I will forevermore, I expect, be trying to re-create the purity of that time. Having done nothing, I had nothing to lose. Having made a happy life without having achieved anything at all artistically, I found that any artistic achievement was a bonus. Having finally conceded that I wasn’t a prodigy after all, I had the total artistic freedom that is afforded only to the beginner, the doofus, the aspirant.

I started to write my text maybe 8 years ago, not to be read. It is like a rough draft. Each shows and works helps to build my narrative. The narrative is more cohesive and in the end at some point, I will be ale to release all the works with one narrative putting all the works together.

The doors of perception are not so much cleansed, as Aldous Huxley famously found after his first experience on mescaline, as they are cracked open and left askew.

Beyond these primeval tools, the interdependency of created objects is astounding. Select at random any of the many thousands items within reach of where you now sit. None of them could exist without many of the others around it. No technology is an island.

For a while after it was published I'd read it to myself before I went to sleep at night, and it made me feel really secure. I'd never actually ever written something before which was designed to comfort. I think what's happening in the story is not just what I thought my friend needed to hear, but what some very vulnerable part of me also needs to hear.

Ryan Singer from 37signals joins Bob and Chris for this episode of Jobs-to-be-Done Radio!

The results offer some tantalizing hints about how wolves first turned doglike. “The conventional view is that the hunter-gatherers go out and get a puppy,” said Chung-I Wu of the University of Chicago, an author of the Nature Communications study. If humans actually did breed early dogs this way, then dogs would have descended from a very small population.

That’s not what Dr. Wu and his colleagues have found, though. Instead, it appears that a large population of wolves started lingering around humans — perhaps scavenging the carcasses that hunters left behind.

In this situation, aggressive wolves would have fared badly, because humans would kill them off. Mellower wolves, by contrast, would thrive. If this notion turns out to be true, it means that we didn’t domesticate wolves — they domesticated themselves. SLC6A4 may have played a crucial part in this change, because serotonin influences aggression.

When you're comfortable in your own skin, you can do anything.

Frances Ha - Theatrical Trailer (2013) 86 min - Comedy - 12 June 2013 (France) 8.3 Your rating: -/10 Ratings: 8.3/10 from 295 users Metascore: 86/100 Reviews: 4 user | 43 critic | 5 from Metacritic.com A story that follows a New York woman (who doesn't really have an apartment), apprentices for a dance company (though she's not really a dancer), and throws herself headlong into her dreams, even as their possible reality dwindles. Director: Noah Baumbach Writers: Noah Baumbach (screenplay), Greta Gerwig (screenplay) Stars: Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner, Adam Driver

One of my favorite bits from one of my favorite comedians newest specials. This footage is from the HBO Oh My God Comedy Special by Louis CK I did not create this nor do I own the rights to it. I am simply uploading this for pure entertainment and potential educational purposes.

Now I don’t pretend to be a qualified artist (I couldn’t draw a bull to save my life), but I can recognize the mathematical aspects of his paintings, and I can write a damn fine program. There is one obvious way to consider Picasso-style line drawings as a mathematical object, and it is essentially the Bezier curve. Let’s study the theory behind Bezier curves, and then write a program to draw them. The mathematics involved requires no background knowledge beyond basic algebra with polynomials, and we’ll do our best to keep the discussion low-tech. Then we’ll explore a very simple algorithm for drawing Bezier curves, implement it in Javascript, and recreate one of Picasso’s line drawings as a sequence of Bezier curves.

Nature, anarchy, self-sufficiency, anti-system feelings, simple life. 

When we’re designing a product, we have to look to different attributes of the product. Some of those attributes will be the materials that it’s made from and the form that’s connected to those materials. So for example, with the first iMac that we made, the primary component of that was the cathode ray tube, which was spherical. We would have an entirely different approach to designing something like that than the current iMac, which is a very thin, flat-panel display. […]

A lot of what we seem to be doing in a product like [the iPhone] is actually getting design out of the way. And I think when forms develop with that sort of reason, and they’re not just arbitrary shapes, it feels almost inevitable. It feels almost undesigned. It feels almost like, well, of course it’s that way. You know, why wouldn’t it be any other way?

Early on, we came to believe that Google's emerging search business was the biggest threat that eBay faced. eBay helped users find hard-to-find, unique products. Google's goal of organizing the world's information also helped users find hard-to-find, unique products. The mechanisms and models were different, but the overlap was clear and we came to view Google as our top competitive threat.

