wolkenmachine

this tumblr is about: | into the archive | also check out: my website | my music blog

[passingfad]

Innovation defined as rearranging pieces and adding more processing power is not some big idea that is going to disrupt the broken status quo, It IS the broken status quo.

[passingfad]

A beautiful and heartfelt talk by Dana (Donella) Meadows, author of the book “The Limits to Growth”, on why it’s important to build shared vision.

[passingfad]

There has been a striking change in the behavior of the intellectual class in recent years. The left intellectuals who 60 years ago would have been teaching in working class schools, writing books like "mathematics for the millions" (which made mathematics intelligible to millions of people), participating in and speaking for popular organizations, etc., are now largely disengaged from such activities, and although quick to tell us that they are far more radical than thou, are not to be found, it seems, when there is such an obvious and growing need and even explicit request for the work they could do out there in the world of people with live problems and concerns. That's not a small problem. This country, right now, is in a very strange and ominous state. People are frightened, angry, disillusioned, skeptical, confused. That's an organizer's dream, as I once heard Mike say. It's also fertile ground for demagogues and fanatics, who can (and in fact already do) rally substantial popular support with messages that are not unfamiliar from their predecessors in somewhat similar circumstances. We know where it has led in the past; it could again. There's a huge gap that once was at least partially filled by left intellectuals willing to engage with the general public and their problems. It has ominous implications, in my opinion.

Noam Chomsky (http://www.mrbauld.com/chomsky1.html)

[beinganddesign]

A device that broadens your perspective

[sci-universe]

We actually have pictures that great of Mars, a planet about 225 million kilometers (140 million miles) away from us. Image copyright: NASA

[nevver]

Caught soul stealing, Antoine Geiger

[totallynotagentphilcoulson]

“I just learned smudge tool now let me condemn technology by using technology”

[bogleech]

Every time I think artists are done embarrassing themselves with this bizarre phone-shaming obsession, they sink to an even more comedic low.

[passingfad]

Chomsky & Krauss: An Origins Project Dialogue

[passingfad]

An Evening with Christopher Alexander

[passingfad]

The movie shows a 3D Map of the nearby Universe, where we take successive slices. The volume we have mapped is roughly circular, so its a bit like slicing an orange vertically from the edge through to the opposite edge. The location of our Milky Way Galaxy is in centre  of the middle frame (marked SGZ=0) halfway through the movie.  The map spans nearly two billion light year from side to side. Regions with many galaxies are shown in white or red, whereas regions with fewer galaxies are dark blue.

https://uwaterloo.ca/news/news/astrophysicists-draw-most-comprehensive-map-universe

[passingfad]

interaction

[passingfad]

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Upton Sinclair

[passingfad]

If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.

John von Neumann

[interactionaday-blog]

[passingfad]

Our lives are full of interactions. We interact with objects, people or ideas every day and all the time. In an attempt to better understand these interactions I design or find an interaction every day, and record it.            

an interaction a day

[stunningpicture]

"People use statistics the way a drunk uses a lamp post — for support, not illumination." –Vince Scully

(via stunningpicture)

[passingfad]

Bone, Flesh, Skin: The Making of Japanese Lacquer 

[passingfad]

Isotype

from wikipedia:

(International System of TYpographic Picture Education) is a method of showing social, technological, biological and historical connections in pictorial form. It was first known as the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics(Wiener Methode der Bildstatistik), due to its having been developed at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien (Social and economic museum of Vienna) between 1925 and 1934. The founding director of this museum, Otto Neurath, was the initiator and chief theorist of the Vienna Method. The term Isotype was applied to the method around 1935, after its key practitioners were forced to leave Vienna by the rise of Austrian fascism.

[passingfad]

Energy Systems Language

from wikipedia:

The design intent of the energy systems language was to facilitate the generic depiction of energy flows through any scale system while encompassing the laws of physics, and in particular, the laws of thermodynamics (see energy transformation for an example).

In particular H.T. Odum aimed to produce a language which could facilitate the intellectual analysis, engineering synthesis and management of global systems such as the geobiosphere, and its many subsystems. Within this aim, H.T. Odum had a strong concern that many abstract mathematical models of such systems were not thermodynamically valid. Hence he used analog computers to make system models due to their intrinsic value; that is, the electronic circuits are of value for modelling natural systems which are assumed to obey the laws of energy flow, because, in themselves the circuits, like natural systems, also obey the known laws of energy flow, where the energy form is electrical. However Odum was interested not only in the electronic circuits themselves, but also in how they might be used as formal analogies for modeling other systems which also had energy flowing through them. As a result, Odum did not restrict his inquiry to the analysis and synthesis of any one system in isolation. The discipline that is most often associated with this kind of approach, together with the use of the energy systems language is known as systems ecology.