Like designing things for the first time Gordon Murray insists on keeping experience 'at the back of your mind, not the front' and to work from first principles when designing. For instance, in designing a component such as a suspension wishbone, 'it's all too easy - and the longer you're in design the easier it is - to say, I know all about wishbones, this is how it's going to look because that's what wishbones look like.' But if you want to make a step forward, if you're looking for ways of making it much better and much lighter, than you have to go right back to load path analysis. It is like designing things for the first time, rather than the nth time. Nigel Cross & Anita Clayburn Cross, Winning by Design: The Methods of Gordon Murray The eyes of a travelerZen Mind, Beginner's MindTotal collaboration experience
I have failed my art The novice goes astray and says, “The art has failed me.” The master goes astray and says, “I have failed my art." Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality: From AI to Zombies experiencewisdom
Memory prompts Journals are memory prompts and perhaps capture exquisite (and not so exquisite) moments of experience. Roger Kitching, A Reflection of the Truth notetakingmemoryexperience
Iconography It is understandable that those students who must work from reproductions of works of art are usually more interested in iconography than in the more subtle questions of technique and quality, but it is regrettable that technical ignorance should so frequently prevent art historians from considering the whole experience of the artist. Cyril Stanley Smith, A Search for Structure artexperiencetechnique
The scale of human experience It is the scale of human experience, from which thought and imagination take off, and to which they must return. Cyril Stanley Smith, A Search for Structure creativityexperience
The downgrading of experience Today scientific constructs have become the model of describing reality rather than one of the ways of describing life around us. As a consequence there has been a very marked decrease in the reliance of people on their own experience and their own senses. The downgrading of experience and the glorification of expertise is a very significant feature of the real world of technology. Ursula M. Franklin, The Real World of Technology scienceexperience
There and not there For what Bob was trying to capture in these efforts was the incidental, the transitory, the peripheral—that aspect of our experience that is both there and not there, the object and not the object of our sensations, perceived but seldom attended to. Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees experienceperception
You leave with the art If we define art as part of the realm of experience, we can assume that after a viewer looks at a piece, they "leave" with the art, because the "art" has been experienced. We are dealing with the limits of an experience—not, for instance, with the limits of painting. Robert Irwin, James Turrell & Ed Wortz, Report on the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967–1971 experience
Tetlock and the Taliban An Essay by Richard Hanania richardhanania.substack.com How a humiliating military loss proves that so much of our so-called "expertise" is fake, and the case against specialization and intellectual diversity. The lesson of Tetlock (and the Afghanistan War), is that while you certainly shouldn’t be getting all your information from your uncle’s Facebook Wall, there is no reason to start with a strong prior that people with medical degrees know more than any intelligent person who honestly looks at the available data. What excellence is experienceacademiaexpertise
The Helsinki Bus Station Theory An Article by Arno Rafael Minkkinen www.fotocommunity.com Stay on the bus. Stay on the f*cking bus. Why? Because if you do, in time you will begin to see a difference. The buses that move out of Helsinki stay on the same line but only for a while, maybe a kilometer or two. Then they begin to separate, each number heading off to its own unique destination. Bus 33 suddenly goes north, bus 19 southwest. ...It’s the separation that makes all the difference, and once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire (that’s why you chose that platform after all), it’s time to look for your breakthrough. Suddenly your work starts to get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it. Your vision takes off. creativitypracticephotographyexperience
Seventeen Years A Song by Ratatat & Young Churf en.wikipedia.org I've been rapping for about seventeen years, okay? I don't write my stuff anymore, I just kick it from my head, you know what I'm saying? I can do that. No disrespect— But that's how I am Everything has been composed experienceskill
I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine An Article by Rach Smith rachsmith.com What I’ve learnt through experience is that the number of languages I’ve learned or the specific frameworks I’ve gained experience with matters very little. What actually matters is my ability to up-skill quickly and effectively. If you focus on: learning how you best learn, and practicing effectively communicating the things you've learned you can't go wrong. learningprogrammingskillexperiencepractice
The brag document An Article by Julia Evans jvns.ca It’s frustrating to have done something really important and later realize that you didn’t get rewarded for it just because the people making the decision didn’t understand or remember what you did. The tactic is pretty simple! Instead of trying to remember everything you did with your brain, maintain a “brag document” that lists everything so you can refer to it when you get to performance review season! workexperiencememorycollections
Eyes on the ground A Quote by Akira Kurosawa www.youtube.com When you go mountain climbing, the first thing you’re told is not to look at the peak but to keep your eyes on the ground as you climb. You just keep climbing patiently one step at a time. If you keep looking at the top, you’ll get frustrated. I think writing is similar. You need to get used to the task of writing. You must make an effort to learn to regard it not as something painful but as routine. writingexperienceskill
