Well deserved attention

for Ray Caesar in wired Magazine. Wired News: Animator Makes Waves as Artist

I have one of his works in my home, and it continues to be a pleasure to look at. It's nice to see that his work is so succesful. Good for him. Meanwhile, I continue to be artist-turned-animator-turned-guy-in-a-cubicle. Is this a reversible process?

2 squares

The excellent Eldritch Press has a copy of El Lissitzky's children's book, 2 squares on ibiblio.

Cover, Suprematicheskii Skaz (About 2 Squares), El Lissitzky, 1922

A good explanation of the book is also available.

Die Stadt

1, Die Stadt, Frans Masereel, 1925

Blueprints

The New York Public Library has made a stunning image archive available for online viewing.

NYPL Digital Gallery

I immediately fell for this: more than 150 year old blueprints of algae.

I hate flash...

when there's no compelling reason to use it, as is usually the case, but this is one example that really works.

FREITAG individual recycled freeway bags | FREITAG Taschen aus LKW Planen

The bags are nice too.

counting my blessings

Update:

This post contained a long list of diseases I didn't (and still don't) have, from A-alphalipoprotein Neuropathy, a rare autosomal recessive familial disorder of cholesterol metabolism to Zygomycosis, a fungal infection.

I began to notice that all kinds of sites were linking to this website, all of them, I suspect, automatically. No human would link to my post to provide a link to medical information, because there was none. So there you have it. A surprizingly large number of "medical" websites post links to pages that contain keywords (diseases) that trigger automated adds for the medications for those diseases. That's almost as bad as comment spam, and I want no part in it.

On the difficulty of getting things wrong

Getting something right seems to some people to be very difficult. These are usually the people that feel that "you learn from your mistakes". This is a misconception. Nobody learns anything remotely useful from their mistakes. There are an infinite number of ways of doing something. Almost all of them are wrong, except for very few. A very large number of those, in addition to being wrong, are more complicated than the right ones. Doing something wrong is not only inefficient, but difficult as well. So what about learning from our mistakes? Of course we learn something from our mistakes; what we learn is how *not* to do something. But who cares? Knowing how not to do something doesn't mean we can just take the inverse of how not to do it and then we know how to do it. The opposite of getting it wrong, in almost all cases, is still getting it wrong. Knowledge is only valuable if it applies to a finite number of situations, in all other cases, it's value is inversely proportional to the number of situations to which it applies.

Interview

Via Paolo. Includes a fun little interview with Harry Frankfurt Frankfurt, H.G.: On Bullshit.

If there is so much of it, and who would doubt that, then bullshit must have a use, a purpose, but what is it?

Bullshit solves many problems. Nobody likes the truth, but lying is reprehensible, so we resort to something that helps us evade the truth altogether.

That, and epistomology is difficult.

Oscar Fischinger

I came across the Program Details for Lucky Strike Cigarette Commercial: Square Dance
today and was reminded by a commenter of the work that Oscar Fischinger did for commercial for Muratti in the 1930s. I've only been able to see it once. It was very funny and beautiful. Fischinger worked on early versions of Fantasia, and I was fortunate enough to see some of that work as well. Fischinger's work is so much more brilliant than that of the people that copied his work. The final version of Disney's Fantasia is to Fischingers tests what the Lucky commercials are to the Muratti commercials. It is a shame that there is such an abundance of mediocre material and the really good stuff is so hard to come by. There's a video you can order, but no DVD yet.