1. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
  2. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
  3. Abo, Akinori 9
  4. aesthetics 19
  5. agile 30
  6. Albers, Josef 17
  7. Alexander, Christopher 135
  8. Alexander, Scott 5
  9. Allsopp, John 4
  10. Ammer, Ralph 6
  11. Anderson, Gretchen 7
  12. anxiety 9
  13. Appleton, Maggie 5
  14. Aptekar-Cassels, Wesley 5
  15. Arango, Jorge 4
  16. architecture 110
  17. art 86
  18. Asimov, Isaac 5
  19. attention 17
  20. Auping, Michael 6
  21. Aurelius, Marcus 14
  22. Bachelard, Gaston 12
  23. Baker, Nicholson 10
  24. beauty 58
  25. Behrensmeyer, Anna K. 7
  26. Bell, Larry 3
  27. Bjarnason, Baldur 5
  28. Blake, William 5
  29. blogging 21
  30. body 11
  31. Boeing, Geoff 7
  32. boredom 9
  33. Botton, Alain de 38
  34. Brand, Stewart 4
  35. Bringhurst, Robert 16
  36. Brooks, Frederick P. 22
  37. Broskoski, Charles 6
  38. brutalism 7
  39. building 16
  40. bureaucracy 12
  41. Burnham, Bo 9
  42. business 15
  43. Byron, Lord 14
  44. Cagan, Marty 6
  45. Calvino, Italo 21
  46. Camus, Albert 13
  47. care 6
  48. Carruth, Shane 15
  49. Cegłowski, Maciej 6
  50. Cervantes, Miguel de 7
  51. chance 11
  52. change 16
  53. Chiang, Ted 4
  54. Chimero, Frank 17
  55. choice 8
  56. cities 51
  57. Clark, Robin 3
  58. Cleary, Thomas 8
  59. Cleary, J.C. 8
  60. code 20
  61. collaboration 16
  62. collections 31
  63. Collison, Simon 3
  64. color 23
  65. commonplace 10
  66. communication 31
  67. community 7
  68. complexity 11
  69. connection 24
  70. constraints 25
  71. construction 9
  72. content 9
  73. Corbusier, Le 13
  74. Coyier, Chris 4
  75. craft 65
  76. creativity 58
  77. crime 9
  78. Critchlow, Tom 5
  79. critique 10
  80. Cross, Nigel 12
  81. Cross, Anita Clayburn 10
  82. css 11
  83. culture 13
  84. curiosity 11
  85. cycles 7
  86. Danielewski, Mark Z. 4
  87. darkness 28
  88. Darwin, Will 10
  89. data 8
  90. death 38
  91. Debord, Guy 6
  92. decisions 9
  93. design 131
  94. details 30
  95. Dickinson, Emily 9
  96. Dieste, Eladio 4
  97. discovery 9
  98. doors 7
  99. Dorn, Brandon 11
  100. drawing 23
  101. Drucker, Peter F. 15
  102. Duany, Andres 18
  103. Eatock, Daniel 4
  104. economics 13
  105. efficiency 7
  106. Eisenman, Peter 8
  107. Eliot, T.S. 14
  108. emotion 8
  109. ending 14
  110. engineering 11
  111. Eno, Brian 4
  112. ethics 14
  113. euphony 38
  114. Evans, Benedict 4
  115. evolution 9
  116. experience 14
  117. farming 8
  118. fashion 11
  119. features 25
  120. feedback 6
  121. flaws 10
  122. Flexner, Abraham 8
  123. food 16
  124. form 18
  125. Fowler, Martin 4
  126. Franklin, Ursula M. 30
  127. friendship 6
  128. fun 7
  129. function 31
  130. games 13
  131. gardens 26
  132. Garfield, Emily 4
  133. Garfunkel, Art 6
  134. geography 8
  135. geometry 18
  136. goals 9
  137. Gombrich, E. H. 4
  138. goodness 12
  139. Graham, Paul 37
  140. graphics 13
