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
A Bookless Library
Via Time U.S.
A Bookless Library Opens in San Antonio.
On Saturday, Bexar County Digital Library – a $2.4 million, 4,000-square-foot space, also known as BiblioTech and located on the south side of San Antonio – opens to the public. The library, built with $1.9 million in county tax money and $500,000 in private donations, looks like an orange-hued Apple store and is stocked with 10,000 e-books, 500 e-readers, 48 computers, and 20 iPads and laptops. It has a children’s area, study rooms and a Starbucks-esque café. Most importantly, it will have no printed material.
It is probably inevitable, but this is too soon, at least to me. I couldn’t live without my e-reader, my iPad, my computer, but I do love my books. And when I go to the library I want to see and smell Real Books!
Having fun isn’t hard…
when you have a library card
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It is not a matter of impressiveness, but I admit that I am very proud of my books. In an earlier blogpost on my Dutch personal website I compared the book to a vinyl record and the e-reader to a CD/mp3-player/iPod/Spotify. The digital version sounds better, takes less space, is less vulnerable and, best of all, is portable. But the downside is: you don’t have a relationship with the music you are playing. When you put a record on the turntable, back in the olden days, you was teleporting yourself for 20 minutes to another world. The same with books. My e-reader contains more than 1,700 titles in a space of just one very thin paperback, is much lighter, reads just as good, has a built-in dictionary, and best of all, is portable. It allows me to read everywhere. I use my e-reader (Sony) or my iPad (Zinio/Kindle) for the stuff I just want to read, just to read a story or to acquire knowledge. Science, Fiction and Science-Fiction. However, there still are some books I just want to possess. I want to look at my bookcase every now and then and remember the good times I had when reading that particular book.
Call me old-fashioned, it doesn’t bother me at all. At least not when it comes to books. And sometimes, when I really want to be in another world, I go to my library, where I hope to find Real Books!
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