"I came over here because I wanted to kill people."

"The truth is, it wasn't all I thought it was cracked up to be. I mean, I thought killing somebody would be this life-changing experience. And then I did it, and I was like, 'All right, whatever.'"

"I shot a guy who wouldn't stop when we were out at a traffic checkpoint and it was like nothing"

"Over here, killing people is like squashing an ant. I mean, you kill somebody and it's like 'All right, let's go get some pizza.'"

The next time I saw him, in a front-page newspaper photograph five months later, he was standing outside a federal courthouse in North Carolina, where he had pled not guilty to charges of premeditated rape and murder. The brutal killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and her family in Mahmudiyah that he was accused of had taken place just three weeks after we talked...

from Encountering Steven Green

"I get all my ideas in Switzerland near the Forka Pass. There is a little town called Gletch, and two thousand feet up above Gletch there is a smaller hamlet called Uber Gletch. I go there on the fourth of August every summer to get my cuckoo clock repaired. While the cuckoo is in the hospital, I wander around and talk to the people in the streets. They are very strange people, and I get my ideas from them." --Dr. Seuss

"The right to take photographs is under assault now more than ever. People are being stopped, harassed, and even intimidated into handing over their personal property simply because they were taking photographs of subjects that made other people uncomfortable. Recent examples have included photographing industrial plants, bridges, and bus stations. For the most part, attempts to restrict photography are based on misguided fears about the supposed dangers that unrestricted photography presents to society...

The Photographer's Right is a downloadable guide that is loosely based on the Bust Card and the Know Your Rights pamphlet that used to available on the ACLU website. It may be downloaded and printed out using Adobe Acrobat Reader. You may make copies and carry them your wallet, pocket, or camera bag to give you quick access to your rights and obligations concerning confrontations over photography."

The Photographer's Right

Also see Travel Photography and the Law

"I felt like poisoning a monk." --Umberto Eco on why he wrote The Name of the Rose

"The English department [of the University of Ibadan] was a very good example of what I mean. The people there would have laughed at the idea that any of us would become a writer. That didn't really cross their minds. I remember on one occasion a departmental prize was offered. They put up a notice: Write a short story over the long vacation for the departmental prize. I'd never written a short story before, but when I got home, I thought, Well, why not. So I wrote one and submitted it. Months passed; then finally one day there was a notice on the board announcing the result. It said that no prize was awarded because no entry was up to the standard. They named me, said that my story deserved mention. Ibadan in those days was not a dance you danced with snuff in one palm. It was a dance you danced with all your body. So when Ibadan said you deserved mention, that was very high praise.

I went to the lecturer who had organized the prize and said, "You said my story wasn't really good enough, but it was interesting. Now what was wrong with it?" She said, "Well, it's the form. It's the wrong form." So I said, "Ah. Can you tell me about this?" She said, "Yes, but not now. I'm going to play tennis; we'll talk about it. Remind me later, and I'll tell you." This went on for a whole term. Every day when I saw her, I'd say, "Can we talk about form?" She'd say, "No, not now. We'll talk about it later." Then at the very end she saw me and said, "You know, I looked at your story again, and actually there's nothing wrong with it." So that was it! That was all I learned from the English department about writing short stories. You really have to go out on your own and do it." --Chinua Achebe

"The war correspondent gets more drinks, more girls, better pay, and greater freedom than the soldier, but at this stage of the game, having the freedom to choose his spot and being allowed to be a coward and not be executed for it is his torture. The war correspondent has his stake - his life - in his own hands, and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute. I am a gambler. I decided to go... in the first wave." --Robert Capa, on D-Day

Roberto Matta

Lyonel Feininger

Hans Bellmer

“For years, I photographed dead bodies"

Letizia Battaglia

Why judging cameras by megapixels is misleading

How to Sleep Comfortably on a Hot Night

Don’t Read This Post (or the Kitty Gets It)!

The Ian Knot: 2 minutes of practice make for faster shoelacing

10 Rules for Writers

1. Verbs HAS to agree with their subjects.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.
4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
5. Avoid clichés like the plague. (They’re old hat.)
6. Be more or less specific.
7. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
8. Also too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
9. No sentence fragments.
10. Don’t use no double negatives.
11. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.

