Trying to stay atop the bouncing tech bandwagon of Web 2.0 I jumped with both feet into social media (Twitter), leaving behind old, reliable platforms such as Howard Rheingold’s Brainstorms. Then Twitter turned bad and I left for Mastodon, which was great but persnickety, and honestly it seemed like anyone I really wanted to follow…
On a recent trip to Sunset Beach, I came across an old tree with thinning branches, draped with copper-green lace lichen. A few of the branches were broken, splintered on the ground, dotted with holes bored by insects. The lichen doesn’t harm the tree’s living branches, but the dead branches give the lichen a place…
Last week, after the Santa Ana winds had cleared, I wanted to re-hang our patio sails, but I needed some kind of gizmo. I wanted a hook that I could attach to a screw…without removing the screw. (It’s a long story.) I figured I’d have to go to Home Depot and hunt through their hardware…
Is it not by his high superfluousness we know Our God? For to equal a need Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling Rainbows over the rain And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows On the domes of deep sea-shells, And make the necessary embrace of breeding Beautiful also as fire, Not even the…
There’s a feeling you getin the presence ofbeautiful buildings and bustling courtyards.A sense that these spacesare inviting you to slow down,deepen your attention, and bea bit more human. What if our software could do the same? This is the opening to the Resonant Computing Manifesto, a charter that aims direct our attention to the human…
The question isn’t “when will the robots become self-aware and take over?” The real question is, “are the robots adding life, supporting humanity, right now?” For instance, when AI is used to help radiologists read mammograms, there is a 20% improvement in detecting cancer. This is clearly a case where AI adds life. But when…
Reading source material, taking notes, then transcribing and rearranging those notes, and finding connections between them are all central to thinking, according to Sönke Ahrens. Legendary note-taker Niklas Luhman argued that it was impossible to think without writing. Now of course you could very easily feed a LLM a big stack of research papers and…
Here are two delightful animations that illustrate the idea of structural unfolding popularized by Christopher Alexander. They are fun to watch. And thought-provoking. A Matter of Form by Rene Jodoin A Geometry of Circles by Philip Glass Via Kottke
I once read a story about NASA engineers working on one of the first research satellites. They spent a long time trying to design a motorized system to deploy the solar panels that would power the satellite. Every solution they came up with was too complicated, too big, or required batteries that were too heavy.…
The Center for Humane Technology is working to popularize the term “AI drift,” describing a model’s tendency to degrade in performance over time. I’m not crazy about the term because I don’t think it clearly communicates the dangers that AI presents to people as they go about their daily lives. In my workplace I’m seeing…
I’ve been working for years on “life garden” document, trying to come up with an at-a-glance view of where my life is working and where it isn’t. I’ve been trying to apply Christopher Alexander’s principles of living structure. And I’m stuck. My document has all kinds of structures and centers and boxes and arrows. But…
I just heard that Annie Dillard, a writer who expressed the wonder and wildness of the natural world, has passed away. Reading Dillard I became aware that, far from being conservative…selecting for the least amount of energy consumption…the creative forces that bring us life are wildly playful, exuberant, and wealthy. After the one extravagant gesture…
I just got from the library Kevin Kelly’s book Excellent Advice for Life: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. It’s a pithy little volume, packed with tiny bits of wisdom. It’s like a cross between the best package of fortune cookies you’ll ever find and the Biblical book of Proverbs. Friends are better than money.…
It took about 50 years for the automation of elevators to eliminate the job of elevator operator. Once you can reach your floor with the simple push of a button, why would you pay someone just to push the buttons? The problem is that elevator operators delivered other services besides being sure the lift was…
If we design and construct buildings to suit our purposes, why do some buildings adapt with us as our purposes change, but other buildings refuse to change? That’s the question Stewart Brand asks in this six part series created by the BBC, based on his book How Buildings Learn. Over the course of the series…
