v.z.com: colorless green ideas

made in 1991.

I think one of the persistent crises of my life has been not being able to decide whether I love or hate Le Corbusier. I really want to stage a simultaneous reading of his Towards a New Architecture and Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Yesterday I looked at the inside of a hard drive for the first time ever. Kind of fitting that the day before I made these photos.

We really abstract away from what things really are made of to make them into workable concepts.

Saw these two pictures just a few pages apart in Art Papers, pertaining to absolutely unrelated articles.

A first round of experiements in generating sound from arbitrary data by writing raw pcm files.

INITIAL POPULATION Start with a text.
COSMIC RADIATION BOMBARDMENT For a randomly selected three percent of all letters in the text, replace each with a randomly selected letter of the same case.
NON-SURVIVAL OF MALADAPTIVE MUTATIONS For each word which is no longer a valid member of the set of all lexical items of the language of the original text, revert it to its previous state;
SURVIVAL OF ADAPTIVE MUTATIONS for each word which is still a valid member of the set of all lexical items of the language of the original text, keep it in its new state.
NEXT GENERATION Repeat this process.

- is there 24-hour wi-fi anywhere in boston?
- so you’re a poet? not exactly but
- a score of infinite length for cell phones and a laptop
- the most boring writer in the world and on boredom as a positive value
- comparative organizational analysis of the university systems of the u.s. and chile
- the joys and sorrows of studying abroad
- taking pictures of people on the subway, writing down things they say and making up stories around them; ongoing repairs on the q line
- life angst
- paris may ‘68
- breakdown of discrete human boundaries at the atomic or molecular scale, and at the cellular scale as well over time
- cartesian dualism
- death and the eternal soul
- feeling vs. knowing
- basic vocabulary in respective languages
- finding the extraordinary in the everyday; everyone is a lost poet; the alienation of labor and the tragedy of the human condition
- languages where you wish someone good health at the beginning vs. at the end of a conversation
- not having a word for goodbye that means goodbye forever; how an optimistic language is the expression of a religious culture
- cartesian dualism
- death and the eternal soul
- the august 1991 putsch
- the phenomenology of the primacy of experience
- salvador allende
- stalin’s purges
- pinochet
- beijing avant-garde performance: people buried in dirt bursting above ground
- buried armies
- symbolism in chinese culture
- the mass media in western culture
- comparative history of world writing systems
- the history of thought
- mental parallels between architecture and writing
- media addiction
- hume’s ethics of belief
- september 11th
- malaria
- the mass media
- the peace corps
- do we deserve to be happy?

yes! that’s him! and i saw him talk!