"... So, I had a double life. In the summer I was a teenage messiah with an old Harley Davidson and cowboy hat and cowboy boots, and during the rest of the year I was taking walks with an old man who I had literally run into. I knocked the wind out of him and he said with a thick French accent, "are you planning to run like that for the rest of your life?" I said, "yes sir, it looks that way," and he said, "well, bon voyage." The following week I met him again. He had a long name but he asked me to call him by the first part which to my ears was something like Mr Tayer.

He had no self-consciousness whatsoever. He had leaky margins and he was falling into lovingness with things all the time. He would fall to the ground in the park in ecstasy to look at a caterpillar with his long gaelic nose raking the ground. "Oh Jean look, a caterpillar! What does a caterpillar become, uh? Moving, changing, transforming - metamorphosis. Can you feel yourself to be a caterpillar? What is it to be a papillon, a butterfly? The butterfly is within you! What is the butterfly of Jean in ten, twenty, thirty years, uh? I replied tentatively, "I think I'll be flying around the world meeting different peoples and helping them to be what they can be." This question was my adolescent initiation.

He was something. He had all kinds of strange ways of relating to reality. He'd talk to trees and rocks, addressing them tu, toi, thou. We would lean into the wind and say, "this same wind was once sniffed by Jesus Christ. Alexander the Great - very interesting, Genghis Khan - not so good.(laughter) Here it comes, Jean d'Arc - be filled with Jean d'Arc! Be filled with the tides of history - same molecules." People followed us around, not laughing at us but with us. He created a kind of conversational gestalt. He would look at you as if you were God in hiding and I would leave my littleness behind when I was with him.

We walked together twice a week for a year and half. The last time I saw him was on April 7th 1955. He was very pale. He went off on this extraordinary riff about spirals. It began with a talk about the floor of Chartres Cathedral and brains and intestines and galaxies and evolution. He said, "Jean, the people of your time at the end of the 20th century will be taking the tiller of the world, but they cannot go directly, they must touch upon every people, every culture - you must do that Jean. It will be a great field of mind, we will be turning the corner on the human race."

He said, "au revoir Jean," and I said, "goodbye Mr Tayer, I'll see you on Tuesday." My dog Chicky didn't want to go and was whining. The next Tuesday he didn't come. For eight weeks I went to meet him but he still didn't come. He had died that Easter Sunday but I didn't know it. Years later in graduate school somebody handed me a book without a cover called The Phenomenon of Man. I read it and the words were very familiar. I asked where the cover was and my friend showed it to me with the photo of the author. Mr Tayer had been Pierre Teilhard de Chardin."

From an interview with Jean Houston

Bush Jr molests German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who shrugs him off.

Embarrassingly offensive.

Why isn't this all over the mainstream news?

Imagine if Clinton had done this during his Presidency.

Improving Your Writing from PigDog

Nick Kushner

Why I hate programming competitions

Confessions of a Textbook Editor

Copy What You Like

Why Perl is a Valid Choice

Six things I also dislike about Ruby (and four that I don't)

Polyphasic Sleep (Day 3)

I managed to awaken just fine from my last couple of naps, which I took more or less on time. But now, at a little after 7am, I'm starting to feel pretty sleep deprived. I feel tired and drowsy, and am finding it difficult to concentrate on reading.

Now I am beginning to see the wisdom of making the attempt to switch to a polyphasic sleep schedule when one has absolutely no other commitments. Unfortunatley I have quite a lot of work to do in the next couple of weeks.

I hope I won't crash from lack of sleep or be reduced to a non-functional state, but it may be inevitable the way this is going. I've actually gotten about 6 hours of sleep in the last 24hrs, which is about 4hrs less than I usually like to get, but twice as much as what I'm aiming for. So this is likely going to get much worse before it gets better.

Polyphasic Sleep (Day 2)

Napping for just 45mins was no problem this time, since I didn't even feel the least bit tired or sleepy when the time case. Anyway, I'd only managed to doze off for a short time, and my nap was interrupted by a phone call. I also managed to spontaneously get up one minute before the alarm was set to ring.

Polyphasic Sleep (Day 2)

I think I should rename this "The Oversleep Chronicles", because yes, I overslept again. Set my alarm for 10:30am, got up at 1pm. This time I have no excuse. The alarm went off. I walked over to it, turned it off, and went back to sleep. The room outside my bed just felt so cold, and my bed felt so warm and cozy, and my mind was so groggy.

