At a loss?
When do you know it’s time to put your pet down?
thoughts on a holographic universe
Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.
stockholm syndrome
The decision to use Stockholm’s rabbit cadavers as bioenergy to warm Swedes living in Värmland doesn’t sit well with Stockholm-based animal rights activists.
Wikireader
Wikireader can run on two AA batteries for 12 months of normal usage. That is awesome.
Inside Scientology
“Technology,” or “tech,” is what Scientologists call the theories, methods and principles espoused by L. Ron Hubbard — “LRH,” as Natalie calls him. To the devout, he is part prophet, part teacher, part savior — some Scientologists rank Hubbard’s importance as greater than Christ’s — and Hubbard’s word is considered the word. Hubbard was a prolific writer all his life; there are millions of words credited to him, roughly a quarter-million of them contained within Dianetics, the best-selling quasiscientific self-help book that is the most famous Scientology text.
It’s long; it’s bat-shit crazy; it’s fucking fascinating: anyone interested in the capacity for humans to manufacture meaning should appreciate it.
Fiat 500 Abarth
Coming to America, sold by Chrysler, to compete with Mini.
To what extent
do you consider buying an ebook for an ebook reader different from buying an mp3 file instead of a CD? Discuss.
Michael Hurley
From his masterpiece “Portland Water”:
“There’s a stream runnin through the meadow / Why don’t you stop and throw a rock in the water? / I can tell by your eyes that you wanna…”
And I’m sure to the marrow in my bones that Monsieur Hurley will never record a holiday album for the kiddies.
Eric Bogle’s
truly potent anti-war song.
It’s been performed by the Pogues and many others, but Bogle wrote it.
Reading Machines
An essential discussion is brewing on e-readers.
- Tim Carmody discusses single use reading machines.
- Jason Kottke notices that single-use reading machines, the Kindle and the Nook, are geared toward selling books, not reading.
- Marco Arment defends the current devices: “These are great devices for reading, even if you need to use one before you’re convinced, and any objection to their current software limitations is likely to be temporary.”
- Jason expands his idea and responds to Marco’s post arguing that, no,”The problem isn’t that you can’t route around Amazon’s design decisions with clever hacks, but that Amazon chose to optimize the device for reading (and buying) books.”
- Tim reflects, riffing off of Jason’s thoughts, on the differences between reading books and blogs and asks, “What a dedicated blog reader would look like?”
Time for Andrew to put on his thinking cap. In the meantime, what do you want from an e-reader/ebook reader/reading machine?
Bride of the Corn | Let’s get lost
Today I tried but failed to get lost in the corn maze. I was not ravaged in the corn. That comes later in the story.
Read more
The Good Soldier again
“But, at any rate, there is always Leonora to cheer you up; I don’t want to sadden you. Her husband is quite an economical person of so normal a figure that he can get quite a large proportion of his clothes ready-made. That is the great desideratum of life, and that is the end of my story. The child is to be brought up a Romanist.
“It suddenly occurs to me that I have forgotten to say how Edward met his death.”
(Ford Madox Ford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1990, pp. 292-3.)
sleep on it
By which, I assume, unconscious thought means an accumulation of past experiences.
Previous research suggests that sometimes the more consciously we think about a decision, the worse the decision made. Sometimes what’s needed is a period of unconscious thought – equivalent to “sleeping on it” according to the researchers – in order to make better decisions. Here’s how they study this phenomenon:
“[... In a] typical experiment demonstrating this effect, participants choose between a few objects (e.g., apartments), each described by multiple aspects. The objects differ in desirability, and after reading the descriptions, participants are asked to make their choice following an additional period of conscious thought or unconscious thought. In the original experiments, unconscious thinkers made better decisions than conscious thinkers when the decisions were complex.”
The Locative Value of the Nook
Tim notes that the Barnes & Noble’s Nook is taking a decidedly different marketing strategy than the Kindle:
The promise of the Kindle is that you can buy and read books any where at all — that is, nowhere in particular. The Amazon store has no location. You read the books on your screen, and they are technically stored on your device, but effectively, the books are likewise nowhere.
Barnes & Noble, on the other hand, is still committed to the idea that books have that they are most properly browsed and bought and read in specific locations. They say: yes, you can use your Nook anywhere — but the very best place to use it is in one of our stores. What’s more: as long as you’re in the store, you can read as much of as many books as you want. Just like if you were flipping the pages. That’s huge!