Gods of the Word A Book by Margaret Magnus www.amazon.com Imagine that we had no voice and no tongueMy nameReference and Is-nessIt flows out and fillsNo less than a Zeus+6 More PhonaestheticsThe arbitrariness of the signThe body image
Imagine that we had no voice and no tongue Socrates: Imagine that we have no voice and no tongue, but want to communicate with one another. Wouldn’t we like the deaf and the dumb make signs with the hands and the head and the rest of the body? Hermogenes: There would be no choice, Socrates. Socrates: We would imitate the nature of the thing: lifting the hands to heaven would mean lightness and upwardness. Heaviness and downwardness would be expressed by letting them drop toward the ground... Hermogenes: I don’t see that we could do anything else. Socrates: And when we want to express ourselves with the voice or tongue or mouth, the expression is simply their imitation of what we want to express? Hermogenes: I think, it must be so. communication
My name “I am the utterance of my name.” — Thunder, Perfect Mind, The Nag Hammadi Library To call each thing by its right name identitynames
Reference and Is-ness There are at least two aspects to what we have traditionally called the meaning of a word. One aspect is reference, and the other is something I will call ‘inherent meaning’ following Ullman (1963). Inherent meaning is ‘Is-ness’ meaning. Inherent meaning is a word’s identity, and reference merely its resumé, where it has gone and what it has done, an itemization of its contexts. ‘Is-ness’ is unifying. Each word has a single pronunciation, a single inherent meaning. But reference is divisive. It makes what was one thing – the word – appear to be many things – its senses. It is inherent meaning which gives all those multifarious senses the power of being a single word. meaningwords
It flows out and fills This deeper meaning of a word isn’t confined to what we think of as a dictionary definition. Rather it flows out and fills all the space available to it. Although a basic sense does affect the dynamics of a word, it has no power over its essence. Like the captain of a ship, it can control the crew’s actions, but not their minds. Each word has an aspect of meaning which lies deeper than any of its senses, and it is fundamentally on this meaning that all the senses depend. wordsidentity
No less than a Zeus I too am a true believer in the autonomy of the archetype. A /t/ or an /h/ is no less than a Zeus. The consonants are not essentially physical, but they live, evolve and influence human affairs. We overlook something essential if we deny that they can get up and walk around. This is not to say that their existence is independent of the human psyche. But then everything depends on everything.
Like a prism When you look at phonemes, you look through the perspective of morphemes, which are one linguistic level higher. The higher level is like a prism that splits the light in two. What was one thing, like ‘length’ at the phoneme level, looks like two opposite things ‘long’ and ‘short’ from the perspective of the morphemes. In practice, when you find both a word and its opposite, then the phoneme is not about either of these two things, but about what is common to them. information
Fracturing If we step back and view from afar this process of One-ness and Is-ness to fracturing and interpretation – of inherent meaning to reference, it follows that what lies at the foundation of language is simply what it is – sound – free of reference and interpretation. What makes what we know as language from its sound is fracturing and interpretation or using a word for a function other than what it simply is.
To evolve the language itself So in the process of talking, we might say we are putting words in slightly new contexts, and then testing them against our peers to see if our experiment in juxtaposition had ‘meaning. If we succeed, we have introduced new contexts for the words we use. These contexts will be taken up by our listeners, and will gradually become clearly enough defined to be thought of as referents. Once our words gain new referents, they start affecting the underlying phonosemantic structure of the language, the clustering patterns, the network of semantic relations. That is, the purpose of talking in the long run is to evolve the language itself. evolution
Scooting over There is at this point no evidence that acquired characteristics can be inherited. It is held that all changes to a genome are random, and cannot be subject to any higher principle. However, when a word is used in a new context, as it is whenever we say something new, a new sense is permitted. This does affect the phonosemantic structure, the linguistic DNA. Words in the vicinity of this word ‘scoot over’ to make room and allow themselves to be influenced by its philosophy. The language itself is now different. language
The element becomes a sign Each unit can be seen purely as form, as what it is. Or it can be viewed as having a function. Its function is only understandable within the next higher level of organization. And in every case, function must succumb to the constraints of form. Once this worldly function is assigned, the element becomes a ‘sign’. It falls into the realm of concept. There is a mapping from one thought system to another. Form follows function formfunction
The demand of a new word Why are these phonosemantic classes enough, and we need neither more nor less? Why are these consonants enough, and we need neither more nor less? What determines the need for a new word? How is this demand ‘felt’ by a language? How did the metabolic pathways of American English recognize that ‘jerk’ and ‘twerp’ and ‘punk’ and ‘nitwit’ and ‘dork’ and ‘ass’ and ‘goon’ and ‘twit’ and ‘dodo’ and ‘bum’ and ‘nerd’ and ‘dunce’ and ‘turd’ and ‘boob’ and ‘chump’ and ‘bitch’ and ‘bastard’ and ‘prude’ and so on and so forth simply were not equal to the task? We had to add ‘turkey’ and ‘squirrel’ as well? wordslanguagemeaning