Lectures on electricity

In all ages the thunder of heaven has contributed more powerfully to promote the cause of imposture and tyranny. By the science of electricity, however, the future possibility may be exterminated of renewing these frauds. It has enabled the most common artificer to avert every danger of attending a thunderstorm. It teaches the vulgar mind to smile at a thousand religious ceremonies.

--George Cadogan Morgan

Score Your Very Own 80's Film

Urushi Musical Interface from Yuri Suzuki on Vimeo.

Links

Abstract Concrete

Minimal Products

What Science Fiction Authors Think About

Indonesian Dessert

Herzog (from the other end)

Welcome to Lagos

Best thing like this I've seen in a long, long time. Refreshing to see this take on poverty and the human spirit. No patronizing shots with sad dull music, it's not a lamentation that says "look at these poor people" it's a celebration of the people and a look at human civilization in the throws of change for better or for worse. And...it's all on youtube.

I picked up Ayn Rand and the World She Made. I can't wait to jump into it. There was a time when Rand for me was the end-all, and I absolutely adored her and her work. Later I distanced myself from her completely. My thoughts on her now are a bit more complicated. I realize how deeply flawed she was and also how brilliant she could be. The things that shape us as teens don't ever really leave us; we internalize them and even if we think much differently as adults, the essence of these things must still be there. I'm excited to read a book that is neither full of condemnation or unquestioning praise, and to get a feel for what someone who encountered Rand as an adult for the first time has to say.

From the Fountainhead:

"I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body."

Perdido Street Station

You haven't read any book like this. It's delightfully genre-bending but it isn't really delightful. You could accurately pin almost any adjective to it but doing so would be doing the novel a disservice. It's just... new. Or at least it's new to me.

Here's a taste:

"He entered. Light seemed to give up the struggle halfway through the thick, soiled windows, leaving the interior in shadows. The walls were unadorned except by dirt. The pub was empty of all but the most dedicated drinkers, shambolic figures huddled over bottles. Several were junkies, several were Remade. Some were both: The Dying Child turned no one away. A group of emaciated young men lay draped across a table twitching in perfect time, strung out on shazbah or dreamshit or very-tea. One woman held her glass in a metal claw that spat steam and dripped oil onto the floorboards. A man in the corner lapped quietly from a bowl of beer, licking the fox's muzzle that had been grafted to his face."

Link

A Fresh Quid of Tobacco

"I asked the Negro factotum about the hire of horses, and presently a man came in from the bar who, he said, could supply my needs. This man, the very type of a Western pioneer, bowed, threw himself into a rocking-chair, drew a spittoon beside him, cut a fresh quid of tobacco, began to chew energetically, and put his feet, cased in miry high boots, into which hiis trousers were tucked, on the top of the stove. He said he had horses which would both "lope" and trot..."

That's from A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Lucy Bird. Look her up.

Meat

"If pigs are fed on residues and waste, and cattle on straw, stovers and grass from fallows and rangelands – food for which humans don't compete – meat becomes a very efficient means of food production. Even though it is tilted by the profligate use of grain in rich countries, the global average conversion ratio of useful plant food to useful meat is not the 5:1 or 10:1 cited by almost everyone, but less than 2:1. If we stopped feeding edible grain to animals, we could still produce around half the current global meat supply with no loss to human nutrition: in fact it's a significant net gain."

From an article in the guardian on the book "Meat: A Benign Extravagance" by Simone Fairlie

Are you an abstract human? Am I?

"I remember that I was in Berlin at the Wissenschaftskolleg, and there was a woman, Barbara Lane, there who was an architectural historian. We went to a housing area, where two types of Seidlungen or housing were to be found together: Bauhaus housings and a competing housing project by National Socialist architects. It was interesting to me, that the Bauhaus architects had figured out exactly how many square meters people needed, how much water they needed, how much sunlight, playground space… They had planned for an abstract human being; and the architecture could have been executed anywhere in the world. Whereas the Nazi architects had build genuine homes, with little chimneys, small front steps in brick—all these references to vernacular architecture that was part of the German cultural tradition. I realized that in a sense, the international aspiration of the Bauhaus school was to be placeless and universal, as IKEA does now. I found myself a little embarrassed that I would rather have lived in a dwelling designed by the Nazis than a Bauhaus home, but it does illustrate my point of governing: how is it executed? With what level of ambition in mind?"

--James C. Scott


"There is a sameness—this is one of the things that is boring people—this sameness. This sameness has economic implications. You don’t get new products and services out of sameness. Now the Americans haven’t gotten dumbed down all of the sudden so that only a few people who can decide on new products for change are the only ones with brains. But it means that somehow there isn’t opportunity for these thousands flowers to bloom anymore."

--Jane Jacobs

Windless Wave of the Spears of the Bull

Kennings for beer from this index of kennings

lœðar jastar; — ‘of the yeast’s flood; may ’ - BEER

brim horna – — ‘the surf of horns ’ - BEER

vindlauss vágr geira svigðis — ‘windless wave of the spears of the bull ’ - BEER

I take it these make sense because they drank beer from a horn?

How can I help make this happen?

I found these on dezeen.com. They are by an american firm called Choi + Shine Architects.