Entropy…

In this essay David Brooks presents a case that, our problems aren’t economic, they are cultural, and therefore there’s no point in tackling them by economic means. Earth to Brooks: the economy strongly determines the culture. That is why we now talk of a culture of greed, the degree of which represents a tectonic shift in our culture and which has itself undermined community bonds.. Read ..

What Our Words Tell Us

About two years ago, the folks at Google released a database of 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008. You can type a search word into the database and find out how frequently different words were used at different epochs.

The database doesn’t tell you how the words were used; it just tells you how frequently they were used. Still, results can reveal interesting cultural shifts. For example, somebody typed the word “cocaine” into the search engine and found that the word was surprisingly common in the Victorian era. Then it gradually declined during the 20th century until around 1970, when usage skyrocketed.

I’d like to tell a story about the last half-century, based on studies done with this search engine. The first element in this story is rising individualism. A study by Jean M. Twenge, W. Keith Campbell and Brittany Gentile found that between 1960 and 2008 individualistic words and phrases increasingly overshadowed communal words and phrases.

That is to say, over those 48 years, words and phrases like “personalized,” “self,” “standout,” “unique,” “I come first” and “I can do it myself” were used more frequently. Communal words and phrases like “community,” “collective,” “tribe,” “share,” “united,” “band together” and “common good” receded.

The second element of the story is demoralization. A study by Pelin Kesebir and Selin Kesebir found that general moral terms like “virtue,” “decency” and “conscience” were used less frequently over the course of the 20th century. Words associated with moral excellence, like “honesty,” “patience” and “compassion” were used much less frequently.

The Kesebirs identified 50 words associated with moral virtue and found that 74 percent were used less frequently as the century progressed. Certain types of virtues were especially hard hit. Usage of courage words like “bravery” and “fortitude” fell by 66 percent. Usage of gratitude words like “thankfulness” and “appreciation” dropped by 49 percent.

Usage of humility words like “modesty” and “humbleness” dropped by 52 percent. Usage of compassion words like “kindness” and “helpfulness” dropped by 56 percent. Meanwhile, usage of words associated with the ability to deliver, like “discipline” and “dependability” rose over the century, as did the usage of words associated with fairness. The Kesebirs point out that these sorts of virtues are most relevant to economic production and exchange.

Daniel Klein of George Mason University has conducted one of the broadest studies with the Google search engine. He found further evidence of the two elements I’ve mentioned. On the subject of individualization, he found that the word “preferences” was barely used until about 1930, but usage has surged since. On the general subject of demoralization, he finds a long decline of usage in terms like “faith,” “wisdom,” “ought,” “evil” and “prudence,” and a sharp rise in what you might call social science terms like “subjectivity,” “normative,” “psychology” and “information.”

Klein adds the third element to our story, which he calls “governmentalization.” Words having to do with experts have shown a steady rise. So have phrases like “run the country,” “economic justice,” “nationalism,” “priorities,” “right-wing” and “left-wing.” The implication is that politics and government have become more prevalent.

So the story I’d like to tell is this: Over the past half-century, society has become more individualistic. As it has become more individualistic, it has also become less morally aware, because social and moral fabrics are inextricably linked. The atomization and demoralization of society have led to certain forms of social breakdown, which government has tried to address, sometimes successfully and often impotently.

This story, if true, should cause discomfort on right and left. Conservatives sometimes argue that if we could just reduce government to the size it was back in, say, the 1950s, then America would be vibrant and free again. But the underlying sociology and moral culture is just not there anymore. Government could be smaller when the social fabric was more tightly knit, but small government will have different and more cataclysmic effects today when it is not.

Liberals sometimes argue that our main problems come from the top: a self-dealing elite, the oligarchic bankers. But the evidence suggests that individualism and demoralization are pervasive up and down society, and may be even more pervasive at the bottom. Liberals also sometimes talk as if our problems are fundamentally economic, and can be addressed politically, through redistribution. But maybe the root of the problem is also cultural. The social and moral trends swamp the proposed redistributive remedies.

Evidence from crude data sets like these are prone to confirmation bias. People see patterns they already believe in. Maybe I’ve done that here. But these gradual shifts in language reflect tectonic shifts in culture. We write less about community bonds and obligations because they’re less central to our lives.

