Algorithms and Intention

Algorithms. While teaching a week-long course in half-model making and marine drafting I came across a tangible definition of an algorithm. In drafting we use splines, long, thin wooden battens that we bend around control points held by lead weights called ducks or whales. The shape, density and grain of the wood influences how it

Life Is Between

I continue to resist the desire to be catchy and to be interesting with hooks and arresting phrases that can be isolated and passed along to spread the word. I keep returning to the realization that whatever is profound is also very close to what appears trite, even obvious. That it takes a certain plodding,

Self Mastery, not Self Control

The title of this post is a nod at an earlier post, Mastery, not Control, in which I laid out a case for distinguishing between these two terms and showing the consequences related to each. In the end, that post did rely on distinguishing self-mastery from the will-to-control. This is still the case here, but

Cross-Post from Stone Soup

Adjusting Expectations Reading accounts of life in preindustrial contexts is often a lurching experience. We find so many instances where we are used to, “And we started her up and motored on through!” Where, instead days weeks, even months or years, are spent dealing with a discrete obstacle of distance, or adverse conditions such as wind,

What’s to Come? Beyond Bohemia

Shoal Hope has been, among other things, an opportunity to look into the phenomena of Bohemia as it evolved in the early Twentieth Century, the way the concept of Bohemia began to lose its way; from Berger’s Moment of Cubism before World War I, to the aftermath of that war, and the corroding effects of

Lie to me, everyone else does…

An old friend, one of the funniest people I’ve ever met, uses this line frequently. It’s funny. It’s true. It’s true for all of us. Is this just the way things are? Is this the only way things can be? If so, there’s a big reason for pessimism and the need to escape into irony

Intertwined Time

A man and woman pose in Dagestan, ca. 1910 Following a link supplied by a friend, I found this series of photographs taken a century ago in southeastern Russia. The magic of these pictures comes in large part from their being in color. This was done with three b&w exposures using color filters, then projecting

Shaping Awareness, part II

This post has been pressing for the last few days. Of course so was the track of Hurricane Irene. Still not sure if I’m ready to proceed, but I would like to capture some of the conditions swirling around this situation. A giant storm like Irene is physically a dynamic interaction of air and water

Shaping Awareness

I began this piece sitting in an automotive dealership’s waiting area, a U of chairs arrayed around a television playing daytime tv at full volume. I shared this space with a handful of other inmates, all eying the screen in between looking at a magazine, or a best-seller, or texting on a mobile phone. The

Innovation, Creation, and Change

Sick as we are, finding further bad news of our diagnosis and prognosis at every turn; we look to innovation, creation, and change for some way to turn back the clock, or at least carve out some detour from the horrors we see in our path. This is understandable. Predictable. But is it good or

I’m not a Brand, are you?

Vague currents swirl about. I’m between things, in a weightless apogee of the summer solstice and its aftermath. I’m waiting for what’s coming to materialize, and for the ways to talk/write these changes will require. In the meantime, I’m struck by our push to turn ourselves into Brands. It’s curious that as I begin to

The World, or the world…

I’ve attempted to carve out distinctions and definitions on a regular basis here. Then I’ve backslid and muddied the waters again and again by letting ambiguity and habit blur these distinctions. Maintaining a vocabulary requires the patience of an archeologist, wiping away the dust of the millennia as a current erupting volcano sifts down a