Si Deus pro nobis, quis contra nos?
March 25, 2013 by at 10:53 pm
Credere adversario dedecet nos nihil iam superesse suadenti quod iniustitia coram ac violentia nencon malitia ipsa efficere queamus.
— Papa Franciscus (@Pontifex_ln) March 24, 2013
October 28, 2012 by at 7:10 am
Heh.
October 24, 2012 by at 2:16 pm
“As [Jobs’] life wound down, and cancer claimed his body, his great passion was designing Apple’s new, three-million-square-foot headquarters, in Cupertino. Jobs threw himself into the details. ‘Over and over he would come up with new concepts, sometimes entirely new shapes, and make them restart and provide more alternatives,’ Isaacson writes. He was obsessed with glass, expanding on what he learned from the big panes in the Apple retail stores. ‘There would not be a straight piece of glass in the building,’ Isaacson writes. “All would be curved and seamlessly joined. . . . The planned center courtyard was eight hundred feet across (more than three typical city blocks, or almost the length of three football fields), and he showed it to me with overlays indicating how it could surround St. Peter’s Square in Rome.’”
Alan Jacobs on Christianity and the Future of the Book
December 22, 2011 by at 10:07 pm
Articles by Alan Jacobs are always worth reading, and I think I’ve enjoyed this one from the The New Atlantis more than any other.
Consider, for instance, the variety of writing technologies discernible just in the Old Testament: the “brick” on which Ezekiel is commanded to inscribe an image of Jerusalem (4:1), the “tablet” used by Isaiah (30:8) and Habakkuk (2:2), the stone on which the Decalogue is inscribed (Ex. 24:12, Joshua 8:32). The styli used by Isaiah (8:1) and Jeremiah (17:1) may have been used to write on metal. Clay tablets were kept in jars (Jeremiah 32:14) or boxes (Exodus 25:16, 1 Kings 8:9). But the Scriptures themselves, it is clear, were typically written on papyrus scrolls and kept in cabinets.
And then along came the codex, compared to which even Gutenberg’s newfangled printing device was technologically something of an afterthought—Codex 1.1, if you will. So the question now is: What do all these iPads and Kindles portend? All in all, just another brick? Or is there something more revolutionary afoot? What will be required of this generation?
Read the whole thing here.
Today in Kindle Fire
December 14, 2011 by at 7:49 am
The New York Times takes aim at some weaknesses in the Kindle Fire…
“A few of their many complaints: there is no external volume control. The off switch is easy to hit by accident. Web pages take a long time to load. There is no privacy on the device; a spouse or child who picks it up will instantly know everything you have been doing. The touch screen is frequently hesitant and sometimes downright balky…”
Uh-oh. The dreaded spouse or child. But wait! There’s hope!
“There will be improvements in performance and multitouch navigation, and customers will have the option of editing the list of items that show what they have recently been doing. No more will wives wonder why their husbands were looking at a dating site when they said they were playing Angry Birds.”
“Dating site” is my new favorite euphemism.
Quin Finnegan on Rediscovering Pokémon
Yikes! It’s tough reading all that Heidegger when nefarious creatures like this show up in your living room …
But having ably disposed of “Gastly”, he’s now taking the offensive—hunting for more of these hobgoblins born of technology and our ever-shrinking minds.
And taking in an architecture lesson or two along the way.
