February 2009
22 posts
2 tags
Exploring Logo Designs with Mathematica →
As starting points for design explorations, corporate logos are ideal. They often distill a single idea into simplified geometric form that is straightforward to parameterize in Mathematica. Once a logo is in Mathematica, exploring its parameter space quickly leads to the discovery of new graphic phenomena, emergent forms, unexpected relationships, and burgeoning lines of inquiry. Mathematica’s...
2 tags
Watch Paul Graham write an essay →
Watch as entrepreneur, essayist, and all around genius Paul Graham writes and edits an essay using a new playback feature for Etherpad.
1 tag
WatchVideo for Royksopp’s new track Happy up Here from the upcoming album of the same name.
2 tags
The Euro Invasion of France (2002) →
The euro has homogenised a variety of coinage that was as colourful as it was impractical. Euro notes are identical throughout the entire eurozone. The coins still carry a national imprint (2) on one side, though: member states of the European monetary system are allowed to apply national logos and symbols on the coins minted in (or for) their own country; the amounts of these nationally minted...
3 tags
The Unabomber Was Right →
Ted Kaczynski, the convicted bomber who blew up dozens of technophilic professionals, was right about one thing: technology has its own agenda. The technium is not, as most people think, a series of individual artifacts and gadgets for sale. Rather, Kaczynski, speaking as the Unabomber, argued that technology is a dynamic holistic system. It is not mere hardware; rather it is more akin to an...
Pertinent Terms: Regulatory Capture →
Regulatory capture is a term used to refer to situations in which a government regulatory agency created to act in the public interest instead acts in favor of the commercial or special interests that dominate in the industry or sector it is charged with regulating.
- Wikipedia
2 tags
Dmitry Orlov: Social Collapse Best Practices →
“I would like my insights to be of help during these difficult and confusing times, for altruistic reasons, mostly, although not entirely. This is because when times get really bad, as they did when the Soviet Union collapsed, lots of people just completely lose it. Men, especially. Successful, middle-aged men, breadwinners, bastions of society, turn out to be especially vulnerable. And when...
1 tag
1 tag
Oh wow. Bottles.
A friend of mine remarked recently that she thought I had good taste in containers. Which, on reflection, might be the result of a heuristic I developed awhile back when deciding how much money to spend on stuff.
I reasoned that the stuff you have to deal with on a daily basis, or that performs an essential duty, should be of the highest quality that one can afford at the time (given other...
1 tag
2 tags
NYTimes: The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art! →
“Quality,” primarily defined as formal skill, is back in vogue, part and parcel of a conservative, some would say retrogressive, painting and drawing revival. And it has given us a flood of well-schooled pictures, ingenious sculptures, fastidious photographs and carefully staged spectacles, each based on the same basic elements: a single idea, embedded in the work and expounded in an artist’s...
1 tag
1 tag
Crispin Sartwell's Translation of the Tao de Ching... →
“…the Tao Te Ching is an anarchist political text, and its radical attack on political authority and wealth have often been obscured by translators: I have tried to restore a sense of its pointed political critique, its direct attack on inequalities of wealth and power in ancient China. Finally, I regard the work as more playful and aware of its paradoxes than most other translations...
1 tag
Ranking and Mapping Scientific Knowledge →
The Eigenfactor Project and Moritz Stefaner collaborate in these interactive visualizations “based on Eigenfactor Metrics and hierarchical clustering to explore emerging patterns in citation networks.” Yeah… or in other words, this series of four visualizations - radial diagram, stacked, clustering, and network map - explore journal article citations.
via FlowingData
1 tag
Global recession - where did all the money go? The... →
1 tag
What a SWAT team did to Cheye Calvo's family may... →
“Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to...”
– Kakuo Okakura, “The Book of Tea”
2 tags
Intermittent Euphony: Keith Jarrett - “The...