  141. Greene, Erick 6
  142. Hamming, Richard 45
  143. happiness 17
  144. Harford, Tim 4
  145. Harper, Thomas J. 15
  146. Hayes, Brian 28
  147. heat 7
  148. Heinrich, Bernd 7
  149. Herbert, Frank 4
  150. Heschong, Lisa 27
  151. Hesse, Herman 6
  152. history 13
  153. Hoffman, Yoel 10
  154. Hofstadter, Douglas 6
  155. home 15
  156. Hoy, Amy 4
  157. Hoyt, Ben 5
  158. html 11
  159. Hudlow, Gandalf 4
  160. humanity 16
  161. humor 6
  162. Huxley, Aldous 7
  163. hypermedia 22
  164. i 18
  165. ideas 19
  166. identity 33
  167. images 10
  168. industry 9
  169. information 42
  170. infrastructure 17
  171. innovation 14
  172. interaction 10
  173. interest 10
  174. interfaces 36
  175. intuition 8
  176. invention 10
  177. Irwin, Robert 65
  178. Isaacson, Walter 28
  179. Ishikawa, Sara 33
  180. iteration 13
  181. Ive, Jonathan 6
  182. Jackson, Steven J. 14
  183. Jacobs, Jane 54
  184. Jacobs, Alan 5
  185. Jobs, Steve 20
  186. Jones, Nick 5
  187. Kahn, Louis 4
  188. Kakuzō, Okakura 23
  189. Kaufman, Kenn 4
  190. Keith, Jeremy 6
  191. Keller, Jenny 10
  192. Kelly, Kevin 3
  193. Keqin, Yuanwu 8
  194. Ketheswaran, Pirijan 6
  195. Kingdon, Jonathan 5
  196. Kitching, Roger 7
  197. Klein, Laura 4
  198. Kleon, Austin 13
  199. Klinkenborg, Verlyn 24
  200. Klyn, Dan 20
  201. knowledge 28
  202. Kohlstedt, Kurt 11
  203. Kramer, Karen L. 10
  204. Krishna, Golden 10
  205. Kuma, Kengo 18
  206. language 20
  207. learning 29
  208. life 59
  209. light 31
  210. loneliness 12
  211. love 25
  212. Lovell, Sophie 16
  213. Lupton, Ellen 11
  214. Luu, Dan 8
  215. Lynch, Kevin 12
  216. MacIver, David R. 8
  217. MacWright, Tom 5
  218. Magnus, Margaret 12
  219. making 77
  220. management 14
  221. Manaugh, Geoff 27
  222. Markson, David 16
  223. Mars, Roman 13
  224. material 39
  225. math 16
  226. McCarter, Robert 21
  227. meaning 33
  228. media 16
  229. melancholy 51
  230. memory 28
  231. metaphor 10
  232. metrics 19
  233. microsites 49
  234. Miller, J. Abbott 10
  235. Mills, C. Wright 9
  236. minimalism 10
  237. Miyazaki, Hayao 30
  238. Mod, Craig 15
  239. modularity 6
  240. Mollison, Bill 31
  241. morality 8
  242. Murakami, Haruki 21
  243. music 16
  244. Müller, Boris 7
  245. Naka, Toshiharu 8
  246. names 11
  247. Naskrecki, Piotr 5
  248. nature 51
  249. networks 15
  250. Noessel, Christopher 7
  251. notetaking 34
  252. novelty 10
  253. objects 15
  254. order 10
  255. ornament 9
  256. Orwell, George 7
  257. Ott, Matthias 4
  258. ownership 6
  259. Pallasmaa, Juhani 41
  260. Palmer, John 8
  261. patterns 11
  262. Patton, James L. 9
  263. Pawson, John 21
  264. perception 22
  265. perfection 7
  266. performance 17
  267. Perrine, John D. 9
  268. Petroski, Henry 24
  269. philosophy 6
  270. photography 20
  271. physics 6
  272. Pinker, Steven 8
  273. place 14
  274. planning 15
  275. Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth 18
