August 2010
2 posts
Words →
A short little video from the indefatigable Radiolab. See if you can find them all.
An illustrated guide to the meaning and journey... →
A brief and wonderful insight (to me) timely as I’m 6 days from registering for that purple bit and signing up for the red (and beyond).
May 2010
2 posts
Bobulate: Confidence for good →
I recently did this thing. I co-founded and am now chairing a graduate program. And I did it by taking a considerable leap from a career as a designer that I’d been growing for more than a decade. Sure, my first job out of college was an educator, and I’ve been an educator on the side ever since….
Welcome to the future
Today, I feel genuinely that technology is starting to stop being technology in the best possible way. My feelings are that up until very recently we’ve been bombarded by artifacts of technology: screens and processors, programs and databases. I like these things, but they’re not what I want in my life.
Today, I own a magic window that displays maps of the entire world, finds...
January 2010
1 post
Futurism
The thing Apple seems to know better than any other company that exists today is pretty simple:
This is the future
What that means is that our science has far outstripped our culture — it always does — and that there is an incredible arbitrage between them. Apple is selling us something out of a dream people had back in the 70s. Something real, physical, beautiful, impeccable.
And one...
October 2009
2 posts
... became a statistic.
I despise this phrase. It is used to invoke the unbelievable, impersonal namelessness that being one in a large number carries. At the same time, though, it shores all of the true human concern that those statistics are seeking to support and suggests that there’s just another nameless casualty gone by instead of an effort to turn away these eventualities. It’s a denouncing of the...
September 2009
5 posts
Addict
I’m addicted to the mindbend. I spend inordinate amounts of time seeking out things that I don’t just not understand but fully cannot twist my head around enough to get at them. Philosophy and language both are happy pastimes, and I’m always on the lookout for more.
But really I feel it’s deeper than that. I’m enticed to look at things through other people’s...
Another old story: Perfectly Fair
Jonathan pulls his hat lower to hide his face. He doesn’t belong here. He huddles his jacket closer, starts to turn away… but he’s caught. The sound of faint melodic laughter. He turns slightly and leans back his head, hoping to catch a glimpse of the world beyond his hat brim. Across the street he sees dancers and mothers and lovers and children. Sounds of joyous music and strains of pleasant...
I Thought This Was So Clever Just 3 Years Ago:...
Corruption in America is reaching, stretching out to a new high. Never before have the sacred institutions held so close to heart been so violently ravaged by the pale forces of ignorance and carelessness. Brace yourself, for I speak not in hyperbole; today it is simply frightful the level of disregard for the immutable laws of grammar and punctuation. This author personally spends endless nights...
“So many languages you speak, that many times you are alive”
– I’ve heard that this is a quote in Polish, though I don’t want to be held to that. I don’t believe it has to have come from any one place, I think it’s kind of the national anthem of a world we’ve been crawling toward since there was language for us to utter.
"It's kinda cool doing stuff you love," he said. →
I suppose I do believe in the power of rock.
As much as my outlook on a place like Pakistan depresses me, news that some strappy, foolish young people are trying to find expression of their strife, their culture, their world — especially in the face of convention and threat — makes me very, very happy. I’d even propose it as a metric of the stability of a country: if your young culture is...
August 2009
3 posts
I feel like we're building ourselves an alien... →
There are conflagrations around the corners
I am unbearably selfish, I state
And these sounds echo in-between my near and far
Each reverberation melts by exponentiation
And then I remain unwaited
Ergodic path nosing its tail
My eyes strain to see beyond their periphery
My ears poised on the very edge of note
My fingers pull at the substance of my experience
All together searching for some hidden warmth
Something refulgent to...
December 2008
1 post
“He smiled at her. “Dude, I’m not doing science,” he replied. “I’m just cheating...”
– http://infovore.org/talks/if-gamers-ran-the-world/
November 2008
1 post
Get Up and Go →
October 2008
3 posts
Affairs of the Wind
Not satisfied with this yet, but satisfied enough
We’ve had great times, you and I
And — no — they really were wonderful
And — no — it’s not you
It’s definitely me
I’m sorry. But I’m leaving you for the wind.
