The Aesthetics and Beauty of Knowledge
Shih was the opposite of facts and raw information; shih was the elegance of knowledge, the insight and skill to organize knowledge into meaningful patterns. As an artist chooses colours or light to make her pictures, a master of shih chooses textures of knowledge – various ideas, myths, abstractions, and theories – to create a way of seeing the world. The aesthetics and beauty of knowledge – this was shih.
– David Zindell, The Broken God, 1993
Geek Attitude
The attitude thing is about flexibility, portability, creativity, sociability and jamming (ran out of suitable “ity” words!). It’s about improvising – in the practical and musical senses of the word; not getting tangled in boundaries and the “right” way to do things.
Definitely the only way to travel.
– Martin Delaney – “Laptop Music”.
Kuehleborn's Unfathomable Thoughts
Connotea is closing
Connotea, nature.com’s social bookmarking site, is closing on March 12th, 2013. Bad News? I don’t think so, because there are a lot of bookmarking tools, and the world of the internet is changing rapidly. So: in the beginning you simply bookmarked inside your browser. AFAIK you can still do that with most browsers, but who […]
Why are online articles so expensive?
George Dvorsky wrote an article for io9.com: did life on other planets originate from earth? He describes the study by Edward Belbruno, Amaya Moro-Martin, Renu Malhotra, Dmitry Savransky: “Chaotic exchange of solid material between planetary systems: implications for lithopanspermia” I’m not sure about the soundness of the conclusion (the possibility of lithopanspermia, a kind of […]
MindMeister on Google Drive
MindMeister has been integrated with Google-Drive. This service, FKA Google Docs, means you can also share your favourite MindMaps. Also, they promise there are even more ways to create your MindMaps, but I wasn’t able to try it because I’ll have to wait until Drive is availabe to me – that is how it always […]
BrainBuilding with Khanacademy
I’m one of the >85,000 subscribers worldwide for the Artificial Intelligence Class taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. Great, but not special, since at least 84,999 other people did that too. I’ll only be proud when I finished the course, because it troubles me if my math skills are still up-to-date – I left […]
GOGBOT 2011
The eighth edition of the GOGBOT Festival takes place from the 8th to 11th of September 2011 in the centre of Enschede. This annual festival for music, art and technology is organised by Planetart. The program looks very interesting with again a lot of transhumanistic influences, although maybe not as much as last year, when […]
Google+
I had to wait some time before I got my invitation; but now I’m on Google+. I’m not sure yet if it will be an improvement over Facebook, but some people claim it will change the Web as we know it. They’re definitely right: the Web is changing constantly. From what I’ve seen I can […]
Gotta Share! The Musical
Improv Everywhere is a New York City-based prank collective that causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places. Their fourth Spontaneous Musical Project is about a speaker at the GEL Conference in New York, talking about a so-called brand-new social media platform “Twirlr” and is suddenly interrupted by a man who refuses to turn […]
Demand Media buys CoveritLive
A long time ago I wrote about LiveBlogging software CoverItLive. After my testdrive I haven’t done anything with it; today they sent me a message that Demand Media acquired CoveritLive in February. It’s all very very good for us and for them. Given that Demand is a publicly traded company, I can’t really talk too […]
Bloglines will shut down
That is very bad news, my favourite newsreader Bloglines will shut down on October 1. Dissappointed! On their blog Ask.com explains how they came to this decision. Of course it’s all about “focus”. Their focus is Q&A offering. Then why did they acquire Bloglines in 2005? Why don’t they just sell it? Okay, they are […]
Yoono as a Twitter Client
Yoono is free software that allows you to connect and share with all your social networks and instant messaging services in one place. I’ve tried a lot of other applications that brought together my social web activities, like Pidgin (only Instant messaging), Digsby (very nice and more than only IM, but not portable) and Tweetdeck […]