  276. poetry 13
  277. politics 9
  278. Pollan, Michael 6
  279. practice 10
  280. problems 31
  281. process 22
  282. production 7
  283. productivity 12
  284. products 20
  285. programming 9
  286. progress 16
  287. Pye, David 42
  288. quality 25
  289. questions 8
  290. Radić, Smiljan 20
  291. Rams, Dieter 16
  292. Rao, Venkatesh 14
  293. reading 16
  294. reality 13
  295. Reichenstein, Oliver 5
  296. religion 11
  297. Rendle, Robin 12
  298. repair 28
  299. research 17
  300. Reveal, James L. 4
  301. Richards, Melanie 3
  302. Richie, Donald 10
  303. Rougeux, Nicholas 4
  304. Rowe, Peter G. 10
  305. Rupert, Dave 4
  306. Ruskin, John 5
  307. Satyal, Parimal 9
  308. Saval, Nikil 13
  309. Sayers, Dorothy 32
  310. Schaller, George B. 7
  311. Schwulst, Laurel 5
  312. science 17
  313. seeing 36
  314. Sennett, Richard 45
  315. senses 11
  316. Seuss, Dr. 14
  317. Shakespeare, William 4
  318. Shorin, Toby 8
  319. silence 9
  320. Silverstein, Murray 33
  321. Simms, Matthew 19
  322. Simon, Paul 6
  323. simplicity 14
  324. Singer, Ryan 12
  325. skill 17
  326. Sloan, Robin 5
  327. Smith, Cyril Stanley 29
  328. Smith, Justin E. H. 6
  329. Smith, Rach 4
  330. socializing 7
  331. society 23
  332. software 66
  333. solitude 12
  334. Somers, James 8
  335. Sorkin, Michael 56
  336. sound 14
  337. space 20
  338. Speck, Jeff 18
  339. speech 6
  340. spirit 10
  341. streets 10
  342. structure 13
  343. Strunk, William 15
  344. Ström, Matthew 13
  345. style 30
  346. Sun, Chuánqí 15
  347. symbols 12
  348. systems 18
  349. Sōetsu, Yanagi 34
  350. Sōseki, Natsume 8
  351. Tanaka, Tomoyuki 9
  352. Tanizaki, Jun'ichirō 15
  353. taste 10
  354. Taylor, Dorian 16
  355. teaching 21
  356. teamwork 16
  357. technology 41
  358. texture 7
  359. thinking 30
  360. Thoreau, Henry David 8
  361. time 54
  362. Tolkien, J.R.R. 6
  363. tools 32
  364. touch 8
  365. transportation 16
  366. Trombley, Nick 44
  367. truth 15
  368. Tufte, Edward 31
  369. Turrell, James 6
  370. typography 25
  371. understanding 32
  372. urbanism 68
  373. ux 100
  374. Victor, Bret 9
  375. Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène 4
  376. vision 7
  377. visualization 34
  378. Voltaire 4
  379. wabi-sabi 8
  380. walking 23
  381. Wallace, David Foster 33
  382. Wang, Shawn 6
  383. war 7
  384. waste 12
  385. Watterson, Bill 4
  386. Webb, Matt 14
  387. Wechler, Lawrence 37
  388. whimsy 11
  389. White, E.B. 15
  390. Wirth, Niklaus 6
  391. wisdom 20
  392. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 7
  393. Woolf, Virginia 11
  394. words 35
  395. work 80
  396. writing 55
  397. Wurman, Richard Saul 18
  398. www 88
  399. Yamada, Kōun 5
  400. Yamashita, Yuhki 4
  401. Yudkowsky, Eliezer 17
  402. zen 38
  403. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
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Words, Symbols, Icons, Pictograms

