Entropy…

Minimalism. The art of continually removing things until all you have left is beauty…

Music has a whole new feel. – Stunning new unified packaging & design for Apple’s just released all new iPod family.  There’s something peaceful and serene about Apple’s new iPod packaging.  Their holistic design works on the basis that less is more, and indeed it is.

iPod nano has been completely redesigned with Multi-Touch — the same technology that makes iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch so amazing. Now it’s half the size and even easier to play. And everything you want to hear is just a tap or swipe away

iPod touch has an all-new design that makes it the thinnest, lightest, most amazing iPod touch ever. Holding one is all the proof you need. With its curved design, iPod touch is now a mere 7.2 millimeters thin. Its engineered glass front and stainless steel back feel sleek and smooth in your hand. Turn it on, and you’re instantly blown away by the brilliant Retina display. iPod touch is the perfect combination of stunning design and revolutionary technology — brilliant from the outside in.

Explore Apple ipod

Read about Apple’s Environment story here

The relationship to the world that the modern science fostered and shaped now appears to have exhausted its potential. It is increasingly clear that, strangely, the relationship is missing something. It fails to connect with the most intrinsic nature of reality and with natural human experience. It is now more of a source of disintegration and doubt than a source of integration and meaning. It produces what amounts to a state of schizophrenia:

Man as an observer is becoming completely alienated from himself as a being.-

- Václav Havel

Pl read this fascinating essay by Jonathan Harris -The Renaissance man for information age

Our Digital Crisis

The Internet is causing mass homogenization of human identity, making us all look the same.

We use the same tools and social networks, fitting into the same templates, designed by companies to maximize page views and profits

Most online experiences are made, like fast food, to be cheap, easy, and addictive: appealing to our hunger for connection but rarely serving up nourishment. Shrink-wrapped junk food experiences are handed to us for free by social media companies, and we swallow them up eagerly, like kids given buckets of candy with ads on all the wrappers.

These experiences are sensitive neither to individual humans nor to the human collective, but only to page views and growth (in a corporate, not personal sense).

It is fitting that these companies call their customers “users”.

As we fill in the same boxes, answer the same questions, and express ourselves in the same generic ways, we might think this convergence of identity is a good thing, leading to some kind of global unity or mass empathy. But true empathy comes not from forcing people all to be the same, but from helping people to appreciate their differences.

Our online tools do a great job at breadth (hundreds of friends, thousands of tweets), but a bad job at depth. We live increasingly superficial lives, reducing our relationships to caricatures and our personalities to billboards, as we speed along at 1,000 miles an hour.

We trade self-reflection for busyness, gorging ourselves on it and drowning in it, without recognizing the violence of that busyness, which we perpetrate against ourselves and at our peril.

For the last 100 years—from letters, to phones, to faxes, to emails, to chats, to texts, to tweets—communication has been getting shorter and faster, but we are approaching a terminal velocity.

I doubt there is a shorter means of communication than the tweet, unless we start to make monosyllabic grunts at each other or communicate silently, brain to brain. Brief gestures of communication can be beautiful, but can also be shallow. So what will happen next? Will we stop at the tweet, or will we bounce back in the other direction, suddenly craving more depth? I’d bet on the latter.

But even if we start to crave more depth, we cannot run away to a more primitive time.

The momentum of technological growth is too strong for us to prevent it from defining our future. Like it or not, our future world will largely be digital.

Instead of fleeing to the forest, we must find the humanity in the machine and learn to love it. If we decide the humanity does not yet exist there in the ways we expect, then we must create it.

© By-Jonathan Harris -

Jonathan makes projects that reimagine how humans relate to technology and to each other. Combining elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling.

“Very few in public life habitually step back and think about the weakness in their own thinking and what they should do to compensate.” –

Once again David Brooks with his incisive & reflective thoughts..

A Case of Mental Courage

In 1811, the popular novelist Fanny Burney learned she had breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy without anesthesia. She lay down on an old mattress, and a piece of thin linen was placed over her face, allowing her to make out the movements of the surgeons above her.

“I felt the instrument — describing a curve — cutting against the grain, if I may so say, while the flesh resisted in a manner so forcible as to oppose & tire the hand of the operator who was forced to change from the right to the left,” she wrote later.

“I began a scream that lasted intermittingly during the whole time of the incision — & I almost marvel that it rings not in my ears still.” The surgeon removed most of the breast but then had to go in a few more times to complete the work: “I then felt the Knife rackling against the breast bone — scraping it! This performed while I yet remained in utterly speechless torture.”

The operation was ghastly, but Burney’s real heroism came later. She could have simply put the horror behind her, but instead she resolved to write down everything that had happened. This proved horrifically painful. “Not for days, not for weeks, but for months I could not speak of this terrible business without nearly again going through it!” Six months after the operation she finally began to write her account.

