. Some of the most obvious things aren’t obvious at all, until you think of them. The things my friend Derek Robinson talks about as being in the beforeground. Too close to notice / right under our noses all along. . And I think that’s one of the principles of creative thinking — a lot […]
[ cross-posted from SmartMobs – this post is not about the tragic Aurora shooting, but about internet advertising mechanics and unthinking juxtapositions ] Our hearts go out to all the bereaved. ….. If you know the Sembl project, you know we’re always on about juxtaposition as a means of generating a sort of stereoscopic depth […]
[ cross-posted from Zenpundit — mapping, holding two worldviews in mind at one time, a conductor’s score, complexity thinking ] . . About a year ago, the Atlantic reported that the Library of Congress had been given a map of the flat earth, designed according to Biblical principles — yet showing knowledge of the border […]
I’ve been playing what we’d now call Sembl games for years now, sometimes online and sometimes on napkins in cafes, and because the basic board for this kind of play just consists of some circles with lines joining them — what mathematicians would call a graph — I’ve designed a few boards myself, and found […]
[ Cross-posted from Zenpundit — this one’s a prose poem: it begins with a statement so tight it needs to be unwound, and unwinds it ] . I wrote this urgently starting when it “woke” me at 4am one morning in the late 1990s or 2000, and as soon as it was out, I found […]
I was writing a post for Zenpundit a day or two ago about two topical interests of mine — religiously sanctioned violence and social media — which came together some while ago when a Taliban spokesperson began using Twitter to make press announcements, and a press officer of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) […]
[ cross-posted from Zenpundit — one bead from NASA for the glass bead game as rosary ] Consider her sacred, treat her with care.
I don’t think you want to see me attempting to draw an orangutan – but if I was persuaded to try, I’d probably use a technique along the lines of DragonArt’s post on the topic, from which the two illustrations above are drawn. I came across this site, by the way, while looking for a […]
When I was searching for illustrations for my piece on ancient Sembl boards, I was under the impression that Rembrandt had made an illustration of some old sage having a vision of a slightly unusual form of the Sephirotic Tree of Jewish Kabbalah. I wasn’t able to find it: what I did find, however, was a […]
[ from the Glass Bead Game via the HipBone Games to Sembl — cross-posted with minor changes from