banking.economics.sustainability and other shiny stuff
Who this is responding to an interviewer?
Q: Salinger’s protagonist is driven mad by the ugliness in life. What drives you nuts?
A: The human predicament: the fact that we’re living in a nightmare that everyone is making excuses for and having to find ways to sugarcoat. And the fact that life, at its best, is a pretty horrible proposition. But people’s behavior makes it much, much worse than it has to be.
The answer is here.
Several Circassian men boasted to me that they had kidnapped or "stolen" their wives, in order to force them to marry them. At first I was shocked, but the situation was not in fact what it sounded like. Far from being effectively the rape of an unwilling woman, Circassian bride-stealing is a strategic step taken to force her unwilling parents to agree to her getting married. The stealing is ritualized, and accompanied by a volley of gunshots to alert the parents that it has happened. The couple would never be alone together, and the groom's uncle would normally be employed as an emissary to sound out the prospective in-laws.
If they relented -- which they almost always do -- and agreed to the match, she would return home immediately, and the wedding would be prepared. If they did not agree, she would go to live with the groom's uncle until the wedding.
That is from Oliver Bullough's Let Our Fame be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus.
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From the Codex Atlanticus, this is a letter that Leonardo da Vinci wrote in 1482 to the Duke of Milan advertising his services as a "skilled contriver of instruments of war". From the translation:
6. I have means by secret and tortuous mines and ways, made without noise, to reach a designated spot, even if it were needed to pass under a trench or a river.
So, Leonardo was pretty much Q from the Bond films or Lucius Fox from Batman. But the artist was in there as well...at the bottom of his list, stuck in almost as an afterthought:
11. I can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze, or clay, and also I can do in painting whatever may be done, as well as any other, be he who he may.
Update: If Leonardo was a programmer, his letter might have read something like this:
4. Again, I have kinds of functions; most convenient and easy to ftp; and with these I can spawn lots of data almost resembling a torrent; and with the download of these cause great terror to the competitor, to his great detriment and confusion.
(via nickibinds)
It suddenly makes sense.
Web TV network Current parodies its Silicon Valley brethren from time to time. Here's their devastating Twitter-takedown.
