Robin Sloan
Whomst styles?
Withered or seasoned?
An Article by Robin SloanThe Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply.
This is the reason a Nintendo console never has the fastest chips or the beefiest specs of its generation; instead, its remixes components in an interesting and generative way. Think of the Gameboy’s monochrome screen, the Wii’s motion controller, the Switch’s smartphone form.
[Gunpei Yokoi] is talking about reliability and predictability, in performance and supply alike. He wants the components to be boring, so their application can be daring.
A Library Demand List
A Website by Robin SloanThis visualization takes the current New York Times Best Sellers list for combined print and e-book fiction and scales each title according to the demand for its e-book edition at a collection of U.S. public libraries, selected for their size and geographic diversity.
Fish: a tap essay
A Mixed Media Work by Robin SloanThis is a kind of manifesto about the difference between liking something on the internet and loving something on the internet.
It’s also an experiment in a new format: a “tap essay,” presenting its argument tap by tap, making its case with typography, color, and a few surprises.
The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge
A curious fact
Is it not a curious fact that in a world steeped in irrational hatreds which threaten civilization itself, men and women — old and young — detach themselves wholly or partly from the angry current of daily life to devote themselves to the cultivation of beauty, to the extension of knowledge, to the cure of disease, to the amelioration of suffering, just as though fanatics were not simultaneously engaged in spreading pain, ugliness, and suffering? The world has always been a sorry and confused sort of place — yet poets and artists and scientists have ignored the factors that would, if attended to, paralyze them. From a practical point of view, intellectual and spiritual life is, on the surface, a useless form of activity, in which men indulge because they procure for themselves greater satisfactions than are otherwise obtainable.
Roaming and capricious
Now I sometimes wonder whether the current of utility has not become too strong and whether there would be sufficient opportunity for a full life if the world were emptied of some of the useless things that give it spiritual significance; in other words, whether our conception of what is useful may not have become too narrow to be adequate to the roaming and capricious possibilities of the human spirit.
Use
I am pleading for the abolition of the word “use”, and for the freeing of the human spirit. To be sure, we shall thus free some harmless cranks. To be sure, we shall thus waste some precious dollars. But what is infinitely more important is that we shall be striking the shackles off the human mind and setting it free for the adventures which in our own day have, on the one hand, taken Hale and Rutherford and Einstein and their peers millions upon millions of miles into the uttermost realms of space and, on the other, loosed the boundless energy imprisoned in the atom.
Freedom
Thus freedom brings not stagnation, but rather the danger of overwork.
The Institute for Advanced Study
The Institute is, from the standpoint of organization, the simplest and least formal thing imaginable. It consists of three schools – a School of Mathematics, a School of Humanistic Studies, a School of Economics and Politics. Each school is made up of a permanent group of professors and an annually changing group of members. Each school manages its own affairs as it pleases; within each group and each individual disposes of his time and energy as he pleases. The members who already have come from twenty-two foreign countries and thirty-nine institutions of higher learning in the United States are admitted, if deemed worthy, by the several groups. They enjoy precisely the same freedom as the professors. They may work with this or that professor, as they severally arrange; they may work alone, consulting from time to time anyone likely to be helpful. No routine is followed; no lines are drawn between professors, members, or visitors. Princeton students and professors and Institute members and professors mingle so suggested that he might find it worth freely as to be indistinguishable. Learning as such is cultivated. The results to the individual and to society are left to take care of themselves.
A tiny rivulet in a distant forest
Science, like the Mississippi, begins in a tiny rivulet in the distant forest. Gradually other streams swell its volume. And the roaring river that bursts the dikes is formed from countless sources.
Institutions of learning
Institutions of learning should be devoted to the cultivation of curiosity and the less they are deflected by considerations of immediacy of application, the more likely they are to contribute not only to human welfare but to the equally important satisfaction of intellectual interest which may indeed be said to have become the ruling passion of intellectual life in modern times.