The Two Things game
Economist Glen Whitman on The Two Things:
A few years ago, I was chatting with a stranger in a bar. When I told him I was an economist, he said, “Ah. So… what are the Two Things about economics?”
“Huh?” I cleverly replied.
“You know, the Two Things. For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay, here are the Two Things about economics. One: Incentives matter. Two: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”Since, Glen has been playing this each time he meets someone from a different profession, which is how he gathered The Two Things about the Two Things:
1. People love to play the Two Things game, but they rarely agree about what the Two Things are.
2. That goes double for anyone who works with computers.Head over to see a collection of The Two Things from binary systems to piloting an airplane, or a talk that wraps up with them. As for me: 1) intrigued, 2) curious if it could be edited down to only one thing.
On the patience of looking
On this snowless winter in New York, I ran across an etymology of “no two snowflakes are alike.” It comes from a 1925 report that predicts, “Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated.” The author — Wilson Bentley:
In 1885, at the age of 20, Wilson Alwyn Bentley, a farmer who would live all his life in the small town of Jericho in Vermont, gave the world its first ever photograph of a snowflake. Throughout the following winters, until his death in 1931, Bentley would go on to capture over 5000 snowflakes, or more correctly, snow crystals, on film. Despite the fact that he rarely left Jericho, thousands of Americans knew him as The Snowflake Man or simply Snowflake Bentley.Dubbed “America’s First Cloud Physicist,” Bentley’s obituary (note that he contracted pneumonia after walking home six miles through a slushy snowstorm) read:
Longfellow said that genius is infinite painstaking. John Ruskin declared that genius is only a superior power of seeing. Wilson Bentley was a living example of this type of genius. He saw something in the snowflakes which other men failed to see, not because they could not see, but because they had not the patience and the understanding to look.Seems to me there is no greater goal and no greater compliment: Bentley not only devised a new way to see (transforming early physics of clouds and pioneering an understanding of snowflakes), but demomstrated the patience needed to fiercely look.
[Image: [Bentley] experimented for years with ways to view individual snowflakes in order to study their crystalline structure. He eventually attached a camera to his microscope, and in 1885 he successfully photographed the flakes. This photomicrograph and more than five thousand others supported the belief that no two snowflakes are alike …]
This is so good.
“ Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
Hofus the Stonecutter
Once upon a time in Japan, there was a poor stone-cutter, named Hofus, who used to go every day to the mountain-side to cut great blocks of stone. He lived near the mountain in a little stone hut, and worked hard and was happy.
One day he took a load of stone to the house of a rich man. There he saw so many beautiful things that when he went back to his mountain he could think of nothing else. Then he began to wish that he too might sleep in a bed as soft as down, with curtains of silk, and tassels of gold…
… Straightway a rock he became. Proudly he stood. The sun could not burn him and the rain could not move him.
“Now, at last,” he said, “no one is mightier than I.”
But one day he was waked from his dreams by a noise,—tap! tap! tap!—down at his feet. He looked and there was a stone-cutter driving his tool into the rock. Another blow and the great rock shivered; a block of stone broke away.
“That man is mightier than I!” cried Hofus, and he sighed:—
“Ah me! Ah me!
If Hofus only the man might be!”
And the voice answered:—
“Be thou thyself!”
In the chinese folklore; Hofus the Stonecutter, the greedy Hofus craves more and more power and goes through a loop of wants for power where he finally realizes that he wants to be himself.
A story about greed and moral, of course, but also a strange loop where Hofus starts out as a stonecutter and ends up like a stonecutter.
“ A strange loop arises when, by moving up or down through a hierarchical system, one finds oneself back where one started.”
DRAWING MACHINE
Two pendulums relative movement and rhythm plotted on a large sheet of paper. Pendulum are set in motion by hand and then decreases slowly and eventually stop altogether. Drawing Machine is built as a moving sculpture, and a tool with which a number of studies of time, force and motion can be made. See video link at the top of the page.
pica
n. [abbr. picayune] the smallest measurable unit of human connection, typically exchanged between passing strangers—a flirtatious glance, a sympathetic nod, a shared laugh about some odd coincidence—moments that are fleeting and random but still contain powerful emotional nutrients that can alleviate the symptoms of feeling alone.
(via ninakix)
