapour with a “formative faculty” that guides its form. There is no apparent purpose to the flake's shape, he observes: the “formative reason” must be purely aesthetic or frivolous, nature being “in the habit of playing with the passing moment”. That delightful image, which touches on the late Renaissance debate about nature's autonomy, remains resonant today in questions about the adaptive value (or not) of some complex patterns and forms in biological growth.
Born in England, Williams was educated at the Charterhouse School, in London, and at Pembroke College, Cambridge, just in time to thrust his way into his nation’s post-Reformation religious controversies. Disagreement over England’s official faith was why radical Protestants, now known as Pilgrims and Puritans, departed to settle colonies at Plymouth (1620) and Massachusetts Bay (1630). When Williams expressed similarly radical beliefs, and faced arrest, he and his wife fled to New England in late 1630. Their need to leave was so urgent that they crossed the Atlantic in winter, ordinarily considered too dangerous a time for ocean traffic. The Williamses settled in Plymouth Colony, and then in Massachusetts, where Williams again annoyed the authorities. When officials arrived at his house to arrest him in the winter of 1636, he was gone.
Williams struck overland, through snow and bitter cold, “wch I feele yet,” he reminisced later in life. He survived because he had help. “The ravens fed me in the wilderness,” he said, comparing himself to the scriptural prophets sustained by bird-borne morsels, though his “ravens” were Indians. With their assistance, he reached the upper bend of a bay that would be named for its inhabitants, the Narragansett. There, Williams bought land from its native proprietors and established a settlement he called Providence, to honor the divine assistance given to him and other Christians on their flights from persecution.Then here is the bit about the separation of Church and State:
And yet Williams seemed determined to offend. “I desire not to sleep in securitie,” he had warned the Massachusetts governor John Winthrop, in perfect self-knowledge of his capacity to be purer than the so-called Puritans. He stated that the colony’s civil authorities could not regulate “the First Table,” those among the Ten Commandments that governed religion; they could prosecute someone for adultery, but not for making (or worshiping) graven images. Next, Williams refused to take an oath of fidelity to Massachusetts, on the grounds that anything sworn in God’s name for worldly purposes was corrupt.
The authorities in Massachusetts were so outraged that having failed to arrest Williams, they tried to obliterate his new settlement. He went back to England to get a charter to protect his colony on his own terms: with a “hedge or wall of Separation between the Garden of the Church and the Wildernes of the world.” In several publications, he argued that the individual conscience should not — could not — be governed, let alone persecuted. If God was the ultimate punisher of sin, it was impious for humans to assume his authority. And it was “directly contrary to the nature of Christ Jesus . . . that throats of men should be torne out for his sake.”
Barry shows how controversial these beliefs were at the time, and in this way reinforces the standard image of Williams as an early proponent of liberty of conscience. But his emphasis on the English context for the controversy neglects Williams’s even bolder insistence that what was true for Christian Europeans was true for others, including Indians.However, the most fascinating part of the review focuses on Williams' views on Native Americans:
In his “Key Into the Language of America” (1643), a dictionary and a cultural anthropology of New England Indians, Williams called his native hosts and neighbors “Barbarians,” yet argued that they had consciences and rights as worthy of respect as anyone’s. He preached to the Indians, but thought that any coerced conversion of them would represent a false faith, an abomination to God. Nor did he think Indians should be deprived of their land. Against the near-universal assumption that America had more land than its indigenes needed or even knew about, he pointed out that they were “very exact and punctuall in the bounds of their Lands, belonging to this or that Prince or People.”
That was even more controversial than the doctrine of religious liberty among Christians. In the mid-1500s, a Catholic theologian, Bartolomé de Las Casas, had made a similar point. While cataloging Spanish atrocities against Indians, Las Casas defended them as inhabitants of a land to which they had rights, and said their lack of Christian faith did not justify abuse of them. Few were convinced. Consider the 18th-century Catholic missionary, Father Junípero Serra. He assumed that Spaniards had the right to take up land in California and that the church had the duty to reorganize Indians into Christian settlements, by force if necessary. Three thousand miles from Providence, at a rest stop on Interstate 280 in Northern California, a larger-than-life image of Serra faces the Pacific. Its back is turned against Williams’s far-off statue, as if also against his radical example of what New World societies might represent.
The United States is part Serra, part Williams. A “hedge or wall of Separation” between church and state was affirmed by the Constitution; rights for Indians were not. Williams would have considered it a battle half-won. He did not think an “American soul” needed to be created — such souls already existed within Indians. By largely confining Williams’s story to the establishment of liberties for America’s adopted populations, without equal attention to the defense of its indigenous inhabitants, Barry has perhaps underestimated his remarkable subject.Read the full review here.
Eid-Ul-Azha Mubarak
Free Download IDM 607 Full Version
Hall of human origins at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History
Religion in America
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Ramadan by CCD
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Seitan and Broccolini with Clementine Teriyaki
Song: Holding Hands Around the World
