I love this from The Haunted Household by Christoph Niemann
Even more annoying is that our dishwasher is always — always! — already full or not yet emptied.
is a 30-year-old human being, lives in Chapel Hill, NC, works as Vice President of newfangled.com, reads, writes, draws, and thinks about the future.
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Christopher Butler
Christopher Butler
13 Hours in 10 Minutes (via)
"People whose governing habit is the relinquishment of power, competence, and responsibility, and whose characteristic suffering is the anxiety of futility, make excellent spenders. They are the ideal consumers. By inducing in them little panics of boredom, powerlessness, sexual failure, mortality, paranoia, they can be made to buy (or vote for) virtually anything that is ‘attractively packaged."
— Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, pg. 24
"The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers."
— William Deresiewicz, The Disadvantages of an Elite Education
Surfing on Entropy
Brian Eno: People tend to think that it’s total control or no control. But the interesting place is in the middle of that.
Kevin Kelly: Right. We have no word for that state of in-between control. We have some words like “management,” or “herding,” or “husbandry.” All these are words for co-control.
Brian Eno: I call it “surfing.” When you surf, there is a powerful complicated system, but you’re riding on it, you’re going somewhere on it, and you can make some choices about it.
Kevin Kelly: I think I know what you mean. Artificial life researchers talk about surfing the wave of increasing complexity. A very complex system gets close to a certain edge between rigid control and utter chaos - that’s when the whole thing can surf to the next level of complexity. They see this in evolutionary systems. Some go as far as to say that’s what life does: surf on entropy.— Gossip is Philosophy from Wired Magazine Issue 3.05 | May 1995
(via lauterthanbombs:msg)
Brainstem and spinal cord discovered in Michelangelo
Michelangelo, the 16th century master painter and accomplished anatomist, appears to have hidden an image of the brainstem and spinal cord in a depiction of God in the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling, a new study by Johns Hopkins researchers reports. These findings by a neurosurgeon and a medical illustrator, published in the May Neurosurgery, may explain long controversial and unusual features of one of the frescoes’ figures.
"Engaged by brilliant illuminations; challenged by reading in Latin, without spacing between words, capitalization, or punctuation; and invited into the commentary of past readers of the text, medieval readers of Augustine, Dante, Virgil, or the Bible would surely be able to give today’s digitally-distracted multitaskers a run for our money. The physical form of the bound book brought together all of these various “links” into one “platform” so that the diverse perspectives of a blended contemporary and historical community of thinkers could be more easily accessed."
"The function of these images in illuminated manuscripts has no small bearing on the hypertext analogy. These “miniatures” (so named not because they were small—often they were not—but because they used red ink, or vermillion, the Latin word for which is minium) did not generally function as illustrations of something in the written text, but in reference to something beyond it. The patron of the volume might be shown receiving the completed book or supervising its writing. Or, a scene related to a saint might accompany a biblical text read on that saint’s day in the liturgical calendar without otherwise having anything to do with the scripture passage. Of particular delight to us today, much of the marginalia in illuminated books expressed the opinions and feelings of the illuminator about all manner of things—his demanding wife, the debauched monks in his neighborhood, or his own bacchanalian exploits."
— Elizabeth Drescher, comparing illuminated manuscripts to hypertext
Alvin Toffler, 40 years after the publication of his book, Future Shock
Forty years ago, America was gripped by Future Shock. It was a book, published in July of 1970 — but it was also an idea.
But what about their book’s main prediction — the idea that change is speeding up, and that it threatens to overwhelm us? Alvin Toffler says he sees it happening, and that others do now, too.
“In the past, you made a decision and that was it. Now, you make a decision and you say, ‘What happens next?’ There’s always a next,” he says.
Still, the accelerating change doesn’t seem to be driving people crazy, as was predicted by Future Shock. Alvin Toffler says it may be that younger generations have simply become more adapted to change, that it is their culture.
Crazy people usually don’t acknowledge their insanity… Just sayin’
