1981 book by Tom Wolfe lambasting modern art and modernist (international style) architecture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (/miːs/ mees; German: [miːs]; born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies; March 27, 1886 – August 17, 1969) was a German-American Architect.[1] He is commonly referred to and was addressed as Mies, his surname. Along with Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Frank Lloyd Wright, he is widely regarded as one of the pioneers of Modernist architecture. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: A Matter of Taste. In light of other recent discussions, Scott Alexander recently attempted a unified theory of taste, proposing several hypotheses. Is it like physics, a priesthood, a priesthood with fake justifications, a priesthood with good justifications, like increasingly bizarre porn preferences, like fashion (in the sense of trying to stay one step ahead in an endless cycling for signaling purposes), or like grammar? (more)

Cyril Edet: The Digital Spectacle and Its Unseen Effects. The internet used to be a place you could go to. It was like a room on your desktop. And this room had different things you could pick up, look at, and put down. You could step out of it whenever you wanted. (more)

Lucas Gelfond: The Laboratory and the Artist: Review of John Beck's and Ryan Bishop's Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology, and the Military-Industrial Avant-Garde In 1966, ten thousand people attended “9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering,” a now-forgotten collaboration between Bell Labs engineers and New York art world heavyweights. The pairings were colorful and bizarre. Robert Rauschenberg, for example, staged a tennis match with rackets wired to cut the lights in the auditorium each time a ball was hit, amplifying the sound of each volley (more)

Maitrī (Pali: mettā) is a Sanskrit term that refers to benevolence,[1] loving-kindness,[2][3] friendliness,[3][4] amity,[4] good will,[5] and active interest in others.[4] The term appears in various ancient and medieval Indian texts, such as the Upanishads, Jain Sutras and Buddhist Suttas.[6] Within Buddhism, it is notably the first of the four sublime states (Brahmaviharas), one of the ten pāramīs of Theravāda Buddhism, and expounded upon in the Metta Sutta. The cultivation of benevolence (mettā bhāvanā) is a popular form of Buddhist meditation.[7]: 318–319  It is a part of the four immeasurables in Brahmavihara (divine abidings) meditation.[7]: 278–279  Metta as "compassion meditation" is often practiced in Asia by broadcast chanting, wherein monks chant for the laity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maitr%C4%AB

Lion’s Roar: Metta Meditation: A Complete Guide to Loving-Kindness. Increased compassion for ourselves and others, better relationships, and decreased stress and anxiety are just some of the benefits of metta meditation, or loving-kindness practice. In this step-by-step guide, we lead you through the how and why of compassion practice with written, audio, and video instruction. (more)

VisakanVeerasamy: 'Smart Writing' is about cultivating taste, suspending judgement and chasing your curiosity. I saw someone tweet “I wish smart writing came to me as easily as dumb tweeting (Twitter)” — and so I am here to share my strategy for using the latter to precipitate the former (more)

Anthony Michael Fadell (born March 22, 1969) is an American engineer, designer, entrepreneur, and investor. He was senior vice president of the iPod division at Apple Inc. and founder and former CEO of Nest Labs. Fadell joined Apple Inc. in 2001 and oversaw all iPod hardware, software, and accessories development. He is known as the "father of the iPod". As the co-creator of the iPhone, he also worked on the first three generations of the iPhone and oversaw all iPhone hardware, firmware, and accessories development from March 2006 to November 2008. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Fadell (more)

The Importance of Fun for a Prolific and Innovative Bauhaus. Many imitators of the famous art school’s output have missed the surreal, sensual, irrational, and instinctual spirit that drove its creativity. (more)

Albert Wenger: Attention on Digital Monopolies. I am concerned that regulators are missing the fundamental source of monopoly power in the digital world: network effects arising from the control of data.... The only way to go up against this effect is to shift computational power to the network participants. (more)

MacOS-X image/PDF lite viewer/editor

Print-to-disk format used by Adobe Acrobat. Sometimes used for EBook publishing. Just horrible, pls use epub. (more)

David Chapman on Vividness: The electricity of liberated perception (more)

The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce - by Umberto Eco, Thomas Albert Sebeok et al (more)

someone who seeks knowledge via the scientific method?

Cosma Shalizi on Information Society and the Information Economy. The text which follows was mostly written in the 1990s, which explains, if it does not excuse, some of the now-dated references. (more)

A Future for Socialism, by John E. Roemer, Harvard University Press, 1994 (more)

Cosma Shalizi term: novels by non-scientists about the research life and the creative travails of scientists (more)

AI companies are racing to build AIs that are smarter than humans in every way. In AI 2027, we predicted that this would result in either extinction or irreversible concentration of power. Plan A is our positive vision for what should happen instead. https://ai-2040.com/ (more)