My daughter, before she could read, taught me what the internet is. She was very anxious about what was written about her on the net, and made me go through all of it with her. This seemed crazy from a little kid from the world where we’re told by jackasses that kids don’t care about privacy, so I tried to tease out why she cared. As she described why, I began to see what the net was to her, and really is to all of us: the net is what we all already know, but haven’t thought of yet. And because of this, because of how strange this is, we who seek to understand and explain the world are in terrible trouble.

People don’t go online to become someone else, they go online and the network makes them into many selves, all as true in the moment as any other, and all changing the world with their tiny ephemeral footprints, making a trillion memories none of us will ever remember to remember, all watched over by machines of loving grace.

Actor Bill Murray reads two poems by Wallace Stevens at Bubby's Brooklyn, as part of Poets House's 17th Annual Poetry Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge, Monday June 11, 2012

There's a tendency to discuss the art of the past hundred years in terms of binary oppositions: abstract versus figurative; conceptual versus craft-based; painting versus photography; and so on. Richter, who since the 1970s has been almost universally acknowledged as a late-modern master, reduces these binaries to rubble. Here's a painter whose work is inseparable from photography; a man so devoted to craft that he reportedly makes his students construct their own pallet-trolleys before allowing them to raise a brush in anger, yet indulges in Joseph Beuys-style performances in which he lounges on a staircase grasping a wire (as in the 1968 piece Cable Energy), or Debordian critiques of consumer culture in which he installs himself on pedestal-mounted furniture amid a soundscape of advertising slogans (as in the 1963 piece Living with Pop: A Demonstration of Capitalist Realism); who exhibits colour-charts alongside pastoral landscapes; places mirrors around his paintings; photographs a single grey brushstroke from 128 different angles and lays these out in a large grid; or projects a yellow one, massively enlarged, on to fresh canvas and repaints it as a giant 20-metre streak … I could go on and on: his versatility and scope are stunning.

"It Takes A Village To Make Bad Art" Dave Hickey will talk about the downside of economies of scale in art practice, art education, and art education in the age of Global Art and the digital Global Village. He will explain why bigger isn't necessarily better. PLEASE NOTE: The opinions expressed by the speaker are not necessarily those of the institution.

I think it was Goethe who said that love is an unreal thing, and marriage is a real thing, and any confusion of the real with the unreal always leads to disaster.

"The noted suicide researcher Edwin Schneidman described the thinking process that proceeds suicide as "tunnel vision" - a narrow focus on immediate concerns, avoiding meaningful integrated thinking, and being closed to new ideas or interpretations..The link between rigid thinking and suicide has long been established. For many years researchers thought that rigidity was a personality trait that predisposed people to commit suicide, but recent evidence indicates that the rigidity of suicidal persons is temporary, part of the response to personal crisis. This fits the view of suicide as an escape from the self: A person undergoing a personal crisis responds with mental narrowing, which includes the rejection of meaningful thought and a rigid adherence to preset, narrow styles of thinking.

The sense of the passage of time among suicidal people resembles that of acutely bored people. The present seems an endless drag...A five minute interval may seem like eight or ten minutes to a suicidal person...Another sign or the restricted time perspective of suicidal persons is their inability to think about the future...They use the future tense less than other people...People spend the time prior to a suicide in empty, meaningless busywork...copying numbers, sorting files, proofreading or making simple calculations."

Remember that the only representation of you, no matter what your station, is you — your presentation, your demeanor. You simply must attend. Stand when someone enters the room, especially if you are lowly and he is the boss, and even if the reverse is true. Look them in the eye. Ask yourself: Does anybody need an introduction? If so, before you say one word about business, introduce them to others with pleasure in your voice. If you can't muster enthusiasm for the people you happen upon in life, then you cannot be gracious. Remember, true graciousness demands that you have time for others.

But we have chosen to recognise an in-house design team which has had an enormous impact on its industry. Under creative director Richard Turley, (not forgetting editor Josh Tyrangiel) Bloomberg Businessweek has trounced its rivals with a verve and energy that recalls the heyday of the printed magazine.

Just things as they are,
Unblinking, lying mute
In that bright light--
And the trees waiting for the night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

The one thing I am trying to do in my "real" life is simplify. There are really only a handful of things I care about, so I'm trying to minimise the distractions associated with the other things. It's basically: family, writing, teaching.

As artists, we want to be working at the border of what is known. How else can we begin but by making furrows in the unknown? The only way to do this is to “know” that the mark you make will be yours, yours alone.

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me.

The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.

The Internet unlocked the world of bits. 3D printing is unlocking the world of atoms.