By DAVID BROOKS © NYT

“If the library is a model of the universe, we should try to turn it into a universe on a human [modern]. With a word .. a nice library, where you want to go “_ Umberto Eco

In earlier years, it was a church or palace that marked the centre point of a town. But in a modern society, it is the significance of a place for individual knowledge and enrichment of experience that takes centre stage. And that is how the library gains more and more significance for society

The city of Stuttgart, Germany has officially opened a marvelous new media center, the Stuttgart City Library. This cavernous white wonder is unobtrusive in design, where the books and visitors provide the color to an otherwise neutral environment.

The visual center of the Stuttgart City Library is its grand atrium, a five-story open chamber that feels like the work of a modernist MC Esher.  The interior is bright without direct lighting, it is warm without paint color and intimate yet open.

This work by Yi Architects is a success in design, instantly one of the world’s most beautiful libraries.

In the aimless age in which we live, we have to create an architecture that remains true to its essentials and inner core.  In this case, worked on a construction  – a completely homogeneous, calm, monolithic building that contains a great many of the secret values of our civilisation.

These values are neutralised and polished to the point where they possess a universal value that applies to all ages, so that only our pure spirit is projected onto the material

This post is being reproduced from my friend Sandra Wells blog, whose thoughts & writing profoundly radiates and mediates our quest of wholeness ..

John O’Donohue was a much loved Irish poet and philosopher who much too soon–at 52 years of age. As the poet, David Whyte, put it, John was a love-letter to humanity from some address in the firmament we have yet to find and locate, though we may wander many a year looking or listening for it.

He has gone home to that original address and cannot be spoken with except in the quiet cradle of the imagination that he dared to visit so often himself. I’ve just begun to read his work and love the idea that “ The question holds the lantern.”

THE QUESTION HOLDS THE LANTERN

Humans have an uncanny ability to domesticate everything they touch. Eventually, even the strangest things become absorbed into the routine of the daily mind with its steady geographies of endurance, anxiety and contentment. Only seldom does the haze lift, and we glimpse for a second, the amazing plenitude of being here. Sometimes, unfortunately, it is suffering or threat that awakens us. It could happen that one evening, you are busy with many things, netted into your role and the phone rings. Someone you love is suddenly in the grip of an illness that could end their life within hours. It only takes a few seconds to receive that news. Yet, when you put the phone down, you are already standing in a different world. All you know has just been rendered unsure and dangerous. You realise that the ground has turned into quicksand. Now it seems to you that even mountains are suspended on strings.

If you could imagine the most incredible story ever, it would be less incredible than the story of being here. And the ironic thing is that story is not a story, it is true. It takes us so long to see where we are. It takes us even longer to see who we are. This is why the greatest gift you could ever dream is a gift that you can only receive from one person. And that person is you yourself. Therefore, the most subversive invitation you could ever accept is the invitation to awaken to who you are and where you have landed. Plato said in The Symposium that one of the greatest privileges of a human life is to become midwife to the birth of the soul in another. When your soul awakens, you begin to truly inherit your life. You leave the kingdom of fake surfaces, repetitive talk and weary roles and slip deeper into the true adventure of who you are and who you are called to become. The greatest friend of the soul is the unknown. Yet we are afraid of the unknown because it lies outside our vision and our control. We avoid it or quell it by filtering it through our protective barriers of domestication and control. The normal way never leads home.

Once you start to awaken, no one can ever claim you again for the old patterns. Now you realise how precious your time here is. You are no longer willing to squander your essence on undertakings that do not nourish your true self; your patience grows thin with tired talk and dead language. You see through the rosters of expectation which promise you safety and the confirmation of your outer identity. Now you are impatient for growth, willing to put yourself in the way of change. You want your work to become an expression of your gift. You want your relationship to voyage beyond the pallid frontiers to where the danger of transformation dwells. You want your God to be wild and to call you to where your destiny awaits.

You have come out of Plato’s Cave of Images into the sunlight and the mystery of colour and imagination. When you begin to sense that your imagination is the place where you are most divine, you feel called to clean out of your mind all the worn and shabby furniture of thought. You wish to refurbish yourself with living thought so that you can begin to see. As Meister Eckhart says: Thoughts are our inner senses. When the inner senses are dull and blurred, you can see nothing in or of yourself; you become a respectable prisoner of received images. Now you realise that ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty’ and you undertake the difficult but beautiful path to freedom.

On this journey, you begin to see how the sides of your heart that seemed awkward, contradictory and uneven are the places where the treasure lies hidden. You begin to become true to yourself. And as Shakespeare says in Hamlet: To thine own self be true, then as surely as night follows day, thou canst to no man be false.

