Digital, Paper, Notes, Bits.
There is a world of difference, psychologically speaking, between the passive observation that things don’t work out very well, and the active, penetrating insight that complex systems exhibit unexpected behavior.
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The former is paralyzing. The latter is predictive.
This is an example of what happens in a market-based system: any clash between generating profit and protecting the natural world is resolved in favour of business, often with the help of junk science. Only those components of the ecosystem which can be commodified and sold are defended.
— The Self-Hating State (via burningfp)
Source: burningfp
All the components in a smartphone — the sensors, the GPS, the camera, the ARM core processors, the wireless, the memory, the battery — all that stuff, which is being driven by the incredible economies of scale and innovation machines at Apple, Google, and others, is available for a few dollars. They were essentially “unobtainium” 10 years ago. This is stuff that used to be military industrial technology; you can buy it at RadioShack now.
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Hardware startups - Chris Dixon (via iamdanw)
I remember sketching a networked device with a GPS in it circa 2003, and being told, “you’re never gonna be able to prototype that.” And they were right.
It’s pretty damn amazing, what’s changed in the last 10 years.
(via iamdanw)
Source: cdixon.org
When we finally added thumbnail views we launched it with distinct “file not found” and the “image not digitized” icons. But there’s also a necessary third icon that no one in the museum world ever seems eager to talk about: An icon for images that have been digitized but that can’t be shown because they haven’t been licensed or some equally insane restriction.
— [this is aaronland] you’ll design thank us in the morning (via iamdanw)
(via iamdanw)
Source: aaronland.info
What’s impossible to ignore is how many of the individuals diagnosed with mental disorders are essentially anti-authoritarians. This was potentially a large army of anti-authoritarian activists that mental health professionals are keeping off democracy battlefields by convincing them that their depression, anxiety, and anger are a result of their mental illnesses and not, in part, a result of their pain over being in dehumanizing environments.
— Bruce E. Levine (How psychologists subvert democratic movements)
(via notational)
Source: zcommunications.org
We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified — how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don’t know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.
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Richard Feynman, born on May 11, 1918, on the role of scientific culture in modern society – timeless, remarkably timely read.
Pair with how ignorance drives science.
(via explore-blog)
(via explore-blog)
Smart bookmark
This object was in common use in medieval libraries, even though very few survive today. It’s a bookmark - and a smart one for that matter. As with our own bookmarks, it tells you where you are in the book: the rope was attached to the binding and placed between two pages. The reader subsequently pulled down the marker along the rope to the line where he had stopped reading. Since an open medieval book often presented four text columns, the reader then turned the disk to indicate in which column he had left off. In this case we read “4” in medieval Arabic numerals - the column on the far right. So this tiny piece of parchment marks it all: page, column and line. That’s what I call smart.
Source unknown, likely 13th or 14th century
(via awesomearchives)
Source: erikkwakkel
Just as lifestyle choice served as a flawed but logical response to political impotence, so BrewDog offers revolution not just as a PR gimmick, but as a way of absolving our inability to meaningfully change the world under capitalism – a phenomenon pithily summarised by Slavoj Žižek when he observed of Starbucks’s green marketing that “you can remain just a consumerist because your altruistic nature, solidarity with poor, is included in with the price.” The ale makes our rebellion for us – only our presence as customer is required.
— Byron, Brewdog, and the recuperation of radical aesthetics | openDemocracy (via iamdanw)
Source: iamdanw
Large systems usually operate in failure mode.
When a system is set up to accomplish some goal, a new entity has come into being — the system itself. No matter what the “goal” of the system, it immediately begins to exhibit system behavior; that is, to act according to the general laws that govern the operation of all systems. Now the system itself has to be dealt with. Whereas before, there was only the problem — such as warfare between nations, or garbage collection — there is now an additional universe of problems associated with the functioning or merely the presence of the new system.
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Put another way: When faced with a problem, you might try building some sort of system to address that problem.
An example of the former is Neal Stephenson’s Heiroglyph Project. Stephenson wants to push science fiction authors to tell stories that can inspire the doing of new Modernist-scale dreams. Personally, he wants to build a 2km tall tower to make it cheaper to put things into space.
To this, I say: fuck yeah. We need these big dreams to try to dynamite us out of our incrementalism (in both physical and digital innovation). If Neal and his buddies can do it then I’d love to see them take the scale of Modernist ambition and prove that it can be done without the attendant de-humanizing that lead us to reject Modernism in the 20th Century.
— On Thingpunk | Ideas For Dozens (via iamdanw)
(via iamdanw)
Source: urbanhonking.com
If you look back at what happens since that time there have been a lot of measures introduced to impose discipline. Take something as simple as raising tuition fees – it’s much more true in the US than elsewhere, but in the US tuition is now sky high – in part it selects things on a class basis but more than that, it imposes a debt burden. So if you come out of college with a big debt you’re not going to be free to do what you want to do. You may have wanted to be a public interest lawyer but you’re going to have to go to a corporate law firm. That’s quite a serious fact and there are many other things like it. In fact the drug war was started mainly for that reason, the drug war is a disciplinary system, it’s a way of ensuring that people are kept under control and it was almost consciously designed that way… The idea of freedom is very frightening for those who have some degree of privilege and power and I think that shows up in the education system too. And in the workplace… for example, there’s a very good study by a faculty member here, who was denied tenure unfortunately, who studied very carefully the development of computer controlled machine tools – first developed in the 1950s under the military where almost everything is done…
— Noam Chomsky (via azspot)
(via rafaelfajardo)
Source: newleftproject.org
The problem with winking to take a picture, or looking at something to select it, or nodding to approve, is that these gestures already have existing, established meaning. Overloading existing behavior with new semantics is bound to create problems.
Source: ignorethecode.net
The approach of practical, consumer-grade augmented reality confronts us with a interlocking series of concerns, ranging from the immediately practical to the existential.
Source: speedbird.wordpress.com
I want to jump up on the table and scream, “Do you know how lucky we are to be doing this? Do you understand that the only way to repay that karmic debt is to make something good, is to make something ambitious, something beautiful, something memorable?
— Overheard: Steven Soderbergh | Film Comment | Film Society of Lincoln Center