Social journalism celebrates the notion of authenticity over speed, collaboration over competition. The news reporter’s primary rival today is not another reporter but the searing intimacy of online testimony and imagery. We must make our peace with that.

BLVR: You’ve kind of gone past the point of no return.
DS: Yeah. There’s a wonderful line from one of Coetzee’s later novels in which he is implicitly criticizing his own work for not having the mark of greatness, which to Coetzee is that you have to deform the medium in order to say only what you can say. In Coetzee’s opinion, he himself never did that. Which is an interesting critique. Anyway, what I’m very interested in is altering the face of an artform. That’s what excites me. That’s what interests me. If my work is no good, it’s just a kind of random gathering of notes, and if it is good, it’s maybe pushing the non-fiction form a little bit forward. Without pretending I’m by any means the only person doing this, but I’m quite a champion of it. 

Jony Ive is himself classic Apple. Brushed steel, polished glass hardware, complicated software honed to simplicity. His genius is not just his ability to see what others cannot but also how he applies it. To watch him with his workmates in the holy of holies, Apple’s design lab, or on a night out is to observe a very rare esprit de corps. They love their boss, and he loves them. What the competitors don’t seem to understand is you cannot get people this smart to work this hard just for money. Jony is Obi-Wan. His team are Jedi whose nobility depends on the pursuit of greatness over profit, believing the latter will always follow the former, stubbornly passing up near-term good opportunities to pursue great ones in the distance. Jony’s values happen to add value — emotional and financial. It takes a unique alchemy of form and function for millions of people to feel so passionately about the robot in their pocket.

Would you take advice from William S Burroughs? What if it were filtered through the humanistic sensibilities of Patti Smith? Addressing the crowd at last summer’s Louisiana Literature Festival at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the punk poetess shared some good counsel laid on her in her youth by the Beat’s highest priest. Build a good name, he told her, and make sure everything you create stays true to it, until eventually that name becomes its own currency.

Thomas Keller is a successful chef, restaurateur, and cookbook writer. His first restaurant in New York, however, closed when the stock market bottomed out in the 1980s. From the setback he learned that while he was a great cook he wasn't as strong in financially running the restaurant or in how to run a dining room. When he purchased the French Laundry (in Yountville CA) he realized he had to hire someone to focus on the dining room and have someone who could be responsible for the finances, which allowed him to focus on the food. He refers to this successful combination as "the tripod". Keller holds multiple three star ratings by the Michelin Guide, having received a total of seven stars in the 2011 editions. He was interviewed by MBA 2 student Colleen Donovan as part of the View from the Top speaker series at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. View from the Top Speaker Series: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/cldr/events/vftt.html Thomas Keller Restaurant Group: http://tkrg.org/

This week MoMA New York unearths a hidden gem from the archive of German cinema’s most badly behaved enfant terrible, the inspired New Wave filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (infamous director of The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola). From April 14 through 19, the museum will screen Fassbinder’s surreal and rarely seen 1973 sci-fi film World on a Wire (Welt am Draht), originally made as a two-part series for German TV. Based on the novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye—one of the first writers to discuss the concept of virtual reality—the story unfolds as a research scientist mysteriously dies and his second-in-command, Dr. Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch,) is elected to take over his work on an artificial world made up of programmed projections of human beings. Strange apparitions and headaches begin to afflict Dr. Stiller (signaled in the film by squalling from an analog synthesizer), and when people begin disappearing into thin air, he decides to investigate. The film’s Ken Adam–style futuristic sets, mix of Wiemar-esque cabaret costumes and 70s-utopia fashion, and dizzying cinematography create an electrifying journey for what is essentially a very heated philosophical debate on human existence. As Fassbinder put it at the time: “Perhaps another, larger world has made us as a virtual one?” Today’s clip is an excerpt from the newly restored version of the film, art-directed by original cinematographer and frequent Fassbinder collaborator Michael Ballhaus. The DVD version of World On a Wire, released by Second Sight on May 17, will be accompanied by a documentary on its restoration.

Nassim Taleb and Daniel Kahneman discusses Antifragility at NYPL on Feb 5, 2013 http://www.pleasemishandle.com/video/ Fat Tony's Antilibrary: An online directory of books, articles and videos by Nassim Taleb.

The thing is, I think that there’s a new form, that I’d like to see. It’s more like an album that you put on than an experience that you have once. You’re meant to internalize in one viewing. I’m sort of interested now… No, not sort of — I’m completely interested. That’s the way I think of Upstream, as an experience that you have once, and hopefully you have a full emotional experience.