Close
  • The brain is wider than the sky

    The brain is wider than the sky,
    For, put them side by side,
    The one the other will include
    With ease, and you beside.

    The brain is deeper than the sea,
    For, hold them, blue to blue,
    The one the other will absorb,
    As sponges, buckets do.

    The brain is just the weight of God,
    For, lift them, pound for pound,
    And they will differ, if they do,
    As syllable from sound.

    Emily Dickinson, The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
    www.bartleby.com
    1. ​​The Art of Looking Sideways​​
    2. ​​the speed of God​​
    • words
    • thinking
    • cognition
  • Shortlist of interesting spaces

    Nick Trombley, barnsworthburning.net
    • craft
    • work
    • walking
    • www
    • notetaking
    • words
    • euphony
    • melancholy
    • zen
    • darkness
    • gardens
  • Mondegreen

    A mondegreen is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning. Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to clearly hear a lyric, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense.

    American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in 1954, writing that as a girl, when her mother read to her from Percy's Reliques, she had misheard the lyric "layd him on the green" in the fourth line of the Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Murray" as "Lady Mondegreen".

    Wikipedia
    en.wikipedia.org
    1. ​​Misinterpretation as inspiration​​
    • creativity
    • understanding
    • words
    • mondegreens
  • Sonorisms I

    the authenticity of the gesture
    as if the air had taken on substance
    representation and re-presentation
    a first order of presence
    this painterly game of pick-up sticks
    Irwin's "fetish finish"
    questions all of whose possible answers would never exhaust them
    the art is what has happened to the viewer
    an art of things not looked at
    a dialogue of immanence
    the information that takes place between things
    your house is the last before the infinite
    his "project of general peripatetic availability"
    that shiver of perception perceiving itself
    a desert of pure feeling

    Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
    1. ​​Phonaesthetics​​
    2. ​​Architectural dark matter​​
    • words
    • euphony

    Various pithy phrases and remarks scattered throughout the book.

  • What you're trying to swim

    There is an art to using words; even when definitions are not literally true or false, they are often wiser or more foolish. Dictionaries are mere histories of past usage; if you treat them as supreme arbiters of meaning, it binds you to the wisdom of the past, forbidding you to do better. Though do take care to ensure (if you must depart from the wisdom of the past) that people can figure out what you’re trying to swim.

    Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality: From AI to Zombies
    • words
  • Let the meaning choose the word

    What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.

    Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.

    Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality: From AI to Zombies
    • meaning
    • words
  • An affection for words

    There’s an amazing thing that happens when you start using the right dictionary. Knowing that it’s there for you, you start looking up more words, including words you already know. And you develop an affection for even those, the plainest most everyday words, because you see them treated with the same respect awarded to the rare ones, the high-sounding ones.

    Which is to say you get a feeling about English that Calvin once got with his pet tiger on a day of fresh-fallen snow: “It’s a magical world, Hobbes. Let’s go exploring!”

    James Somers, You're Probably Using the Wrong Dictionary
    1. ​​It's a Magical World​​
    • words
    • knowledge
    • curiosity
  • z-z-z

    living in symbols
    Bing Xu, Book from the Ground: From Point to Point
    • words
    • communication
    • symbols
  • No words to describe

    If there is no term for something, it might be thought that the commodity is of small importance. But it is just as likely that this something is of such importance that it is taken for granted, and thus any conveniences, like words, for discussing it are unnecessary.

    Donald Richie, A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics
    1. ​​The quality without a name​​
    2. ​​This is Water​​
    • meaning
    • words
  • Good morning, Vincent

    Perhaps I shall name the cat that scratches at my broken window Van Gogh.
    Or Vincent.
    One does not name a piece of tape, however.
    There is the piece of tape, scratching at my window. There is Vincent, scratching at my window.

    Good morning, Vincent.

    David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress
    • words
  • As if a word were no more than coordinates

    The New Oxford American dictionary, by the way, is not like singularly bad. Google’s dictionary, the modern Merriam-Webster, the dictionary at dictionary.com: they’re all like this. They’re all a chore to read. There’s no play, no delight in the language. The definitions are these desiccated little husks of technocratic meaningese, as if a word were no more than its coordinates in semantic space.

    James Somers, You're Probably Using the Wrong Dictionary
    • words
  • A soft and fitful luster

    Who decided that the American public couldn’t handle “a soft and fitful luster”? I can’t help but think something has been lost. “A soft sparkle from a wet or oily surface” doesn’t just sound worse, it actually describes the phenomenon with less precision. In particular it misses the shimmeriness, the micro movement and action, “the fitful luster,” of, for example, an eye full of tears — which is by the way far more intense and interesting an image than “a wet sidewalk.”

    It’s as if someone decided that dictionaries these days had to sound like they were written by a Xerox machine, not a person, certainly not a person with a poet’s ear, a man capable of high and mighty English, who set out to write the secular American equivalent of the King James Bible and pulled it off.

    James Somers, You're Probably Using the Wrong Dictionary
    • meaning
    • words
  • Big things and little things

    It is hardly possible that human beings could have decided logically that they needed to develop language in order to communicate with each other before they had experienced pleasurable interactive communal activities like singing and dancing. Aesthetic curiosity has been central to both genetic and cultural evolution.

    All big things grow from little things, but new little things will be destroyed by their environment unless they are cherished for reasons more like love than purpose.

