“Libraries of life”

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Hidden behind the popular displays at many of your favorite natural history museums — in their basements, back rooms and, increasingly, off-site facilities — sit humanity’s most important libraries of life, holding not books but preserved animal and plant specimens, carefully collected over centuries by thousands of scientist explorers.

— Libraries of Life, Nathan Lujan and Larry Pagefeb, February 27, 2015, New York Times

Ungovernable Hybridity

“And if ‘vibes’ are now considered intellectual property, let us swiftly prepare for every idiom of popular music to go crashing into juridical oblivion. Because music is a continuum of ungovernable hybridity, a dialogue between generations where the aesthetic inheritance gets handed down and passed around in every direction. To try and adjudicate influence seems as impossible as it does insane. Is that the precedent being set here?”
— It’s okay if you hate Robin Thicke. But the ‘Blurred Lines’ verdict is bad for pop music. Chris Richards, Washington Post, March 11, 2015

"The momentous arises only from the trivial"

Quote:

A common tactic in discussions about the Internet as a free-speech medium is to discount Internet discourse as inherently trivial. Who cares about blurry kitten pictures, illiterate YouTube trolling, and Facebook posts about what your toddler said on the way to day care?

…The usual rebuttal is to point out all the “worthy” ways that we communicate online: the scholarly discussions, the terminally ill comforting one another, the distance education that lifts poor and excluded people out of their limited straits, the dissidents who post videos of secret police murdering street protesters.

All that stuff is important, but when it comes to interpersonal communications, trivial should be enough.

The reason nearly everything we put on the Internet seems “trivial” is because, seen in isolation, nearly everything we do and say is trivial. There is nothing of particular moment in the conversations I have with my wife over the breakfast table. There is nothing earthshaking in the stories I tell my daughter when we walk to daycare in the morning.

Taken together, these “meaningless” interactions make up nearly the whole of our lives. They are the invisible threads that bind us to our friends and families. when I am away from my family, it’s these moments I miss. Our social intercourse is built on subtext as much as it is on text - - when you ask your wife how she slept last night, you aren’t really interested in her sleep. You’re interested in her knowing that you care about her. When you ask after a friend’s kid, you don’t really care about her potty-training progress - - you and your friend are reinforcing your bond of mutual care.

If that’s not enough reason to defend the trivial, consider this: the momentous arises only from the trivial. When we rally around a friend with cancer, or celebrate the extraordinary achievements of a friend who does well, or commiserate over the death of a loved one, we do so only because we have an underlying layer of trivial interaction that makes our connection to these people meaningful…

The copyright wars are about all the things we care about on the Internet, and increasingly that encompasses just about everything in our lives.

From Cory Doctorow, Information Doesn’t Want to be Free
http://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/information-doesn-t-want-to-be-free

Slow

“It used to be that companies got big slowly and methodically. Create a product, achieve success locally or regionally, then grow a step at a time by building sales, distribution, and service channels, and ramping up manufacturing capability to match your progress. Everything took its time. The acorn, after long, slow decades, grew into the oak. We called this “growth,” and there may still be industries where it is good enough.”
— Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, How Google Works.
“The people who invented Unix were not trying to teach you how to use a computer as we understand computers today; rather, they were educating professionals as to the best way to operate an incredibly heavy and expensive piece of industrial equipment. The 1974 paper says that you can run Unix on cheap computers, computers that cost as little as $40,000 ($202,000 in 2014.) Right now there are two Unix workstations in my closet that cost $35 each.”
— From Paul Ford’s The Great Works of Software, re: The Unix Time-Sharing System, Richie & Thompson, Bell Laboratories, 1974.

Not in my lifetime

“I am embarrassed to admit (don’t tell anyone) that when I first saw the interior doors on the Enterprise slide open automatically as crew members walk up to them, I was certain that such a mechanism would not be invented during my years on Earth.”
— Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, on his impressions of the original Star Trek series. (From the essay Happy Anniversary, Star Trek, in Space Chronicles, p. 197) 

"2% Milk. 98% Spiders"

From a Reddit thread: Can you tell us a scary story in 5 words or less?

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Monday. (Wzup)

Living alone, toilet was warm. (EndsWithMan)

Alone in bed. Blanket shifts. (Hippo55)

It enjoys watching you sleep. (AwkwardAlligator)

You awoke suddenly, buried alive. (Panx)

Hard drive failed, no backups. (perrpello)

Wife screams, at her funeral. (ab1kenobe)

Just saw my reflection blink. (BakeAked)

Landed on moon. It’s hatching. (jsz)

Swimming…. “Something touched my foot.” (cliffsofinsanity)

Your browser history is public. (Drew)

2% milk. 98% spiders. (Onion920)

Door opens. Empty. Footsteps approach. (adycharlie)

Wake. Work. Eat. Sleep. Repeat. (cmikel)

You didn’t kill that spider (kuronokei2)

Winged spiders. That is all. (praisedragjesus)

Reddit was bought by Comcast. (DragonsCanBeBeaten)

- - via Reddit (HT mostlysignssomeportents)

"You couldn't have even thought of it"

Quote:

Design will continue to be driven by technology…It’s been like that since the existence of design.

Ultimately we want to do work that is by human beings, for other human beings. Because of the event of modernism 100 years ago people at the time decided that the machine-made should be brought to the forefront of design and architecture. Having that became the status quo of world wide anything - - architecture, design, and graphics: We actively work against that.

There is some distraction in technology. For one thing I think it brought in an incredible increase in boredom. All tools are available within the same machine, and you can do them while sitting in the same position in front of the same screen. When I went to art school it was silk-screening over here and lithography there and painting there and and you needed to change rooms and sometimes buildings to do them all. 

But we benefit from technology in so many other ways…We have a piece in our exhibition, The Happy Show, that can detect if the viewer is smiling and react to that smile by becoming a colorful piece from a black-and-white piece. Not only couldn’t you have done it 10 years ago, you couldn’t even have thought of it. You would have never come up with the idea.

Designer and typographer Stefan Sagmeister, from The Creative Class #5

"…There was no common language"

Quote:

The whole potential of the [design] industry is completely turned upside-down now. The things that were really difficult for me when I started off… are now so much closer to a young designer or startup designer. So what’s going on at the moment is that quite high-tech industrialized techniques are within reach of people with a laptop…

This was quite inconceivable when I started.

I’m more interested in the connection between design tools and engineering tools now.

Previously, there was no common language between the tools of engineers and factories and the tools of designers, and so those worlds were completely apart. What’s happening now is that the same files can be translated from something which is just a concept to something which is real, automatically.

…

For a young designer starting out, the difficulty is in having enough time to be anonymous. I think that for a lot of people starting out that have one great idea, that one idea belongs to everybody very quickly… I benefited from a non-digital era where I could be, broadly speaking, anonymous for maybe 5 or 10 years with only very few people knowing what I was doing - - allowing me to create my own uniqueness, my own personality.

Designer Tom Dixon, The Creative Class #2

“It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.”
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451