Why is this huge? Well, for the same reason geo-locating phones and augment reality are. Technology highest goal has been to destroyed our sense of distance, the vastness of space. Now, however, technology has an opportunity to redeem itself by augmenting the depth of space, by causing us to be more, as Tim says, “location aware.”
Anything that helps us recall our physicality is a good thing, a very good thing.
Hanging Basket
from the comments
I guess I can think about it, though, and find myself suddenly stuck in any of my decades. The thought process involved makes me feel like I do when I scroll quickly down through my collection of thousands of pictures from the past dozen years or so. That flashing of time like sunfish feeding. Lately I’m just a pincushion when it comes to the effects of time. How is it that the past can be so clear, and looking at it makes it even more clear–and yet we are never any closer to stepping into it to say unsaid goodbyes, or to encourage or comfort a person. Stupid life.
entry level Fisker in Wilmington
Fisker is retooling an old GM production facility in Wilmington Delaware to produce an entry level counterpart to its high end luxury hybrid sedan.
The current schedule is to have the car in production by the end of 2012 with volumes getting up to 75,000-100,000 units annually by 2014. Fisker has moved up its development schedule for what they are calling Project Nina thanks to the $528 million low cost loan it recently received courtesy of the Department of Energy. During the announcement, Fisker stated that he wants to export half of the production from the plant while creating 5,000 jobs in the U.S. (2,000 at the plant and 3,000 at suppliers). The local UAW president was also on hand, so it looks like the plant will remain unionized, which is very unusual for a startup auto plant.
Words to Live By
More from Tokyo, including images of the Japanese translation of Norman Lock’s Land of the Snow Men…
Emigre No. 70
When I post about Emigre these days, I never know how much context is needed. Emigre was as essential to my sense of DIY enthusiasm as Gordon Lish, and The Quarterly, were to my thinking about editing and literature.
This 512-page book, designed and edited by Emigre co-founder and designer Rudy VanderLans, is a selection of reprints that traces Emigre’s development from its early bitmap design days in the mid 1980s through to the experimental layouts that defined the so-called “Legibility Wars” of the late 1990s, to the critical design writing of the early 2000s. Featuring interviews with, among others, The Designers Republic, Allen Hori, Rick Valicenti, Vaughan Oliver, Mr. Keedy, Ed Fella, and essays by Lorraine Wild, Anne Burdick, Zuzana Licko, Kenneth FitzGerald, Andrew Blauvelt, Kalle Lasn, Rick Poynor and many more.
the children of asphalt
Notice that I am refraining from the “In Russia, mushroom picks you!” gag in the header:
But reports trickle out from regional rescue services throughout the fall: The western region of Kaluga conducted 21 searches for mushroom hunters, of whom seven were brought to safety, five were found dead and nine were still missing.
Perm reported 11; Irkutsk had carried out 35 by late August.
Aleksandr Zmanovsky, who leads a rescue team near Bratsk, said nearly every year someone goes into the wild and is never found — often because of bears, who so thoroughly bury the remains of a body that “we will never find anything.”
An older generation knew how to navigate by the angle of the light, he said.
“If a person just puts on his sneakers and goes into the taiga, or someone drives him there and he doesn’t know where he is, then of course he gets lost,” Mr. Zmanovsky said. “I call those people the children of asphalt, those who grew up in the city. People who grew up in villages, they don’t get lost.”
spam names
Faye Hackett
Madge Dumas
Words fail me
Just take a listen.
(On a much healthier note, the Zombies’ Odessey & Oracle was just at number 3 in the Amazon mp3 album sales chart.)
apples
Local apples don’t last long on the table.
All that we See is Vision,
from Generated Organs gone as soon as come, Permanent in The Imagination, Consider’d as Nothing by the Natural Man.
(William Blake. From the text accompanying his engraving of the Laocoön. Circa 1826-1827.)
I hate
floss and flossing, and when cotton candy (which I also hate) is called floss. I hate when ads say fleece (a slant rhyme for floss) instead of sweat pants and sweat shirts, and I hate it when it’s cold enough to wear sweat pants and sweat shirts (which it is right now in Alamo). I hate rain, mist, fog, sleet, drizzle, cloud cover (as opposed to individual and widely separated clouds, which are tolerable), humidity, and winter. I hate winter. Did I mention that I hate winter? Oh, yeah, I hate winter.
