In a long piece at The Atlantic, Robert Wright ponders recent arguments about the biological basis of morality. “If Greene thinks that getting people to couch their moral arguments in a highly reasonable language will make them highly reasonable, I think he’s underestimating the cleverness and ruthlessness with which our inner animals pursue natural selection’s agenda. We seem designed to twist moral discourse — whatever language it’s framed in — to selfish or tribal ends, and to remain conveniently unaware of the twisting.”
Month: November 2013
Troubled Bridge Over Water.
In the “Cool Things We Could Build Too If We Weren’t Addicted to Austerity” Department, architects plan to build a nifty Mobius-inspired bridge near Changsha. “The pedestrian bridge is 150 metres across and 24 metres high, spanning the river via a number of different spaghetti-esque pathways at different heights.”
Those Pipes, Those Pipes Still Calling.
Among them, of course, Leo O’Bannon: On its 100th anniversary, BBC surveys the enduring popularity of Danny Boy. “All the flowers are dying, and they will be for a long time, but then they’ll bloom again and Danny will still be on the road. You never know, because somewhere the pipes, the pipes will be calling.”
Another Side of Llewyn Davis.
Heisenberg? Try Cheney.
A late but welcome reassessment from Conor Friedersdorf: Breaking Bad as an analogy for post-9/11 America. “The world dealt us an unfair blow, and we used it as an excuse to break bad…We became inured to the selfishness of our actions. We slid predictably down the slope upon which we stepped, and the farther we go the uglier it gets. We haven’t hit bottom yet or anything close to it.”
A BWOMMPology from Zimmer.
Update: “[R]eading [the Zimmer article] and seeing someone on the inside, who knows exactly how everything happened, outright lying, that bothered me. I just feel the truth on the whole process should be explained once and for all.”
And now we have a BWOMMP-troversy: Inception sound designer Mike Zarin says Zimmer is full of it regarding the origins of the BWOMMP. Having watched all three iterations of the trailer in this link, I’d argue Zack Hemsey’s “Mind Heist” really captures the first BWOMMP in all its glory.