PJH Studios

Author: Patrick

  • Emma Donoghue – Room

    Room: A Novel, by Emma Donoghue, tells the story of a boy named Jack, who lived the first five years of his life in an isolated shed. The circumstances for his sheltered life stem from his mother being kidnapped and imprisoned and bearing the kidnapper’s child, Jack. Jack narrates the story in four acts: life in the room, events leading up to the eventual escape, the escape and initial adjustment and life thereafter.

    Life is the common thread throughout the four acts, and Donoghue uses language to capture the perceptive of an isolated five year old’s view of the world. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it stretches. The simple sentence structure and purposefully incorrect verb tense add to Jack’s proper naming of items within his Room–Rug, Bed, Toilet. At times Jack seems too perceptive or the innocent naivete wears thin, however, he remains an endearing character. Surprisingly, Jack describes his mother well, well enough for her character to be fully realized, and adults and infer the things Jack doesn’t know. Ma, as he calls her has done her best to educate Jack as if he received a normal upbringing.

    The first two acts are tense, with the question–how will they escape, while the last two acts tend to float along as Jack and Ma adjust to their new found freedom. Everything is new to Jack–rain, bees, the entire size of the world. Ma struggles to cope with how much she’s missed, and perhaps the weakest moment of the story is her interview with a TV reporter, where the reporter superficially pities her as a poor subject and questions whether Ma made the right choice in keeping Jack. The dialogue is thin to the point of caricature–the media is only there to exploit the hottest story. Other character interactions are shallow as well in the last act, particularly that of her father.

    Ultimately, the story is about Jack and his growth as his world explodes in a short period of time. Throughout, Donoghue keeps a light of hope on as she illuminates some dark corners.

  • A physicist solves the City equation

    Geoffrey West, a physicist, set out to study cities and urban growth and find variables for growth and decline. Consuming massive amounts of data, he discovered cities are governed by Laws, just like physics.

    After two years of analysis, West and Bettencourt discovered that all of these urban variables could be described by a few exquisitely simple equations. For example, if they know the population of a metropolitan area in a given country, they can estimate, with approximately 85 percent accuracy, its average income and the dimensions of its sewer system. These are the laws, they say, that automatically emerge whenever people “agglomerate,” cramming themselves into apartment buildings and subway cars.

    Cities grow like organisms:

    The correspondence was obvious to West: he saw the metropolis as a sprawling organism, similarly defined by its infrastructure. (The boulevard was like a blood vessel, the back alley a capillary.) This implied that the real purpose of cities, and the reason cities keep on growing, is their ability to create massive economies of scale, just as big animals do. After analyzing the first sets of city data — the physicists began with infrastructure and consumption statistics — they concluded that cities looked a lot like elephants. In city after city, the indicators of urban “metabolism,” like the number of gas stations or the total surface area of roads, showed that when a city doubles in size, it requires an increase in resources of only 85 percent.

    Why do people move to cities?

    In essence, they arrive at the sensible conclusion that cities are valuable because they facilitate human interactions, as people crammed into a few square miles exchange ideas and start collaborations. “If you ask people why they move to the city, they always give the same reasons,” West says. “They’ve come to get a job or follow their friends or to be at the center of a scene. That’s why we pay the high rent. Cities are all about the people, not the infrastructure.”

  • An Intimate Portrait of the Carousel Horse

    An intimate portrait of the carousel horse. Vol. 1 — Southern California is a vintage, specialized photography book from 1982. John R. Cook photographed carousel horses. The copy I looked through contained no forward or afterward to detail what the intimate portraits were attempting to achieve.

    Most of the photos appear to be snapshots and seemingly, there are such subtle differences that the horses are indistinguishable. Perhaps this book could serve as a reference for carousel horses, but these pictures appear about as intimate as the results you’d get from grandma at the family reunion learning how to use her disposable camera.

  • Black Swan

    The ballet Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky serve as both a back drop and an allegory for the film, Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky. Natalie Portman’s Nina Sayers is turned against herself in the ultra competitive, cutthroat world of ballet. The supporting cast of Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey and Winona Ryder serve only to add to the psychological transformation Nina undergoes, from innocent, hardworking dancer, to a self destructive presence, intent on seeking the dark, black goal of perfection. Hershey plays the vicarious, over protective mother who pathologically dotes on her daughter who wails during a key scene later in the movie, “What has happened to my sweet Nina?”

    For the acting, Kunis is good as Lily, seducing Nina to embrace her darker side. Cassel manipulates scenes with Machiavellian intent as the dance director Thomas Leroy. The film is emotionally intense, and visually dark and surreal, and at times jarring with outlandish visuals designed to create a nightmarish fever dream for Nina.

