Noah Landow

designio:

Toku’un-ji Temple Ossuary / Kiyonori Kikutake / Kurume, 1965

That is the most impressive architectural floating massing effect I have ever seen.

A short article on it:

And what suspect is the Flickr source of the photos above:

jkottke:

The world’s largest solar telescope is still getting up to speed but these recently released images offer unprecedentedly spectacular views of sunspots the size of the Earth.

Incredible images. These feel somewhat like the conceptual inverse of that computational photograph of the black hole.

(via jkottke)

I suspect. I’m at risk of turning this into a Ted Chiang fan blog, but sharing another superlative, nuanced, and thoughtful essay/article from him (this time at the Financial Times) arguing a point I strongly agree with, namely that in labeling the current machine tools AI, machine learning, etc we are problematically muddling the distinction between something aware and something that does a good job at making us feel like it’s aware.

jkottke:

In her newsletter, historian Heather Cox Richardson highlights a pamphlet distributed to Army soldiers during WWII on fascism, saying US fascists would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’”

(via jkottke)

thefugitivesaint:

Chris Kenny, ‘Twelve twigs’, 2012 (construction with found twigs)

Source

I have to admit that I came across this piece on kottke.org and was just delighted with the project of using twigs to give the illusion of dance. As Jason writes on his site:

“Artist Chris Kenny uses bits of twig from tree branches to make these interesting found art pieces that exploit the human tendency for pareidolia, including the one above of twigs in motion.”

I should also mention that I’ve always found  Pareidolia, a subcategory of Apophenia, a pretty fascinating aspect of the human mind and it’s incessant need to create order and meaning where there is neither. Ok. Carry on with your day. 

Delightful dancing twigs.

Rory Miller's Meditations On Violence →

I recently realized that Rory’s book, “A Comparison Of Martial Arts Training & Real World Violence” is available on Archive.org.

I took one of his seminars (2017 in NYC) and he was great, every bit as considerate and thoughtful as the book would lead you to expect.

If you study any martial art and find yourself ruminating on questions of how that study might relate to real world application of violence or danger, I strongly recommend a read; it’s the best book on that topic I’ve encountered to date – After decades of looking and reading.

How to manage news burnout

jkottke:

Melody Kramer is one of the smartest, most thoughtful people I know in journalism. She has a new post up at Poynter talking about ways to design the news that take into account that news can be overwhelming.

People take breaks, go on vacations, have stretches where they can’t keep up, work weird hours, have different levels of interest and background knowledge, and so forth – but they still want to be informed, connected, and engaged.

How can we deal with that? Here’s one good idea:

We should allow people to check out or pause and return. I envision a website where someone can say how long they’d like to be away from the news and what kinds of news they’d like when they return. This could most easily be accomplished through newsletters. For example, a landing page might allow a user to say: “I am taking [XX] [days / weeks / months] off. When I come back, I’d like to be updated on [topics] on [this frequency.]”

Years ago, some of us called this “my time” or “TiVo time”: a personalized, time-shifted attention economy. (Actually, I don’t think anybody called it “TiVo time” but me. And maybe a few guys who worked for TiVo.)

And for a little while, say around 2000-2010, media consumption in the form of DVRs, IM chats, blogging (and commenting), RSS feeds, Netflix DVDs (by mail!), was sort of unconsciously driven by this principle. It was available in close-to-real-time, but you could dip in and out of the stream much more easily.

Then a lot of factors – including short-form social media, livestream video, Netflix bingeing, a resurgence of TV events, and maybe especially always-available mobile devices – pushed us back to a much more immediate and real-time immersion in media. This hasn’t always been to everyone’s benefit. Not all consumers’, and not all producers’ either.

Choosing between plunging in or checking out has become a much more all-or-nothing proposition. It doesn’t have to be that way. We know this. We already built a lot of the tech that lets us manage this. Now we just have to figure out the best ways to deploy it.

The failure to elegantly manage this tension between asynchronous and isosynchronous communication tools lies at the heart of so many stressors and challenges last 15 years.

(via jkottke)