She knows my needs
And now I can hardly breathe without her
One day we just collided, we two
I was pushed back a bit and grinned
But I think now I...
A Poem in Emoticons →
Love Song
Separated by skin tone
We practice our footwork
I right, she left: we miss
By the warmth of human breath
Two bodies not quite alone
Tumbling around vibrating roots
From the whirling night and technicolor light
Of some sprawling neon tree
Our past lives behind us grown
Like ballet caught by low-speed film
A twirled cartography extending from routine
Us tracing fleurons with footfalls...
September 2008
10 posts
It's like winning the cosmic lottery →
The Feeling of Flying — The One That Can Only Be...
At any moment, with any stroke, I push myself further and further into the realization that as I speed forward — bursting, screaming and still accelerating all these lights into phosphorescent streaks in my periphery — at any moment, I could die. My wheel sticks, my brake slips, or the friction in every bearing could hit a harmony and rattle my body into dust. I probably won’t, I think now,...
Peptides
Reading I. J. during Biochemistry lecture doesn’t induce much guilt.
With oh-so-many jaunts to the end of the book, checking footnotes involving descriptions complex psychoactive drugs, it actually feels very apropos.
I draw a large circle in the sand, straining my arm to enclose the moment.
“See this? This is what I mean by the ring.”
Three more, smaller rings — one circumscribed, all tangental — get drawn now.
“Using this ring, they’re going to make whole new universes. A thousand times a second! It’s like when the water fills in, wraps around the ring, splashes at the...
I.J. Day 1, pp 34-48
I am in a dark passage lit by dying fluorescent lamps. Incandenza, my ass, the only insights I get to experience are cast in flickering, ghostly light; connected by acronyms; meticulous and building.
I am 4.5% of the way through this book in pages, and I still know major characters only by their initials.
I.J. Day 1, pp 1-33
David Foster Wallace, pompous wily wit. You craft a world of unbelievably precise chromatic tuning: a unbearable star shattered in a clean prism to a multitude of incoherent, ringing beads. Worse, you make this sort of thing seem the norm, and then shatter your reader just the same with shame, tragedy, and personality.
Three days ago David Forest Wallace committed suicide by hanging. Today I...
So Many Neighbors.
The frustrating thing with politics is that if you live in a major, coastal city then you essentially don’t live in America. For all the believed (or evidential) self-importance concentrated there, city votes don’t count exclusively.
But that’s not what gets people angry. Instead, it’s because everyone knows, somewhere deep, that this is the way it’s supposed to...
“You caught him; Mr. Orange was spying on you!
He has a moustache, too”
– Sanjay, holding an orange with a pen-drawn face
Conservation.
A friend told me my homework no longer has the look of something real. He relegated it to the same place as the scribbles on chalkboards behind movie-screen scientists. To most, fluid mechanics is but a wealth of impressive looking gibberish.
Of course, three or so years ago I would have had nothing more to say.
I’ve spent the last three years learning a specific, beautiful tongue with...
If it's not too cloudy →
August 2008
5 posts
“I love my country, but a war is no excuse for bad design.”
– Amy Mabil from Clusterflock.
Demographic Inversion →
Oh, The New Yorker, You're Trying Too Hard
I enjoy reading the New Yorker from time to time. They expose some interesting fiction and poetry beside some exceptional essays. Sure, half the stuff has to do with a city with which I share a coast with and not much else, but those bits are easily ignored
No. What I’m talking about are the comics. I hate those things.
Just how many non sequitur remarks made between disaffected white...
The Large Hadron Collider →
It makes me smile to look at the LHC.
For years people had visions of the future where shining metal rings wrapped in sinews of rainbow wires sat aside giant grids of geometric precision. People drew tunnels of pure energy. Streaming across space they channeled dreams into this electric dance of particles which, with a snap from the hypnotist, coalesced into matter.
It didn’t strike me...
Telescopic Text →
The internet made text interactive. Hyperlinks dangle volumes of context off a couple blue-highlighted words and searching places every thing you read into it’s respective niche in the body of human knowledge.
I’m always fond of the quiescent examples, though. Every time you click, the story unfolds just a little more. Petal by petal a scene blooms.