It took her three months to put down a few thousand words. She suffered headaches as she picked up her pen and began remembering. “I dare not revise, nor read, the recollection is still so painful,” she confessed. But she did complete it. She seems to have regarded the exercise as a sort of mental boot camp — an arduous but necessary ordeal if she hoped to be a person of character and courage.

Burney’s struggle reminds one that character is not only moral, it is also mental. Heroism exists not only on the battlefield or in public but also inside the head, in the ability to face unpleasant thoughts.

She lived at a time when people were more conscious of the fallen nature of men and women. People were held to be inherently sinful, and to be a decent person one had to struggle against one’s weakness.

In the mental sphere, this meant conquering mental laziness with arduous and sometimes numbingly boring lessons. It meant conquering frivolity by sitting through earnest sermons and speeches. It meant conquering self- approval by staring straight at what was painful.

This emphasis on mental character lasted for a time, but it has abated. There’s less talk of sin and frailty these days. Capitalism has also undermined this ethos. In the media competition for eyeballs, everyone is rewarded for producing enjoyable and affirming content. Output is measured by ratings and page views, so much of the media, and even the academy, is more geared toward pleasuring consumers, not putting them on some arduous character-building regime.

In this atmosphere, we’re all less conscious of our severe mental shortcomings and less inclined to be skeptical of our own opinions. Occasionally you surf around the Web and find someone who takes mental limitations seriously. For example, Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway once gave a speech called “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment.” He and others list our natural weaknesses: We have confirmation bias; we pick out evidence that supports our views. We are cognitive misers; we try to think as little as possible. We are herd thinkers and conform our perceptions to fit in with the group.

But, in general, the culture places less emphasis on the need to struggle against one’s own mental feebleness. Today’s culture is better in most ways, but in this way it is worse.

The ensuing mental flabbiness is most evident in politics. Many conservatives declare that Barack Obama is a Muslim because it feels so good to say so. Many liberals would never ask themselves why they were so wrong about the surge in Iraq while George Bush was so right. The question is too uncomfortable.

There’s a seller’s market in ideologies that gives people a chance to feel victimized. There’s a rigidity to political debate. Issues like tax cuts and the size of government, which should be shaped by circumstances (often it’s good to cut taxes; sometimes it’s necessary to raise them), are now treated as inflexible tests of tribal purity.

To use a fancy word, there’s a “Metacognition Deficit“. Very few in public life habitually step back and think about the weakness in their own thinking and what they should do to compensate.  A few people I interview do this regularly (in fact, Larry Summers is one). But it is rare. The rigors of combat discourage it.

Of the problems that afflict the country, this is the underlying one.

By DAVID BROOKS © New York Times

” I sense that the instrument is alive – that when I listen closely for nuance and tone, the inanimate world of strings, wood, pins and steel comes to life. When I honor the piano’s vitality and complexity, I can’t tell whether I am playing the piano or it is playing me.” –Michael Jones

A documentary following Steinway’s Master Tuner

Pianomania is a film about love, perfection and a little bit of madness.

” The tone isn’t breathing.” – complains pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, distraught. This is a typical sentence in Steinway & Sons’ chief technician and Master Tuner Stefan Knüpfer’s normal work day. Each piano has its own personality, each piece demands its own timbre, and every interpretation has a particular temperament.

For Stefan Knüpfer, achieving the perfect tone is all-consuming. Unsurprising when your clients include Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Lang Lang and Alfred Brendel. For Knüpfer is Steinway’s Master Tuner in Vienna, and as such, is responsible for maintaining Steinway’s reputation for superior sound – and where appropriate altering that sound to suit the exacting requirements of the world’s leading pianists.

The documentary Pianomania, charts a year in the world of Knüpfer.  Central to the story are his efforts to achieve multiple tones – through some highly inventive means – for Aimard’s 2008 DG recording of Bach’s Art of Fugue. It’s a long, difficult and at times painful process – witness Knüpfer’s crushing disappointment when his specially designed panels to give the piano a more organ-like sound are abandoned during the recording sessions – yet one that clearly gives much joy and satisfaction. When Aimard finally turns to the Master Tuner with the words “Stefan, I have always dreamt of this sound,” one might well shed a tear.

Pivotal to Pianomania, though, is the quiet charm and enthusiasm of its protagonist. Clearly a great talent in his own right, Knüpfer is happy to remain behind the scenes – as he puts it, “to disappear offstage when the audience enters”. Musician, craftsman, scientist and wry observer – “pianists are mostly dissatisfied” – his passion alone could easily sell the subject matter. But the chance, too, to see leading pianists behind the scenes is not to be missed.

