I say Yes to this entry by Diana Greco on spatial learning. She writes
Learning to walk in cities is a way to learn about how to participate in civic life, how to recognize and inhabit shared space.
In CT this sense of “learning,” which was very a much a part of my everyday life in El Paso, Texas, is hard to sense in a suburban setting. The town center is one thing or the Mexican village court, walled on one side by a cathedral entrance.
What is a stranger on the bus vs one at a Burger King?
A few housekeeping things going on here. Lots of trimming and simplification.
On another note. I opened up my first Vista machine yesterday. The system looks pretty good, with spitting image Mac widgets on the sidebar. But what gets me about Vista is the four-tier system. My mother-in-law, who wanted a basic machine, received the Basic Vista version. But this is a symptom of something, bloat perhaps on the higher end premium system. Even Basic started up slow and ungainly and I’m not sure why.
Why can’t an operating system just be that? Nevertheless, I’m running out of room to be worrying about that sort of thing.
I’ve wanted to knock this one out for some time but needed a few moments for research. The latest innovation in bottled fluids is a total failure. I’m talking about French’s Mustard.
A few years ago, the cone cap went to a snazzy new silicone nipple design. Read about it here: News Perspective 07/02 .
Perhaps the biggest breakthrough in the new package design, however, is the bottle’s closure, created by French’s packaging engineer, Dave Maus, specifically to address the issue of crusty caps. Explains Veriga, “The cap incorporates a silicone valve that creates a vacuum seal that sucks the mustard back into the bottle after use.” Advantages, he says, include fresher mustard, less dripping and the elimination of the “gook” on the cap.
I enjoy mustard on bologna, hot dogs, burgers, fries, and use it for cooking. But the recent nipple design is hard to squirt, inaccurate, blobs around the nipple, and is even more crusty than the cone design. People complained about the cone design because regular use left a crust at the rim. But all you had to do was thumb the thing or wipe it off with a napkin.
Why is this a problem: because the latest from Microsoft will not download and update a machine with ease and simplicity (and why must it cost money?), and as everyone knows, mustard and Microsoft are ubiquitous. Just ask the recent apple commercials.
Simplicity of use and design is always an excellent standard to work from (and end with). The subject may be mustard bottles or rockets. Either way, a re-design (Dell) shouldn’t be so blatantly neglectful and absurd as to result in the very thing a company (or country, for that matter) tries to avoid: BS.
I want my cone mustard bottle back and my 8100 keyboard planted onto a new, slimmer, lighter, and sleeker PC, else I’m dashing for the smaller, sleeker, lighter (yet given to smudge) black MacBook (because the MacBook Pro is too damned big. It’s a laptop for bleep’s sake).
I’m seriously suffering from post-surgery cabin fever.
So far I’ve been successful in upgrading this weblog to the newest version of WordPress. I deeply hacked my old theme. That’s why lots of links do not appear here.
Soon everything will be back in order.
Most people who have encountered interactive experiences have felt the power of immersion, a feeling you get when you suddenly remember where you’ve been or when you hear someone say, “She’s really into that, isn’t she.” When you’re under water you’re under water and when you’re under water you must pace yourself or grow gills. On the one hand, would immersion involve actions in other places, such as turning a stone under water. This is why they say that immersive experiences must require concentration. On several other palms, would immersion simply be a state of new remembering.
But we are, after all, immersed in life and one immersive experience happens within another, as in a Flash infinite symbol structure.
_root is what I wake to in the morning.
We’re hitting Borges’ The Aleph tomorrow in CF. Borges’ fiction will bring a thread to the rest of the course, a sort of color to a quilt of readings that share time, space, aesthetic, and voice. As a whole, they be an image, a glance into an interpretation of “the infinite” in the context of sets, numbers, story, and form.
Any number of stories would work in this regard from the work of Borges. The Library of Babel, The Circular Ruins, and The Garden of Forking Paths. The Aleph as an example of structuring mise en abyme carries the story, in my view, as a story within a story, an image within an image, and an example of all kinds of interesting paradoxes. I.e., how can the contain itself as well as reflect itself at the same time. Simultaneity, repetition, interiority, points. Rational numbers form one infinite set. If this is so, there must be a set of infinite sets. Can the result be represented by a single number or by a symbol? Then what?
It’s been a strange couple of weeks. As many know, I hit a deer in my wife’s Subaru at 45 mph last week and I want to thank everyone who inquired as to my health. I must admit to a new respect for the vehicle given the impact in proportion to the damage. The insurance company and the body shop have done a wonderful job cleaning up this mishap. We’re now driving a loaner Jeep Grand which eats gas like our dog K eats biscuits. All it needs is a missle launcher to complete its massive appearence.
I also want to thank Kent Robbins for coming to my aide after I toilet-rolled a newly installed redoak floor with a 200 or so pound belt sander. It takes a special skill to sand a hardwood floor and K dropped everything and drove in next day and sanded the whole kitchen in a matter of hours with the belt, super edger, and buff sander. It only took me a few hours more to rag on a nice Provincial stain. In addition, my daughter’s friend A had to be rushed to the clinic by my wife for a long wait over horrible stomach pains. Lots of good deeds as the world crumbles on larger scales.
In addition, someone stole our Ned Lamont sign from the front of the house, the first political sign I’ve been proud to display. My wife heard a a car door slam at midnight and a car peel away. Next morning the sign was gone. Another knock against Joe Lieberman in my book. Just silly.
The company one keeps does matter. How we magnetize can change the earth’s rotation. (Yet another reason why poetry matters.) I know this intimately.
I’ll soon be upgrading this weblog to the 2.x version of WordPress. Hopefully Shawn’s theme which I cut down to white-size will still function.
Made a few changes to the look. In addition, I’m a little weary of the Great Lettuce Head tag so I’ve simplified and am going with just Steve Ersinghaus as an obvious title.
Back to work, then.