The journey shows you that from this inner dedication you can reconstruct your own values and action. You develop from your own self-compassion a great compassion for others. You are no longer caught in the false game of judgement, comparison and assumption. More naked now than ever, you begin to feel truly alive. You begin to trust the music of your own soul; you have inherited treasure that no one will ever be able to take from you.

At the deepest level, this adventure of growth is in fact a transfigurative conversation with your own death. And when the time comes for you to leave, the view from your death bed will show a life of growth that gladdens the heart and takes away all fear.

- JOHN O’DONOHUE -

New York Times – Haiku -Serendipitous Poetry
A collection of poetry algorithmically extracted from New York Times articles and selected by Times editors.

Whimsy is not a quality we usually associate with computer programs. We tend to think of software in terms of the function it fulfills. For example, a spreadsheet helps us do our work. A game of Tetris provides a means of procrastination. Social media reconnects us with our high school nemeses.
But what about computer code that serves no inherent purpose in itself?

There is pleasure to

be had here, in flares of spice

that revive and warm.

This is a Tumblr blog of haikus found within The New York Times. Most of us first encountered haikus in a grade school, when we were taught that they are three-line poems with five syllables on the first line, seven on the second and five on the third. According to the Haiku Society of America, that is not an ironclad rule. A proper haiku should also contain a word that indicates the season, or “kigo,” as well as a juxtaposition of verbal imagery, known as “kireji.” That’s a lot harder to teach an algorithm, though, so we just count syllables like most amateur haiku aficionados do.

As dawn broke we warmed

strawberry Pop Tarts over

the dying embers.

How does our algorithm work? It periodically checks the New York Times home page for newly published articles. Then it scans each sentence looking for potential haikus by using an electronic dictionary containing syllable counts. We started with a basic rhyming lexicon, but over time we’ve added syllable counts for words like “Rihanna” or “terroir” to keep pace with the broad vocabulary of The Times.

Not every haiku our computer finds is a good one. The algorithm discards some potential poems if they are awkwardly constructed and it does not scan articles covering sensitive topics. Furthermore, the machine has no aesthetic sense. It can’t distinguish between an elegant verse and a plodding one. But, when it does stumble across something beautiful or funny or just a gem of a haiku, human journalists select it and post it on this blog.

Stop the machine and

scrape down the sides of the bowl

with a spatula.

Finding the haikus is only the beginning. Because we want the poems to retain their visual integrity, even when people share them across social networks, we post them as images instead of text. On every image, you’ll notice a seemingly random background pattern of colored lines. The different orientations of those lines are computer-generated according to the meter of the first line of the poem.

So, what’s next? This experiment in automated poetry detection has only just begun. We’ll fine-tune the algorithm, expand the dictionary and see what treasures we find. We hope you’ll follow along.

By Jacob Harris is a senior software architect at The New York Times.
Enjoy Times Haiku Blog

Tags: New York Times

A Stunning Survey Of Pics By Eero Saarinen’s In-House Photographer
Hired as a designer, Balthazar Korab captured some of the most important monuments to Modernism.

In 1954, a young Hungarian went to work with Eero Saarinen in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. As his then colleague, Cesar Pelli, describes him: “[He] was a small sensation: he had a fur-trimmed coat, a homburg, and a Van Dyke beard.” His design bona fides were equally exotic:

He had been a distinguished architectural student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, in Paris, and a draftsman under Le Corbusier. But even though he did substantive design work in Saarinen’s studio, he was quickly tapped as the in-house photographer, creating pictures that became indelible symbols of the Mad Men age of Modernism.

TWA Flight Center, New York, New York, 1956–62.
Process model shot through the portal at the top of the Y-shaped structural pier, ca. 1956.

TWA Flight Center, interior view from the mezzanine level at night, 1964. Says Korab: “This is my classic image of the project that reveals the complexity of the Saarinen approach to a four-dimensional experience in this space.”

More than 200 of his photos are cataloged in Balthazar Korab: Architect of Photography (Princeton Architectural Press), a new picture book by John Comazzi, who details the émigré’s moves from Budapest to Paris and the United States. Despite his artistic accomplishments, Korab considers himself “an architect who makes pictures rather than a photographer who is knowledgeable about architecture.” Indeed, it is his specific insights about buildings that inform the way he is able to exploit light and shadow in ways that perhaps couldn’t have been achieved with an untrained eye.

View out the above Pictures which are  some of Korab’s best pictures. Particularly interesting are the process shots, like the one of the large-scale model of Saarinen’s TWA terminal, which gives the impression of being in the space. According to the photographer: “The clients were shown a slide show of the photographs, and the effect was so successful that they bought the whole project without even seeing the model.”