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December 24 2011
Crow. detail. French 1447 Enlum. by tony harrison on Flickr.
November 25 2011
November 15 2011
“— Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Breakfast of Champions.I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance. And all music is.
”
(via neil-gaiman)
October 23 2011
“ It’s probably natural, here in the 21st century, to fret over the future of literature — to worry that, in an era in which everyone wants everything to be social and interactive, serious reading will be impossible. Yet books are curious objects: their strength is to be both intensely private and intensely social — and marginalia is a natural bridge between these two states. It might end up serving equally well as a bridge between online and literary culture, between focus and distraction: a point of contact that could improve both without hurting either. Digital technology, rather than destroying the tradition of marginalia, could actually help us return it to its gloriously social 18th-century roots. ”— Sam Anderson
July 02 2011
piae
June 18 2011
Are texting teens losing empathy skills?
“Texting teens aren’t learning empathy skills, according to psychologist Gary Small, who spoke at a Hechinger Institute seminar on digital learning in California.”
Tai Viet
The Tai Viet script is used for writing the Tai Dam, Tai Dón, Tai Daeng, Thai Song and Tày Tac languages spoken in Vietnam, Laos, China and Thailand.
May 25 2011
Leviathan Strikes by Matt Brown
May 24 2011
Archaeological News: The Voynich Manuscript: will we ever be able to read this book?
A 15th-century manuscript is written in a language that has baffled every expert. Is it just a brilliant hoax, or will someone eventually decipher its meaning
Somewhere deep inside the bowels of Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library – the Ivy League institution’s own cemetery of…
Man Punching Bear Men’s
buy it here
May 06 2011
Archaeological News: Finding on Dialects Casts New Light on the Origins of the Japanese People
Researchers studying the various dialects of Japanese have concluded that all are descended from a founding language taken to the Japanese islands about 2,200 years ago. The finding sheds new light on the origin of the Japanese people, suggesting that their language is descended from that of the…
May 02 2011
April 29 2011
Building the Freedom Press
“I cut the bamboo gears with a CNC router. A few of the steel parts — namely the counter weight and head arms, as well as the FREEDOM text — I waterjet cut from 3D SolidWorks files. (I like SolidWorks because it lets me run the gears and get the tolerances perfect.) The steel frame is made out of 3” I-beam that I cut and welded together in my studio. I had to buy a bigger saw and a nice welder for it.”
Did the Sale of Pyrex Hurt the Crack-Cocaine Industry?
“Pyrex is valued by cooks for its sturdiness in the kitchen, particularly its ability to withstand rapid, dramatic temperature changes that typically shatter normal glassware. It turns out that people making crack cocaine valued this quality too.”
April 22 2011
April 14 2011
Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education.
“It’s something about the scarcity and the status. In education your value depends on other people failing. Whenever Darwinism is invoked it’s usually a justification for doing something mean. It’s a way to ignore that people are falling through the cracks, because you pretend that if they could just go to Harvard, they’d be fine. Maybe that’s not true.”
April 13 2011
Boba Fett at the Antiques Road Show.
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