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Nov 14, 2011
Mental landscapes
“One thing I wanted to tell you is that I often think of him,” Tamaru said. “Not that I want to see him again or anything. I really don’t. We wouldn’t have anything to talk about, for one thing. It’s just that I still have this vivid image of him ‘pulling rats out’ of blocks of wood with total concentration, and that has remained an important mental landscape for me, a reference point. It teaches me something—or tries to. People need things like that to go on living—mental landscapes that have meaning for them, even if they can’t explain them in words. Part of why we live is to come up with explanations for these things. That’s what I think.”
“Are you saying that they’re like a basis for us to live?”
“Maybe so.”
“I have such mental landscapes, too.”
“You’d better handle them with care.”
“I will.”
—1Q84, Haruki Murakami, p. 516
Nov 13, 2011
Zeloot | The Strange Attractor
Strange and wonderful Dutch concert posters.
Dec 5, 2009
“An outline of the requirements for a computer-aided design program,” Steven Coons, MIT. From the 1963 Proceedings of the Spring Joint Computer Conference.The design process begins with a graphical description of a proposed device or system to satisfy a human need.
To say that the description is graphical is to assert that at the very inception of an idea the designer’s understanding of his creation is almost visceral instead of intellectual. He perceives his idea at first not in the perfection of a well-turned English word description, nor in the precision of a mathematical formula, but in some nebulous assembly of building blocks of structure, vaguely beheld; he ‘feels’ his creation. The sketch forms the natural bridge between these vague stirrings of the imagination and the subsequent precise statement of the refined details of the concept.
Nov 23, 2009
In an electronic age, all that properly moves is information. The massive overlay of antecedent and existent technologies takes on a peculiar character of simultaneity in the electronic age. All technologies become simultaneous, and the new problem becomes one of relevance in stress and selection, rather than of commitment to any one.”Community and Privacy, by Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander, 1963
–Marshall McLuhan, Letter from Toronto, 1960
Jun 20, 2009
via slavin:
Judika Zirzow, 24, visiting her hometown, Hoyerswerda, in eastern Germany, where housing is being torn down because the population is decreasing. (via Germany’s East Declines 20 Years After Berlin Wall Fell - NYTimes.com)
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