  • Kevin Smith and how to work for yourself

    Kevin Smith on working for yourself:

    Life is mutable; the rigidity of working for someone else doesn’t allow for much flexibility. So create your own ideal universe.

  • Kevin Kelly – What Technology Wants

    In What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly views technology’s evolution from multiple perspectives–the anthropologist, the sociologist, the evolutionary biologist, the technologist and the futurist. Using these perspectives, he examines his core thesis: technology is an extension of our abilities.

    Broken into four sections, Origins, Imperatives, Choices and Directions he combines ideas from various disciplines with stories, documented history and deconstruction of facts. In Origins, evolutionary biology and anthropology explain humans and human interaction with technology. We began as a very simple species, and we adopted tools as we needed them. As homo sapiens evolved, our needs became more complex.

    Throughout Imperatives, he documents history and science with sociology in mind–how does technology affect us as it progresses? How do we reconcile our needs and abilities as humans adapt and grow into higher order civilizations? Technology comes from lower order needs, desiring of higher order abilities.

    Choices begins with Kelly stating that the Unabomber was right. Quoted at length from his manifesto, the Unabomber disdained technology due to it taking over our lives and growing beyond our control. Kelly points out the flaws in the manifesto somewhat cautiously–humans are incapable of fully living without technology. The Unabomber relied on others for tools and materials.

    The last two chapters consist of Kelly’s futurist, philosopher take on where technology is going. At length, he charts Technology’s Trajectories among 10 different areas: complexity, diversity, specialization, ubiquity, freedom, mutualism, beauty, sentience, structure, evolvability. These areas are the same areas that life itself works within, he states. Lastly, in a nod to James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games, Kelly believes that our relationship with technology and ideas will constantly push boundaries and seek ways to grow in order to continue.

    In short, this book is full of ideas and perspectives. One particularly interesting idea he proposes is how many geniuses missed out on fully reaching their potential because they weren’t alive at the right time in history? Further, once a technology is created, in never ceases to exist. It may become rare, but it will serve a niche. If you want to get the most out of What Technology Wants in the shortest amount of time, read the last two chapters. Read the entire book for a synthesis of numerous ideas converging at once.

  • Seth Godin – Tribes

    Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us serves up a compact guide to be a leader of ideas. How should a leader of a tribe, a movement, cause, purpose devoted to a singular mission act or think? That’s what Godin covers with a mixture of anecdotes, stories from people who have led and succeeded or analogy or blunt deconstruction of a point.

    At about 130 pages, it reads quickly with each point or example no more than 300 to 500 words. He writes with purpose and clarity. There are times when his anecdotes seem thin, needing more context or explanation. Or is this a clever trick for the reader to become curious about the person he mentions and Google them?

    If you’ve read other Godin books, similar themes emerge. His emphatic belief that the factory mindset of cranking out widgets is broken. Education that invokes follow the rules behavior is an unsuccessful path. People fail not by the act of failing, but by not doing anything due to fear.

  • A Darwinian theory of beauty

    Denis Dutton gave a TED talk about beauty from the perspective of Darwin. In it, beauty is a representation of the best possible outcome, be it animals (rabbits), art, a soccer kick and on and on. We’re hardwired to recognize beauty, despite its subjectivity.

  • Can technology end poverty?

    Kentaro Toyama worked at Microsoft Research India for several years leading research initiatives but also ICT4D, or Information and Communication Technologies for Development. ICT4D seeks to address global poverty with technology.

    He learned a few things while there.

    Technology—no matter how well designed—is only a magnifier of human intent and capacity. It is not a substitute.

    Just giving impoverished communities access to technology won’t help those communities. They need skills and literacies to operate the given technology. They heed to be shown how the technology will help them in their own environment with practical day to day uses.

    In every one of our projects, a technology’s effects were wholly dependent on the intention and capacity of the people handling it. The success of PC projects in schools hinged on supportive administrators and dedicated teachers. Microcredit processes with mobile phones worked because of effective microfinance organizations. Teaching farming practices through video required capable agriculture-extension officers and devoted nonprofit staff. In our most successful ICT4D projects, the partner organizations did the hard work of real development, and our role was simply to assist, and strengthen, their efforts with technology.

    How technology can address poverty? Look at how it’s widened.

    1. Access: Increase the access to technologies
    2. Capability: Everyone has the same skill level
    3. Motivation: How to apply the technologies and skills to relevant situations