Bobulate, for Intentional Organization

Stefan Hagemann with advice on how to answer a professor, but really on how to answer anyone:

Be interested in a lot of things: Some questions are designed to test your command of a set of facts, and some leave little room for interpretation. Once in awhile, a question might even permit a “yes” or “no” answer. But often you’ll be dealing with open-ended questions, ones about which there is much to say and from many angles. Recognize that most open-ended questions range across academic disciplines and areas of interest, and do your best to develop a good grasp of the world around you. Good question-answerers read widely, talk to their peers and professors, attend on-campus events such as plays and concerts, and (I’m guessing here) subscribe to PBS and NPR. Good question-answerers also listen. If you know a little bit about the world around you and make an effort to experience your immediate environment, you may be surprised by your ability to add outside knowledge to your answers. Broad experience equals (or at least increases the chance for) serendipity.

In the spirit of school approaching, Stefan’s full list on how to answer a professor:

• In the spirit of serious inquiry
• With honesty
• From a position of power
• Be interested in a lot of things
• Pay attention to how others do it
• With panache

Would love to hear an answer that uses all of them in the same sentence.

[via the inimitable]

Eno on unadventure:

“In my normal life I’m a very unadventurous person,” Mr. Eno said. “I take the same walk every day and I eat in the same restaurants, and often eat exactly the same things in the same restaurants. I don’t adventure much except when I’m in the studio, and then I only want to adventure. I cannot bear doing something again, or thinking that I’m doing something again.”

As Jacobs once said, “Differentiation emerg[es] from generality. Differentiations become generalities from which further differentiations occur.” My summer has been only about variation — in location, in people, in process — but slowed down creation here. It’s good to be home.

Russell Shorto points out small shifts in thinking that can have large effects — from bicycle safety to fresh food:

Dutch drivers are taught that when you are about to get out of the car, you reach for the door handle with your right hand — bringing your arm across your body to the door. This forces a driver to swivel shoulders and head, so that before opening the door you can see if there is a bike coming from behind. Likewise, every Dutch child has to pass a bicycle safety exam at school. The coexistence of different modes of travel is hard-wired into the culture.

Related:

Cyclists can’t carry six bags of groceries; bulk buying is almost nonexistent. Instead of shopping for a week, people stop at the market daily. So the need for processed loaves that will last for days is gone. A result: good bread.

I’ve always appreciated the is-it-feasible-to-carry-in-one-trip constraint of shopping. It’s been a useful way to keep my love of lovely things in check, and has helped me remain at least somewhat graceful walking the streets of New York City.

[via]

The simple form of a tree provides inspiration for a kindergarten space and movement as a tool for learning:

In “Philosophical Investigations,” Ludwig Wittgenstein writes that what children and foreigners have in common is the absence of knowledge of language and a set of codified rules. This leads them — in the first instance — to learn through the senses and the body. To give the children more freedom to move around the school, the directors of the Fuji Kindergarten requested Tezuka to design spaces without furniture: no chairs, desks or lecterns. As a result, “Ring Around a Tree” offers an architecture where there are no measures taken to constrain space, in order to liberate the body.

And that includes the floors of the structure itself:

The space created by Tezuka seems to have just two floors, but for the children the building has six floors with volumes that are one meter high. The compressed spaces, which can only be reached by crawling, further the freedom of movement and ability to use the body as a means of learning.

The tree was a “place-playmate” for several generations — a treehouse, a waiting shelter, a climbing space — before recently transformed. What places do we consider playmates, and how might they be, should they be, transformed?

James Bridle has made a book — 202 maps based on his movements over the past year. Importantly, it is “based on” his movements because:

[T]he data was not recorded by me, but by my phone. In April, researchers Alasdair Allen and Pete Warden revealed that the iPhone was storing location data without the users’ knowledge.

Regarding this data:

This digital memory is better than mine — it frequently recalls things and places I have no personal, onboard memory of, and over time I come to rely on it over my own memories, just as I recall my sister’s birth not through my own vision, but in the form of a photograph of the event. I appear, physically and impossibly, in my own mental image.

Of the idea of place:

We share the city, and increasingly the world, with another nature, invoked by us but long since split at the root, which looks at the same world with other eyes. The other city is the abstract machine: the digital networks, access points, substations and relay points, datacenters and fiber rings; its inhabitants are sensors and screens. Seeing through the machines’ eyes is a kind of breach: accessing a grosstoplogy of the network. (Timo Arnall breaches, oh so elegantly, here and here.)

