the tweney review

Most tai chi chuan (aka taijiquan) videos are New Age snoozers of the yoga-hippies-on-the-beach variety. You’d never guess from them that tai chi is originally a martial art with serious defensive and offensive applications. That’s why I applaud Internal Damage: Advanced Tai Chi Chuan for Combat (DVD, $40). The instructor, Glenn Hairston, is a security professional, bodyguard, and former cop. His video was filmed entirely on an urban outdoor basketball court, with weeds coming up through the cracks and graffiti on the walls. The soundtrack is badass hip-hop. And the entire focus of the video is on how you can use different parts of the Yang style tai chi form in hand-to-hand combat.

Hairston does gloss over some critical details (”push with full body energy” — but how to do that right, well, that could take literally years of study). More annoyingly, there are no chapter markers in the DVD so you just have to fast forward and reverse to find the parts you want. But these are quibbles. In a showdown between the yoga hippies and Hairston, my money is definitely on the big black guy.

“Gee, what a beautiful sunset! If only I had an inspiring Zen poem to make this moment last forever.” Mr Haiku (from the engaging Duke of Uke)

Without trying to defend the clueless Senator Ted Stevens, I still have to ask: Why was it stupid for him to say the Internet is a “series of tubes” but it’s smart when people in the know call it a “bunch of pipes“? Huh? (Yeah, I know Doc says it’s not just pipes, it’s also a marketplace, which as we know means it’s also a conversation.) Here’s a map of all those pipes, btw. Looks like a big clusterfuck of tubes, actually, more than a “series.”

Here’s a story I wrote a couple months ago that I really had fun with. The working title was “the palimpsest in the synchrotron,” which I loved, just because I got to use the words “palimpsest” and “synchrotron” in the same sentence. Over and over again. Just try saying it aloud, and you’ll see what I mean: “The palimpsest in the synchrotron.” Fun, isn’t it?

Wired 14.07: START: Blast to the Past

To decode da Vinci, you need a firm grasp of art. To learn from Archimedes, you need to get your hands on something a bit more sophisticated. Like a synchrotron that accelerates electrons to nearly the speed of light to produce x-rays. At least, that’s what scientists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center are using to reveal works by the ancient Greek mathematician that are hidden in 1,000-year-old parchment.

After pulling my hair out for a few hours, I learn that Internet Explorer doesn’t render table widths exactly as you specify them in the “WIDTH” properites, unless you add “table-width: fixed” to the table’s style sheet. Aarrgh. IEBlog : Table Rendering

I can’t find a decent explanation anywhere of why the #1 soccer player in France would headbutt another player in the final moments of the big game. This is as good as any: “the lofty hermeneut within me saw it as the supreme existentialist gesture—le grand refus—at the very moment of being inducted into multicultural sainthood by Chirac.” Barry Yourgrau: Oh, Zidane, Zidane, What Have You Done?

BTW, video (the only source, thanks to the uptightness of FIFA) is here in a highlights clip, about 1′30″ from the start.

Kyle MacDonald started with a single red paperclip, and, through a series of trades, managed to exchange it for a whole house: one red paperclip

Leaving aside the tiresome journalists vs bloggers debate for a moment, here’s a chewy piece by Tom Stites about the failings of newspapers over the past 10-20 years to address the needs of all citizens. In fact, newspapers have been deliberately turning away readers from the bottom tiers of the economy, Stites persuasively argues:

What really makes me twitch is that the amount and distribution of serious reporting that people can read are both dwindling, and they’re dwindling in a way that all but cuts off citizens who are less than affluent – the hourly wage earners, the marginally self-employed, the Wal-Mart shoppers, the regular folks of America.

… what we’re talking about here is a class divide – two classes of citizens, one that’s well served with quality reporting and one that’s left to the vagaries of the manipulators. Given our country’s cherished values, this is a disgrace. And it is a terrible threat to democracy, which we all know can’t function without a well-informed citizenry.

Tom Stites: Is Media Performance Democracy’s Critical Issue?

Excellent guiding principle: “Concrete is much easier to work with before it is poured.” Todd Lappin - 15 Minutes of Madness