    Cyril Stanley Smith, A Search for Structure
    • aesthetics
    • evolution
    • words
  • Vibrations in the air

    Words are not just vibrations in the air, they work more powerfully than that, and on more powerful objects.

    Natsume Sōseki, Kokoro
    • words
  • Le ☀️ est caché par les ☁️

    les mots et les images.jpg
    René Magritte, Words and Images
    • words
  • 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.

    Margaret Magnus, Gods of the Word
    • meaning
    • words
  • 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.

    Margaret Magnus, Gods of the Word
    • words
    • identity
  • 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?

    Margaret Magnus, Gods of the Word
    • words
    • language
    • meaning
  • Numeric anagrams

    "Eleven plus two" is an anagram of "twelve plus one".

    — Craig Sharp

    /

    Twelve + One = Eleven + Two
    I love the beauty of this numeric/anagram equation for 13

    — Linda Vanderkolk

    Daniel Eatock, Numbers/Words
    eatock.com
    • words
  • Safety cut rope axe man

    In the first nuclear reactor, constructed by Enrico Fermi in 1942 under the bleachers of the University of Chicago football stadium, the control rods were held up by a manila rope. A man with an axe was told to cut the rope if the reactor got out of hand. This "safety cut rope axe man" is supposedly the origin of the term SCRAM for an emergency shutdown procedure.

    Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape
    • words
    • acronyms
    • energy
  • He had but to speak

    He had but to speak aloud the words that came into his head, and those around him would fall in line.

    Shane Carruth, Primer
    • words
    • communication
    • persuasion
  • Fish and water

    How does one speak about something that is both fish and water, means as well as end?

    Ursula M. Franklin, The Real World of Technology
    • meaning
    • words
  • Perilous to be sure

    It would not be clear where the boundary of sanctioned speech lay until an attempt had been made to cross it and that attempt had failed. Such efforts Wittgenstein regarded with benevolence. He treated them as reconnaissance expeditions, perilous to be sure, but well worth the effort expended on them.

    H. Stuart Hughes, The Sea Change
    • words
    • exploration
    • speech
  • The word invents itself

    Posits certain neologisms as arising from their own cultural necessity—his words, I believe. Yes, he said. When the kind of experience that you're getting a man-sized taste of becomes possible, the word invents itself.

    David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
    • words
    • meaning
    • novelty
    • invention
  • Words and Images

    An Essay by René Magritte
    1. ​​Le ☀️ est caché par les ☁️​​
    • symbols
    • images
    • words
    • art
  • Book from the Ground: From Point to Point

    A Novel by Bing Xu
    mitpress.mit.edu
    1. ​​z-z-z​​
    • language
    • symbols
    • words
  • There Is No Word

    A Poem by Tony Hoagland
    www.poetryfoundation.org

    what I already am thinking about
    is my gratitude for language—
    how it will stretch just so much and no farther;

    how there are some holes it will not cover up;
    how it will move, if not inside, then
    around the circumference of almost anything—

    how, over the years, it has given me
    back all the hours and days, all the
    plodding love and faith, all the

    misunderstandings and secrets
    I have willingly poured into it.

    • language
    • words
  • 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
    • poetry
    • chance
    • words
    • euphony
  • A brief foray into vectorial semantics

    An Article by James Somers
    jsomers.net

    One of the best (and easiest) ways to start making sense of a document is to highlight its “important” words, or the words that appear within that document more often than chance would predict. That’s the idea behind Amazon.com’s “Statistically Improbable Phrases”:

    Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.

    • math
    • meaning
    • words
    • notetaking
    • search
    • chance
  • Four years of noting down my favourite words

    An Article by Matt Webb
    interconnected.org

    I like words, and I note down ones that catch my eye as we cross paths.

    Sometimes I read over the list, random access style, just to remind myself of forgotten thoughts. Each word is a bookmark into a little cascade of concepts in my brain.

    So because I’d like to keep these words somewhere I can find them in the future, I’m putting them here.

    Storm Doris
    Mimecom
    Cloudbleed
    Athleisure
    Cromwell
    H7N9
    Trappist-1
    ... (+448)
    
    • words
    • euphony
    • collections
  • The primacy of interpretation over sensation

    A Fragment by Mark Liberman
    languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

    Our memory of exact word sequences usually fades more quickly than our memory of (contextually interpreted) meanings.

