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Doing some work-related research, I came across two quotes about the role of public art and museums in our lives:

The only reason for bringing together works of art in a public place is that … they produce in us a kind of exalted happiness.  For a moment there is a clearing in the jungle, we pass on refreshed, with our capacity for life increased and with some memory of the sky.  — Kenneth Clark

It is the judicious exercise of the museum’s authority that makes possible that state of pure reverie tha an unencumbered aesthetic experience can inspire.”  — Phillipe De Montebello

Walking through the National Gallery of Art the other day, I was lucky enough to catch this shot of a man repairing the iconic Calder mobile in the lobby:

I’ve always enjoyed Calder (at Storm King Art Center, especially, but also the more intimate Calder’s Circus), but this was revealing on several levels. Of course, you get to see the scale of the work in a way that looking up at the ceiling only partially conveys. But to see that fin/scale piece up close, and to see its shape, and the connective tissue to the rest of the piece, makes you appreciate the elegance of the shape and how perfect it is. It’s also cool to see the guy using nylon thread to stabilize the mobile (pardon the pun). . .

Nice reminder that even the highest art (another!) is craft, artifact, and human.

From a NY Times article about Jon Stewart’s status as one of the most trusted journalists in America, a nice quote from Stephen Colbert about the craft of satire.  It can apply to so many things where you are looking at the difference between amusing and brilliant, mockery and satire, good and great:

“We often discuss satire — the sort of thing he does and to a certain extent I do — as distillery,” Mr. Colbert continued. “You have an enormous amount of material, and you have to distill it to a syrup by the end of the day. So much of it is a hewing process, chipping away at things that aren’t the point or aren’t the story or aren’t the intention. Really it’s that last couple of drops you’re distilling that makes all the difference. It isn’t that hard to get a ton of corn into a gallon of sour mash, but to get that gallon of sour mash down to that one shot of pure whiskey takes patience” as well as “discipline and focus.”

… as opposed to paranormal. I like my conspiracies and para-normal stuff as much as your average pulp-minded citizen, but sometimes the real normal or veri-normal (cute, huh?) is even more fun. The latest mystery is in today’s NYT, in an article about how scientiests are still trying to figure out why glass is hard:

The arrangement of atoms and molecules in glass is indistinguishable from that of a liquid. But how can a liquid be as strikingly hard as glass?

“They’re the thickest and gooiest of liquids and the most disordered and structureless of rigid solids,” said Peter Harrowell, a professor of chemistry at the University of Sydney in Australia, speaking of glasses, which can be formed from different raw materials. “They sit right at this really profound sort of puzzle.”

Other mysteries include, how do trees manage to bring water up to leaves 100 feet in the air? and why is ice slippery (and skateable)?

Just kindle-bought Bob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Legends, and am amused by Bill James’s prologue:

The academics have won. The standards of accuracy that began in academia have been embraced by paid reporters and have now spread to the limitless legions of dignified researchers, pouding out accurate if boring biographies about absent and long-dead heroes.

And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, you know? Dinosaurs are more interesting than unicorns. I don’t even read fiction; history is always more interesting. I am just saying… something humanizing and indefinable has been lost in the search for the truth — lost or, worse yet, thrown away. For thousands of years, men made slightly heroic fiction out of their own petty lives. You can’t get away with that anymore.”

It’s a strange introduction to a book that is largely about debunking baseball myths. Stranger still, coming from someone who almost single-handedly turned number-crunching into part of America’s pastime and may have done more for increasing overall numeracy in the country than any government initiative. Still, it’s nice to hear a high priest of truth-by-numbers acknowledge that there’s more to baseball, and other things, than the numbers might be able to tell.

As with every TV show hit, I’m to-DVD months late on The Wire, the fourth season of which I’m watching now.  Episode 4, written by emerging fave author Dennis Lehane, has a great scene with design wisdom in it.  Bunk is walking with Kisha to her first crime scene as a homicide detective, giving her some real advice (in the middle of a lot of pranks on the newb.)

Bunk (putting on the latex gloves):  “You know what you need at a crime scene?”

Kisha: “Rubber gloves?”

“Soft eyes.”

“Like I’m supposed to be crying and shit?”

“You got soft eyes, you can see the whole thing. You got hard eyes, you’re staring at the same tree, missing the forest.”

“Ah, Zen Shit”

“Soft eyes, grasshopper.”

I love this.  It captures the way some people can’t get their heads out of the immediate details or who can’t stop rigorously applying the same design principle without nuance.  In a lot of meetings, I talk about soft and hard edges — on issues, on design elements, taxonomies, how we frame a problem.  Seeing with soft eyes, eyes that go beyond the immediate detail, eyes that entertain and apprehend nuance — that’s cool.