I just didn't have the determination to stick with it despite the inevitable discomfort. But now I do. There'll be no oversleeping next nap. I also think I'm going to try napping in my clothes, as some other polyphasics have recommended, so there'll be less disincentive to get out of bed.

Polyphasic Sleep (Day 2)

Well, ok. So I overslept. But I blame my alarm clock!

I got pretty drowsy at around 4:20 am, so instead of waiting 'till 5 like I'd planned, I decided to take my nap a bit early, and set my alarm for 5:05 (since I'm planning to stay awake in 6hr blocks, I decided to get 45mins of sleep each time, for a grand total of 3hrs per 24hrs). Anyway, I awoke not at 5:05 but at 7:39, oversleeping almost 3hrs. But my alarm clock was still on! (though it wasn't beeping when I awoke)

I'm pretty sure this alarm does not go off by itself. So it should have still been beeping when I awoke, though I can't be certain. Plainly it either malfunctioned or I did. I don't remember it beeping, and I certainly did not turn it off. So it must have gone off, if it worked, and I must have slept through it. And if it didn't work then I'm happy to have only overslept 3hrs. Well, the vibrating alarm I bought yesterday should be arriving in the mail any day now. So hopefully that'll manage to wake me, and do so without disturbing those around me.

For now I'll just treat this as my core sleep and try to proceed with my other naps as usual. The question is when to take my next nap. If I hadn't overslept I'd take my nap 6hrs later at 11am, except that I was trying to move my schedule up a bit to be in sync with school, so maybe at 10am. But now I only have 2hrs 'till 10am. I think I'll still nap then, otherwise I'll have totally screwed my schedule up.

Polyphasic Sleep (Day 2)

My second nap was more of a break than a real nap. I did loose consciousness of where I was, but when I came to I felt that I hadn't really slept, just concentrated intently. But in retrospect, I think I did get some sleep, and my initial analysis of the period as "not really sleep" was simply confused because I was half asleep at the time. I also managed to wake up after 20 minutes without aid from the alarm clock, which I'd set for 30 minutes.

I took my nap a little early, at 11pm instead of at midnight, since I'd realized I really hadn't thought things through when I'd started, and had made no effort to synchronize my nap schedule to my school schedule. So the earlier nap is an attempt to remedy this.

I feel relatively refreshed, compared to the drowsiness I'd felt immediately before the nap, but I expect that the effects of sleep deprivation will start to occur within the next twelve hours, as I've only had 6 1/2 hours of core sleep plus an hour of naps in the last 24hrs, compared to my usual 10hrs of sleep. Still, I'd stayed up 'till 7am last night, so maybe I won't really start to feel it until sometime around then.

By the way, I feel I should mention there is something that makes my own situation rather unique compared to other polyphasic sleep experimenters. Over the last several months I've been using a light therapy lamp and a negative ion generator to treat seasonal affective disorder.

I don't know (and I don't think anyone knows) how using these devices is going to affect me while attempting to switch to a polyphasic sleep schedule. Exposure to bright light is supposed to affect the production of melatonin and help to regulate one's diurnal rhythms.

The general advice for people who have trouble getting up in the morning is to use the light boxes just as you wake up for about one hour to one half hour. But what do you do when you're waking up four to six times per day instead of just once, and napping for just 20-30mins at a time instead of getting a full night's sleep?

If I keep using the lamp once in the morning it might make it harder for me to switch to a polyphasic sleep schedule. But if I try using it for a few minutes each time I awake then I'll be in completely uncharted territory. Who knows what effect that will have on my body chemistry or mental health? It might help me adapt easier to the polyphasic schedule. Or it could really mess me up. Or it might have no effect. I simply don't know, and I don't think anyone does. There's been relatively little research in to polyphasic sleep, little research in to light therapy, even less research in to negative ion therapy, and absolutely no research in to combining all three. As far as I know I'll be the first one trying this combination.

This gives me pause, but I think there are many much riskier things in life (like getting in to an automobile). So I think I'll stick with it for now, and leave my therapy regimen the way it is. Later, I might try slowly adjusting the light regimen to be more in tune with my polyphasic schedule (assuming I succeed). Changing the light regimen right away may in fact help me make the adjustment to a polyphasic schedule, but it compounds the unknown factors in my particular situation. Combining all three of these factors is risky enough in itself. There's no need to make it potentially worse by messing with the schedule of light I get during the day as well as the amount and schedule of sleep.

Anyway, I think I'll take my next nap at around 5am. 'Till then.