[colin-vian]

Manuel Barbadillo  1969

[flasd]

Edward Weston, ca. 1935

[wolfliving]

*Oh brother

[eksblog]

I love the metaphor of rose-colored glasses. That’s the way to view the world. They’re rose-colored, meaning there is a tint. You are seeing a rosier future than we will really experience. But they’re glasses. They’re not opaque, right? They’re not blinders. You actually are seeing the world. And if there’s a train coming, it’s a little bit rose-tinted, but it’s a train.

Dan Gilbert, on the Freakonomics podcast, uses the idea of “rose-tinted trains” to impress that positivity is not necessarily blind or impractical. 

[11-9n]

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth all undiscovered before me.

Sir Isaac Newton (via 1109-83)

[tacanderson]

The Marines Are Building Robotic War Balls

Establishing a beachhead on enemy-held turf is historically one of the most dangerous jobs in warfare, just ask Achilles. But the robotic age may make it slightly less so. A research team from Stamford, Conn. has developed an amphibious drone that they are currently testing with the Marines. The GuardBot is a robot ball that swims over water at about 4 miles per hour and then rolls along the beach, at as much as a 30-degree incline and 20 miles per hour.

They said war balls.  

[stoweboyd]

O’er the wine dark sea, the bellicose balls they swam!

[melisica]

Alicja Atomova

[sulphuriclike]

Davis Ayer

[nevver]

The Only Naming Convention That Works

[historical-nonfiction]

Nicely Literal

The word ‘Freelance’ comes from 1820 novel ‘Ivanhoe’. It meant a mercenary knight with no allegiance who offered his services in exchange for money.

[noodlesinbroth]

[eksblog]

Wild contouring. As we continue to see new projects that radically re-imagine the appearance of the face for a facial recognition-filled future, it feels easier to imagine makeup as a means to privacy. This image kind of captures this line of thinking. 

[consciousfree]

31 / 365

[notational]

This person’s GIF flyers are great.

[eksblog]

"Everyone gets the joke sooner than we used to." – Grant McCracken

[11-9n]

The alternative would seem to be a sort of deep focus in isolation, in which one accepts the incompleteness that comes from being apart from an audience, that comes from not seeking final judgment on what one is doing and letting it remain ambiguous, open-ended, of the present moment and not assimilated to an archive of identity. To put that tritely: The best way to be yourself is to not be anybody in particular but to just be.

Rob Horning, Social Media Is Not Self-Expression

[warrenellis-deactivated20200730]

a company called Orbital Insight is now tracking “the shadows cast by half-finished Chinese buildings” as a possible indicator for where the country’s economy might be headed.

[eksblog]

The comment about the library in Snow Crash strikes a chord, but here's to hoping that the logic does hold up when put into more frequent practice.

[noosphe-re]

[botpoet]

Prof. Lev Manovich - a writer, artist academic and theorist working broadly within the filed of new media and software studies - gave a talk during lunchtime one afternoon at the School for Poetic Computation. While eating a sandwich, Manovich spoke quite broadly about his own work, but in...