Head over to pick up Where the F**k Was I?

Sam Anderson on the art of seeing, or what a physical almanac can teach us about our physical selves under the crush of nonphysical information on the Internet:

We need to remember the value of nothing. It’s like breathing: you can’t inhale all day.

We need to learn to make peace with the information we don’t know, to embrace the zeroes, to relearn the pleasures of hunger, need, interruption, restraint. We need to work up our ignorance muscles. We need to organize our internal absences to create meaning. We are responsible, in other words, now and forever, for our own deletionism.

What if we read language as something else? Color, music, landscapes. What if the letterforms were something else entirely? Ingrid Fetell points to the reason we read so easily — our letterforms have evolved from natural forms (break mine):

Neuroscientist Marc Changizi writes in his book The Vision Revolution that the reason we read so easily is because our letterforms evolved to look like natural objects, (or more correctly, parts of objects) which our brains are primed to process quickly because they surrounded us in our ancestral environment. Reading a text is then very much like reading a landscape. 

Our letters look like they do because our brain is fast at processing edges and contours, which hold information about an object that could be urgently relevant to our survival, but slower at processing stimuli less urgently relevant to survival. (Is that a cliff edge or a gently sloping hillside? A tiger’s sabre tooth or a ripe apricot? The fastest way to know is shape.) Our letters are not colors because such a detailed level of color identification is not as urgent a mental task; the systems for “reading” color are just naturally slower, (though colors hold lots of intrinsic emotional significance…

[Image: One can read the color and shape of this piece just as well — better? — than one can listen to it.]

Nico Muhley with an approach to reading:

[I] came across somebody’s blog, the first line of which was, “I decided not to read this when it came out.” What. Why would you take the time to write that you, on purpose, didn’t read something? What a strange impulse, and a strange thing to admit to; maybe it’s something in my makeup but it seems only polite to listen to every goddamn thing and read everything and don’t stop listening and reading and looking until you keel over in a pile of Belgian schmattas and headphones, and until that time, feel terribly guilty about not having read, listened, seen. I have a page on my phone that is devoted to things I need to read, things people have recommended to me. The principle is to go into everything wanting to like it. I read those Dan Brown books! The only reason I could see not to would be to make a terrible autobiographical point, and reading things with hatred in the heart is the opposite of fun, so I found a way in that felt like making the best of an airport bistro.

If we go into everything seeing good, seeing possibility in those airport bistros, boingo wifi, saying ‘yes and,’ what might be possible? It’s the ‘wanting to like it principle.’

Chuck Wolfe reports on corners as the central place of urban life. More so than public squares, he says, the corner is an elemental feature of travel between places:

At crossroads, whether paved and straight or dirt and ill-defined, destinations meet wheeled and other forms of transport, while natural systems meet reconstructed space. As modes of transportation coalesce, people watch and wait. Often, drainage, power and other utilities focus at such central points, above and below ground. Corners are places of safety and intimidation, homogeneity and contrast.

And:

[U]urban corners may represent the best, most visible and pragmatic opportunity to reorient our cities, and become nothing short of the baseline—the building blocks—for reinvention of city neighborhoods in the new millennium.

This summer, I’ve (voluntarily) absconded from New York City to live in the woods a few hours north. While I’ve made the transition, it’s been a bit quiet around here. Everything is quite the opposite. It’s un-urban, for instance, and in fact, there is not a corner to be found for a few dozen miles in any direction. As a long-time urban dweller, even this temporary transition has been tranquil yet trying. I was told the city was here for me to use, yet here there is no city.

If corners are opportunities to unify design and land use, then it’s some other actor or agency that must be the decision-maker. But who? What is the baseline of unurbanism?

To celebrate Emerson’s 208th birthday, The Domino Project republished Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance. Consistent with its message to trust yourself, they’ve launched a 30-day writing challenge:

#Trust30 is an online initiative and 30-day writing challenge that encourages you to look within and trust yourself. Use this as an opportunity to reflect on your now, and to create direction for your future. 30 prompts from inspiring thought-leaders will guide you on your writing journey. Sign up below to receive the prompts by email. If you like this pledge, check out reverb10, it’s inspiring.

My prompt for today:

If ‘the voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks,’ then it is more genuine to be present today than to recount yesterdays. How would you describe today using only one sentence? Tell today’s sentence to one other person. Repeat each day.

Inspired by atomic sentences, I’ve already been doing this for 30 days — with surprising results. What’s your sentence of the day?