June 2013
11 posts
“Within hours of the disclosure that the federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.”
—The New York Times editorial is NOT PLEASED about the news broken by The Guardian about the federal government’s data collection on phone calls through Verizon (essentially everything but the actual conversation). The anger in the editorial is visible and sharp, and is an excellent interrogation of the necessity and effectiveness, as well as the morality, of measures like this one. (via thepoliticalnotebook)
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Ever since the 1500s, and for hundreds of years after, the only people who used @ were bookkeepers, who used it as a shorthand to show how much they were selling or buying goods for: for example, “3 bottles of wine @ $10 each.”
Since these bookkeepers used @ to deal with money, a certain degree of whimsical fondness for the character developed over time. In Danish, the symbol is known as an “elephant’s trunk a”; the French call it an escargot. It’s a streudel in German, a monkey’s tail in Dutch, and a rose in Istanbul. In Italian, it’s named after a huge amphora of wine, a liquid some Italian bookkeepers have been known to show a fondness for.
Even with such cute names to recommend it, though, @ languished in obscurity for three and a half centuries, only ending up on a new invention called the typewriter when salesmen realized that accountants and bookkeepers were buying them in droves.
In 1971, however, a keyboard with a vestigial @ symbol inherited from its typewriter ancestors found itself hooked up to an ARPANET terminal manned by Ray Tomlinson, who was working on a little program he’d come up with in his goofing-off time to send messages from computer to computer. Tomlinson ended up using the @ symbol as the fulcrum of the lever that ultimately ended up lifting the world into the digital age: email.
” —I just love language history.
“My alone feels so good, I’ll only have you if you’re sweeter than my solitude.”
—Warsan Shire (via petrichour)
May 2013
25 posts
Green Gloves
The National
We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved, and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time.
When we hesitate in being direct, we unknowingly slip something on, some added layer of protection that keeps us from feeling the world, and often that thin covering is the beginning of a loneliness which, if not put down, diminishes our chances of joy.
It’s like wearing gloves every time we touch something, and then, forgetting we chose to put them on, we complain that nothing feels quite real. Our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world but to unglove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold and the car handle feels wet and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another being, soft and unrepeatable.
Mark Nepo in The Book of Awakening
Song: “Green Gloves” by The National
“Impossible is a concept that makes one’s heart laugh and throw peanuts at the television.”
—Modern Love
Play
“We live today not in the digital, not in the physical, but in the kind of minestrone that our mind makes of the two.”
—MoMA’s Paola Antonelli, mastermind of Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects, at a recent TED salon titled “Design Is Everywhere.” (via explore-blog)
