Vin Crosbie's Personal Blog

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Esoterica

In the Mood Today for East Asia

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I’m in an eastern Asian mood today. Many things have reminded me of it. For instance, Thailand is renown for its Public Services advertisements on television. Here is a recent example, a full movie told in only three minutes: Click here to read Adweek’s story about why and how it was produced.  The same producers two years earlier created a possibly even better Public Services short, about compassion: The story behind that one is here. ∅   Kudos to Chinese pharmaceuticals billionaire Li Jinyuan who took 6,400 of his employees on a nine-day vacation in France.  They arrived aboard 84 commercial flights and occupied 140 hotels.  the cost was €15 million ($18 million). ∅   Who exactly won? Forty years after Communist North Vietnam took over capitalist South Vietnam, an international poll reports that Vietnam is now the world’s most capitalist country. China was ranked fourth. ∅ When traveling to such places, or anywhere in the world, I’d always thought that the best passport to have was Swiss, because nobody blocks the politically neutral Swiss. However, CNN reports that the best passport to have is actually U.S. or U.K., followed by France, South Korea, or Germany, or Sweden, or Italy, or Denmark, Singapore, Finland, Japan, Luxembourg, or Netherlands, and only then Swiss. Those groupings are based upon how many countries the passport holder is allowed to enter either without a visa or by relatively easily obtaining a visa upon arrival at the border. One hundred forty-seven countries permit that for U.S. or U.K. passport holders. ∅ Speaking of travel, it was interesting to see the the CEO of the Starwood Hotel Group concede that his company’s Sheraton brand has become tired and in need of change. ∅ You might say that I’m sensitive to submarines. Although my naval officer father served aboard surface ships during World War II and the Korean Conflict, I grew up around New London, Connecticut, headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s submarine fleet. Seeing nuclear submarines silently leave that port (which was actually across the river in the town of Groton) was a routine sight. By far the most advanced submarines in the world are the Seawolf-class submarines constructed just after the end of the Cold War. These ships indeed are parts of a trio of U.S. ‘superweapons’ that no other nation possess. The other two in the trio are the super-accurate LGM-30G Minuteman III missiles (each capable of delivering within 30-minutes a thermonuclear warhead, […]

Meet Ahmet Merabet, The Muslim French Policeman Who Gave His Life Defending Freedom of Speech

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Meet 49-year old Ahmet Merabet, a Muslim policeman from the 11th Arrondissement of Paris, who on Wednesday (7 January 2015) gave his life defending the right of free speech. He and 49-year-old policemen Franck Brinsolaro, a French Christian, where guarding the offices of the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo when three Islamicist terrorists attacked with assault weapons, killing Merabet and Brinsolaro then 12 members of the newspaper’s editorial staff. It was Merabet’s death that was pictured in a spectator’s mobile phone video.

Data Visualizations of Vital Statistics

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Here are two well done data visualizations by mathematician and software design Brad Lyon and graphic designer Bill Snebold. The first depicts real-time information about births and deaths in the United States. Whenever and wherever one of those events occurs, the map shows it. The second depicts the same real-time information worldwide. (Click ‘Restart Simulation’ if either data visualization doesn’t automatically start when you visit it). The Atlantic monthly magazine explains more background about these data visualizations.

Efficient Days

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A story in the Huffington Post  features a chart from the book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey and RJ Andrews how famously creative people spend their average days. Besides Ludwig von Beethoven, it features people such as Victor Hugo, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, et. a. Besides showing who was a ‘morning’ and who an ‘evening’ person, it’s helped me realize that my most productive working hours aren’t that eccentric. What else I’m reading today: For the first time in the history of the United States, the majority of member of its Congress are millionaires (as is President Obama and six of the nine members of the U.S. Supreme Court). So, is the United States governed by rich people? Quite literally, it is: the majority are people in the top one-percent of incomes.

Is Mass Nudity Art?

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Are nude photographs art? Does nudity still shock you? If you’ve been perplexed by those questions, take a look at New York photographer Spencer Tunick’s ‘human art‘. During the past 20 years, thousands of people en masse have volunteered to disrobe and pose for him. I think his work is certainly art and nudity has ‘paint’ (even when his nudes are wearing paint!)

May my Robot Mix a Drink for You?

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httpv://youtu.be/8zP7yP8hdLE This amazing documentary from the Japanese TV network NHK (which someone on YouTube mistakenly labelled as from the BBC) details  how advanced technologies about humanioid robots have become. Because I think NHK erred by starting the documentary with an artist’s robot, rather than with something more interesting, feel free to start this video as 4 minutes 15 seconds.  This clips ends unexpectedly after 48 minutes, but continues (with a bit of overlap) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrBWsSFgNsM Expect to see these robotic being around town in 2020. I’ll then be asking you if my home robot recognize who you are, greet you at the door, escort you to me, then get us some tea, coffee, or some other beverage?

