玉手箱

est. 2008 rewind selectah

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Super Normal

Designers generally do not think to design the "ordinary". If anything, they live in fear of people saying their designs are "nothing special". Of course, undeniably, people do have an unconscious everyday sense of "normal", but rather than try to blend in, the tendency for designers is to try to create "statement" or "stimulation". So "normal" has come to mean "unstimulating" or "boring" design.

It's not just designers; people who buy design and clients who commission designers do not see "normal" as a design concept or even entertain the idea of creating a "new normal". To dare, then, to design something "normal" within this prevailing scheme of design common sense raises the stakes; it makes for a consciously designed normal above-and-beyond normal that what we might call "Super Normal". Why super? Well, if our sense of normal falls within the realm of non-design, then the unthinkable attempt to undercut all the excesses and bold, brash statements recognised as design must conversely transcend them.

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Maintenance of Everything

A worrying condition worldwide is that civilization’s critical systems are rarely adequately resourced for long-term sustainment. The authors draw attention to the related concept of sustainability:

The best-known socio-ecological definition of sustainability (attributed to the “Brundtland Report”) is commonly paraphrased as “development that meets the needs of present generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

The distinction is that sustainability is merely a goal, whereas sustainment is a plan, a program, a set of actions. The one says, “Aspire”; the other says, “Here’s how to get it done.”

And keep it done. Unrelenting endurance is the commitment.

Charles C. Mann, a science journalist, expands on the distinction. He wrote me:

“Sustainability” has become, all too often, a vaguely invoked goal of reaching some steady-state situation in the indefinite future. “Sustainment” calls for a course of present-day action, iterative and constantly adjusted.

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Maintenance of Everything

This is a story of three generations in the family of the eminent mathematician-physicist Freeman Dyson, who died in 2020. In 1913, his father, Sir George Dyson, was a music teacher at Marlborough College in England. A friend related this anecdote to Freeman:

Your father had just bought his first motorcycle. They wheeled it up to the top of the school playing fields behind the College, next to the open grassland of the Wiltshire Downs. Your father then proceeded to dismantle the machine entirely, laying out all the different parts neatly on the ground. Then he reassembled it again, putting it all back together correctly, so that when he filled the tank with petrol and turned on the motor, it started immediately. He mounted it, and drove off at speed.

When I heard this story from Freeman’s son, science historian George Dyson, I asked him, “Did your dad do that kind of thing? Do you?”

Sir George’s grandson George wrote back:

Freeman, yes, but in a totally different non-physical way. I think anything he looked at he mentally dismantled down to the level of quantum field theory (below the level of even atoms or elementary particles) and then reassembled it before trusting it. I think that’s how he could just walk into any field and make sense of it. But he didn’t do it with his hands. I’m more like his father—physically taking things apart. Still maintain a 37-year-old Volvo, etc.

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Visit Original Link

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The Society of Mind

What is Life? One dissects a body but finds no life inside. What is Mind? One dissects a brain but finds no mind therein. Are life and mind so much more than the “sum of their parts” that it is useless to search for them? To answer that, consider this parody of a conversation between a Holist and an ordinary Citizen.

Holist: “I’ll prove no box can hold a mouse. A box is made by nailing six boards together. But it’s obvious that no box can hold a mouse unless it has some ‘mouse-tightness’ or ‘containment.’ Now, no single board contains any containment, since the mouse can just walk away from it. And if there is no containment in one board, there can’t be any in six boards. So the box can have no mouse tightness at all. Theoretically, then, the mouse can escape.”

Citizen: “Amazing. Then what does keep a mouse in a box?”

Holist: “Oh, simple. Even though it has no real mouse tightness, a good box can ‘simulate’ it so well that the mouse is fooled and can’t figure out how to escape.”

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Soft City

Walk-straight-through access, via a covered entrance passage or a connecting hallway, creates an ease of connection between the public realm of the street and the private world of the courtyard, getting from one world to a completely different one in a matter of seconds. Within an urban form where two such distinct kinds of outdoor space exist in such close proximity, the potential to walk straight through from private courtyards to the public realm is extremely convenient.

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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha – which is to demean oneself.

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Lumina / Bladerunner / Excavator / 2025