Links for 2011-06-10

"[S]omething crazy happened in this particular game.

In this particular game, a team won with only three players on the floor. And this was not a "metaphorical" victory or a "moral" victory: They literally won the game, 84-81, finishing the final 66 seconds by playing three-on-five. To refer to this as a David and Goliath battle devalues the impact of that cliché; it was more like a blind, one-armed David fighting Goliath without a rock. Yet there was no trick to this win and there was no deception -- the team won by playing precisely how you'd expect. The crazy part is that it worked."

"This diyogÃ, dating to the early 1880s, was probably made to earn money for the woman who wove it. Beyond that, it's a blanket; there's a plethora of uses for a blanket. What use is there for The Persistence of Memory? It sits in a museum to be gawked at; it has for almost seventy years, since very shortly after it was painted. I don't know if Dalà got any money when the Museum of Modern Art got the painting, but I sincerely doubt money's what he had in mind when he painted it. I've seen various interpretations of the painting, a popular one being that it has to do with the theory of relativity (something Dalà denied). There's a sharply limited number of ways to interpret the diyogÃ: it's a blanket.

That is, I think, why we know DalÃ's name and not that of the 1880s Navajo blanket-weaver: the difference between art and craft is the difference between needing to think about the work and needing to use it in order to appreciate it. "