Bloglines - Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz

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Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz By Meatbomb Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz , Witkacy for short. Artist, photographer, absurdist playwright, surrealist novelist, philosopher, witness to the Russian revolution, art theoretician and critic, the Great Malinowski's closest friend, drug fiend, and by most accounts a raving maniac and self-involved pain in the ass. His greatest novel was sadly prophetic: fleeing east to escape the invading Nazis, and then hearing the news that the Communists were also on the way, he slit his wrists on September 18, 1939 in the village of Jeziory, a martyr and victim to his obstinate belief in the freedom and independence of man against the bankruptcy of ideology and the coming wave of totalitarianism. Previously here, but this guy's work is just too bizarrely compelling, and his legacy too obscure, to not get a little bit more attention.

Bloglines - Complete Digital Issue

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Fine Books Blog Notes on book collecting from the editors and writers of Fine Books & Collections magazine.

Complete Digital Issue By Scott Brown Today we launched a new feature on our website - a complete sample issue in a cutting-edge digital format. A lot of people want to see a copy of Fine Books & Collections before buying it so we created an online version of our January/February 2006 issue. I think the technology's pretty cool - you can flip through the magazine, click the page when you want to zoom in to read. Click again and you're browsing again. You can even print a low-res version. As an added bonus, all the hyperlinks in the text and the ads are live. Personally, I hate reading an entire magazine like this, and we don't plan to start publishing a digital edition, but for a sample copy, I've never seen anything better. So take a look, and then subscribe. Six issues - nearly 500 pages on book collecting in full color - are just $25 (in the US). It's hard to beat.

Bloglines - Findings fractals in the stock market

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Boing Boing

Findings fractals in the stock market By noemail@noemail.org (David Pescovitz) David Pescovitz: Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractals, spoke last week to an audience at MIT gathered by the Molecular Frontiers Club. Mandelbrot focused his remarks on his recent efforts to seek out patterns in the NASDAQ. (Video of a 2001 lecture at MIT, where Mandelbrot touched on this subject, is available here.) The fractal nature of the market is the subject of Mandelbrot's latest popular book co-written with journalist Richard L. Hudson, titled "The (Mis) Behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin And Reward." From the MIT News Office: An unusual type of fractal that comes from a simple equation, the Mandelbrot Set (image at right) is popular outside of mathematics because of its aesthetic appeal and its complicated structure. No one has been able to prove the Mandelbrot Set is true, according to Mandelbrot. "But no one has been able to prove it's not true, either," he said, as large pictures of fractals filled the screen behind him. Mandelbrot recently began to apply his knowledge of fractals to explain stock markets. "Markets, like oceans, have turbulence," he said. "Some days the change in markets is very small, and some days it moves in a huge leap. Only fractals can explain this kind of random change." Link to MIT News Office article, Link to buy The (Mis)Behavior of Markets

Bloglines - Day of the Dead remix contest winners

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Boing Boing

Day of the Dead remix contest winners By noemail@noemail.org (Cory Doctorow) Cory Doctorow: FreeCulture USC has announced the winners in its contest to remix the original film, Night of the Living Dead. There are some fantastic entries! Link