The Ball Clock
Design without Reach: “Tootsie Pops and a few other household items can be used to imitate a Nelson clock” fantastic!
Design without Reach: “Tootsie Pops and a few other household items can be used to imitate a Nelson clock” fantastic!
To me, The Smiths mean cheap hair gel, unwashed sheets, damp walls, badly ventilated gas fires and impossible expectations. A beautiful fury with everything, because it isn't you.
The Independent Online Edition > Some bands are bigger than others. "It seems entirely right to me that there should be a symposium - although academia needs The Smiths far more than The Smiths need academia."
A revolution is happening based on web standards, it can either help or hurt the Mac, a lot depends on Apple and right now a lot of us don't have a lot of confidence in the decisions Apple is making so it can go either way.
Applepeels: Switching from Apple. I agree. The painful truth is that signs of cluefulness from Cupertino are few and far between these days.
That black vein in shrimp is poo!
I really would like to stop working forever--never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I'm doing now--and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I'd like to keep living with someone -- maybe even a man -- and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence.
Ginsberg in the 50s (a brief excerpt from David Burner's Making Peace with the Sixties).
“Processing is a programming language and environment built for the electronic arts and visual design communities. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, and researchers for learning, prototyping, and production.”
I got on the train the other morning, on the same car through the same doors that I usually do, and instead of turning right I turned left and sat in the seat corresponding to my usual seat. Sitting down, I found a wedge of read newspapers and, next to them, a cheap paperback edition of the 14th century Christian mystical text, The Cloud of Unknowing.
Fortunately, it's a more modern translation than the online version, which I find really difficult to puzzle through. Let's look at a passage from the prologue. The first paragraph comes from the online edition, the second from my newfound copy.
Fleshly janglers, open praisers and blamers of themselves or of any other, tellers of trifles, ronners and tattlers of tales, and all manner of pinchers, cared I never that they saw this book. For mine intent was never to write such thing unto them, and therefore I would that they meddle not therewith; neither they, nor any of these curious, lettered, or unlearned men. Yea, although that they be full good men of active living, yet this matter accordeth nothing to them.
However, there are some presently engaged in the active life who are being prepared by grace to grasp the message of this book. I am thinking of those who feel the mysterious action of the Spirit in their inmost being stirring them to love. I do not say that they continually feel this stirring, as experienced contemplatives do, but now and again they taste something of contemplative love in the very core of their being. Should such folk read this book, I believe they will be greatly encouraged and reassured.
Pitchfork: Daily Music News: “J. Mascis and Lou Barlow will perform together under the Dinosaur Jr. name for the first time in 15 years.”
A digital puff of marijuana, for example, temporarily slows the action of the game like a sports replay. Taking an Ecstasy tablet creates a mellow atmosphere that can pacify aggressive foes. The use of crack momentarily makes the player a marksman: a "crack" shot.
But using each drug also leads to addiction, which can lead to blackouts that cost the player inventory and to demotions or even expulsion from the police force, which halts progress in the game. In measured doses, the substances can make a tough challenge easier, but the makers of the game say it is possible to play without using the drugs at all.
The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > Where a Puff of Marijuana Is the Ultimate Power-Up
O'Reilly Network: Remixing Culture: An Interview with Lawrence Lessig
I was at the World Social Forum, but much of what was going on at the World Social Forum was related to Brazil's leadership in spreading free software and free culture. So the free software movement has exploded in Brazil, led in part by the government, which is increasingly using free software in its own work and requiring it for much of the government's coding work. The free culture movement is being pushed in Brazil largely because of the culture minister, Gilberto Gil, who envisions a future where an increasingly large proportion of the content in Brazil is made available to the world via Creative Commons licenses.
Now the strategy in both cases is to increase wealth in Brazil. The view of free software is that it's far better for Brazil if the technology industry is trained in the skills needed to build and modify and extend free software than if they're trained in the skills of how to implement a patch for the latest Windows virus. That's about technology self-sufficiency.