Saying a subject is too awful or painful to joke about is like saying a disease is too awful to be treated.

I touched on this point earlier in How to Survive in Design (and in a Zombie Apocalypse), but something like Facebook Home is completely beyond the abilities of Photoshop as a design tool. How can we talk about physics-based UIs and panels and bubbles that can be flung across the screen if we’re sitting around looking at static mocks? (Hint: we can’t.) It's no secret that many of us on the Facebook Design team are avid users of QuartzComposer, a visual prototyping tool that lets you create hi-fidelity demos that look and feel like exactly what you want the end product to be. We’ve given a few talks on QC in the past, and its presence at Facebook (introduced by Mike Matas a few years back) has changed the way we design. Not only does QC make working with engineers much easier, it’s also incredibly effective at telling the story of a design. When you see a live, polished, interactable demo, you can instantly understand how something is meant to work and feel, in a way that words or long descriptions or wireframes will never be able to achieve. And that leads to better feedback, and better iterations, and ultimately a better end product. When you are working on something for which the interactions matter so greatly—in this case, a gesture-rich, heavily physics-based ui—anything less simply will not do.

It’s not about passion. Passion is something that we tend to overemphasize, that we certainly place too much importance on. Passion ebbs and flows. To me, it’s about desire. If you have constant, unwavering desire to be a cook, then you’ll be a great cook. If it’s only about passion, sometimes you’ll be good and sometimes you won’t. You’ve got to come in every day with a strong desire. With passion, if you see the first asparagus of the springtime and you become passionate about it, so much the better, but three weeks later, when you’ve seen that asparagus every day now, passions have subsided. What’s going to make you treat the asparagus the same? It’s the desire.

One of the biggest shifts the connection economy has brought is that assets are no longer reserved for companies and organizations. Now that everyone has the ability to own a slice of the attention paid to media, now that everyone can build and nurture a network, assets are no longer off limits to people who work for a living.

For writers and media companies looking for yet more ways to adjust to the digital tide, Mr. Ebert demonstrated that it is much easier to surf a wave enthusiastically than to crankily swim against it. Great writing, constant reinvention and an excitement about what comes next seem to have done the trick for him. And besides, typing your way off this mortal coil is not a bad way to go.

Mickey Drexler, CEO and Chairman of J Crew discusses his views on the value of an MBA, leadership succession, consumer research, and motivating people. He spoke at the Stanford Graduate School of Business at the View from the Top speakers series. http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/cldr/events/vftt.html

Ironing out the little problems can make it so companies can avoid big disasters. Recorded: January 31, 2007 Related Article: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/2007entepreneurshipconf.shtml Catmull appeared at the 2007 Entrepreneurship Conference at the Stanford Graduate School of Business

One afternoon in the late ’70s I asked Ruscha about his “Standard Stations” paintings: “These are standard stations, right? As in standardized stations?” Ruscha nodded. Then he said, “Yeah, but they’re also standard stations,” and a little bell went bing! Of course! Lapsed-Catholic Ruscha! Standard stations of the cross! Fourteen stations, minus the crucifixion. Thirteen stations from Los Angeles to the Calvary of Ed’s hometown in Oklahoma – then thirteen stations back to Los Angeles, refusing that sacrifice. Perfect.

I don’t think you should ever say anything that you’re going to have to apologize for later. If the heat gets hot, just let them get mad. How did somebody make you apologize? Did they literally hit you on your body? Let them be upset. It’s not the worst thing in the world. It doesn’t mean you’re going to be a pauper. It’s a desperate thing to need everybody to be really happy with everything you say. To me the way to manage is not to have 50 versions of yourself — I do this thing, and the next time you’re going to hear me is the next time I do another one. As soon as you crack your knuckles and open up a comments page, you just canceled your subscription to being a good person.

SC I can tell you what does matter to me: I think about things on hopefully a long timeline. What I gauge as success is if I can write a work that is still relevant at some point in the future. The further and further into the future it’s relevant, the more successful it is. That doesn’t mean that I’m so full of myself I think anything I do is going to be relevant in the future. But if at any point I think it’s not, I’ll just stop and I’ll quit. My job now that the film is done is to let it impact culture at a certain level, so that it has a chance to carry forward on its own, and be filtered or reviewed or however you want to call it. It goes through the crucible of time and attention and if it’s worth anything it will stay around, and if it’s not then it will go away. I don’t necessarily think things that are very commercial now are going to be in any way relevant in the future. That’s my gauge for success.