joelbush:

HT information aesthetics

God is not a cosmic API call.

Though, given the internets, you’d be forgiven for having that as a tacitly developed conceptual model.

is the internet abstraction incarnate?

not just Twitter

merlin:

advertising

M.McLuhan Field Day Time!

I think that Voltaire has a point in making fun of the Christian Strawman’s worldview that “this is the best of all possible worlds.” Because it sure does not seem best!

But the truer, non-strawman’s take is that this is the best of all possible fallen worlds, the best of all possible sin-filled worlds. (Cause, duh, the best possible world was the one in which A&E did not fall. Which, in the Gen text, is never told as if it had to happen.)

So, to put it even more succinctly, this is the best of all possible broken worlds.

Or, this is the best of all possible not-best worlds.

In other words, this is the doctrine of prevenient grace: that, out of sheer grace, God keeps the world from it’s repeated attempts to kill itself.

Not that the world is stopped from trying to kill itself. It’s that God keeps it from succeding.

The Philosopher’s World Cup.

“I’m always up for finding new books to help me better understand design or improve my practices, but it can be very difficult to find the meat from so many fatty offerings. That’s why I try to keep this list focused on design, type, and theory. There are many lists for good web design books around, but few of just straight up good design books, and many of these topics are applicable anywhere… . this doesn’t aim to be comprehensive, but I personally vouch for the usefulness all of these books offer.” —Jason Santa Maria

“Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

“… it is equally important to recognize how traditional, indeed classical, is the question that lurks inside the problem of the new class: intellectuals and power, enlightenment and politics, conceptual thinking and lived life. From one point of view, the rise of the new class involves the priority of thinking—not any thinking, however, but a technocratically foreshortened, instrumentalist, and administrative thinking—over the lifeworld of everyday interactions, communities, and traditions, and the orders of human nature. It is the assertion of the primacy of logic against the complexity of living, and it runs the risk therefore of collapsing either into an irrelevant ineffectiveness, an idealism incapable of grasping the real, or a destructiveness, when it tries to refashion ways of life into its own invented programs.”

maryjuanita:

—last night in Toronto we saw Rodrigo and Gabriela at the Phoenix Theatre.  AMAZING.  (I would [not so] secretly like to be Gabriela.)  They played the above song, Tamacun, for the encore after a perfectly entertaining and entirely too short two hours of intense and mesmerizing performance.  (Someone’s already posted the Toronto encore from last night here.  Though the quality is not good, you may be able to appreciate some of the wonderful intensity of the show; we were about three people back from Gabriela, stage right.)

I would watch and listen again and again. But I can’t.  The call of biochem and genetics starts to drown out even the resounding and wonderful echo of last night’s show.  Que barbaridad.

Another beautiful wonderful example of craftsmanship.

putthison:

lonelysandwich:

“Ironing techniques by professional craftsmen (shirt)” - プロの職人によるアイロンがけテクニック(ワイシャツ)

This short instructional film showcases unmatchably masterful ironing technique that we’d all do well to learn from, but it’s also one of the most absorbing, delicious demo videos I’ve ever seen.

via Joel Zimmer, from a series of similarly beautiful instructional videos at Garra.jp (WARNING: ALL-FLASH and Japanese)

What a pleasure it is to watch someone do something well!  This is the part of the intrinsic good of craftsmanship.