We struggle to make our words transform simple paper into something descriptive and meaningful. In fact we struggle to make the screen represent our thoughts through words alone (long live gopher!) and so we resort to posting images.
What if you were forbidden from using inks or dyes; banned from expressing yourself through words or from drawing/painting a picture on paper? Would you learn to transform the paper itself into a physical representation of your thoughts? This could be a whole new way to present complex information to the viewer, without need for anything other than the paper itself (no inks, etc.) …something like this.
Never underestimate the creative ability of the human mind.
WHEN I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high pil’d books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And feel that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
Apparently Keats died from tuberculosis (TB) in 1821. London suffered immensely from this disease in the past (killing up to 20% of the population) and there were many serious efforts to eliminate it entirely, so I find it surprising to see on the UK Coalition site that TB is spreading rapidly:
Tuberculosis is making a dramatic comeback in parts of the UK where levels of the disease are now higher than those in China and parts of India and Africa. The Tuberculosis rate has risen by 80% in London over 10 years, to reach 40 cases per 100,000. In 2001 were 7,300 cases in the whole of the UK, of which more than 3,000 were in London. Around 60% of the UK’s TB cases are people who were born abroad, and were infected it before they arrived. A study in 1995 showed that, among the homeless, levels of TB were 200 times higher than in the general population.
Perhaps even more alarming is that the disease is not being identified properly, which was also one of the problems that Keats’ faced:
A paper presented to a meeting of the British Thoracic Society showed that more than half the 121 cases of TB that arrived at an accident and emergency department in Newham were not recognised as TB, in spite of symptoms such as coughing up blood.
I went to Tucson and it gave
me a headache. I don’t know how.
Everyone’s a cousin in this world.
I drove down a road of enormous houses
that encompass many toilets. Down hallways,
leaping left or right, you can crap at will.
A mile away a dead Mexican child slept
out in the desert on the wrong side of a mattress.
Jim Harrison is sometimes a satisfying source of insight. He has some clever quips that show he’s trying to avoid resting on the surface of things…
So I was fiddling around with some of the new online home valuation services, like Zillow, and found them disappointingly superficial. Who thinks up these algorithms? Can they be a real reflection of our society? For example, I noticed I could just keep adding bathrooms to increase an estimate of a home’s value. It does not matter how many bedrooms, kitchens etc. are in the house; configure a single-story 1 bedroom, 5 bathroom house and it is worth far more than a two-story 3 bedroom, 3 bathroom house.
Clearly, the more toilets, the better off you are.
We struggle to make our words transform simple paper into something descriptive and meaningful. In fact we struggle to make the screen represent our thoughts through words alone (long live gopher!) and so we resort to posting images. 