YouTubal ligation

I was just watching this excellent video addressing the "blind watchmaker" analogy (suggested by ruthling), and have to ask: does anyone find it possible to follow YouTube comment threads? There's only one level of nesting, for one thing, so if B replies to A and C replies to B, it looks like C has replied to A. More horribly, though, I see the same threads, and pieces of threads, appearing again and again in the comment stream — because, wherever one comment appears chronologically, the entire thread surrounding it appears with it. If A is posted on Monday, B is posted on Tuesday, and C is posted on Wednesday, then the A-B-C thread appears as a unit on Monday, and again on Tuesday, and again on Wednesday. Three comments become nine. This breaks many things, among them page and comment counts. In a thread with twenty replies, it quickly becomes ridiculous; I page backwards through the comments and see the same pages of replies again and again.

I wish the blind watchmaker who designed YouTube would step in.

Now museum, now µ don't

Important note for those visiting Harvard museums: the signs say, in a no-nonsense way, that you need to acquire a photography permit if you want to take pictures. This is daunting, but easily done — they are free, and require only the signing and dating of a form.

adfamiliares and I visited two Harvard art museums today, the Sackler and the Fogg, taking two-thirds advantage of the three-for-one admission deal. The Sackler is hosting a special exhibit on the way classical statuary really looked — i.e., garishly colored and not at all "classical" — based on recent work done in Munich to recover traces of pigments on the ancient stone. It is shocking — my preconceptions were screaming "Coloring book!" and "Action figure!" rather than "Foundations of Western art!" — but it paints (ha ha!) a much cheerier and more vivid picture of the ancient world, and gives its residents more recognizably human tastes. Here's an example, sort of annoyingly munged up with "interactivity," and here is the original. I'll try to post a couple of my own photos shortly.

I'm not aware of anything special going on at the Fogg, but they had a rich selection of religious art that ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous — like the Steve Martin deadpan monk with the comedy knife through his head, and the flying Jesus shooting laser-beams of blood from His hands and feet to mark Saint So-and-So with stigmata. A small but intense collection of modern art lurked upstairs, including a gargantuan sculptural collage of wooden shims and twisted branches that looms over and enfolds the viewer, complex and a bit scary but unified.

We had Vietnamese food at Lê's afterward (their jasmine limeade is a startling, but very effective, mix of flavors), then she went off to church and I went off to Diesel for a mochaccino. Caffeine in a café atmosphere is like a pry bar, unsticking the logjam in my head and letting ideas flow clear and untroubled for a couple of hours. I think I clench up at my desk sometimes; wallowing in overstuffed leather armchairs while developing a foam mustache is good for not stifling myself.