It’s also a nice alternative for people who are sick of quoting Steve Jobs’s rap about zooming in zooming out.

Just spent a very fun hour on BaseballBoss, a fantasy-like service that people have been predicting for years. It allows you to create teams, drawing on players from all eras of baseball. Here’s a sampling of potential team members, using the baseball card metaphor:

The explanation at the top is part of a nicely crafted guided tour — a good blend of sparse text, tight navigation, and what so far seems to be an experience crafted well enough to not require much explanation. When I got my first 40 cards, I was tickled to see old timer names like Cotton Minahan and Pug Bennett:

(I was also happy to think how happy Cotton would have been to pull down $1MM. Probably wouldn’t have been bitter that Batista was getting $5MM).

After setting up my team — The Vishniak Sting — my first challenge was with the 1906 White Sox. BaseballBoss calculates the results of every at bat (presumably pitches as well, but can’t tell yet) and gives you a very entertaining score card.

I was crushed to see the Sting get crushed - 6-0 - but check it out. Ed Walsh, a 1906 pitcher who still holds the record for the lowest career ERA (1.82), pitched the full 9.0 innings! It’s an honor to lose to an ironman like that.

You can also read a highlights play list:

What a dream come true for real baseball fans this must be. I managed to find (through Google Book Search) a Roger Angell passage I remembered about the beauty of the box score for true fans. Rather than text, I got a pic of the page:

I am oddly moved by this whole thing.

Really great article in The Atlantic about the internet’s possible impact on our cognitive structures/patterns/modes. The title, “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, sounds like the usual whingeing about the internet — how it hurts our spelling, makes us less polite, decreases our capacity for independent thought, makes us less inclinced to memorize epic poetry, etc. But this article is smarter and more relevant on several fronts.

The thread of the article is that the author has noticed that while he has become quite adept at scanning a staggering amount of information and number of articles on the web, he has become less and less able to finish books or even articles. Friends of his have noticed that as well.

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

The article, and many of the people cited in it, speak in clear tones of worry that we are losing something, but it avoids being a tedious baby-boomer lament. Instead, it has a nice survey of how we have always lamented new technologies (Socrates worries that texts will undermine memory and deep learning in The Phaedras, Nietszche’s typewriter causes speculation about what his real voice is, people worry that the printing press will make knowledge too cheap).

It goes deeper, though, into how we have always thought about our consciousness and how our consciousness may be shaped, by our technologies. We used to think of our brains as clocks, then machines, now computers . . .

There is a woe to us argument:

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

This puts me in conflict. My tech side, which abhors tech laments rolls my eyes, but my conspiratorial said “uh-oh.” Then there is a genuinely sad part:

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

This upset in ways that upset me: I am no longer even a trailing member of the digital vanguard.  (And the fact that I found the article through a sample of the magazine on the Kindle — the device that was going to get me reading again — is not a comfort.)

I had a conversation recently about what it means to post pictures on Flickr. I recently bought a pretty expensive camera (Canon EOS XTi) because I was starting to care enough about what I was recording to put money into some equipment that could compensate for my lack of talent and knowledge. After posting a bunch of very disappointing pictures on flickr today, I went back and found the first two pictures I ever posted — the ones that got me onto flickr. The first is a cool sunrise in Portsmouth, NH. I described it as a “Windham Hill wannabe moment”.

The second was a picture of my dog, Maggie, shoving her head into a hill of snow to pursue a scent she had picked up. I love canine moments of abandon.

I didn’t really learn anything concrete about my urge to share, but I did remember that urge to “put it out there” cuz I thought it was good to have it out there and not just on a disk drive in my closet (where pictures eventually must be archived).

I remember, in the early 1990s, reading a NYT review of a Bobbie Ann Mason collection of short stories, in which the reviewer said something like “Mason is terribly sympathetic to small-town people who live away from the things they love. They put up antennae to catch whatever signals they can of a life of the mind that exists only distantly for them” . . . I can’t find that line and am only sure about the putting up antennae part, but I think the urge to share is connected to that kind of reach — send out signals, wait for signals. Put it out there.

Biking past PS 22 in Crown Heights, I saw some cool fence decorations. From a distance, they looked like old guild symbols, and I thought perhaps this was a magnet school around science and technology. On closer inspection, they were much more: twisty lines of metal text suggesting shapes aspiring to be objects that thought they might be something else.

This shape reads: “Look at the short pants acting like binoculars dreaming of a hand drum.” This was my favorite, but there were more and they were interconnected, check them out on my flickrstream.