    More broadly, the exact auditory sensations normally fade very quickly; the corresponding word sequences fade a bit more slowly; and the interpreted meanings last longest.

    These generalizations can be overcome to some extent if the sound or the text has especially memorable characteristics. (And the question of what "memorable" means in this context is interesting.)

    • memory
    • senses
    • meaning
    • speech
    • words
  • Derrière les fagots

    A Definition
    forum.wordreference.com

    A fagot is a bundle of branches tied with a string. They used to be kept in a corner of a barn or shed, and people used to hide things (wine, valuables, etc) behind them often for a long time, and forget about them. It is a way of saying that [a thing] is very good, but has been forgotten for a long time and recently re-discovered.

    • words
    • memory
  • The monkey, the tiger beetle and the language of innovation

    An Article by Courtney Hohne
    blog.x.company
    Image from blog.x.company on 2020-12-22 at 2.03.22 PM.png

    What we’ve learned from 10 years of moonshot taking about choosing your words wisely — and the many benefits of doing so:

    • v0.crap
    • Tiger Beetle Moments
    • Killing our projects
    • In the fog
    • The Altimeter
    • The Icebergs
    • Headwinds & Tailwinds
    • Chaos Pilots
    • Patiently impatient, responsibly irresponsible, passionately dispassionate
    1. ​​v0.crap​​
    • words
    • innovation
  • Old words

    A Quote by Winston Churchill

    Short words are best
    and the old words, when short,
    are the best of all.

    1. ​​Old solutions​​
    • words
    • wisdom
  • A lightbulb is not an idea

    An Article by Ralph Ammer
    ralphammer.com
    Image from ralphammer.com on 2020-07-27 at 4.59.21 PM.gif

    With conventional placeholders, such as words, we can describe patterns for a large number of situations. On the other hand it is easy to fool yourself (and others) with words, since you can avoid to be specific. Any business meeting can confirm this.

    When you draw something you are forced to be specific — and honest.

    Our illustration of an “idea” from above is unconventional in the sense that it conveys specific original thoughts of what an idea is. It adds value to the words.

    And that is the catch: The drawing must be unconventional to support the conventional words. We have to make sure not to use “words in disguise”. Take a common illustration for “idea” for example, which haunts flip charts all over the world: the lightbulb.

    The lightbulb image works on a purely symbolic level, it only replaces the word “idea”. This image of a household item contains no original thought about what an idea is. While symbols like these work well as international replacements for words or icons to indicate a light switch for instance, they convey no nutritional value as illustrations — they are empty.

    • words
    • ideas
    • symbols
    • drawing

See also:
  1. meaning
  2. symbols
  3. euphony
  4. language
  5. communication
  6. speech
  7. notetaking
  8. chance
  9. memory
  10. wisdom
  11. knowledge
  12. curiosity
  13. aesthetics
  14. evolution
  15. identity
  16. acronyms
  17. energy
  18. persuasion
  19. exploration
  20. novelty
  21. invention
  22. ideas
  23. drawing
  24. images
  25. art
  26. thinking
  27. cognition
  28. math
  29. search
  30. craft
  31. work
  32. walking
  33. www
  34. melancholy
  35. zen
  36. darkness
  37. gardens
  38. innovation
  39. creativity
  40. understanding
  41. mondegreens
  42. collections
  43. senses
  44. poetry
  1. James Somers
  2. Margaret Magnus
  3. René Magritte
  4. Bing Xu
  5. Eliezer Yudkowsky
  6. David Markson
  7. Winston Churchill
  8. Cyril Stanley Smith
  9. Natsume Sōseki
  10. Donald Richie
  11. Daniel Eatock
  12. Brian Hayes
  13. Shane Carruth
  14. Ursula M. Franklin
  15. H. Stuart Hughes
  16. Lawrence Wechler
  17. Robert Irwin
  18. David Foster Wallace
  19. Ralph Ammer
  20. Emily Dickinson
  21. Tony Hoagland
  22. Nick Trombley
  23. Courtney Hohne
  24. Matt Webb
  25. Mark Liberman
  26. Wesley Aptekar-Cassels