May 2009
169 posts
“Write then, now that you are young, nonsense by the ream. Be silly, be sentimental, imitate Shelley, imitate Samuel Smiles; give the rein to every impulse; commit every fault of style, grammar, taste, and syntax; pour out; tumble over; loose anger, love, satire, in whatever words you can catch, coerce, or create, in whatever metre, prose, poetry, or gibberish that comes to hand. Thus will you learn to write.”
—
Virginia Woolf, Letter to a Young Poet. (via danielsh)
The same sentiment has been many times, among them: “remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition; don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better; composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better.”
(via dailymeh) [Which is not to say: be uninhibited, but: be all-imitating.]April 2009
311 posts
“Operations in an enterprise is like the kitchen of the house. Few people talk about it, but it’s the kitchen that makes the house a home.”
—Tai Tran (via taitranquotes)
“We also have some new features to prevent flamewars. The most conspicuous is an exponential delay before reply links appear on deeply nested comments. We’d noticed these were rarely the most interesting comments on the site. We’re hoping that instead of killing stupid arguments, it will be sufficient to apply gradually increasing drag to them.”
—Hacker News News
Play
“They say that the monks of eight or nine hundred centuries ago often had to face unenthusiastic, occasionally hostile audiences, who were most reluctant to follow the steps of a theological proof or of a moral sermon, and that the Alphabeta exemplorum was born out of that difficulty and the need to overcome it. What the monks did was to share out the weight of the discourse equally, so that each of the twenty or so letters of the corresponding alphabet would bear some of that weight on its tiny shoulders and help to carry the load; for example, A might be used to demonstrate the existence of the Afterlife, B would speak of St. Basil, and C would summarize the arguments of its two fellows and offer a first Conclusion. In short, all the other letters—with the possible Exception of the E—would do the same, and the audience would arrive at Z with their minds fully focused on all those ideas, which seemed to advance as if by leaps.”
—Words Without Borders: A Surprising Tale in the Form of an Alphabet
Welcome to the White House →
georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov
Bush’s WhiteHouse.gov
ASCII by Jason Scott →
ascii.textfiles.com
The effort is underway to archive GeoCities.
TwiTip →
twitip.com
“10 Ways To Be Useful on Twitter”
corprewland →
corprew.org
“The Wasteland” re-interpreted as a cat macro.
Investoralist →
investoralist.com
“Do We Really Want a Paperless World?”
Design is Philosophy →
designisphilosophy.com
What successful European newspapers are doing that Americans aren’t.
“Over the years the three major Norwegian newspapers Aftenposten, Dagbladet and VG have all experimented with different types of layouts and text vs. image placement. Over the last year or so they have all landed on pretty much the same model which works exceptionally well for all of them. I call it Massive Image Overload: On the front page every story, no matter how small, is accompanied by a big photo and only the title and the short two-line excerpt is featured. This strategy creates a visually compelling and easy to understand front page with huge click-through rates. Combined with properly interspersed ads and other effects and you have a money making machine. ¶ But the Massive Image Overload strategy goes beyond that. Once you get to the actual story it is always accompanied by a huge main photo or video on the top of the page. This was actually done as a result of big reader surveys and it is both attractive and effective. Articles with multiple photos are often also accompanied by Flash image galleries, photo documentaries with adjoining audio or in some cases entire sub-pages with more images. This makes the stories far more enjoyable to look at and easier to digest and also increases the over-the-shoulder factor.”
—10 steps to save the newspaper | Design is Philosophy - The Pink & Yellow Media Blog
“Even with such technological advances, the improved capabilities of digital storage continues to act against “paperlessness,” argues Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster at the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Palo Alto, Calif. In his prophetic and metaphorical 1989 essay, “The Electronic Piñata,” he suggests that the increasing amounts of electronic data necessarily require more paper. ¶ “The information industry today is like a huge electronic piñata, composed of a thin paper crust surrounding an electronic core,” Mr. Saffo wrote. The growing paper crust “is most noticeable, but the hidden electronic core that produces the crust is far larger - and growing more rapidly. The result is that we are becoming paperless, but we hardly notice at all.”
—What ever happened to the paperless office? | csmonitor.com
“One can imagine a process of taking ‘ice cores’ in the history of philosophy: rather than following the circulation of ideas, picking a static point (e.g., a university) and following the shift of ideas over time at that point; and then comparing these various samples.”
—Siris: Dashed Off
“In writing about the classic epic Ramayana, A K Ramanujan talks about three hundred Ramayanas. The version that is most appealing is the appeal of Rama to Sita not to follow him into the forest and her challenge to him to show one Ramayana, where Sita had not accompanied Rama to the forest.”
—Many Ramayanas: The (hi) story of IISc « Materialia Indica
