We don’t know about all of you fleshy readers but, if robots had an “inner child”, ours would undoubtedly have short-circuited trying to process all of this awesome. College football fan or not, anyone that loves classic video games should take a few minutes to watch this performance.
Oh my. :D
The Reuters Elections 2012 portal has relaunched just in time for Wednesday evening’s presidential debate. View campaign ads, the latest polling figures, a look back at how we voted over the past few decades, opinion and analysis and the latest news from the campaign trail.
Tonight’s Presidential Debate will be live blogged on the portalREUTERS ELECTIONS: The latest news and analysis from Reuters.com
Awesome stuff. Awesome timing.
Albert Einstein (via politicalprof)
(via blogviii)
Health care remains No. 1 topic ahead of Obama, Romney debate
The issue of health care has consistently defined the presidential campaign as Obama and Romney head into their 1st debate tonight, according to NBC Politics’ computer-assisted analysis of more than 3 million comments on Twitter and Facebook.
Photo: A composite image of President Barack Obama, left, and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Photos taken July 24, 2012.
Presidential debate tonight at 9pm EST.
Many people are concerned about the so-called ‘deterioration of language’ caused by the increased prevalence of shorthands and nonexistent ‘IM’ grammar. But is this really as problematic as it seems?
I am not saying that literature is worthless - far from that. What I am suggesting is that this shift in culture may not necessarily be bad, and that, taking into account the environment today’s youth with be projected into, the long-acclaimed virtue of being cultured and well-versed may not be as essential as it was before.
Students constantly complain of academics being useless when they go out into the world. If they are competent in the necessary languages and can meet the relevant requirements of their desired jobs, why is it that they have to be ‘cultured’ and preserve the beauties of ancient lore in their day-to-day conversations?
Moreover, who is to say what ‘beautiful language’ is and isn’t? Yes, Dickens and Austen have more complex sentence structures and arguably more elegant descriptions, but that is all based on an arbitrary definition of what beauty in language is. Can the simplicity of ‘brb’ not be a form of beauty as well?
Again, I must stress that I am not an advocate of the scrapping of literature. I myself am quite keen on literary studies and look up to the authors mentioned in this post, as well as many others. It is just the perception that everyone should be ‘cultured’ that irks me - can we not leave this role to those who love the language and enjoy it, instead of forcing the stereotype on most everyone else? That way, we can all maximise our potential in benefiting society through different means, andpave the pathway to a better future for us all.
TTTTrends by Robert Wilson.
Note from the Designer:
During this project I aimed to identify, explore and challenge the continuously emulated trends showcased on the wealth of design blogs and image aggregators. Employing the visual devices of each trend, I wanted to ask why, in a community that praises originality above all else, are certain elements and styles constantly regurgitated.
A personal goal is for the images to be absorbed back into the blogosphere to sit beside the content it strives to question.
‘Hipster’ and perceived beauty come to mind. A fresh look at some stuff we come into contact with almost every day.
That One Where Mitt Romney Appears To Be Having An Existential Crisis.
When you screw up Venn diagrams, you open yourself up to responses like this one. Just an FYI.
THE ART PROCESS:
Psychedelic Art - Part IThe first time I laid eyes on Leif Podhajsky’s art, my pupils dilated so large that they may as well have gotten stuck that way because I’ve been seeing things hypersensitivly* ever since. (*not a real word)
I’m sure this man is considered a god in some type of alternate world and I’d certainly bow to him. His work is deeply concerned with nature to the point of creating within what I like to call a sub-nature or possibly a post-nature. I say this because nothing in his images feel like anything he’s showing us can be real, aside from the objects we have some previous relationship to. In short, he is bending our human relationship with what we’ve accepted as reality.
It’s mostly the geometry which controls the ease of these images, making them so to damn good to look at. Despite somewhat troubling or melancholic themes, there’s a comfort here with soothing tones and fluid lines. Some of Leif’s images feel like you may just fall into them, and others feel like you might become them; psychedelic art is like drugs without the drugs.
I’ve spent hours looking at his reality-altering images having read literally nothing about who he is and where he came from. His work speaks on so many frequencies that I didn’t feel the need to read into the human behind it, though for the informative value of this post, I’ll direct you to this interview by Flur magazine.
I love art. I love the way it stimulates thinking and brings minds into new realms of possibilities, and with that into new ways of thought. I’m no seasoned art critic, but I like to think that ‘good’ art (i.e. my idea of good) speaks to every person in its own way. What I’ve continually struggled with, however, is how to analyse art, which is a horrible thing to struggle with, to be honest. Shouldn’t we analyse art however we want to, since there is no right and wrong in art? (AND analysis of art is likely considered an art in and of itself?) Oh well. But anyway, as the author of the post mentioned, geometry and various elements of art are always important to look at, in my opinion.
Take the first painting: The work is evidently extending from a focal point in in the centre. The shape in the centre is like that of a (?) concentric two-faced head, with each head alternating between white and black, or a similar duo of light and dark colours. I can see 19 such heads. And within the range of the first three outmost layers is an interesting contraption consisting of triangles, an eye, a crescent (moon?), two heads and two symbols that look like that representing females. Note that the eye is positioned seemingly on the line of symmetry of the work. Perhaps it is asking the reader to adjust his/her focus such that the two beige heads combine into something similar to the concentric heads at the centre?
The heads also produce a sort of three dimensional effect, which is strengthened by the light rays extending from the centre. These make the work seem like a creased piece of cloth. Oh, and did I mention it can look like a warped target?
But the beauty of it is that there are often no definite answers to art, and the meaning behind the eye, the crescent, and…well everything is still a mystery, really. We can only offer our explanations, but true understanding is typically reserved for the artist alone, sometimes not even for the artist who created the work in the first place.
Edit: Do bear in mind that such analysis may ruin the beauty of a work. It’s sometimes better to view it ideologically than mathematically, though mathematics need not be about statistical analysis and CAN be pretty abstract…oh well, you get what I mean. Just need to get out of the habit of going with assertions as to the nature of objects/subjects and hence often not allowing the entire train of thought to be fleshed out.
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