The picket fence There was a fence with spaces you could look through if you wanted to. An architect who saw this thing stood there one summer evening. Took out the spaces with great care and built a castle in the air. The fence was utterly dumbfounded, each post stood there with nothing round it. Christian Morgenstern, The Art of Looking Sideways www.andrew.cmu.edu spacearchitectureabsurdity
From the head of Jove A complex structure is a result of, and to a large extent a record of, its past. Though a proton and an electron may, as a pair, be able to spring full-panoplied from the head of Jove, more complex things cannot, or at least do not. Everything complicated must have had a history, and its internal structural features arise from its history and provide a specific record of it. One might call these structural details of memory “funeous,” after the unfortunate character in Borge’s story “Funes the Memorious” who remembered everything. The Interpretation of Microstructures of Metallic Artifacts What the advancing interface leaves behind memorytimestructurematerial