Bobulate

Taming the alarm clock

A nine-point proposal for crafting a more humane alarm clock (or,
how to play an aria):

First, replace the ferocious bell with a discreet dry sponge, then sharpen the hour hand (1) like the blade of a pocket knife so that when it comes into contact with the thread (2) you have extended to correspond with the hour at which you want to be woken, it will sever it. A sturdy firebrick (3) painted dull white is attached to the thread and tied on with a preferably two-coloured cord; the brick, no longer help by the thread drops onto the bagpipes (4) crushing them. An aria will come out of the bagpipes. This will depend on the chords you set the night before (remember to set both alarm clock and bagpipes), and the air of the aria will hit the paddle (5) wheel made of eleven starched ostrich features and will make it turn.

The process ends with, as you might imagine, an unleashed bicarbonate that heats a coffee pot. The way all good things should end.

Bruno Munari’s work as described by Dan Shepelavy: “a realm where the tweaking of adult conventions and the stimulation of children’s imaginations meet, mingle, draw, type, play, and get wonderfully, absurdly, heartwarmingly weird.”

Precisely.

What You See Is What You Mean

On Donald Knuth and when WYSIWYG transforms to WYSIWYM:

As opposed to industry-standard page layout programs that implement a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) paradigm, TeX produces “What You See Is What You Mean” (WYSIWYM) by using plain text files and a semantic mark-up language compiled on-the-fly to produce final pages.

Then:

This is where the moral objection comes in. Once the typographic decisions have been passed over to software, then the information no longer is tied to any one specific form. The possibilities multiply.

Also:

Plato reminds us that the very tool used to create books — writing — may have placed us in this double bind for good, between remembering and forgetting, information on or off, from zero to one and back.

(I still think he just needed a thank you note.)

Composition in performance, the future

Robin Sloan asks, what if the magazine article of the future, the album of the future, and the novel of the future are all the same thing, live events:

It’s an amazing live event that happens… every night! But I don’t really like the associa tion, because it implies so much about format, tone, scale — lots of things. There’s a reason I’m build­ing my perfect weapon out of TED and Phoot Camp, not Jay Leno and Char­lie Rose. At the very beginning I said this was the magazine article of the future, the album of the future, the novel of the future. It stretches a bit here, but I think it’s a fun stretch.

He goes on to describe the five properties that make these events a media product: Live, Generative, Publishable, Performative, and Serial.

This (and the entirety of the post which is truly necessary to bring the argument together) reinforce what Walter Ong refers to as “secondary orality.”

I always get excited to see Ong in practice.

But even more fascinating: this is evidence of a potential return to the oral tradition in practice. Studies of some of the oldest living oral cultures demonstrate that the structure of oral narrative itself, before the advent of writing, show this pattern. Prior to the advent of writing — long before texts of any kind — performers would compose oral narratives much in the way Robin describes, relying on generative formulas. They were composing texts while they were performing them live. The “publishable” aspect was different, of course, but the intent the same.

Social media has long been showing signs we’re returning there, but the event aspect pointed out here feels like a new step in this direction.

Spontaneously, against your better judgment

Often, I return to Seamus Heaney, in his Crediting Poetry Nobel lecture, where he explores the properties of poetry:

I credit [poetry] immediately because of a line I wrote fairly recently encourage myself (and whoever else might be listening) to “walk on air against your better judgment.” But I credit it ultimately because poetry can make an order as true to the impact of external reality … An order where we can at least grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. An order which satisfies all that is appetitive in the intelligence and prehensile in the affections.

I credit poetry, in other words, both for being itself and for being a help, for making possible a fluid and restorative relationship between the mind’s centre and its circumference, between the child gazing at the word “Stockholm” on the face of the radio dial and the man facing the faces that he meets in Stockholm at this most privileged moment. I credit it because credit is due to it, in our time and in all time, for its truth to life, in every sense of that phrase.

There seems to be a natural symmetry there with the findings Oliver Sacks expresses in Musicophilia with the natural rhythm people seem to feel with music.

Music seems to have a special power to animate us. There’s something about rhythm that seems to compel one to move with the beat. This is an exclusive human propensity. Children spontaneously move with the beat. No animal does so spontaneously.

Algorithmic expressionism

Mark Wilson in an interview on the intuitive nature of writing software:

Writing software can be very intuitive. Even with a very formally defined programming goal, there are usually many different ways to achieve that goal. Choosing a good path to achieve the goal is a question of intuition, judgment, intelligence, and probably a thousand other things. In my case, I don’t have a formally defined goal — except to make what I hope are interesting pictures. So I’m juggling these various algorithms — these recipes — in my software, adding a bit more here, taking some away there. I could almost describe my working process as “Algorithmic Expressionism.” This might be a bit of hyperbole, but again, I don’t have a formal goal. I follow the process where it leads me.

This immediately struck me as similar to E. L. Doctorow on writing: “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Wilson again on the random aspects of the software and surprise:

The power and excitement of image making with these machines lies with their power to create many choices. Randomness does lead to surprises and this is always exciting.

Wise words.

Defying the limits of paper

Inspired by a 1967 paper airplane contest at the Great Hall in New York, Klara Hobza developed a contest, the New Millennium Paper Airplane Contest.

This weekend, Studio 360 interviewed Hobza on the book which chronicles the entries:

Depending on what you try to achieve with your paper airplane, you’ll choose a different design. If it’s supposed to stay in the air for a long time, then the wings will be much wider, and if you try to get it to get it to fly farther, it will be a more dart-like narrow shape.

Hobza describes the feeling as, “Defying your own physical limits of your own physical body.” You may want to make your own to try out your own limits.

Bauhaus women

Ninety years after Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus, its female students sound as contemporary as they would today.

But The Guardian poses a question: if the world’s most famous modern art school accepted women, then why have we never heard of them?

The school’s fleeting existence (just 14 years), the rise of the anti-modern National Socialist movement and six years of world war may have been factors, but the uncomfortable truth is that the Bauhaus was never a haven of female emancipation.

More women than men applied to the school in 1919, and Gropius insisted that there would be “no difference between the beautiful and the strong sex” — those very words betraying his real views. Those of the “strong sex” were, in fact, marked out for painting, carving and, from 1927, the school’s new architecture department. The “beautiful sex” had to be content, mostly, with weaving.

Update: Details on MoMA exhibition and more at DO.

The honey maker of the United States

The White House carpenter is making honey:

A White House carpenter for the past 25 years, Mr. Brandts started beekeeping in the backyard of his Maryland home three years ago.

Now it’s been organized into something quite impressive:

Numbering more than 65,000 at one point, the bees produced a bumper crop of honey this year, the first time honey has ever been made on White House grounds. …. The total haul was 134 pounds of honey, or roughly 11 gallons.

This charming video shows the hives on the South Lawn, part of Michelle Obama’s organic kitchen project. Elisabeth Goodridge, in the voiceover:

“The White House honey is purely natural, and it won’t be processed in any way.” And that may or may not be a euphemism.