The Players. (Shadow Monsters)

Philip Worthington: Shadow Monsters. Brought to you by Processing!

Sol Lewitt: cubic-modular wall structure, black. 1966.

Thesis cards

nice photo tiffany

yay industry lab!

tiffanychu:

@formlabs launch pahty @industrylab #3Ddance http://instagr.am/p/SuYh18t1Q0/

[gallery]

my new room has bigass ceilings so i’m looking for ways to use that space, effectively. or not. 

also I’m digging this teapot. 

<src>”http://convoy.tumblr.com/” </src>

slide from her presentation for lab group meeting on Casimir Force. 

I <3 Lululululululululu

so I don’t believe in ergonomics really after dealing with RSI/tendonitus for a year and a half. Perhaps I’ll post about that over the holidays. However, I have trouble with keeping my head back and not yoking my neck like a turtle over my screen, so perhaps a laptop stand is in order..

I dig how the keyboard tucks away. I want to build something less pretentious than this, but it’s a nice shape to think about.

At a certain point, you have to leave childish things behind, like the sense wow-I-can-draw, or in my case, wow-I-can-read, until you have what is called a talent. But as you become an adult and if you have to make things, you have to kind of give up the idea of processing the talent otherwise you would have spent your life painting beautiful fruit bowls and I would have certainly written stories that sound exactly like Agatha Christie. You have to move from facility to something else.

Zadie Smith on talent. Also see Smith’s 10 rules of writing and more sage advice on writing from famous authors. (via explore-blog)

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnOfomPgETs?wmode=transparent&autohide=1&egm=0&hd=1&iv_load_policy=3&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&showsearch=0&w=500&h=375]

Loove of the harmonies that start at 2:36. Really funky. Took that movie ending to the next level. 

Also Lulu is basically Holly Golightly, or rather the other way around. 

(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)

New Apt for the New Year. I’m about to be such an adult. Weird.

Philip Greenspun and Web Dev of the 90's

In October 1995, the MIT Media Lab threw itself a tenth anniversary party. I skipped it so that I could take snapshots of colored trees in Vermont, but my friends said that the physical event was fabulous: little gifts for everyone, cleverly packaged; a Photomosaic poster by Rob Silvers; women in plastic pants. As an adjunct to the physical event, the Media Lab was going to create the best Web site ever. They got NYNEX to bring in a 45-Mbps T3 network connection; you wouldn’t want millions of users to get slowed down working their way through MIT’s 100-Mbps backbone. They got Hewlett-Packard to donate a huge pile of multiprocessor machines with disk arrays. They hired expert consultants to plug all the computers in and hook them up to the network. They hired professionals to do graphic design and site layout.

After getting back from foliage country, I visited http://www.1010.org with high hopes. There wasn’t any magnet content. Nobody had bothered to write stories or take pictures. Every day a Media Lab editor posed a question and then sat back to watch a USENET-style discussion evolve. There were only a handful of postings in each area. One user had contributed a smiley face. Colon dash right-paren. That was his entire message. This didn’t really shock me until I noticed that on a scale from 1 to 7, this post had been rated 4.3 by other users. Yes, several other users had taken the trouble to rate this three-character posting. When the 10-day Web event was over, the massive disk arrays held almost enough user-contributed data to fill two 3.5 inch floppies.

Inspiring.

Moved over to the other side of the room @industrylab. So much space to build some (space) stuff.

this picture almost makes me want a cat.

almost.

lol. artists at lunch.

so many black shirts.

Julien d’Ys sketchbook

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lp53t8ow9uI?wmode=transparent&autohide=1&egm=0&hd=1&iv_load_policy=3&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&showsearch=0&w=500&h=375]

(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)

Rebekah Cox's frustrating HuffPo article on Women in Technology

the boyfriend’s response is: 

“i find that article kind of frightening and a bit dissapointing. I think it’s in an important space and is an interesting slice of percieved-reality from a skilled/succesful female programmer. 

I generally think that the situations that she describes as “bad for women” are not particularly “good for men.” I’ve been in “vocal-punch-to-the-face” environments and think they’re usually poorly focused. That said, i do think i could “handle” them pretty well because of reasons. I would argue that aside from some brutally high functioning programmers, people who communicate like this can’t dream of being in a position to lead others or be “more than just a programmer;” not that they’d want to. 

The article is disappointing because Rebekah misses her chance to describe a better environment for female developers, and developers in general. You, female programmer, can benefit from these things but will have these drawbacks. That is all. I am a warrior women and you must be to. 

A more constructive article might go like: 

‘

Female programmers experience these crappy things but can also have these intrinsic advantadges. Software development (and high tech) would benefit if all of the orgs in the food chain (companies, colleges, open-source community, etc)  would focus on ”training” women in some styles of communication of man-ogres while also training man-ogres in human-sensitive and organizational-sensitive interactions. This paper describes some of the short term and long term efforts that individuals and organizations could do to increase the efficacy of the community.  

In conclusion, technology is super fun and super valuable and we should be super focused on making sure all the smart capable people join us, not just Xena Warrior Princess. 

‘

or something. “

Rebekah Cox's frustrating HuffPo article on Women in Technology

looking for seymour pappert mathworld quotes on the internet and I found this.

What a breath of fresh air. Someone writing about programming without the arrogant know-everything voice that dominates. Someone who can say, “I am not the best at this” and “I don’t know everything—here is what I’m trying”. 

In terms of rhetoric, I fell in love with the voice of the writer at the very beginning and that made his platitudes easier to take. For the most part I agreed with him, but the disclaimer at the beginning especially helped for the ones that left me a little unsettled at first until I read on.

Some excerpts:

"I have pretty high standards in the naïve belief that it is possible to write software that sucks much, much less than what we put up with."

"I’m also wrong a lot of the time. That didn’t seem to be a roadblock for the majority of people who write about programming on the internet."

in response to: “What makes good and what makes bad programmers?”

1. "Programmers who know they will make mistakes" [Good]


2. "Programmers who think they will not make mistakes" [Bad]

The problem with education beyond just how we teach programming (especially with respect to music education):

"In reality, the two largest influences on how programming is taught today are: nostalgia, and the way in which the teacher learns best." 

“Programming is not just explaining things to the computer but working out how things work.”

looking for seymour pappert mathworld quotes on the internet and I found this.