My Favorite Quotations

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“The most beautiful makeup for a woman is passion. But cosmetics are easier to buy.” – Yves Saint Laurent. “Don’t tell me how educated you are; tell me where you have traveled.” – Mohammed. “All is flux, nothing stays still. Nothing endures but change.” – Heraclitus. “The seen is the changing; the unseen is the unchanging.” – Plato. “It is not certain that everything is uncertain.” – Pascal. “The future is here. It’s just unevenly distributed.” – William Gibson. “If you want to know the future, invent it.” – Peter Drucker. “The most important skill to learn is the skill to learn new skills.” – Paul Bourke. “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” – Einstein. “They were there looking for people who had the talent to think outside the box. It never occurred to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing.” — Malcolm Gladwell. “An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents. … Its opponents gradually die out and the growing generation is familiar with the idea from the beginning.” — Seventy-eight year-old, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Planck in 1934. “Some see the glass as half empty, some see the glass as half full. I see the glass as too big.” — George Carlin. “Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men the most.” – Thucydides. “I have often reflected that the causes of the success or failures of men are dependent on their ability to suit their manner to the times.” — Machiavelli. “Out of clutter, find simplicity. From discord, find harmony. In the middle of difficulty, lies opportunity.” – Einstein. “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your [creative] work.” – Flaubert. “”Do not deny the classical approach, simply as a reaction, or you will have created another pattern and trapped yourself there” – Martial artist Bruce Lee. “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” – Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow “This is a great wall.” – U.S. President Richard Nixon at the Great Wall of China, February 1972.

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A Fourth Chapter in Life

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“American lives have no second acts,” wrote the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. His fellow novelist Ernest Hemingway disagreed, as do I. My life is now in its fourth chapter or act, I’ve realized as I start another new year. My first was as the eldest child of newspaper publishers in a New England small town. I was skinny and studious, which made bullies prone to pick at me. Indeed, I was told by my parents that I needed to behave well due to their positions in town. And I was over-protected by them, forbidden to join any school sport team lest I get injured. I chafed during this chapter of my life. Going away to college began the second chapter, marked by liberty, bits of exuberance, and romantic and career disasters. I became wild in college, the opposite of studious and over-protected. The liberty of living on my own, unrestrained by parents or their legacy in my hometown, was too seductive to resist. I got into a lot of trouble in college and eventually stopped attending classes. I left college because I didn’t know what I really wanted to do for a living. I went to work for my family’s newspaper for a few years. During that time, I met a coed at a nearby university, who I then lived with for eight years. She also wanted to work for my family’s newspapers, but there was something about her that troubled my surviving parent, who said no. So, I chose her over family and left my family’s business. I joined a brand name journalism company which unbeknownst to me was failing after 70 years. She and I bought a house; the company I joined went bankrupt twice; and the stress of saving it and my mortgage strained my marriage. Next I knew, the woman I lived with had had multiple affairs, ultimately running off with a guy when his wife alerted me to my woman’s second (or third?) adultery. I lost my love, home, and job. Rebuilding my life from that rubble was the third chapter. I repaid the financial debts from my failed mortgage and marriage (my ex- also ran away from the former) and built from scratch a career in New Media (fortunately from its early days). Within ten years, I was speaking professionally at conferences worldwide and had clients on five of the six settled continents. Within 15 years, […]

A Eulogy for My Mother

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Delivered by Vincent Bartlett Crosbie Funeral of Lucy May Bartlett Crosbie Friday, January 6, 2012 St. Joseph’s Church 99 Jackson Street Willimantic, Connecticut, USA   Forgive me if my voice quavers or breaks. Outside as my role as her son, I’ve given perhaps 100 speeches, to up to a thousand people. But this will be the most difficult I’ve ever given: The eulogy for Lucy before her closest friends. All who knew Lucy knew that she was as integral to Eastern Connecticut as are the Willimantic, Shetucket, and Thames rivers. And like those rivers, her life was enriched by various streams: The headspring of these streams was the legacy she inherited at a young age: The daily newspaper her great-great-grandfather founded in 1877 and which the family has operated ever since. She never had to find a purpose in life. The Chronicle was the effervescent stream that gave her life purpose. That purpose was to ensure the flows, ebbs, eddies, and course of news and information about the area’s communities. To satisfy the thirsts of people who wanted to know what was going on in the town where they lived. She was the reporter’s reporter. If she couldn’t find a reporter to report the story, she would do it herself. (Indeed, it wasn’t unusual for police or firemen to see the Chronicle’s publisher among the first responders at a blaze or accident. On the day she died I finally disconnected the police/fire radio in her home.) Her standards of journalism were high. Those who worked for her know that she brooked no inaccuracies, never meandered from objectivity. She was a font of local knowledge. The high water marks of her work were probably the 100th and 125th-year commemorative editions of the Chronicle and 275th and 300th-year editions about the founding of the town of Windham, each of which offered a flood of historical information and stories about this community—most written by Lucy. (She even wrote a history book about Groton Long Point, the community where for decades she spent summers.) Her career, which lasted for 66 years, ran a remarkable course. She began working part-time at the Chronicle at age 16, one month after the death of her father, at the time the newspaper’s publisher. She then completed in just three years a B.A. in Management from Boston University, thereafter working for the Chronicle for the rest of her life. In […]