A few things that could be poetry An Article by Wesley Aptekar-Cassels notebook.wesleyac.com The right combination of street signs, viewed from a artful vantage point Words on bit of packaging, torn to reveal and conceal as needed The output of a command line tool, perhaps unexpectedly Overheard words, drifting along, liberated from their initial context A form, at first appearing bureaucratic, revealing humanity on deeper reflection An idea, if you consider it divine enough poetrychancewordseuphony
Rewarding Curation An Article by Wesley Aptekar-Cassels notebook.wesleyac.com Something interesting about the design of Twitter is that it doesn’t have much of a way of rewarding curation, only authorship. ...I’m inclined to think that the mechanisms of distribution of information are very important, and I think figuring out ways to reward good curation is probably an important thing. ...I don’t really know what the solution is here, but I do think that finding and curating good links and bits of information is useful, and something that should be rewarded more than it currently is. organizationcollectionscontent
How Websites Die An Article by Wesley Aptekar-Cassels notebook.wesleyac.com I recently started compiling a list of defunct blogging platforms. It’s been interesting to see how websites die — from domain parking pages to timeouts to blank pages to outdated TLS cipher errors, there are a multitude of different ways. It leaves no sign of its past self behindThis obsession with permanence
Matter versus Materials: A Historical View An Essay from A Search for Structure by Cyril Stanley Smith Atoms and aggregatesAesthetically motivated curiosityWhose eyes had seen and whose fingers had feltThe alchemists in their mixingsA holograph of itself+3 More
Atoms and aggregates I see science reversing the trend toward atomistic explanation that has been so triumphant in the last 400 years, and I predict a more human future based on the symbiosis of exact knowledge (which is by its very nature limited) and experience. ...Matter cannot be understood without a knowledge of atoms; yet it is now becoming evident that the properties of materials that we enjoy in a work of art or exploit in an interplanetary rocket are really not those of atoms but those of aggregates...It is not stretching the analogy much to suggest that the chemical explanation of matter is analogous to using an identification of individual brick types as an explanation of Hagia Sophia. The edifice from which they came architecturescience
Whose eyes had seen and whose fingers had felt Aristotle’s 18 qualities of homoeomerous bodies that he chose to explain in detail in his Meteorologica, are just those fine points of behavior that would be noticed in a workshop. They are: solidifiable meltable softenable by heat softenable by water flexible breakable fragmentable capable of taking an impression plastic squeezable ductile malleable fissile curable viscous compressible combustible capable of giving off fumes This redundant list of properties is not the neat classification of a philosopher. It reads more as if it were based on a conversation with a workman whose eyes had seen and whose fingers had felt the intricacies of the behavior of materials. craftmaterialtexturecollections
The alchemists in their mixings Many wonderful things must have been seen by the alchemists in their mixings. The Alchemist euphonycuriosity
A holograph of itself All [physical properties of matter] derive from the different patterns of the interaction of electrons and photons within the fields of the positively charged atomic nuclei, stabilized in a particular morphology by the interaction of the levels themselves. Matter is a holograph of itself in its own internal radiation. physics
To worship at the shrine of mathematics The new [physics-based] viewpoint is so potent that it has perhaps, caused too many metallurgists to forsake their partially intuitive knowledge of the nature of materials to worship at the shrine of mathematics, a trend reinforced by the curious human tendency to laud the more abstract. mathabstraction
What the advancing interface leaves behind I see in the complex structure of any material—biological or geological, natural or artificial—a record of its history, a history of many individual events each of which did predictably follow physical principles. Nothing containing more than a few parts appears full panoplied, but it grows. And as it grows, the advancing interface leaves behind a pattern of structure perfection or imperfection which is both a record of historical events and a framework within which future ones must occur. From the head of Jove historygrowthstructure
A realization that this leaves out something essential Nothing so fundamental lies in the realm of concern to us aggregate humans, where the need is, now, for the study of real complexity, not idealized simplicity. In every field except high-energy physics on one hand, and cosmology on the other, one hears the same. The immense understanding that has come from digging deeper to atomic explanations has been followed by a realization that this leaves out something essential. In its rapid advance, science has had to ignore the fact that a whole is more than the sum of its parts. knowledgecomplexityholism