Review of Andrew Keen's "The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the Rest of Today’s User-generated Media Are Destroying Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values".
The original site is no longer on the internet but the URL to this article has been replaced with an Internet Archive one.
This article reviews the range of emulsions, photochemistry, and processing techniques that have been proposed and put into practice for the successful mak- ing of display holograms. It covers various types of media including gelatin-based emulsions and photopolymers (it focuses on the former) and considers external factors that affect the final results. This is a compact review of the history of the field but focuses on the range of easily available commercial emulsions, as well as certain accounts of how to make holographic emulsions from scratch. It considers various combinations of developer, bleach, and redeveloper, which have been used to achieve the best of various trade-offs for such factors as resolution, contrast, dif- fraction efficiency, clarity, color quality, blackest blacks, and resistance to printout. It describes a recent advance in hypersensitizing holographic emulsions.
"Variable Fonts represent an evolutionary shift in typography; let’s check in on this new font standard and the impact it’s having." Published under the Microsoft Design Medium account.
Dream speech is an understudied area of dream research worthy of attention for its potential to shed light on the nature of the interactions between the dream-self and dream-others, the patterns of discourse that occur among dream characters, and the structure and content of dream speech itself. The history of the study of dream speech is surveyed. Investigation of the structure and content of dream speech points to interesting similarities and differences in waking, imagined, and dreamed speech. Dream speech data support recent evidence that higher-order cognitive activity is a feature of dreaming no less than of waking thought. The study of dream speech offers a window on understanding dream structure and content more broadly.
This paper strives to pluralize notions of taste in relation to the canonized category of the Hindu or Indian temple. I put ‘Hindu’ in italics because I include Jain temples in my discussion and I put ‘Indian’ in italics because the architecture I discuss predates India as a nation-state and in the twenty-first century includes buildings in South and Southeast Asia as well as the Diaspora. Through a discussion of the Archaeological Preservation Aesthetic (APA) and multiple variants of the Ritual Renovation Aesthetics (RRA), new ways of looking emerge. This paper seeks to reconcile the hegemonic assumptions about art historical taste and the temple within an increasingly global environment. The main argument is predicated on temple users’ practice as a form of curatorial practice in the field and provides a deep description of the multiplication of aesthetics due to increasing privatization of temple administration in India. The tenth-century cluster of temples from the Medapata region (Southern Ra…
Curious to reflect on the factors contributing to the internal decision-making processes of intuitive design, a reflective study was established to systematically examine and document the practice of intuition while performing an iterative aesthetic task. Autoethnographic techniques were used to document the reflective practices that occurred over numerous iterations spanning several weeks of activity. Our analysis concludes with a summary of reflections on how intuition informs judgment in design cognition. We examine four dimensions of intuition in design—efficiency, inspiration, curiosity, and insight—and the reflective and sensory inputs that drive intuitive speculation and impulse.
The rhythmic repetitions that run through weaving, dance, music, poetry, and prayer are guidelines that can be followed with eyes closed and hands outstretched toward a sensory experience of the sacred. This essay traces the synergies between these somatic practices and the potential of rhythmic entrainment to generate numinous states. As cultural paradigms shift from the disembodied mind to mindful embodiment, weaving and cloth provide models for relational thinking and nonhierarchical structures. The author forwards the notion that the act of weaving sensitizes the body-mind to a perception of the interconnected universe.