"You’ve been interested in the revolution in thinking that took place during Renaissance. I love the term “natural philosophy”…<br />
<br />
It is lovely indeed. Too bad it hasn’t been used since 18th century.<br />
<br />
What does that term mean to you?<br />
<br />
Before Galileo, philosopher was somebody who studied great books. Many of those people were extraordinarily brilliant, but their absolute obedience to books was destructive. What Galileo did was to say natural philosophy is written in the Great Book of Nature & one must move from reading books in library to reading books around us—that is, use experimental method & believe in power of the eye. That was the big thing. Newton was called a natural philosopher. & in 18th century, professions of mathematics & physics were not deeply distinguished, but now they are.<br />
I’m certainly a philosopher entranced with unifying ideas. However, I don’t only study books; I study nature. Also art of the past, for purpose of finding artifacts that I could embrace."

"Like…Ivan Illich, John Chris Jones was decades ahead of his time…wrote about cities w/out traffic signals in 1950s…was an advocate of what today is called call ‘design thinking’…advocated user-centered design well before term was widely used…began by designing aeroplanes – but soon felt compelled to make industrial products more human…fuelled his search for design processes that would shape, rather than serve, industrial systems. As a kind of industrial gamekeeper turned poacher, Jones went on to warn about potential dangers of digital revolution unleashed by Claude Shannon…realized attempts to systematize design led, in practice, to separation of reason from intuition & embodied experience w/ design process…‘I’ve been drawn to study ancient myths and traditional theatres for decades’ he writes; ‘unless we can rid modern culture of its realisms there is no getting out of the grim realities of commercial engineering and the way of life built on it’…"

"artists who work in certain materials have, for decades, usually had trouble being taken seriously as fine artists. Glassblowers, ceramicists, textile workers, furniture makers &, until a few decades ago, photographers were all not usually welcome in fine art galleries or the museums that show fine art… unless it was a show dedicated to only ceramics, for example.

"I have a reflex­ive dis­like of sub­urbs. I grew up in Orlando, in one of its sub­urbs stacked on sub­urbs, all in dis­tant orbit around a tiny cen­ter of faux-urbanity we called down­town. (Which in turn hov­ered in dis­tant orbit around a giant cen­ter of faux-reality we called Dis­ney World.)

"Hieronymus Bosch (English pronunciation: /ˌhaɪəˈrɒnəməs bɒʃ/, Dutch: [ɦieːˈɾoːniməs ˈbɔs]; born Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Aken [jəˈrun ɑnˈtoːnɪsoːn vɑn ˈaːkə(n)]; c. 1450 – buried August 9, 1516) was an Early Netherlandish painter. His work is known for its use of fantastic imagery to illustrate moral and religious concepts and narratives."

See also: http://www.csun.edu/~aee52628/NCSS/Popular%20culture%20index.html

"While these images feature a curious mixture of Catholicism, heterodoxy, folklore, and astrology, there is scant evidence that they encode any coherent mystical or “ancient” wisdom. As far as we know, the hand-drawn decks we have from the Renaissance were designed to amuse nobles with ordinary card games that first entered Europe in the fifteenth century. ... This point is important to emphasize, given the curious fog that cloaks our appreciation of the occult streams that animate the West. On the one hand, secular historians (and most of the better-informed adepts) recognize that the forms and even the content of much of today’s ancient or traditional lore are modern reconstructions rather than unbroken currents."

"From the Codex Atlanticus, this is a letter that Leonardo da Vinci wrote in 1482 to the Duke of Milan advertising his services as a "skilled contriver of instruments of war". From the translation:

"Using touchscreen technology and animation software, the digitized images of rare and beautiful historic books in the biomedical sciences are offered at kiosks at the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Visitors may ‘touch and turn’ these pages in a highly realistic way. They can zoom in on the pages for more detail, read or listen to explanations of the text, and (in some cases) access additional information on the books in the form of curators’ notes.

"Of all the changes that swept over Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the most widely influential was an epistemological transformation that we call the "scientific revolution." In the popular mind, we associate this revolution with natural science and technological change, but the scientific revolution was, in reality, a series of changes in the structure of European thought itself: systematic doubt, empirical and sensory verification, the abstraction of human knowledge into separate sciences, and the view that the world functions like a machine. These changes greatly changed the human experience of every other aspect of life, from individual life to the life of the group. This modification in world view can also be charted in painting, sculpture and architecture; you can see that people of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are looking at the world very differently."

"Of all the changes that swept over Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the most widely influential was an epistemological transformation that we call the "scientific revolution." In the popular mind, we associate this revolution with natural science and technological change, but the scientific revolution was, in reality, a series of changes in the structure of European thought itself: systematic doubt, empirical and sensory verification, the abstraction of human knowledge into separate sciences, and the view that the world functions like a machine. These changes greatly changed the human experience of every other aspect of life, from individual life to the life of the group. This modification in world view can also be charted in painting, sculpture and architecture; you can see that people of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are looking at the world very differently."

"We must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable laws of economics. These so-called laws are, in actuality, the economic mechanisms of 13th Century monarchs. Some of us analyzing digital culture and its impact on business must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems."

"He makes no effort to advance learning in general. If a project fails to find financing, he abandons it. In certain especially hasty sketches, he seems to be ridding himself of nagging ideas in order to free himself to turn his attention to something more mentally refreshing."

"The word arroba has its origin in Arabic ar-rubʿ (الربع), the fourth part (of a quintal). Arroba was a Spanish and Portuguese unit of weight, mass or volume. Its symbol is @. In weight it is equal to about 25 pounds in Spain, and 32 pounds in Portugal. An Italian academic claims to have traced the @ symbol to the Italian Renaissance, in a Venetian mercantile document signed by Francesco Lapi on May 4, sent from Seville to Rome, describing the goods and treasures arriving on a ship from the Americas to Spain 1537. The Aragonese historian Jorge Romance located the appearance of the @ symbol at the "taula de Ariza" registry from 1448, to denote a wheat shipment from Castile to the Kingdom of Aragon. The unit is still used in Portugal by cork merchants, and in Brazil by cattle traders, defined as 15 kg. In the Spanish language and Portuguese language, the term arroba has now become synonymous with the symbol due to its use in e-mail addresses."

"Your ringside seat to history - from the Ancient World to the present. History through the eyes of those who lived it, presented by Ibis Communications, Inc. a digital publisher of educational programming."

"The notion of a “dark ages” is really Renaissance disinformation. It’s an effort to make Renaissance innovations to banking, manufacturing, and corporate law look like modernity instead of the extraction of wealth by the few. It was only after the invention of monopoly centralized currency that the economy in Europe began to tank, common lands were fenced in, farming and grazing became impossible for peasants, sustainable land became speculative property, food supplies diminished, jobs required going to workshops in the city, health deteriorated and, you guessed it, the plague began."

"What could possibly make someone want to leave New York and move to Buffalo?" “I don’t miss my old life in New York. I only miss the life in New York I know I never would have had.”

"argues there is no such thing as "personal democracy"...genuine democratic discourse can only be participatory & collective...real democracy isn't just blogging and commenting, it's treating the entire world as "open source" and remakable by direct parti