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PhD preface
augerloizeau: “… the story of humanity’s repeated attempts to colonise the red planet. The first men were few. Most succumbed to a disease called the great loneliness when they saw their home planet dwindle to the size of a fist. Those few who survived found no welcome on Mars. But more rockets arrived from earth,…
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nevver: Evil flourishes when good men do nothing.
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jillsies: 17th Century Modernism? The abstract paintings shown here are not by Kazimir Malevich or Paul Klee but by Hindu tantra devotees from Indian cities like Jodhpur and Chomu, the anonymous heirs to a pictorial tradition that dates to the 1600s. Painted on salvaged paper and rarely measuring more than a foot high, the images…
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Apple has built a closed ecosystem where it exerts control over nearly every piece of the supply chain, from design to retail store. Because of its volume—and its occasional ruthlessness—Apple gets big discounts on parts, manufacturing capacity, and air freight. “Operations expertise is as big an asset for Apple as product innovation or marketing,” says…
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kateoplis: Chacaltaya mountain in Bolivia with an elevation of 17,785 ft once had one of the highest glaciers in South America. The 18,000-year-old glacier had the world’s highest ski run – the first built in Latin America. After losing 80% of its area in the last 2 decades, it finally disappeared in 2009, much faster than scientists had predicted. All that remains is a bedrock. Photo…
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One potential model is something Friedman calls Appletopia: A corporation, such as Apple, “starts a country as a business. The more desirable the country, the more valuable the real estate,” Friedman says. Former “Seastedders” Come Ashore To Start Libertarian Utopias In Honduran Jungle | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation (via bmdesign) Neal Stephenson’s Snow…
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I didn’t have the emotional range. I could only create characters who have really, really super highs and super lows—no middle. It’s taken me eight books to get to a point where the characters can have recognizably complex or ambiguous relationships with other characters. In Neuromancer, the whole range of social possibility when they meet…
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Bester had been doing it in the fifties—a Madison Avenue hepcat who had come into science fiction with a bunch of Joyce under his belt. He built his space-opera future out of what it felt like to be young and happening in New York, in the creative end of the business world in 1955. Paris…
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I’ve been trying out Scribus for typesetting of small books. I can’t get the justification right yet. Imposition of pages is through a PDF plug-in.
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No, the way out of the trench war is usually to adopt openly the “old-fashioned” side that is being critiqued, while finding some way to flip it completely into something strange. I think of Cézanne in painting, who amidst the impressionist revolution found a way to retrieve the solidity of objects without relapsing into academicism,…