"Novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco once said that the list is the origin of culture. But his fascination with lists and organization grew out of his longtime love affair with semiotics, the study of signs and symbols as an anthropological sensemaking mechanism for the world. In bridging semiotics with literature, Eco proposed a dichotomy of “open texts,” which allow multiple interpretations, and “closed texts,” defined by a single possible interpretation. Since semiotics is so closely related to language, one of its central inquiries deals with language acquisition — when, why, and how children begin to associate objects with the words that designate those objects. Most children’s picture books, with their simple messages and unequivocal moral lessons, fall within the category of “closed texts.”

In 1966, Eco published The Bomb and the General — a children’s book that, unlike the “open texts” of his adult novels with their infinite interpretations, followed the “closed text” format…

"And all of this is to prelude a simple question: Why did I have to wait so long for this opportunity? While I was already a music “fan” and immersed in family practices that included going to musical performances, singing at family gatherings, and enthusiastically drumming on car dashboards, it really wasn’t until college that I was able to see music as a source of study, as a place to connect passion with purpose, a place to learn new ways of listening…

we leave music instruction into the hands of people who are inclined on the production side of things (and even then in only limited ways such as marching bands and big band numbers). Why do we wait to make the study of music, its history, and the cultural meaning of it an option only for those students that eventually matriculate into universities?"

"I took some apples out of a paper bag where they had been lying for a long time; I had to cut off and throw away half of many of them. Afterwards as I was copying out a sentence of mine the second half of which was bad, I at once saw it as a half-rotten apple. And that’s how it always is with me. Everything that comes my way becomes for me a picture of what I am thinking about."

"Mission: “sharing, celebrating and enhancing the world's visual language”<br />
The Noun Project collects, organizes and adds to the highly recognizable symbols that form the world's visual language, so we may share them in a fun and meaningful way. Here is our pledge to you:<br />
FREE: The symbols on this site are and always will remain free. We believe symbols can not be effectively shared with the world if they are not free<br />
SIMPLE: Everyone like simplicity. We want you to be able to come to our site and effortlessly find and obtain what you are looking for. Simple as that.<br />
FUN: We think a language that can be understood by all cultures and people is a pretty amazing thing. We also think our symbols and the objects or ideas they represent are works of art worth celebrating.<br />
HIGHEST QUALITY: We get excited about things like scale, proportion, and shape. We are committed to design and quality in everything we do."

"If you want a classier explanation, I'd say you saw a semiotic ghost. All these contactee stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens that look like Fifties' comic art. They're semiotic phantoms, bits of deepcultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like the Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing. But you saw a different kind of ghost, that's all. That plane was part of the mass unconscious, once. You picked up on that, somehow. The important thing is not to worry about it."<br />
<br />
William Gibson, Il continuum di Gernsback, 1981

"We’re nothing more than pattern machines, but the patterns are personal. Non-absolute. If you ever meet two folks who collaborate well, who can finish each other’s thoughts, chances are they share a pattern language. When one says “lightbox it”,

"Mediamatic is a cultural organization in Amsterdam. We do exhibitions, presentations, workshops and much more. This site combines an overview with news and theory. It's edited automatically with anyMeta, matching the topical with heritage in a sometimes

"Through 15 topics & 4 themes...focus lenses on sparkles generated by many frictions between ideas, practices & infrastructures that populate cities...hope to provide raw food for thoughts to consider city of future. Do we want to mitigate, or eliminate t

"a massively multiplayer word association "game" or experiment ... or something. The idea is that given a word, a player types in the first thing that comes to mind and the results are combined into a giant network."

"Here are the origins of several symbols we use in everyday life."

"Symbols.com contains more than 1,600 articles about 2,500 Western signs, arranged into 54 groups according to their graphic characteristics."