And in the free culture context, Brazil is eager to have their music spread broadly to increase the demand for Brazilian musicians. They have a project to create a huge archive of Brazilian music licensed under Creative Commons licenses, which will encourage people to get access to it and share it for noncommercial purposes and remix it.
It's perhaps the most exciting place in the world right now for these issues. They're extremely well-educated and committed people there. And the movement is fundamentally political. It's a mix of all kinds of people from Brazil--I mean, particularly young, but all sorts of young people. Men and women, people who have a technical background, people who don't--all of whom are demanding a cultural and technological future for Brazil that is not dependent on someone else. That's the essential feature in both the software and culture contexts. They want a future where they're not dependent on Microsoft and a future in which they're not dependent on rich copyright holders in the United States.
Speaking of Faith | Brother Thây: A Radio Pilgrimage with Thich Nhat Hanh
Forcibly exiled from his native country, Thich Nhat Hanh is currently visiting Vietnam for the first time in nearly forty years. In 2003, Speaking of Faith took a radio pilgrimage with Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh at a Christian conference center in a lakeside setting of rural Wisconsin. Here, Nhat Hanh discusses the concepts of "engaged Buddhism," "being peace," and "mindfulness" with host Krista Tippett.
"He'd done his work," Winkel Thompson said, adding, in Hunter Thompson's own words, "He was a road man for the lords of karma."
Rocky Mountain News: Family says writer didn't kill himself out of desperation
I'm told that this is the place to get burritos in Boston, and indeed possibly the finest burrito this side of the Mississippi.
Only a handful of major-station radio gems remain on the dial anywhere in the country, stations that still fly their flags of ragged independence like beacons in a wasteland of sameness and blandness and endless replays of Beyoncé and Eric Clapton and Sting, while the FCC stands behind them all like a psychotic nun with a giant ruler and a deep scowl and callused nipples.
Mark Morford is big on podcasting, too.
The Duchess of Northumberland’s controversial poison garden has been officially opened.
Why did the Greenland Norse prefer to starve rather than copy the ways of the Inuit? How did the Anasazi fail to notice that by squandering their piñon on structures, they were eliminating a precious food source? And how do we, in this 21st-century global village, continue to live in denial about impending climate change, something every credible climatologist has confirmed?
Judith Lewis: What Did the Last Easter Islander Say as He Chopped Down the Last Tree? "Jared Diamond, The best-selling author of Guns, Germs and Steel, asks whimsical questions with grave answers. In his latest book, he turns his attention to the collapse of civilization."
Arthur Magazine issue 15 is available as a free pdf: Meditation as a subversive activity; Jessica Yu talks about her Henry Darger documentary; "Hotel and Farm" by Ben Katchor and a special feature with lots of other comics; new columnist Douglas Rushkoff; Ian Svenonius has a conversation with the Secret Service. Ok!
Tagwebs, Flickr, and the Human Brain (by Jakob Lodwick)
Tagging, as seen on Flickr and other sites, allows you to organize things in a way that makes sense to your brain. You may also notice that tagging photos on Flickr is the first time that organizing something has made perfect sense.
This is fantastic and reminds me of the eternal golden braid, but I'm a little bit worried that this guy's mind is about to turn inside out like Robert Pirsig's did.
He was arguably the best breaking-news editor of his generation. He had incredibly sharp instincts about the real news angle of any story. He was a writer's editor as well and made substantial improvements to a story without changing the writer's voice or tampering with the style. Rather, he would get the writer to make the changes the story needed and then he would organize the rewritten prose logically so that it really flowed.
Lucien Carr was one of several fascinating real-life characters, like Neal Cassady, Carl Solomon, and Herbert Huncke, who became legendary through their association with the Beat writers. Lucien holds a special position here: he introduced Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs to each other.
When I consider that a good deal of my time is spent running applications like Disk Defragmenter, Scandisk, Norton AV, Windows Update and Ad-Aware — none of which are available for the Mac platform — it doesn't make sense for me to "switch" to a Mac at this time.
Spring wildflowers of the Pohick Stream valley
