Epistemology and Art

“Two great corrugated-jello-head surfaces that mentate great together!” Hmm, ok, not the most catchy slogan ever devised. Another reason I don’t work in marketing.
TechShop open house today was great. Did a bunch more scanning of stuff from my old notebooks that either I never built or that I want to build again, [...]

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Bloomtacular

This is the part on Sprockets where we BLOOM!!

We’ve had some chills, thrills, and most recently a little heat wave, and by now just about everything is blooming. The coriander/cilantro is going exuberantly to seed, which helps the pollinators and gives me green coriander to put in the freezer, as well as dry [...]

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Anti-Snail Recycling for Your Transplants

Take a 2-liter clear soda bottle, remove the label.
Cut a tall cylinder out of the middle, like a belt or a collar– a slice out of it. Optionally, smooth the edges or put clear tape over them.
Make a cut so that you have a long rectangular strip. Slit halfway from the top [...]

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Stop Watering My Coffee

Clicked on a Twitter link today, to a well-written and pleasant piece on how to retain friends and followers. I’ve got no issues with the author or the piece, but reading it got me verbalizing my uneasy feeling about Twitter and the changes I’ve seen in just the few late-adopter months that I’ve been [...]

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Transforming Art into Science

The biggest problem with transforming Art into Science is that people would rather be Artists than Scientists. No, wait, you say, I love Science! Yeah, now would you rather be a Rock Star or a Lab Tech? Yes, you see the problem.
I recently read a New Yorker article that completely kicks ass [...]

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Stuff vs Life: the War on Accumulator Culture

Cribbed shamelessly from the extremely excellent last hurrah at http://viridiandesign.org, this is my condensed version, which I’ve printed out and put where I can see it EVERY DAY. I have been working on a less-conscious version of this philosophy for the past few months, as I increasingly lose items within my home, clutter and filth [...]

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not from this planet, rly

Skimming thru the CostCo catalog (after declining a suggestion that we purchase the Boom Wireless Game Chair for the cats), I noticed a fake-stone pillar crowned with flame being sold as the “Morrigan Fire Bowl Column.”
“Gee, honey”, I said, “would you buy an explosive-powered open flame named after the Celtic goddess of war and carnage?”
To [...]

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“And that’s when the fight started.”

After all, there’s no such thing as North.
OK, let’s explain a little. Am reading Susan Neiman, “Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists”. It’s slow going, dense with thickets of ideas and little interpretive gardens of classic philosophy. We’ve just finished a brief analysis of, well, I won’t even go there [...]

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Weekend Morning

Woke up at 6am, couldn’t get back to sleep, then Mike’s alarm went off at 6:30ish for Pacificon (ham radio annual conference). Shotgun blasts outside turn out to be duck hunting season starting in the Baylands nearby, no worries.
RISKS Digest: Truly ginormous credit card fraud ring using doctored point of sale card swipers with [...]

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Dah-Dit! Music for Ham Radio

Today’s musical explorations rediscovered the Ham Band, with their charming album “Seek You”,, as Mike wanted it on his iPod. You can buy and download the album directly. Soulful ballads of “radio widows”, odes to climbing the antenna towers for maintenance, following the greyline, and more. Folk-country style mostly, with brief forays [...]

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