May 2012
“while selling out in most other fields of creative endeavor is frowned upon,...”
– How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet
“You can’t pursue any kind of inquiry without a relatively clear framework that’s...”
– Noam Chomsky on the Purpose of Education | Brain Pickings
“Technology is basically neutral. It’s kind of like a hammer. The hammer doesn’t...”
– Noam Chomsky on the Purpose of Education | Brain Pickings
P245 Rings of Saturn (WG Sebald)
In the final analysis, our entire work is based on nothing but ideas, ideas which change over the years and which time and again cause one to tear down what one had thought to be finished, and begin again from scratch.
P244 Rings of Saturn (WG Sebald)
He could quite understand… how easy it was to consider someone barmy, who for so many years immersed himself deeper and deeper into a fantasy world and spent his time in an unheated barn fiddling about with such an apparently never ending, meaningless and pointless project…
April 2012
“Facing down the urge to press a button in a buttonless elevator felt a little...”
– Our Local Correspondents: Up and Then Down : The New Yorker
“They have to talk to each other,” Fortune said. We have to trust that they are...”
– Our Local Correspondents: Up and Then Down : The New Yorker
“In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties,...”
– Our Local Correspondents: Up and Then Down : The New Yorker
“People tend to find it unnerving to ride in an elevator with no buttons; they...”
– Our Local Correspondents: Up and Then Down : The New Yorker
“Generally, England is over-elevatored; India is under-elevatored.”
– Our Local Correspondents: Up and Then Down : The New Yorker
“To take elevatoring lightly is to risk dooming a building to dysfunction and its...”
– Our Local Correspondents: Up and Then Down : The New Yorker
“I spent a great deal of the 1970s avoiding bores with slide carousels who wanted...”
– New Statesman - Twitter is just a new home for old bores
“Things I like: fires, Venice, tequila, sunsets, babies, silent films, heights,...”
– A Sontag Sampler - NYTimes.com
“I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when...”
– A Sontag Sampler - NYTimes.com
“How many Big Data startups might help people see their lives in different ways?”
– The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future - Technology - The Atlantic
March 2012
“I don’t even want to speculate on how dwindlingly few people in the UK have a...”
– Aiming (much) higher than Hackspaces and FabLabs… | Funding Startups (& other impossibilities)
“In the design of lives, as in the design of most other things, you get better...”
– How to Do What You Love
February 2012
“Books are not product. Books are creative endeavors as individual and singular...”
– The Web Is a Customer Service Medium (Ftrain.com)
“a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other...”
– The American Scholar: Solitude and Leadership - William Deresiewicz
“Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about...”
– The American Scholar: Solitude and Leadership - William Deresiewicz
“Social media is to the Read/Write Web what sprawl is to the metropolis of...”
– Arcades, Mall Rats, and Tumblr Thugs – The New Inquiry
“What you get is indifference as a way of managing difference.”
– Richard Sennett: ‘Big society? It’s to keep the bankers happy … ’ | From the Observer | The Observer
“An authentic performance of old music is possible, an authentic experience of it...”
– The 1910 time traveller « thenextwave
January 2012
“Whether it is ‘art’ or not is not really part of the conversation,” he says....”
– Jeremy Deller: ‘I’m more interested in ideas than money’ | Art and design | The Guardian
“Euphemisms may be a species of lie, but some of them are white.”
– Phoney politeness and muddled messages — www.economist.com — Readability
“E. B. White was amused to learn from a farmer friend that many electrified...”
– A List Apart: Articles: An Important Time for Design
“The products that take design seriously and incorporate it from the start are...”
– A List Apart: Articles: An Important Time for Design
“The kinds of stuff we do in ‘making’ are paths to the future, not paths to...”
– Pentagon taps students to build robots, drones | California Watch
“My drawings have been described as pre-intentionalist, meaning that they were...”
– James Thurber
“So I often tell people that the mid-century will be about “old people
in...”
– The WELL: Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky: State of the World 2012
“A small, beautiful, modest, handcrafted society, living in harmony with its...”
– Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things
“I wonder what’s down there, I’ll go and have a smell.”
– Smell-designing Sheffield
“Every meeting must have one clear decision maker. If there’s no decision...”
– How Larry Page Changed Meetings At Google After Taking Over Last Spring
“Which of them would risk the chamber pot of failed hopes being emptied over...”
– m.guardian.co.uk
“The everyday object is the monarch of all objects.”
– The Viridian Design Movement
“It’s not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that you...”
– The Viridian Design Movement
“I live on the Earth. The Earth is a planet. This fact is okay. I am living in...”
– The Viridian Design Movement
The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. (Doren/Adler)
“4) Some people (they are wrong) say design is about solving problems. Obviously...”
– Kicker Studio: Six Questions from Kicker: Jack Schulze
“No one cares about what you think, unless you do what you think. No one cares...”
– Kicker Studio: Six Questions from Kicker: Jack Schulze
“We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for...”
– Borges
And my year end notes, lessons learnt etc http://t.co/h1GGajzw
December 2011
Robert Frost: the writer without a desk
i’m looking for a sound designer for a 30 min film
“Now we drive out the pope
from Christ’s church and God’s house.
Therein he has...”
– Social media in the 16th Century: How Luther went viral | The Economist
i’m going to Stratford City, so there
“I’m fascinated by musicians who don’t completely understand their territory;...”
– Brian Eno: from the Velvet Underground to Burial | Music | The Guardian
Noel Gallagher: if the master tape of your latest album was floating in a vat of hummus (sic) I would push it under
Yup, total tosh http://t.co/m7zyFNsL via @ilovetypography
Can you hear me screaming in Brooklyn? http://t.co/jODlB9rY