There are people who observe workers hammering nails in the hot summer sun and observer that their sweaty hands slip on the handle. They go back to the studio and design a hammer with a rubberized, non-stick handle. Then there are people like Tom Silva who drill a few holes in the handle and get back to work. 

The folks on the right are both less likely to believe in evolution and more likely to adopt natural selection as social policy; whereas folks on the left or more likely to believe in evolution, and adopt policies that circumvent natural selection. I think that’s pretty funny.

In my day… Quincy Jones on Kanye

Posted on Making Good:

“Quincy Jones’s comments about Kanye, while an unimportant diversion, express a criticism you hear from a lot of predecessors that’s worth listening to.

The critique can sound like “he didn’t earn it”, but I think the valuable criticism is that “he didn’t learn it”. As we make things more convenient, we risk circumventing learning experiences that can make our knowledge more whole and our output better.

There are/were real benefits to apprentice-like systems. It’s great that ideas can rise easier these days, but what might we have learned if we weren’t so antsy to get past the student phase? I know I worry about this. 

Anyway, here’s the story…

http://www.npr.org/blogs/ablogsupreme/2010/11/29/131673915/quincy-jones-vs-kanye-west-and-why-it-matters-for-jazz

And as good as Kanye’s music is, none of it compares to MJ and Jones’s Don’t Stop TIll You Get Enough. Click the link and let your desk chair dance begin.”

#invent4me - The MP3 store I want

Someone please make this music service for me:

I would like an MP3 store/system that directs me to the artist’s preferred place of purchase. As a shopper and musician supporter, I would like to know which outlet, in the artist’s opinion, delivers the most support.

The service:

• Present a listing of all music available.
• Allow the artist to choose his/her preferred MP3 store, probably by simply inputting a URL to a product page.
• Artists should be able to make their choices freely. One service may offer a lower price, but support the artist through promotion or other methods. Basically I don’t want this to be an automated choice or factor, I want it to point me to the purchase option that will most help the artist continue making music.
• Connect me to the outlet of choice directly.
• Provide some default service to sell the MP3s if the artist does not set a preference. This default relationship could subsidize the service.
• This could also be some sort of API or database adding this preference to existing song/album listings that could be pulled into a range of services

Now, I also want a separate service that stores all my music in the cloud and all that. But I think of that as separate. The company that can best do that is probably not the company that will be support the artists. 

Read this email from Sufjan Stevens.

So that’s what I’d like. Please make it for me. I don’t have the time.

Next up: Padded undershirts for men who lack upper body musculature. It would sell.

I’m quite thrilled to find a New York Times blog dedicated to drawing, Line By Line by James McMullan, who is not my father.

Drawing by Mr. McMullan.

Broken Lead

Each time I break the lead trying to get a perfect point on my pencil, it’s a little lesson on greed and excess. When I get a perfect point, it’s a little reminder of why you reach for the stars.

Red Lake

This place (Goople Map link) on RadioLab.

Attempting to be human and at home in the world.

The Archbishop of Canterbury talking about art from the Ice Age and what I meant, in Episode 4 of “A History of the World in 100 Objects”:

“It’s really a desire to get inside and almost to be at home in the world at a deeper level, and I think that that’s actually a very deeply religious impulse, to be at home in the world.”

and…

“I don’t think that primitive human beings just had a ready-made word in their heads that sounded like ‘God’, and they immediately knew what it was. They were discovering how to be human in a world that was much more complicated because of their intelligence, and because of the new environmental challenges they were working with, and slowly the world - how should I say it? - almost reshapes itself. With that, and in your identification with the processes of the world, you begin to understand or intuit what in the ‘Old Testament’ is called ‘wisdom’, a kind of principle of cohesion or cohesiveness underlying it all, and you identify that eventually with the mind of God.”

I like defining the religious impulse as the attempt be human and at home in the world.