Pianomania takes the viewer along on a humorous journey into the secret world of sounds, and accompanies Stefan Knüpfer at his unusual job with world famous pianists like Lang Lang, Alfred Brendel, Rudolf Buchbinder and Pierre-Laurent Aimand, among others.   To find the right instrument with the necessary qualities, compatible with the vision of the virtuoso, to tune it to perfection and finally to get it on the stage, needs nerves of steel, boundless passion, and the extraordinary competence in translating words into sounds.

Directors Robert Cibis and Lilian Franck have taken great care to ensure audiences can appreciate the fine alterations in tonal quality. The film was shot in high definition and in Dolby surround sound on 90 separate tracks, a process which allows the audience to experience in some part Knüpfer’s superhuman aural abilities – at least for the duration of the film.

Refer Pianomania documentary site here

Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we? — Henry David Thoreau

Is the artistry of a life devoted lost in the modern age ?

Winters of My Life

Winters of My Life is a portrait of Howard Weamer.  – For the past 35 years he has spent his winters as a hutkeeper in Yosemite’s backcountry. He fills his days writing, reading, photographing, and being an ambassador to mountain culture.

This is a brief look into his world and why he chooses to stay.

This short film by Jonny Burhop, a producer for Discovery, and National Geographic, is patient and respectful.  It is as quiet as the first snowflakes to drift across Sentinel Dome, and just as beautiful. Watch it and consider a life well spent.

For more on Howard Weamer and the Ostrander Hut, check out this 2006 New York Times story

This unusual and highly successful species spends a great deal of time examining his higher motives and an equal amount of time ignoring his fundamental ones.~ Desmond Morris

A look at two ways of thinking about life, one that emphasizes the individual and one that emphasizes circumstances. – Then there is the lived life..

Read this poignant essay by David Brooks

The Summoned Self

This is a column about two ways of thinking about your life. The first is what you might call the Well-Planned Life. It was nicely described by Clayton Christensen in the current issue of the Harvard Business Review, in an essay based on a recent commencement talk.

Christensen advised the students to invest a lot of time when they are young in finding a clear purpose for their lives. “When I was a Rhodes scholar,” he recalls, “I was in a very demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra year’s worth of work into my time at Oxford. I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth.

“That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent doing that, I wasn’t studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it — and ultimately figured out the purpose of my life.”

Once you have come up with an overall purpose, he continues, you have to make decisions about allocating your time, energy and talent. Christensen, who is a professor at the Harvard Business School and the author of several widely admired books, notes that people with a high need for achievement commonly mis-allocate their resources.

If they have a spare half-hour, they devote it to things that will yield tangible and near-term accomplishments. These almost invariably involve something at work — closing a sale, finishing a paper.

“In contrast,” he adds, “investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. … It’s not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, ‘I raised a good son or a good daughter.’ ” As a result, the things that are most important often get short shrift.

Christensen is a serious Christian. At university, he was the starting center on his basketball team and refused to play in the championship game of an important tournament because it was scheduled for a Sunday. But he combines a Christian spirit with business methodology. In plotting out a personal and spiritual life, he applies the models and theories he developed as a strategist. He emphasizes finding the right metrics, efficiently allocating resources and thinking about marginal costs.

When he is done, life comes to appear as a well-designed project, carefully conceived in the beginning, reviewed and adjusted along the way and brought toward a well-rounded fruition.

The second way of thinking about your life might be called the Summoned Life. This mode of thinking starts from an entirely different perspective. Life isn’t a project to be completed; it is an unknowable landscape to be explored. A 24-year-old can’t sit down and define the purpose of life in the manner of a school exercise because she is not yet deep enough into the landscape to know herself or her purpose. That young person — or any person — can’t see into the future to know what wars, loves, diseases and chances may loom. She may know concepts, like parenthood or old age, but she doesn’t really understand their meanings until she is engaged in them.

Moreover, people who think in this mode are skeptical that business models can be applied to other realms of life. Business is about making choices that maximize utility. But the most important features of the human landscape are commitments that precede choice — commitments to family, nation, faith or some cause. These commitments defy the logic of cost and benefit, investment and return.

The person leading the Well-Planned Life emphasizes individual agency, and asks, “What should I do?” The person leading the Summoned Life emphasizes the context, and asks, “What are my circumstances asking me to do?”

The person leading the Summoned Life starts with a very concrete situation: I’m living in a specific year in a specific place facing specific problems and needs. At this moment in my life, I am confronted with specific job opportunities and specific options. The important questions are: What are these circumstances summoning me to do? What is needed in this place ? What is the most useful social role before me?

These are questions answered primarily by sensitive observation and situational awareness, not calculation and long-range planning.

In America, we have been taught to admire the lone free agent who creates new worlds. But for the person leading the Summoned Life, the individual is small and the context is large. Life comes to a point not when the individual project is complete but when the self dissolves into a larger purpose and cause.

The first vision is more American. The second vision is more common elsewhere. But they are both probably useful for a person trying to live a well-considered life.

By DAVID BROOKS © NYT.