Los Angeles Island. Escape from LA , 1996.
Microblog
The film adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation took some liberties in the narrative. But Alex Garland’s vision on the world, the twisted melange of organisms, the shroom-trip in the Southern Reach — all spot on.
Simplicity on the Other Side of Complexity →
My latest post on Res Extensa:
Freedom to exit →
Gordon Brander on credible exit.
Bonaparte Before the Sphinx. Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1886.
Bird’s eye view of Cairo , 1882.
A group of researchers just won the Scroll Prize, a project to read the ancient Herculaneum papyri, burned and buried in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD.
Using AI and computer vision techniques they were able to discern text from the rolled, charred, and brittle papyrus. An unbelievable feat.
If you go back to the Permian, you’d find the Appalachians, Massif Central, Atlas Mountains, and Scottish Highlands were all part of a single range cutting through the Pangean supercontinent.
Whatever happened to the industrial R&D lab? →
Ben Southwood looks at the waning of the big R&D labs:
Why Evolution Has No Goal →
Evolution is a roiling mess of substance and interaction. Order emerges from the stew. Fitness allowing one collection of chemicals to outlast another.
A true complex system is confounding and inscrutable, bucking attempts to make it legible, controllable. “Greatness cannot be planned”.
Let’s build it.
David Deutsch
A gene pool is carved and whittled through generations of ancestral natural selection to fit [a particular] environment. In theory a knowledgeable zoologist, presented with the complete transcript of a genome [the set of all the genes of an organism], should be able to reconstruct the environmental circumstances that did the carving. In this sense the DNA is a coded description of ancestral environments.
—In The Living Wild , Art Wolfe (2000)
(from David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity)
The organism is a key to decoding its environment.
Craftsmanship and Error Correction →
Craftsmanship involves knocking down a succession of steps until it feels 'done'. Cutting, milling, gluing, trimming, assembling, finishing, painting. Each step takes its input from the previous, and might have to correct course from an earlier error.
Adam Savage’s workshop, “The Cave”, in 360°.
I love seeing peoples’ workspaces in detail. Creators form symbiotic relationships with their environments. Our environments shape our workflows, and we mold our environments to fit our goals.
Look back less →
Jason Fried:
A better path is to reflect forward, not backwards. Develop a loose theory while working on what's next. Appreciate there's no certainty to be found, and put all your energy into doing better on an upcoming project. But how will you do better next time if you don't know what went wrong last time? Nothing is guaranteed other than experience. You'll simply have more time under the curve, and more moments under tension, to perform better moving forward. Internalize as you go, not as you went.
The Shirky Principle →
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky
Europe and its fragmented city-state landscape of 1444.
See the full, zoomable hi-res version.
The Aladaghlar Mountains of northwest Iran.
Bailong Elevator , also known as the Hundred Dragons Elevator , is a glass elevator located in the Wulingyuan area of Zhangjiajie, China. It is considered to be the world’s tallest outdoor elevator, standing at a height of 1,070 feet.
If there’s an superlative example of construction project, you’ll find it in China.