As we sat watching a group of suits milling around outside a meeting room, we got to thinking about what the correct term was for a group of suits.
Was there an interesting collective noun like animals have, a la ‘a murder of crows’?
The results reveal some fascinating patterns in city structure. For a start, every city undergoes a kind of respiration in which people converge into the center and then withdraw on a daily basis, almost like breathing. And this happens in all cities.
This “suggests the existence of a single ‘urban rhythm’ common to all cities,” says Louail and co.
When you use drawing to express an idea instead of words or numbers, you engage a different part of the brain. To draw an idea accurately, certain decisions must be made that even the most precise language can overlook. The result of making that series of small decisions? You’re able to get to novel solutions more quickly.
Visual thinking isn’t limited to illustrations, either. It can take many forms…[to] help explore and describe ideas in valuable ways that require little more than a few straight lines and some imagination.
So, next time you reach an impasse, pull out a sketchpad or saddle up to a white board and quiet that inner voice that says you can’t draw. You may end up seeing your way through.
Selfiecity investigates selfies using a mix of theoretic, artistic and quantitative methods. Findings are presented in the selfiexploratory that contains infomation about the demographics of people taking selfies, their poses and expressions.
Here.
(Via rubbishcorp)
We’ve now moved on: broadly speaking, second-generation internet language plays with grammar instead of spelling. If you’re a doomsayer, the innovative syntax is one more thing to throw up your hands about, but compared to a decade or two ago, the spelling has gotten shockingly conventional.
In this sense, doge really is the next generation of LOLcat, in terms of a pet-based snapshot of a certain era in internet language. We’ve kept the idea that animals speak like an exaggerated version of an internet-savvy human, but as our definitions of what it means to be a human on the internet have changed, so too have the voices that we give our animals.
Wow.
This comes dangerously close, I know, to the banal romantic notion that all genuine artists must suffer, which is accurate only in the sense that people are by definition gregarious and that making art, even if you are an actor plunging, in public, down into your depths, is solitary, even asocial, in its untrammelled freedom.
Still, the link between suffering and creativity seems less romantic than pragmatic. There is something to Aristophanes’ satiric parable in which humans were once whole and were then split down the middle, and thus spent their lives seeking their other half. We would not love or desire if we had everything we needed.
Some artists, like Hoffman, would not escape into their creations if art did not mend what life had painfully shattered.
Amidst all the talk and adulatory pats on the back about Advertising’s higher purpose and role in society, this is what it pretty much comes down to.
This is something, it is different to everything else. And better. You should buy it.
The new ad for iPad Air uses a quote from Dead Poet’s Society.
We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.
And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life.
But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.
To quote from Whitman, “O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless… of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?” Answer.
That you are here - that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play *goes on* and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?
The growth of the Internet will slow drastically [as it] becomes apparent [that] most people have nothing to say to each other….
By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.
Most Mondays are mainly meh.
But I’m riding the tubes today. Killin’ it. Love this time of the year.
This felt like a landmark gig for the band - the first since the launch of their EP Abstract that was released in October this year.
Unfortunately, weighing up the sum of all parts, it was a let down. This is a band that is clearly talented - but oh so painfully aware of themselves, and the crowd when live. It was awkward.
There were traces of Shabazz Palaces in there along with Morelloesque guitar riffs but all up it felt really amateurish - look ma, I rap with guitars. The tinny sound setup was partly to blame, Mo really did shine through in those short a capella bursts.
Will still recommend you give this a spin: Abstract EP.
