Archive for December, 2010
Self-indexing Web Page
This post is now a self-indexing web page.
The title of this post is the same as the linked search. As the link is clicked, will bring this page to the top of the linked Google search, which links back to this post.
Prehistoric techno-waste
“If we were to judge ourselves by the efforts of ours that survive the passage of time, we’d be best described as Man the Rubbish Maker. We’ve been polluting since before we were human.
Chipping rocks into tools is a messy, haphazard process. When archeologists investigate ancient rock foundries, they always find vastly more rock waste than they ever find tools. Rock waste is the earliest form of pollution. It is an unsought, useless, and hazardous externality to a technological process.
Paleontologists have found flint-knapping workshops two and half million years old where the stone junk is still sharp enough to slash an unwary hand. The rock waste from prehuman workshops has lasted for geological time-scales. Their speech, their culture, their beliefs about time futurity – that’s gone like an exhaled breath.”
From Bruce Sterling’s sometimes excellent, sometimes weird “Shaping Things”, p. 56-57.
Inebriated in monochrome
“I do believe that it is only in the monochrome that I truly live pictorial life, the painterly life of which I have dreamed. This was precisely what I have hoped for in painting! I find myself within it, in the special matter, the pictorial matter, and I have blossomed. It is true, I am for the first time inebriated and fully satisfied in painting monochromes.”
- Yves Klein, from the excellent exhibition at the Walker Art Center
Video still / abstraction
Still from “Ax Men”, season 3, episode 10, 33:50.
Apple Numeric Keypad
The Apple Numeric Keypad IIe – just a lovely, squat little interface. Would make a great MIDI controller.
Via: All About Apple Museum / Wikipedia
Harmonic Chord Table
Mic –> Speaker
The point of condensation between the recording and the playback.
Infinitely Small Object with an Infinitely Long Shadow
1000 Blank White Cards
The above (amazing) image is from a game called “1000 Blank White Cards“, a card game where the players make up the rules as they go along. I found this while reading about “Nomic“, another similar game “in which the rules of the game include mechanisms for the players to change those rules”.
Tesla’s Lab today
GoogleMaps view of where Tesla’s lab stood in the early 20th century. Sadly, it is now a Subway and dry cleaner.
