COB-13: meetings bring people together
At the heart of a bureaucratic mission statement is bringing people together for a long period of time in a spirit of expansive inclusiveness. Nothing does that better than meetings. Every committed bureaucrats looks back fondly on the time when she or he was free to leave to attend meetings. Meetings provide rare vision that [...]
Applying Newton’s Third Law to human behavior: institutions have mass
Digital forms and ubiquitous networks are greatly increasing opportunities to circulate authored symbolic works. Digitization projects are creating huge online libraries of digitized books that persons around the world can access at zero incremental cost. Storage prices are dropping so rapidly that one small device will soon be able to store all the music that [...]
Tagged: libraries
being cool, old school
The beastly heat in DC this past week revealed that my air conditioner doesn’t work. As a dedicated civil servant on his second shift, I was sitting at my computer late Wednesday night with nothing on but my boxers, my window fan running for all its worth, and I was still overwhelmed by the heat [...]
experiment with a new way of self-realization
turn off, tune out, drop in turn off, tune out, drop in turn off, tune out, drop in
reading at risk, seriously
The U.S. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) this fall will release another report lamenting the decline of literary reading. From the late seventeenth century through the early twentieth century, many cultural leaders would have applauded a decline in reading of popular novels. Now, however, such a decline is a cause for grave concern. Fiction [...]
Tagged: novels, sex differences
writing direction influences spatial representation
Persons’ spatial representations of an action described verbally are biased in the spatial orientation of the action. Recent research indicates that a left-to-right bias develops from experience of a culture’s left-to-right writing system, and a right-to-left bias likewise from a right-to-left writing system. The Morgan Bible of Louis IX and the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp, [...]
Tagged: text
Runaway Model available
I’m considering placing my sculptural masterpiece, Runaway Model, in a private collection. I have nothing against private collections. I’ve acquired from private collections several pieces that are in my apartment. I realize that many persons visit weekly private collections. Nonetheless, I would prefer to place my art in a leading public art gallery, such as [...]