January 2012
2 posts
3 tags
“To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation...”
– Sterling Hayden, Wanderer
3 tags
“Men who ache allover for tidiness and compactness in their lives often find...”
– E.B. White, The Sea and the Wind that Blows
December 2011
1 post
“For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have...”
– Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea
September 2011
1 post
2 tags
“In Holland, we have two words for design. One is vormgeving; in German...”
– Gert Dumbar
June 2011
1 post
“I am troubled by the devaluing of the word ‘design’. I find myself now being...”
– Dieter Rams
May 2011
6 posts
“Good work is not done by ‘humble’ men. It is one of the first duties of a...”
– G.H. Hardy, cited by Aaron, via Kellan
“What we have in academia, in other words, is a microcosm of the American economy...”
– Bill Deresiewicz, Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education
“To be a good mathematician, or a good gambler, or good at anything, you must be...”
– George Pólya
“The standard process of organizing knowledge by departments, and...”
– Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
“A twentieth century problem is that technology has become too...”
– Alan Kay, The Early History of Small Talk
“What one wants is to be able to talk with a diverse club of smart people,...”
– William Tozier, via Bret Victor
April 2011
8 posts
“Most serious thought in our time deals with the feeling of homelessness. The...”
– Susan Sontag, The Anthropologist as Hero
And so our writers parse Rebecca Black and our young men, listless and well-heeled, shop for meaning in the fashion and facial hair of their fathers and grandfathers.
You are what you build
As a writer and a thinker, and maybe as a human, I am critical to a fault. All too many of my efforts, imaginings, and relationships have collapsed under the weight of punishing over-analysis and self-defeat.
A younger me drew pride from impossible standards, viewing them as demonstrations of my (surely considerable) abilities. But this was no more than a convenient lie with which to buffer...
“The trick is never in building the best possible implementation — the trick is...”
– Guy English, Regarding Simplicity (via Buzz)
Guy’s argument is being made within the context of software development, but I believe is equally applicable to all work.
Restated somewhat differently: Abandon perfection for generativity. Perfection is without your grasp, but collective...
“I have always been convinced of my genius, my greatness, my originality. But...”
– Webb Chiles, from Storm Passage, his 1975 account of being the first American to sail around Cape Horn alone.
“If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If...”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
“But most people, especially highly gifted people, do not really know where they...”
– Peter Drucker, Managing Oneself
“I don’t like work — no man does — but I like what it is in the...”
– Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
“For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true...”
– Herman Melville, Moby Dick
March 2011
3 posts
“Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it,...”
– Susan Sontag, on Simone Weil for The New York Review of Books
“A hermit’s hut. What a subject for an engraving! Indeed, real images are...”
– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (via cabinporn)
“And we feel warm because it is cold out-of-doors. Further on…Baudelaire...”
– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
“The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you...”
– Herman Melville, Moby Dick
February 2011
3 posts
“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But...”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“And so I will tell them one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest story of...”
– John Steinbeck, The East of Eden Letters (via christmasgorilla)
January 2011
3 posts
“[Michael] Faraday lived in an era in which a humble-born person with no formal...”
– Heinrich Hertz
“Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word...”
– James Joyce, The Sisters
“For we man are, in fact, the servants of our creations. We remain in...”
– Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea
April 2010
2 posts
“The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual...”
– Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft
“Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses...”
– Ivan Illich, Energy & Equity
February 2009
2 posts
“Instead of applying observation to the things we wished to know, we have chosen...”
– Abbé de Condillac, as cited in Lavoisier’s preface to his Elements.
“Nothing could be more original, nothing more characteristic of oneself than to...”
– Paul Valéry
January 2009
4 posts
“The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their...”
– Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Part 1, §129
As a young child, during moments of acute heartache or shame, I would wonder how such tremendous pain could ever possibly leave me. In late adolescence, I became acquainted with the soul’s self-preserving anesthesia, and learned to draw strength by anticipating the wash of numb which inevitably cooled and detached me from all feeling, allowing what once felt inescapable, to ultimately sit...
“Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. ...”
– Marshall McLuhan
“Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended...”
– Marshall McLuhan
December 2008
4 posts
“The essence of science is cumulative. By changing a problem slightly you can...”
– Richard Hamming, You and Your Research
“When I first prepared this particular talk … I realized that my usual approach...”
– Alan Kay
“The industrial design literature, incidentally, seems to consist primarily of...”
– sidebar anecdote discussing the bewildering paucity of literature on dynamic information design, from Bret Victor’s brilliant software design manifesto, Magic Ink.
“In summary, I claim that some of the reasons why so many people who have...”
– Richard Hamming, You and Your Research